Herman Melville

A whaling ship scours the seas for a mysterious white whale. Its Captain Ahab is obsessed with hunting the creature down. At last, Ahab himself raises the cry, “There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” Those words bring readers to the gripping climax of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale , one of the greatest American novels.

Melville knew the sea well. As a young man, he sailed on a whaling ship to the South Pacific, determined to “sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.,” His first books, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo, were successful. Typee is based on Melville’s real experiences with cannibals on an island in the South Pacific. But when Moby-Dick was published in 1851, it sold poorly and received bad reviews. Melville continued to write, publishing several novels and many short stories. But he had to work as a customs inspector in New York City to earn a living.

Moby-Dick is unlike any other novel. It is an exciting adventure tale, the story of Ahab’s quest for the white whale. But it also offers long passages about whales and the whaling industry. On a deeper level, the book explores such themes as the conflicts between man and nature and between good and evil.

The novel’s greatness was not widely recognized until many years after Melville’s death.

Whaling

From high in the rigging of a tall-masted ship, a lookout cries, “Thar she blows!” The crew springs into action. Quickly they lower their rowboats and set out in pursuit of a nearby whale.

Whaling was a major industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. From ports such as Nantucket and New Bedford in Massachusetts, whaling ships sailed on voyages that lasted for years and took them around the world.

Lookouts on the ships kept watch for whales coming to the surface to breathe. When a whale was spotted, the whalers chased and harpooned it. Then they rowed away to avoid being overturned by their wounded prey.

Sometimes a harpooned whale took a boat on a “Nantucket sleigh ride,” pulling it for hours across the ocean. When the whale finally tired, it was killed with lances. Then the whalers lashed it to the whaling ship and cut it up.

Blubber, or fat, was boiled down to make whale oil, which was sold as fuel for lamps. Corset stays were made from baleen (thin plates of bone from the mouths of right whales). Sperm whales yielded oil used to lubricate fine instruments and waxy ambergris, used in perfume.

At the industry’s peak, there were more than 700 American whaling ships killing some 10,000 whales a year. But whaling declined after 1850 as petroleum replaced whale oil as fuel.

Modern whalers, using harpoon guns and helicopters, brought some species close to extinction.

Here is an article regarding whaling in days gone by.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum site is great place to explore the subject a bit more.