Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most
profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a
work of nature writing--or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the "best book
ever written about nature," and nearly the entirety of the story is set
on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael's sea yarn
is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and
Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a
pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than
three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851.
A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's
Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of
Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids,
barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville
knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in
the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what
was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow's nest,
setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean
in 1851--at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before
the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab's and
Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still
immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of
stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd,
to Melville, King argues that Melville's narrator Ishmael reveals his
own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism.
Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with
contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab's
Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and
its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny
deep--from whale hunters to climate refugees.
