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Vol. 42 No. 11 · 4 June 2020
The Last Whale
by Colin Burrow
Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick
by Richard J. King.
Chicago, 430 pp., £23, November 2019, 978 0 226 51496 3
Complete Poems
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker.
Library of America, 990 pp., £37.99, August 2019, 978 1 59853 618 8
Are you a Moby-Dickhead? If so, are you enough of a Moby-Dickhead to
have visited the Phallological Museum in Iceland to inspect a sperm
whale’s penis? This is one of the many intrepid expeditions undertaken
by Richard King in the course of researching Ahab’s Rolling Sea. His
book, like Moby-Dick itself, tells you everything you ever wanted to
know about whales but were too ashamed to ask. The fact that the sperm
whale’s penis, or ‘grandissimus’, is four and a half feet long is just
one of its juicier details. All but the truly dedicated cetologist will
learn the following from King’s book: that right whales can be
identified by the shape of the callosities around their blowholes, which
are infested with cyamids, or whale lice; that a whale’s spout or blow
contains snot as well as seawater; that ‘belugas have an extraordinary
range of sound out of their blowholes – think whoopee cushions and
bagpipes’; that a giant squid’s eye can be 11 inches in diameter; that
ambergris (which sells for $15,800 a pound) is found in the rectum of
only about 1 per cent of sperm whales and is an accretion that builds up
around indigestible material such as squid heads.
Herman Melville culled his knowledge of whales from his voyage aboard
the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from
William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through
encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling
Voyage round the Globe (1840). King tests this information against
up-to-the-minute data from modern marine science. It turns out that,
with due allowance for the state of knowledge in the 1850s, Melville got
a surprising amount right about whales: their size, their bone
structure, their mass, even their emotional lives. Melville knew that
the destruction of the Pequod by the white whale was physically
possible, King argues, because in 1820 the Nantucket ship Essex was
rammed by a sperm whale and sank. King even cautiously allows, after
what one hopes was a carbon-neutral visit to the cetologist Marta Guerra
Bobo in New Zealand, that a sperm whale could bear grudges against an
Ahab, or can at least in theory recognise individual humans. Anyone who
isn’t completely turned off by sea creatures will enjoy surfing the
waves of information that roll genially from this book.
Ahab’s Rolling Sea also has a big thesis. King argues that Moby-Dick
offers a ‘proto-Darwinian decentring of the human and the elevation of
the whale’. Moby-Dick, King claims, is an ecological fiction that not
only displays sympathy for whales but sets acquisitive human
perspectives against the wide and impersonal horizon of the sea.
Melville’s novel can offer ecological counsel for today since it
encourages us to think about the violence mankind is doing to the
natural world. The statistics support this argument: the global
population of North Atlantic right whales, for instance, has dropped
from an estimated twenty thousand before industrial-scale hunting in the
19th century to 458 today.
It would be hard to fault either the motives or the facts underlying
King’s ecological zeal. But it’s also hard to believe that Moby-Dick
belongs near the top of any global list of ecological fictions. Melville
does ask ‘whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase ... whether
he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale,
like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and them himself evaporate in
the final puff’. But he then contentedly concludes that whales aren’t
actually being exterminated as a result of being hunted: they’re just
changing their routes to avoid whalers, or are ingeniously hiding
beneath the ice caps. ‘Hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle
seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their polar citadels,
and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up
among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting
December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.’ King says that
‘Ishmael’s belief that whales can survive the pressure of American
hunting in the 1850s reflected the mainstream knowledge of his day.’
Fair enough, but that does nothing to boost his ecowarrior credentials.
It’s possible to filter out the krill from the turbid mass of Moby-Dick
and
