America's great white hope

Whales play a romantic role in our national mythology, but they also helped transform a young colony into a world power.

By Ben Cosgrove

Read more: Books, History, Reviews, Book reviews

Aug. 22, 2007 | D.H. Lawrence famously called "Moby-Dick" "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world," and while plenty of readers might agree with only one or the other of those descriptors, there's no questioning the book's pride of place in America's literary imagination. Vast, unruly, shot through with poetry ("untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven"), "Moby-Dick" remains, more than 150 years after its publication, the most astonishing, mysterious, single-volume feat in our national letters.

Small wonder, then, that Herman Melville, his masterpiece and his ornery white whale surface repeatedly in "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America"; in fact, all three seem to companionably inform nearly every page of Eric Jay Dolin's captivating, though weirdly uneven, chronicle of the United States' long, profitable and deadly relationship with whales, from the mid-17th to early 20th centuries.

Now, we're dealing with whales, whalers and a bit of American Gothic and American mythic, here, so let's get something out of the way at the start: Despite the rip-roaring imagery adorning the book's cover -- a justifiably pissed-off beast rising from the depths, smashing a whaleboat, scattering the boat's occupants like matchsticks -- Dolin's story is (thankfully) more than a tale of hardy men going down to the sea in ships, chasing and harpooning anything that moves.

To be sure, there are scenes of wholesale, seaborne slaughter, certain to gratify those who like their history served extra bloody. Mutinies, madness, ships' decks awash in viscera, sweat and blubber -- whaling's innate brutality is on frequent and graphic display. But what ultimately distinguishes "Leviathan" is Dolin's ability to show that, for generations, whaling was far less the romantic adventure of popular imagining (both past and present) than a purely, unapologetically economic engine helping to drive a young country from ambitious, increasingly aggrieved colony to world power.

Aside from a few fun, impractical facts retained from biology or social studies classes, most Americans understandably know little and care less about whaling beyond a vague familiarity with antiwhaling groups like Greenpeace, of course, and the more aggressively confrontational Sea Shepherd.

It was not always so. For a significant part of America's history, open-ocean, wooden-vessel whaling was vital to the national economy and, for many years, as much an element of the young nation's identity as, say, the auto industry was in the latter half of the 20th century. Dolin brings that vanished, watery world back to life, and if he sometimes falls short of his aim -- namely, telling the full, unadorned story of American whaling's extraordinary, largely forgotten rise and fall -- it's not for lack of trying.

The story begins -- or at least really gets going -- off the coast of North America, and like so much of whaling's history, it's rife with contradictions. Marveling at the rapid ascendance of a small, hardscrabble, sparsely populated island called Nantucket in the early 18th century, Dolin neatly points up the incongruity of the island's deeply religious inhabitants embracing the violent rigors of whaling at the same time that he celebrates their success:

Quakerism [was], by mid-century, the predominant religion on Nantucket ... The "fighting Quakers" or "Quakers with a vengeance," as Melville called them, had a strong work ethic and a business sense that proved most efficacious in this emerging industry ... [But] it is a bit strange that this religion, rooted so firmly in pacifism, should have been so instrumental in catapulting Nantucket to the front rank of colonial whaling communities. After all, whaling, at its most elemental, is a brutal, violent, and deadly activity, and one that a pacifist might just as soon avoid.

Dolin has a tendency to sometimes strain for a punch line or to belabor the obvious (peace-loving Quakers butchering the noble creatures of the ocean = paradox; we get it!), and few readers will come away praising his prose for prose's sake. But over the course of 375 pages, plus an additional 80 of notes, he manages to mix the historical with the immediate and particular in such a way that we occasionally feel as if we're enjoying a tale that seems to veer from the verifiable past into the realm of sci-fi.

Consider the sperm whale, "the whale's whale," as one chapter heading in "Leviathan" has it. If these animals didn't exist, it's unlikely that any fantasy novelist's imagination could invent them. When most people think of whales, they probably picture the sperm. Moby-Dick was, of course, a sperm. Most depictions of 18th and 19th century whaling feature sperm whales. As Thomas Jefferson noted, the sperm whale "is an active, fierce animal and requires vast address and boldness in the fisherman."

Males, or bulls, can reach 60 feet long and weigh 50 tons. Their brains, weighing up to 20 pounds, are the largest of any species. They can dive thousands of feet beneath the waves and remain submerged for up to an hour. The sperm whale's skin is 14 inches thick -- the thickest of any animal. Part of their diet is made up of giant squid -- equally freaky, awe-inspiring creatures that can grow to 60 feet long and weigh 1 ton, and that leave nasty, saucer-shaped scars on their adversaries' heads during life-and-death battles in the frigid, lightless, silent depths of the open ocean.

When hunted, these enormous, unpredictable, almost immeasurably strong beasts were in their element; it's the puny predators -- the whalers -- who were, quite literally, at sea. So what compelled men to pile into light, fast wooden boats at the first sight of a whale's spout on the horizon, row like mad through heaving waves, in all weather, and often into the teeth of icy winds, and try to hook into one of these behemoths with a hand-thrown harpoon and a few thousand feet of rope?

Silly question.

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