Ch. 5

WHALE MIGRATION

For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.

Ishmael, “The Chart”

Mystic Seaport, the museum that maintains the Charles W. Morgan, holds also a particular paper chart of the South Pacific that is a rare treasure for an understanding of Moby-Dick. This chart, a map for navigation, is over 170 years old, nearly six feet wide, and it smells like an attic. Folded hard in the middle, likely untouched for decades, the chart was damaged in storage, so that on each end it has a broad brown stripe the width of a book. The chart is sprinkled with water stains and foxing. It’s torn in places, ripped in others, and has been patched and repaired at various stages. Partly obscured by more recent repair cloth is a note at the bottom that it was printed by J. W. Norie in 1825 in London. But this is a revised edition, since, for example, beside four neat little dots near the equator it says in printed script: “Islands, seen 1832.”1

In addition to the depths and coastlines, this Norie chart of the South Pacific has information and misinformation to occupy several afternoons of reading, especially with its antiquated names and the cartographer’s candor. The islands of the Pacific Ocean were the last bits of habitable land to be charted by Western mariners. On this chart, much of the southern coast of Papua New Guinea is simply left blank. Off Ecuador, lovely printed script with long serifs cautions: “The Galapagos Islands are said by Captains Hall, Krusenstern, and others, to lie from 14 to 30 miles more to the eastward, than they are placed in this Chart.”

The curators at Mystic Seaport know very little about this copy of the chart. It was an accidental discovery by the director of the library who pulled it randomly out of a pile one morning. Mystic Seaport has another that’s exactly the same, and several copies of this exact South Pacific chart are surely preserved in a few other collections around the world. What’s special about this one is that it still has the working track lines of the courses of at least two different whaling voyages of the whaleship Commodore Morris, a vessel that was the same size as the Acushnet and the Charles W. Morgan and was built and launched for a voyage to the South Pacific in the same year of 1841. The logbooks from these two different four-year voyages of the Commodore Morris correspond to the track lines on this chart. One of the logbooks was kept by Captain Lewis H. Lawrence and the other was by an unnamed watch officer. Both are preserved at the Falmouth Historical Society near Woods Hole. It was common practice at the time on a chart of this scale to mark the ship’s position every twenty-four hours or so, and then connect these dots with straight lines to mark where the ship had traveled. The ship’s officer measured the distance with a set of dividers. The puncture marks from the steel points of the dividers are still visible on the paper. In pencil and in pen are a variety of notes, corrections, dots, dotted lines, straight lines, sketched lines, circles, boxes, recommendations, and even a couple of dates. The captains and mates occasionally printed “correct” or “incorrect” beside little islands and rocks, or they crossed out islands, or added their own.2

This aged scroll, with its beauty and detail and opportunity for interpretation and history, feels indeed, as Melville would have it in “The Chart,” evocative of the wrinkled, complex, and often unreadable old brow of a grizzled sperm whale or of mad Ahab himself. Still more significantly, beyond the track lines and mariner’s notes, the captains drew several clumps of whale flukes, representing whales sighted. Appropriately, the Commodore Morris sailed out of Woods Hole, the region at the base of Cape Cod, which beginning in the 1870s became the epicenter of marine biology, fisheries research, and oceanography in America. This began with a coastal field station nearby, started by Louis Agassiz. Captain Lawrence, who commanded the 1849–1853 voyage of the Commodore Morris, flogged his men, presided over a range of violence on board, and watched more than a dozen of his sailors desert at different times on various islands. But when it came to tracking whales, he was a model captain. Lawrence was especially thoughtful and quantitative as to where and when he saw whales, recording them in his logbook and on the chart. He also kept an additional section in his log that he titled “When we saw Whales Where we Saw Whales Etc. Etc.” The penciled dots and fluke marks that Captain Lawrence drew on this chart are centered around a group of islets to the northeast of New Zealand, where on a few days in 1851 they caught whales in sight of the Charles W. Morgan. Lawrence also drew dense concentrations of flukes along the equator within what is now the vast island nation of Kiribati (pronounced Kiri-bas), whose islands are scattered like seeds across thousands of miles to the east and west of where the equator intersects the dateline of 180˚ longitude. Captain Lawrence’s largest patch of over two dozen drawn flukes was penciled directly around the equator. He drew these tightly together and among a maze of track lines that go in so many different directions and among so many position dots that it seems as if he must be joking. It is a bird’s nest of lines in and across and around the flukes. (See fig. 15.)

WHERE DOES MOBY-DICK END?

The clump of hand-drawn flukes in the equatorial Pacific on this old treasure of a chart is in one of the prime regions where American whalers hunted sperm whales in the mid-nineteenth century, along a vast whaling ground that Ishmael calls the “Season-on-the-Line.” Ishmael never specifies, however, the exact longitude along the equator where Ahab has his final reunion with the White Whale.

It’s reasonable to imagine Ahab meeting Moby Dick in the eastern equatorial Pacific, somewhere around 120˚ west. In the true story of the loss of the whaleship Essex, the bull sperm whale smashed the hull and sank this ship forty or so miles south of the equator at about 119˚ west in November 1820. Melville had sailed in this region himself, and to some whalemen this longitude was considered the beginning of the “On-the-Line” grounds, to the west of what was known as the “Offshore Grounds.” Toward the end of Moby-Dick, Starbuck says their intended direction is to the eastward from the Sea of Japan. Later Ahab gives the order to sail east-southeast for a time.3

Yet Melville knew that the Pacific is a very big place. It took months to sail across the entirety of the Pacific at this widest transect. If you wanted to cruise along the equator, a captain would’ve sailed from off Japan via the most direct route and then likely just proceeded eastward along The Line. Although Ishmael’s exact “technical phrase” of “season-on-the-line” is hard to find anywhere in the period literature, for the captains of the Commodore Morris the “on-the-line grounds” were much farther beyond the sight of the sinking of the Essex, farther to west in the central and western equatorial Pacific within modern-day Kiribati.4

So for the geography of the end of Ahab and the Pequod, you could argue for really anywhere along the equator in the Pacific. But I imagine the meeting with the White Whale near the region of Kiribati on the basis of the period information that Melville read, the historic abundance of sperm whales in the mid-nineteenth century, the Pequod’s approach from the Sea of Japan, and the amount of time that transpires in the novel.

AHAB’S NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK

As the Pequod sails outbound in the North Atlantic, Ishmael buttresses his yarn by helping his reader understand that a single, violent mostly-white sperm whale could and did exist, and that sperm whales—white, named, or otherwise—could and did destroy whalemen, whaleboats, and whaleships. In “The Chart,” Ishmael seeks to make certain that the reader can accept arguably the least believable plot element of the novel, which happens to be the essential driver to the suspense of his story: that one hell-bent man aboard one ship at his command can track down one single animal who was rarely at the surface and who could range throughout all of the oceans on Earth.5

In “The Chart,” Ishmael explains and defends this possibility. The scene begins with Ahab in his cabin brooding over these scrolls:

Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey . . . Were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.6

The Pequod leaves Nantucket on an icy Christmas Day, which has both poetic resonance as well as autobiographical connections for Melville. For American whalemen, beginning a voyage in the wintertime was as common as any other time of the year. When young Melville signed aboard the Acushnet in New Bedford on Christmas Day of 1840, eight other whaleships had sailed from this port for the Pacific Ocean in just the previous few weeks. The master of the Acushnet, Captain Valentine Pease Jr., set sail with his crew on the third of January. He presumably had the same intention as the others: to arrive off Cape Horn before the southern winter and when the opposing currents were reportedly less strong. This still gave his ship a few months to cruise south and perhaps stop briefly along the way to provision and pick up more crew in the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands, then do some whaling in the Atlantic before heading for the Pacific Ocean. We know that the crew of the Acushnet caught at least a few sperm whales in the Atlantic since Captain Pease shipped home from Rio de Janeiro some casks of sperm whale oil, but even by the 1820s the populations of sperm and right whales in the Atlantic and even off the southwest coast of South America had been so depleted that despite the distance and expense, the far offshore South Pacific provided the most potential for a profitable voyage.7

In Moby-Dick the Pequod crosses the Gulf Stream and sails southeasterly away from the New England winter. Instead of rounding Cape Horn, Ahab sails around the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, and then aims for the waters off Japan by way of the Indian Ocean and Indonesia. Prevailing winds in the far southern latitudes, below the capes, blow from west to east. The Pequod takes the path of least resistance. Part of the reason that Cape Horn was so dreaded by mariners was because to try to “double it,” to attempt to sail around this far southern peninsula from the Atlantic, meant sailing into a freezing, contrary wind and current. Though often a necessity for most Pacific-bound routes before the completion of trans-isthmus railroad service in the 1850s and then the Panama Canal in 1914, Cape Horn represented some of the worst and most unpredictable waters for any sailor. A trip around Cape Horn was the mariner’s badge of honor earned from hard labor amidst nature’s harshest extremes. Melville once commented smugly in the margin of an essay by Emerson that spoke of how a sailor feels no terror in a storm: “To one who has weathered Cape Horne as a common sailor what stuff all this is.”8

The owners of the Pequod anticipate the voyage of their whaleship to be about three years from Nantucket: one to get there, a year to catch whales, and a year or so to get back. Peleg and Bildad expect their ship to sail “beyond both stormy Capes.” They’ve planned for Ahab to navigate around the world. Steering via Good Hope was not the most common direction, but American whalemen certainly sailed this way regularly, about 25 percent of the time. Traveling up toward the Japan Grounds instead of heading toward New Zealand below Australia was more rare, but not unprecedented.9

Ahab intends to meet the White Whale in the Pacific by the following winter, the season-on-the-line. Ishmael says that the expected time for encountering Moby Dick, this prime sperm whaling season, begins in January. The Pequod has neatly one year to get there.

Ishmael explains that Ahab chooses the eastbound route around Good Hope to match where Moby Dick had previously been sighted at other times, such as near the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps Melville chose to send the Pequod this way to distance the story from “Mocha Dick” and to create his first piece of fiction that had no direct connections to his own travels. He had just written about Cape Horn in his most recent novel White-Jacket—as had seemingly every other sailor-writer who had described this rite-of-passage in a literary arms race of stormier and icier waves. Going via the Cape of Good Hope also served the reader some variety and fresh foreign seas, while providing the additional poetry of Ahab sailing along with the rotation of the Earth as he chases the rising sun and the White Whale.

What Ishmael explains in “The Chart”—about navigation, geography, and whale migration—represents well the knowledge and practices of whalemen in the mid-nineteenth century. Although current research confirms some of their logic and experience, other aspects remain unknown or unproven, especially regarding the migrations of sperm whales. We can safely put in the fiction department, for example, Ishmael’s notion that sperm whales migrate in consistent, predictable highways, “veins,” that are the width of the sailor’s view at the masthead—but this was an idea he learned from his fish documents, not one that he entirely fabricated for the sake of the novel.10

AMERICA’S FIRST OCEANOGRAPHER

In 1839, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury traveled from his family’s home in Tennessee on his way to board a naval vessel in New York. In Ohio he gave up his seat to a woman boarding, choosing to sit on top of the coach with the driver. On the way up the Appalachians in the middle of the night, the vehicle rolled over. Maury was left crippled in his right leg for life. The recovery was grueling. It forever altered his career—as well as the history of oceanography. (Maury did not begin a deranged hunt for revenge against the particular horses involved or the stagecoach driver, but he did get a financial settlement. No peg leg was necessary.) Maury had enjoyed a promising career at sea before this accident, which began with a circumnavigation as a midshipman aboard the USS Vincennes. Next Maury was the sailing master on a naval voyage rounding Cape Horn in 1831. Maury returned to publish a study on the best route and season to weather Cape Horn. Now limited to shoreside service after his accident, he was assigned to be the superintendent of what would become the US Naval Observatory and Hydrographical Office in Washington, DC. He and his staff oversaw the Navy’s navigational equipment, chronometers, and charts.11

Maury is in Ishmael’s footnote to “The Chart.” The note begins: “Since the above was written, the statement [about whales having predictable seasonal migrations like fish and birds] is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular.” Ishmael quotes Maury directly about the details of this map.12

Maury expanded the role of his department to include the creation of deep ocean charts focused on winds and currents—as well as whale distribution. Maury and his staff did all this by collecting mariners’ logbooks or the extracted data from their voyages, known as the “abstract logs.” The captains, in exchange for sharing, got free copies of Maury’s charts. For example, a senior captain in New Bedford took Captain Pease’s log of the Acushnet and wrote out an abstract log to send to Maury (see fig. 16). So it’s a lovely and accurate detail in “The Chart” when Ishmael says that “at intervals, [Ahab] would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.”13

Maury took over this government agency at a time when the American merchant marine was rapidly expanding. The number of vessels and men involved increased by four hundred percent between 1815 and 1860. Whaleships were an enormous part of this growth, both in tonnage and men. At its height in the 1840s, the American whaling fleet represented about 735 active ships. Meanwhile, the army and navy had surplus revenue, which filtered down to scientific activities, beginning the connection between American scientists and political and financial forces. This in turn led to the government institutions that would evolve into the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).14

With institutional and financial backing, between 1847 and 1860, Maury’s office produced dozens of charts within six series: track charts, trade winds charts, pilot charts, thermal charts, storm and rain charts, and the final series, composed of six whale charts: two global maps of right and sperm whale distribution and four regional graph-style charts, focused on time of year for these two types of whales. (See fig. 17.) Melville almost certainly didn’t see any of these charts for himself because of the timing of publication. He likely read the announcement, the “circular,” in the newspaper, such as in the New York Herald. The graph-style whale chart that Ishmael mentions in his note to “The Chart” and that Melville read about in the announcement looks like a giant piece of graph paper or a seismograph.15

According to Maury’s charts, sperm whales were far more commonly reported along the equator in warmer waters, while right whales were more common at more southern and more coastal regions, such as off Chile.

Limited by the number of logbooks and other hurdles, Maury’s whale charts certainly had scientific shortcomings, but they were enormous early steps toward group data collection. Maury popularized and compiled information that was often held privately and tightly, just as that information on the chart of the Pacific with the drawn whale-flukes was proprietary information for the captains of the Commodore Morris.

The merit of Maury’s research in science circles has been debated, but historian Graham Burnett wrote that Maury was “probably the single most decorated American man of learning in the nineteenth century,” a scientist widely recognized and respected abroad. Maury’s research stood piously, too, in the tradition of natural theology, occasionally even beyond the comfort of his scientific contemporaries. In 1855 Maury published The Physical Geography of the Sea, an immensely influential and popular volume. It’s often considered the first American book focused entirely on what we now call oceanography. He wrote of the “grand machinery of the universe,” a concept popularized by Isaac Newton, which Maury broadened to the ocean: God had created His clockwork universe, which also must apply to global meteorology and life under the sea. When considering ocean salinity, for example, Maury consulted the Bible as a factual source along with his experiments and mariners’ reports. In advancing theories of ocean currents, trying to find the laws that govern their movements, Maury wrote, “They no doubt, therefore, maintain the order and preserve the harmony which characterize every department of God’s handiwork.”16

It was Lieutenant Maury who appropriated the funds to commission the Taney, that schooner in 1850 that was the first American ship with the primary mission to sample the ocean itself, including the acquisition of deep-sea soundings. In that same notice Ishmael cites in Moby-Dick about the whale charts, Maury wrote both on the potential split between right whale species and a recommendation to whaleship owners that they equip all their ships with twine and scrap iron to allow their men to record depth each day. Maury wrote: “I am sure that the whalemen, from the great philosophical interest which many of them manifest with regard to my researches, would in calms get deep sea soundings for me.”17

THE COMMANDER OF AMERICA’S FIRST VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

Yet Maury was not Melville’s most significant reference for “The Chart.” The footnote seems to genuinely have been a late addition. For the bulk of the material, Melville had been reading the narrative reports of Charles Wilkes, another naval officer, who was the commander of the foundational US Exploring Expedition from 1838 to 1842.

By nearly every account, Charles Wilkes was, at best, an enormously capable, prolific, pompous prick. As Wilkes and his superiors planned the expedition, even Lieutenant Maury, who was not without his own obstinacies, pulled out of any involvement with the endeavor. Wilkes had been the superintendent of the chart and instrument department before him.18

Under Wilkes, the US Exploring Expedition, also known as the US Ex. Ex., surveyed coastlines, collected scientific and anthropological information, and represented the new United States as a growing imperial force. The four-year circumnavigation included six vessels, three hundred fifty sailors and officers, and six full-time naturalists known as the “scientifics.” As would be true for most of American history, military and commercial interests provided motivations, platforms, and funding to advance sampling technologies and the collection of oceanographic and biological data. They brought home some sixty thousand natural history objects and specimens which would later form the core collection for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington—which John James Audubon had offered to direct. Wilkes claimed to be the first to prove that Antarctica was a continent.

When Wilkes returned from the expedition, he was court martialed for his abuses of power. He had an intensity of drive that has led to a theory that he was the model for Ahab. After he survived what he saw as bureaucratic badgering, Wilkes fervently published his five-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition in 1844, which included an atlas. Wilkes oversaw the production of some 180 charts, most of which were of the South Pacific, rendering my treasured chart of the Commodore Morris completely out of date.19

Melville purchased Wilkes’s entire narrative in 1847. Wilkes’s final chapter is titled “Currents and Whaling,” from which Melville quoted in his “Extracts” and drew upon directly for “The Chart” and “Does the Whale Diminish?” Wilkes opened “Currents and Whaling” with a two-page map with whaling grounds hatched in gray. Lines of currents point in various directions across every ocean (see fig. 18). Wilkes began:

It may at first sight appear singular that subjects apparently so dissimilar as currents and whaling should be united to form the subject of one chapter. Before its conclusion, however, we trust to establish satisfactorily that the course of the great currents of the ocean, sweeping with them the proper food of the great cetaceous animals, determines not only the places to which they are in the habit of resorting, but the seasons at which they are to be found frequenting them.20

So this is where Melville got his ideas about currents. From the beginning of the voyage, Wilkes and his team tried to quantify and trace currents. Their research even included recording the direction of floating casks from a shipwrecked whaleship near Fiji. The US Ex. Ex. regularly took deep sea soundings and surface and subsurface water temperature. Wilkes mapped currents and eddies, and put forth theories on global circulation. His connections and ideas on water temperature, currents, trade winds, ocean bottom topography, and the effect of the coastlines portended future knowledge about physical oceanography, including what would later be called upwelling and downwelling. Ahab looks to currents to track sperm whale food, just as Wilkes theorized about sperm whale movements based on jellyfish or small squid being swept along by currents, although these organisms actually do not make up much of the sperm whale’s diet.21

Today sperm whale biologists look more toward factors of high phytoplankton density, variations in underwater topography, and productive upwelling systems in order to predict sperm whale movements, since there are no data or methods even today to track the biomass of deep sea squids that make up the majority of their food.22

Melville cherry-picked from Wilkes what he wanted for Moby-Dick, more so than from Maury, but he used research from both to build the believability of Ahab’s quest to find one single individual sperm whale in all the world’s oceans.

THE WORLD WHALING HISTORY PROJECT

Tim Smith is one of those rare people who actually pauses and thinks before he speaks. He leans back in his chair in northern California and says: “Most of the people in my world had very little understanding about what happened before the industrial whaling of the twentieth century. It takes a couple hundred years to explain how we got to where we are today.”23

Smith heads The World Whaling History Project, an endeavor that first began in Woods Hole. The team, co-led by cetacean expert Randall Reeves, digitized the distribution and seasonal data directly from whaling logbooks. They reassembled the data for sperm and right whales compiled by Maury in the 1850s, along with the data compiled in the 1920s by an American naturalist named Charles Townsend, who had included additional species, such as humpback whales. Smith and his team then added some of their own data through the Census of Marine Life. After several years of work, Smith and his colleagues published in 2012 a brand-new set of maps that far more accurately visualize and record the locations of whale sightings from 1780 through 1920 (see plate 7).24

Smith’s involvement in all this began in the 1970s when he was working for NOAA. He was advising the International Whaling Commission (IWC) on what was known about whale populations in order to help them make more informed management decisions. This inevitably led to questions about how many whales there used to be. Smith dove into the old logbooks and Maury’s work.

He explained that, ironically, in many ways we know less about the status of whale distribution now than we did in the 1800s. American whaleships went everywhere. Today, with a few notable exceptions, large-scale industrial whaling is over. It’s difficult to have any global census of whale populations in the twenty-first century. We have excellent local records from whale-watching boats and from aerial surveys in waters, say, off the coasts off South Africa, and in recent decades, scientists have attached ever-advancing lightweight tags on the animals that relay short-term diving and ecological information. But we still have few modern deep ocean records.

The migration patterns of most of the baleen whale species, such as humpbacks and gray whales, are fairly well-known today. Native Americans, surely, and then the whalemen of Melville’s time built the foundations of this understanding. The movement of sperm whales is another story, however. Ishmael suggests in “Schools & Schoolmasters” that sperm whales have a predictable seasonal migration relative to temperature and food. Yet this was not known then—just as it is not known today.

“We still really don’t understand the movement of sperm whales,” Smith explains. In the 1800s whalemen reported very few sperm whales in the latitudes of the North Pacific and the Southern Ocean, above or below 60˚ north and south, but this is where twentieth-century whalers caught them. Did the whales move or are these data more about where people went to hunt them?

Nineteenth-century mariners understood that sperm whales traveled according to gender and age groups for most of the year. Whalemen could tell sex by size, since females are so much smaller. The men also observed the behaviors of family and age groupings. Captain Lawrence of the Commodore Morris regularly wrote in his logbook when he observed schools of “cows and calves” around the equator. Marine biologists have since confirmed the differences in the range of sexually mature male and female sperm whales, which are more segregated by distance than mates of any other mammal that has sex in the sea. Females and juvenile sperm whales spend their lives in the tropical and temperate zones. Modern experts believe the roaming of the units of female and juvenile sperm whales is likely nomadic, based on food abundance and the traditions of their social groups which were, and still are, recovering from the impacts of human hunting.25

How and why male sperm whales move around the world’s oceans is even less understood. Melville was correct in imagining his old male, Moby Dick, to be solitary and capable of traveling tens of thousands of miles. Older male sperm whales tend to spend more and more time at higher, subpolar latitudes as they age, and then only occasionally migrate down toward equatorial feeding grounds and swim within a breeding area. Among these groups of females, these older males make just short visits, sometimes again and again, but often just for a matter of hours, presumably to mate. Their movements, true to Moby Dick, are highly individualistic. They do not, as Ishmael claims, act as lords of harems, an idea he learned from his fish documents and probably his own time at sea.26

“It’s funny,” Smith says, “because sperm whales are the image for protecting all whales, but they’re still the ones we know the least about. And yet today we have the least interest in getting an overview.”

No organizations or institutions today have the economic and political motivations to mount the kind of large studies necessary to really understand how sperm whales migrate. From the 1920s to 1930s scientists in the Southern Ocean collected data cards from Norwegian whaling captains. In 1925 British oceanographers launched a new ship named the William Scoresby for the express purpose of shooting tags into whales in the same way that other ecologists at the time had been developing systematic programs to band birds and mark fish. Tagging whales at that point was helpful for learning about the rorquals, but the program did not last very long.27

Part of the challenge is that sperm whales are especially hard to track. They dive so deeply and for so long that it’s hard to count and identify them. Tagging devices are still limited even today because of the life of batteries and the pressure conditions that sperm whales subject them to. Researchers, such as those off Dominica and New Zealand, have used data loggers with suction cups, but those usually last for only a matter of hours. The technology is improving quickly, however; scientists working in the Gulf of California, for example, attached an Advanced Dive Behavior tag that remained on a sperm whale for over a month.28

When I ask Smith his thoughts on “The Chart” and the possibility of Ahab’s quest, he pauses. He knows the novel well. He leans back in his chair. “I think the idea that Ahab was chasing a single whale and hoped to find him again was justified by stories of multiple strikes in the same animal. They knew that whales could survive a harpoon, so a given whale had a long-term identity. But the idea that you could look for that one single whale at sea—I think that is totally fiction.”

The maps created by Smith’s team suggest that the hunters were catching whales along the equator year-round. Not more so in January or February. So was there no specific time of year for the on-the-line grounds?

“No. There doesn’t seem to have been any real season,” Smith says. “That was one of the problems. There was this thing about seasonal changes, that sperm whales migrated predictably like fish or birds. We tried to do some analysis of that. What does the data actually say about seasonal distribution? In turns out there is little evidence that the sperm whales left the equator during certain seasons. These are mostly groups of females and juveniles. It was the whalemen that left the line during some seasons. But this just gets into the complexity of sperm whale life history. And how little we still know.”

For Melville in that 1851 “Notice to Whalemen” by Maury, the lieutenant included a table that showed by equatorial region the times of year when sperm whales were cited. It shows seasonal differences, but also suggests year-round presence of sperm whales around the equator to the west of the dateline. Ahab’s date to meet the White Whale in January specifically, the “season on-the-line,” seems more for fiction than fact, both in his time and by what we know today.29

In the summer of 2017, a Spanish organization named CIRCE (Conservation, Information and Research on Cetaceans) reported that they had identified a single sperm whale returning to the Straits of Gibraltar for at least thirteen years, going back to 1998. They had photographed the distinctive fluke marks of a female sperm whale they’ve named “Amanita.” The observers identify her by three evenly spaced scratches in a row on one fluke, below a little notch at the tail.30