In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all
argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish,
and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how
much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero
here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early
nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts
of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the
strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new
sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically
sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was
mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state
inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which
nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake.
Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of
experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin
lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and
anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling
in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial
dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in
the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical
categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of
interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's
creatures.
When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned
both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.
