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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
If, under the spell of "Moby-Dick," you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to join workers in Arabian oil fields or on drilling platforms at sea. On the other hand, firemen, like whalers, are united by their care for one another and for the vehicle that bears them, and the fireman's alacrity with ladders and hoses resembles the whaler's with masts and ropes. Then, there are the armed forces, which, like a nineteenth-century whaleship, can take you around the world in the company of people from ethnic and social backgrounds unfamiliar to you. All these lines of work are dangerous but indispensable, as whaling once was, but none seem perfectly analogous. Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.
Nor is there anything like skinning the whale's penis, "longer than a Kentuckian is tall," and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville's narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like "a candidate for an archbishoprick." For "Moby-Dick," Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter "none of Melville's fish documents was particularly helpful." In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol. In another chapter long suspected of symbolism, Ishmael falls into ecstasy while squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti freshly bailed from the head of a sperm whale: "I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules." But, fanciful as it sounds, sperm-squeezing is attested to by another source. In an 1874 memoir, the whaler William M. Davis recalled how "luxurious" it was to wade into pots of sperm and "squeeze and strain out the fibres," which would darken the oil unless they were removed, and added that, in the rich bath, "I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs."
It is difficult to follow in Melville's footsteps if you can't tell when he's fibbing, but there is no shortage of whaling histories for a Melville aficionado to turn to. ("Though of real knowledge there be little," Melville wrote, "yet of books there are a plenty.") In the latest, "Leviathan" (Norton; $27.95), Eric Jay Dolin offers a pleasantly anecdotal history of American whaling so comprehensive that he seems to have harpooned at least one fact from every cetacean text ever printed. "Leviathan" is a gentle book about a brutal industry. By ending his story when America stopped whaling, Dolin omits the most gruesome years of international whaling history, when new technology increased killing capacity approximately tenfold. He presents whaling in a more innocent age, when it was the fifth-largest industry in America and a source of national pride--in the time before ecology, as well as before steamships, as it were.
It's hard to say who qualifies as the first American whaler. The Inuit hunted whales in the Canadian Arctic a thousand years ago, but Dolin isn't convinced that anyone in what is now the United States did so before Europeans arrived. Basque whale hunters...
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