Ahab's Rolling Sea

1 Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1929), 194. This quotation was introduced to me as a lead by Jennifer Baker.

2 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 565.

3 On Melville and marine life, see, e.g., Bert Bender, Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea-Fiction from “Moby-Dick” to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), vii, 19.

4 Moby-Dick, 64, 273, 424. Throughout this natural history I’ll refer to Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick. In other words, it will be “Melville wrote” (past tense) and “Ishmael says” (present tense). Certainly there are gray areas, especially after the story departs Nantucket and heads out to sea, and the chapters and scenes and even footnotes seem to be narrated by someone we might call Hermael or Ishmelville. But the storyteller, who’s asked us to call him Ishmael, is, like all fictional characters, a creation of the author at a single point in his life, even if the tone feels distant or omniscient or even if this voice refers to himself sitting at his writing desk. On this, see Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), xi; and Maurice S. Lee, “The Language in Moby-Dick: ‘Read It If You Can,’” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 395–96.

5 NOAA Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center as displayed in “Climate Change: Seven Things You Need to Know,” National Geographic 231, no. 4 (April 2017): 31–32; John Walsh and Donald Wuebbles, et al., “Ch. 2: Our Changing Climate,” Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, ed. J. M. Melillo, Terese (T. C.) Richmond, and G. W. Yohe (US Global Change Research Program, 2014), 20–21, 44–45. See also fig. 1, “Global Average Absolute Sea Level Change, 1880–2015,” Climate Change Indicators: Sea Level, United States Environmental Protection Agency, August 2016, www.epa.gov /climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level; and S. Jevrejeva, J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, A. Matthews, and G. Spada, “Trends and Acceleration in Global and Regional Sea Levels since 1807,” Global and Planetary Change 113 (2014): 11–22.

6 Transportation Safety Board of Canada, “Marine Investigation Report, M10F0003: Knockdown and Capsizing, Sail Training Yacht Concordia” (Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2011).

7 Greg Dobie, ed., “Safety and Shipping Review 2016,” Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty SE (March 2016), 4; See also George Michelson Foy, Run the Storm (New York: Scribner, 2018).

8 Moby-Dick, 273.

1 NYC Department of City Planning, “Total and Foreign-Born Population, New York City, 1790–2000,” accessed 31 January 2019, www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/historical-population.page; Jean-Paul Rodrigue, “World’s Largest Cities, 1850,” accessed 31 January 2019, https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=4976. See also Richard F. Selcer, Civil War America, 1850 to 1875 (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 271.

2 Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 67, 129; Williams A. Allen, “25 November 1842,” Logbook of the Samuel Robertson, 1841–46, New Bedford Whaling Museum Log ODHS 1040; also Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (New York: Harper and Bros., 1840), 44–45.

3 Moby-Dick, 524.

4 Pip as a figure to consider environmental justice was introduced to me by Dana Luciano, “Love and Death in the Anthropocene: Geologic Time, Genre, Moby-Dick,” Lecture at Connecticut College, 21 April 2016.

5 Moby-Dick, 370–71; Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (London: John Van Voorst, 1839), 44, 161; Randall R. Reeves, Brent S. Stewart, Phillip J. Clapham, James A. Powell, and Pieter A. Folkens, Guide to Marine Mammals of the World (New York: Knopf, 2002), 21; Stephanie L. Watwood, et al., “Deep-Diving Foraging Behavior of Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus),” Journal of Animal Ecology 75, no. 3 (May 2006): 814–25.

6 Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 74–75; Matthew Fontaine Maury, Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: C. Alexander Printer, 1851), 62–63.

7 The lecture Melville heard was one of Emerson’s in a series of five titled “Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century.” See William Braswell, “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” American Literature 9, no. 3 (November 1937): 317; Herman Melville, “To Evert A. Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, Boston,” Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 121.

8 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 242.

9 This interview with Mary K. Bercaw Edwards was originally conducted on 11 May 2016, then revised in collaboration.

10 The Acushnet was 359 tons and the Charles W. Morgan was 351 tons, both ship-rigged in 1841. Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Waltham, MA: self-published, 1878), 372, 376.

11 Meredith Farmer, “Herman Melville and Joseph Henry at the Albany Academy; or, Melville’s Education in Mathematics and Science,” Leviathan 18, no. 2 (June 2016): 4–28. See also Laurie Robertson-Lorant, “A Traveling Life,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 3–18; and Tyrus Hillway, “Melville’s Education in Science,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 411–25; Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 43, 45, 52; Wilson Heflin, Herman Melville’s Whaling Years, ed. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 4–5.

12 Leyda, 110; Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage, 2006), 35; Merton M. Sealts Jr., Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 19–22; Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1, 1819–1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 110, 181, etc.

13 J. Ross Browne, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, ed. John Seelye (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968), 193.

14 Moby-Dick, 156.

15 Heflin, 59, 67, 69, 106, 110–15. They might have also anchored in Independencia Bay, Peru. See a helpful summary of all Melville’s ocean passages in R. D. Madison, ed., The Essex and the Whale: Melville’s Leviathan Library and the Birth of Moby-Dick (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 264.

16 John James Audubon, “To Daniel Webster, New York, 8 September 1841,” in The Audubon Reader, ed. Richard Rhodes (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2006), 570.

17 Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2009), 1–23; Heflin, 161–70.

18 He dubiously claimed later that he was a harpooner on board, also known as the boatsteerer, who actually threw the first harpoon at a whale. Herman Melville, “To Richard Bentley, 27 June 1850, New York,” Correspondence, 163.

19 Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1989), 4–5.

20 Herman Melville, “To R. H. Dana, Jr., 1 May 1850, New York,” Correspondence, 162. Madison suggests convincingly that Melville was not actually halfway through the novel. See “Introduction: Swimming through Libraries,” The Essex and the Whale, xx–xxii.

21 Herman Melville, “To Nathaniel Hawthorne [1 June?] 1851, Pittsfield,” Correspondence, 191. On this letter, see Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 7.

22 Moby-Dick, 112; Harold J. Morowitz, “Herman Melville, Marine Biologist,” Biological Bulletin 220 (April 2011): 83.

23 See also Laurie Robertson-Lorant, “A Traveling Life,” 5.

24 Robert Madison, 10 June 2016, pers. comm.

25 I’ve estimated conservatively over 8,000 masthead standers per year by multiplying 15 sailors by 550 ships. Charles Wilkes, for example, states, “Between fifteen and sixteen thousand of our countrymen are required to man these [675] vessels.” Not all men on a ship took regular tricks aloft to look for whales. Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, vol. 5 (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 485–86. See also Starbuck, 98; on reading cultures, Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 5.

26 James C. Osborn, Logbook of the Charles W. Morgan, 1841–45, Mystic Seaport Log 143. See also Hester Blum, “A List of Books that I Did Not Read on the Voyage,” Leviathan 17, no. 1 (March 2015): 129–32; Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 167; Mary K. Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 85; Tyrus Hillway, “Melville’s Education in Science,” 417; on natural history and sailors’ journals, D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 110; Michael Dyer, 6 Friday 2017, pers. comm.

27 Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1968), 3.

28 Herman Melville, “Review of Etchings of a Whaling Cruise and Sailors’ Life and Sailors’ Yarns,” Piazza Tales, 206. See Beale, 3.

29 John F. Leavitt, The Charles W. Morgan (Mystic: Mystic Seaport, 1973), 35, 37.

30 Moby-Dick, 159.

1 Moby-Dick, 136.

2 Moby-Dick, 135, 443; Sumner W. D. Scott, “The Whale in Moby Dick,” PhD diss. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1950), 6–27.

3 Madison, The Essex and the Whale, 169–76; Parker, vol. 1, 723–24; Vincent, 128–35; Kendra Gaines, “A Consideration of an Additional Source for Moby-Dick,” Melville Society Extracts 29 (1977): 6–12; Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, “The Infusion of Useful Knowledge: Melville and The Penny Cyclopædia,” Melville Society Extracts 70 (1987): 9–13; Hal Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16.

4 For brief biographies of Beale and Bennett, see Ian A. D. Bouchier, “Some Experiences of Ships’ Surgeons during the Early Days of the Sperm Whale Fishery,” British Medical Journal 285 (18–25 December 1982): 1811–13; and Honore Forster, “British Whaling Surgeons in the South Seas, 1823–1843,” Mariner’s Mirror 74, no. 4 (1988): 401–15.

5 Frederick Bennett, Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), vol. 1, 118–19.

6 Moby-Dick, 265; Beale, 33; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online, ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon, melvillesmarginalia.org.

7 “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,” Southern Quarterly Review 5, New Series (Charleston: Walker and Richards, January 1852), 262.

1 Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 97. Burnett’s Trying Leviathan is the definitive source on this case. See also for a brief summary “Maurice v. Judd,” Historical Society of the New York Courts, accessed 31 January 2019, www.nycourts.gov. The case was published as a pamphlet in the summer of 2019 by the successful prosecuting attorney. William Sampson, Is a Whale A Fish? An accurate report of the case of James Maurice against Samuel Judd . . . (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1819).

2 Bennett, vol. 2, 148–49.

3 Moby-Dick, 136, 307, 370; The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, The Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 27, “Wales—Zygophyllaceæ,” ed. George Long (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1843), 272; Gaines, 6. “Penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem” refers to the penis entering the female and the female feeding with breast milk; “ex lege naturæ jure meritoque” refers to natural law and merit, which doesn’t have much to do with biology. On the biblical groupings, Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 20–23.

4 Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 14.

5 Moby-Dick, 305; Tyrus Hillway, “Melville as Critic of Science,” Modern Language Notes 65, no. 6 (June 1950): 411–14.

6 Browne, 59.

7 Beale, e.g. 15, 18, 106; Bennett, vol. 2, 145; John Mason Good, The Book of Nature (Hartford: Belknap and Hamersley, 1837), 192–93; “Whales,” Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 27, 273.

8 Moby-Dick, 135, 262; on the “squash,” Stuart M. Frank, Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery (Fairhaven, MA: Edward J. Lefkowicz, 1986), 34–35; Good, 192.

9 Moby-Dick, xxiii, 137; “Whales,” Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 27, 273; Sealts, 170; Baron Georges Cuvier, The Class Pisces, with supplementary editions by Edward Griffith and Charles Hamilton Smith, vol. 10 of The Animal Kingdom (London, Whittaker and Co., 1834), 27; Cuvier, Melville’s Marginalia Online. For further discussion on the history of the whales v. fish debate, see Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 211–22.

10 Robert Nawojchik, 14 September 2016, Lecture, Mystic Aquarium.

11 Moby-Dick, 306; Christoph Irmscher, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), 64–84; David Dobbs, Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 31–36; on Ishmael’s “vast floating icebergs” scraping New England rocks, and Melville’s reading of Lyell, Agassiz, et al., see Elizabeth S. Foster, “Melville and Geology,” American Literature 17, no. 1 (March 1945): 61.

12 Louis Agassiz and A. A. Gould, Principles of Zoology, rev. ed. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1851), 210.

13 This interview with Robert Nawojchik was originally conducted on 26 May 2017, then revised in collaboration.

14 Beale, 10–12; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online. For more on how the “Cetology” chapter mocks the scientific community, see, e.g. J. A. Ward, “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick,” American Literature 28, no. 2 (May 1956), 176–77.

15 Agassiz and Gould, Principles of Zoology, 84, 95.

16 Ewan Fordyce, 15 March 2018, pers. comm.; Ewan Fordyce, “Cetacean Evolution,” Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals [EMM], 3rd ed., ed. Bernd Würsig, J. G. M. Thewissen, and Kit M. Kovacs (London: Academic Press, 2018), 180.

17 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. William Bynum (New York: Penguin, 2009), 169; Fordyce, “Cetacean Evolution,” EMM, 3rd ed., 182; Reeves, et al., Guide, 12–13; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, vol. 2 (London: Pimlico, 2003), 99. See also Annalisa Berta, “Pinniped Evolution,” EMM, 3rd ed., 712–22.

18 Annalisa Berta and Thomas A. Deméré, “Baleen Whales, Evolution,” EMM, 3rd ed., 70–72; David W. Laist, North Atlantic Right Whales: From Hunted Leviathan to Conservation Icon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 61.

19 Moby-Dick, 140.

20 Melville would be pleased to know that until quite recently there has been some haggling over the full scientific title. Physeter catadon, referring to the teeth, was in fashion for a while. Physeter is Greek for the blow-hole and was first given by Linnaeus in 1758. See Hal Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 919; and A. A. Berzin, The Sperm Whale (Kashalot), ed. A.V. Yablokov, trans. E. Hoz and Z. Blake (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translation, 1972), 7–13, 16.

21 Agassiz and Gould, 25–26.

22 See David W. Sisk, “A Note on Moby-Dick’s “Cetology” Chapter,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 7, no. 2 (April 1994): 80–82.

23 Moby-Dick, 138.

24 Moby-Dick, 138; Bennett, vol. 2, 154; Beale, 1, 15–16; Reeves, et al., Guide, 234, 241.

25 Charles M. Scammon, The Marine Mammals of the North-western Coast of North America (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 52; and John Jones, Meditations from Steerage: Two Whaling Journal Fragments, ed. Stuart M. Frank (Sharon, MA: Kendall Whaling Museum, 1991), 21; Laist, 23–30. For right whale split as considered in 1851 see Matthew Fontaine Maury, “The Whale Fisheries . . . ,” New York Herald, 29 April 1851, 3. For current taxonomy and genetics, Scott D. Kraus and Rosalind M. Rolland, eds., The Urban Whale (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9; Reeves, et al., Guide, 190; Robert D. Kenney, “Right Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 817–18.

26 Phillip J. Clapham and Jason S. Link, “Whales, Whaling, and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, ed. James A. Estes, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 314–16; Laist, 101–3, 109–10, 165–69. Accounts today about the name of the right whale sometimes suggest that right whales did not sink when killed, but they did, and it was a problem. See Henry T. Cheever, The Whale and His Captors; or, The Whaleman’s Adventures, ed. Robert D. Madison (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2018), 33.

27 Moby-Dick, 139. Wallace argued that Melville purposefully did not name Gray so he could skewer his findings: Robert K. Wallace, “Melville, Turner, and J. E. Gray’s Cetology,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 13, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 155–64.

28 Moby-Dick, 360.

29 For similar common names in the nineteenth century, see Scoresby in the 1820s, whalemen Dean C. Wright, James Osborn, the logkeeper of the Commodore Morris in the 1840s, and William Scammon in the 1870s. Cheever wrote of razor-backs that sounded more like a blue whale by size (The Whale and His Captors, 43–44), as did Bennett (vol. 2, 154). The fin whale’s dorsal fin is about a foot or foot and a half tall. Rob Nawojchik, pers. comm.; OBIS SEAMAP, “Fin Whale—Balaenoptera physalus,” Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Duke University, accessed 31 January 2019, http://seamap.env.duke.edu/species/180527/html; Ishmael seems to conveniently fudge the characteristics of the fin whale spout, however, to confuse the fin whale with a sperm whale at the close of “The Pequod Meets the Virgin” (360). Reeves, et al., Guide, 184, 208; A. G. Bennett, “On the Occurrence of Diatoms on the Skin of Whales,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 91, no. 641 (15 November 1920): 352–57. For more on historical common names, see Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816–1906 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53–56.

30 Reeves, et al., Guide, 226–27.

31 For example, Jones on the whaleship Eliza Adams wrote in 1852 off Cape Horn of “one little fin back,” swimming around the ship (Meditations from Steerage, 18). It seems unlikely this was a juvenile finback if all alone. Perhaps this was a minke, just as Scammon’s “Sharp-headed Finner Whale (Balænoptera Davidsoni, Scammon.) [sic]” was almost certainly a minke (49–51).

32 Osborn, e.g. “15 October 1841”; Dean C. Wright, Meditations from Steerage, 2.

33 Good, 192; Robert Hamilton, The Naturalist’s Library: Mammalia. Whales, &c., vol. 26, ed. William Jardine (Edinburgh: W. H Lizards, 1843), 228–30; Michael Dyer, “Whalemen’s natural history observations and the Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage Round the World,” New Bedford Whaling Museum Blog, 29 March 2016, whalingmuseumblog.org; Dan Bouk and D. Graham Burnett, “Knowledge of Leviathan: Charles W. Morgan Anatomizes His Whale,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Fall 2008): 453; Charles W. Morgan, “Address before the New Bedford Lyceum,” Charles Waln Morgan Papers, 1796–1861, Mss 41, Sub-group 1, Series Y, Folder 1, New Bedford Whaling Museum (1830/37), 12. In 1912 naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy found that the men referred to grampus as beaked whales; his captain called them “algerines,” in Robert Cushman Murphy, Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig Daisy, 1912–1913 (Chicago: Time-Life Books, 1982), 146; Typee, 10; Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 43, 55–56, 173. See also William Scoresby Jr., An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1820), 474.

34 Moby-Dick, 261, 282. For examples of the dolphin fish in sea literature see Dana’s Two Years and William Falconer’s “The Shipwreck” (1762). See Bennett’s discussion of the dying “dolphin,” too; he puts the word in quotes, since it’s the sailor’s word (his Coryphaena hippuris), vol. 1, 8.

35 Bernd Würsig, “Bow-Riding,” EMM, 3rd ed., 135–36. See also Francis Allyn Olmsted, Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1970), 90–92.

36 On “algerines,” see Dyer, “Whalemen’s natural history observations;” Sisk, 81; and, again, Murphy, Logbook for Grace, 146.

37 Bolster, 72; Paul Dudley, “An Essay upon the Natural History of Whales, with a particular Account of the Ambergris found in the Sperma Ceti Whale,” Philosophical Transactions 33 (1724–25): 258; Laist, 18; see also Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 39–40; and M. E. Bowles, “Some Account of the Whale-Fishery of the N. West Coast and Kamschatka,” Polynesian (4 October 1845): 83.

38 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 427.

39 Eric Wilson, “Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being,” Studies in American Fiction 28, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 132. See also Wyn Kelley, “Rozoko in the Pacific: Melville’s Natural History of Creation,” in “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific, ed. Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2007), 139–52; and Karen Lentz Madison and R. D. Madison, “Darwin’s Year and Melville’s ‘New Ancient of Days,’” in America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U. S. Literary Culture, ed. Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 86–103.

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume IV, 1832–1834, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964), 265.

2 Moby-Dick, 204–5; Howard P. Vincent, The Trying Out of Moby-Dick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 169, 174; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 607–11; Jeremiah N. Reynolds, “Mocha Dick; or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal,” Knickerbocker 12 (May 1839) in Madison, The Essex and the Whale, 64; “Five Wicked Whales: A Quintet of Leviathans Well Known to All Whalers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 April 1892, 35.

3 See Walter Harding, “A Note on the Title ‘Moby-Dick,’” American Literature 22, no. 4 (January 1951): 501; Ben J. Rogers, “Melville, Purchas, and Some Names for ‘Whale’ in Moby-Dick,” American Speech 72, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 333, 335; Ben Rogers, “From Mocha Dick to Moby Dick: Fishing for Clues to Moby’s Name and Color,” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 46, no. 4 (1998): 263–76.

4 Parker, vol. 1, 696; Madison, The Essex and the Whale, 9–10, 61; Owen Chase, et al., Narratives of the Wreck of the Whale-ship Essex (New York: Dover, 1989); Leyda, 119; Harrison Hayford and Lynn Horth, “Melville’s Memoranda in Chase’s Narrative of the Essex,” in Moby-Dick, 971–95; Moby-Dick, 203–5. Melville extracted the note on the white baleen whale for Moby-Dick, xxiii, from John Harris’s Compleat Collection of Voyages (1705); see Moby-Dick, 820; Bennett, vol. 2, 220. Whaling historian Michael Dyer found in only one logbook a reference to a lancing of “Old Zeek,” and not a single mention of a named whale in an article in the New Bedford Whalemen’s Shipping List (Michael Dyer, 15 February 2018, pers. comm.); Michael P. Dyer, “O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea”: Original Art of the Yankee Whale Hunt (New Bedford: Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2017), 304. See also the logbook by whaleman-artist John F. Martin, who wrote in 1843 that his shipmates named three right whales that they chased all day, but were unable to kill: “The largest of the whales we chased to day the men gave the name of Old Sorrel. The next, which was spotted, they called Stewball, & the smallest one, Betz.” This seems more like something to pass the time that single day, however. John F. Martin, Around the World in Search of Whales: A Journal of the Lucy Ann Voyage, 1841–44, ed. Kenneth R. Martin (New Bedford: Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2016), 126.

5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Uses of Natural History (1833–35),” The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 8. On historic Boston temperatures: Richard B. Primack, Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 50.

6 For more on natural theology here, see Wilson, 134; and Bruce A. Harvey, “Science and the Earth,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 73.

7 Moby-Dick, 208; Jennifer J. Baker, “Dead Bones and Honest Wonders: The Aesthetics of Natural Science in Moby-Dick,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85–86; Sealts, 122, 171; Parker, vol. 1, 267, 499, 724.

8 Moby-Dick, 183.

9 Dagmar Fertl and Patricia E. Rosel, “Albinism,” EMM, 3rd ed., 20. See also Bennett, vol. 1, 157–58.

10 Moby-Dick, 306–7.

11 Beale, 31.

12 Whitehead, “Sperm Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 920; Berzin, 25, 27; Bennett, vol. 2, 155; Beale, 31. See also Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 1, 459; Richard Ellis, The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Ocean’s Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 97; Reeves, et al., Guide, 240; Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 6–7.

13 Dagmar Fertl, et al., “An Update on Anomalously White Cetaceans, Including the First Account for the Pantropical Spotted Dolphin (Stenella Attenuata Graffmani),” Latin American Journal of Aquatic Mammals 3, no. 2 (July/Dec 2004): 163; Chester Howland, “The Real Moby Dick?” as collected in Yankees Under Sail: A Collection of the Best Sea Stories from Yankee Magazine, ed. Richard Heckman (Dublin, NH: Yankee, 1968), 184–85; Curatorial display, New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2017; Berzin, 27–28; S. Ohsumi, “A Descendant of Moby Dick, or a White Sperm Whale,” Scientific Reports of the Whales Research Institute 13 (September 1958): 207–9; Tim Severin, In Search of Moby Dick: The Quest for the White Whale (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 181–86; Charles “Flip” Nicklin, with K. M. Kostyal, Among Giants: A Life with Whales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12–13; Flip Nicklin, 24 July 2018, pers. comm. via Chris Carey/Minden; Hiroya Minakuchi, 26 July 2018, pers. comm. via Chris Carey/Minden; Helmut Corneli, Alamy Stock Photo, 2016.

14 Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 39; Olmsted, 62; Bennett, vol. 2, 165; New Bedford Whaling Museum, e.g., S-1918 (labeled sperm whale), KWM-686, and S-1890 from a voyage on the barque Newton, 1846–49.

15 Moby-Dick, 337; Berzin, 38–41.

16 Moby-Dick, 307. On blubber see Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 32, 62.

17 Emerson, “The Uses of Natural History,” 16. Moby-Dick, 312; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, new ed. (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1849), 30. See also Parker, vol. 1, 776; Blum, The View from the Masthead, 121–23; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 79–80.

18 Moby-Dick, 307.

1 “Southern Pacific Ocean,” J. W. Norie (1825), Mystic Seaport No. 1942.1082.

2 The chart was donated in 1943 with a set of several other charts by a wealthy descendent of a whaling family named Edward Howland Greene, the same man who gave Mystic Seaport the Charles W. Morgan; Lewis H. Lawrence, captain, Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1849–1853, Falmouth Historical Society, 2006.044.002; Logkeeper, Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1845–1849 (capt. Silas Jones), Falmouth Historical Society, 2013.076.09.

3 Chase, 24; Moby-Dick, 504, 513–14. Other factors to consider to argue for the destination to the east include that the seals encountered in “The Life-Buoy” suggest Galápagos-like rocks (see Olmsted, 177), and Maury’s notice, as discussed below, for the region of the Essex’s sinking lists the best time for whaling as February. On the names of whaling grounds, see John L. Bannister, Elizabeth A. Josephson, Randall R. Reeves, and Tim D. Smith, “There She Blew! Yankee Sperm Whaling Grounds, 1760–1920,” in Oceans Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, ed. David J. Starkey, Poul Holm, and Michaela Barnard (London: Earthscan, 2008), 116–18.

4 Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1849–1853; Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1845–1849. See also Wilkes, vol. 5, 487; Cheever, The Whale, 165, 186; Beale, 189–91; Browne, 548–58.

5 Vincent, 180–85; D. Graham Burnett, “Matthew Fontaine Maury’s ‘Sea of Fire’: Hydrography, Biogeography, and Providence in the Tropics,” in Tropical Visions in the Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 113–14; Samuel Otter, “Reading Moby-Dick,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 73.

6 Moby-Dick, 199.

7 Heflin, 39–40, 48–49, 59–62; Wilkes, vol. 5, 470; Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Viking, 2000), 63–64, 77–78; Matthew Fontaine Maury, “On the Navigation of Cape Horn,” American Journal of Science and Arts (Silliman’s Journal) 26, no. 1 (1834): 54–63.

8 Braswell, 329; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series, new ed. (Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1847), 216.

9 Moby-Dick, 104, 237. According to whaling historian Alexander Starbuck, of the ninety-four whaleships that left New Bedford and Fairhaven in 1841, including the Acushnet, twenty-one whaled most significantly in the Indian Ocean, although it’s not stated if they went by the way of Good Hope (Starbuck, 372–77). For 25% see Raymond A. Rydell, Cape Horn to the Pacific: The Rise and Decline of an Ocean Highway (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 66.

10 Scott, “The Whale in Moby Dick,” 157–58; Wilkes, vol. 5, 483. See also Mardi, 4.

11 Douglas Stein, “Paths through the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and His Wind and Current Charts,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 32, no. 3 (1980): 99–101.

12 Moby-Dick, 199. The quotation in Melville’s footnote appears in Maury, Explanations and Sailing Directions, 3rd ed., 207; Vincent, 184–85; Maury, “The Whale Fisheries,” 3.

13 Moby-Dick, 198; “Abstract Log of the Acushnet, 1841–1844,” The Maury Abstract Logs, 1796–1861, US National Archives and Records Service, record group 27; Heflin, xvii. Melville does not mention whale stamps in Moby-Dick, which would seem a delicious metaphor for Ishmael. These stamps were in use in the 1840s and ’50s and served as an easy reference for whalemen to see what had been killed and where over the course of a previous voyage.

14 Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 71; Andrew W. German and Daniel V. McFadden, The Charles W. Morgan: A Picture History of an American Icon (Mystic: Mystic Seaport, 2014), 11; Davis, Gallman, and Gleiter, 6; Starbuck, 98.

15 Marc I. Pinsel, “The Wind and Current Chart Series Produced by Matthew Fontaine Maury,” Journal of the Institute of Navigation 28, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 125, 130, 137; Vincent, 184; Maury, “The Whale Fisheries,” 3.

16 John Leighly, “Introduction,” in Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), xxiv–xxvii; Burnett, “Maury’s ‘Sea of Fire,’” 116, 127–28; Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 152–53, 167–70. See also on Maury the special issue of the International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 2 (2016).

17 Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 74; Maury, “The Whale Fisheries . . . ,” 3.

18 See, for example, Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 108–11.

19 For Ahab as inspired by Wilkes, see David Jaffé, The Stormy Petrel and the Whale: Some Origins of Moby-Dick (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).

20 Wilkes, vol. 5, 457.

21 Wilkes, vol. 5, 482–84; explaining otherwise was Beale, 34–35, 61–62. On Wilkes and Melville, Jason Smith, “Charles Wilkes,” Searchable Sea Literature, 2013, http://sites.williams.edu/searchablesealit/w/wilks-charles; Parker, vol. 1, 456; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 130. See also Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 30–43.

22 Saana Isojunno, Manuel C. Fernandes, and Jonathan Gordon, “Effects of Whale Watching on Underwater Acoustic Behaviour of Sperm Whales in the Kaikōura Canyon Area,” in Effects of Tourism on the Behaviour of Sperm Whales Inhabiting the Kaikōura Canyon, ed. Tim M. Markowitz, Christoph Richter, and Jonathan Gordon (PACE-NZRP, 2011), 83.

23 Tim D. Smith, 12 December 2016, interview conducted by Skype and then revised in collaboration.

24 Tim D. Smith, Randall R. Reeves, Elizabeth A. Josephson, and Judith N. Lund, “Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail,” PLOS One 7, no. 4 (April 2012): 1–25.

25 Hal Whitehead, “Sperm Whales in Ocean Ecosystems,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, 325; Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 98–100.

26 Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 922; Beale, 51.

27 D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 153–71.

28 M. Guerra, et al. “Diverse Foraging Strategies by a Marine Top Predator: Sperm Whales Exploit Pelagic and Demersal Habitats in the Kaikōura Submarine Canyon,” Deep-Sea Research Part 1 128 (2017): 99, 101; Ladd Irvine, Daniel M. Palacios, Jorge Urbán, and Bruce Mate, “Sperm Whale Dive Behavior Characteristics Derived from Intermediate-Duration Archival Tag Data,” Ecology and Evolution 7 (2017): 7822–23.

29 Maury, “The Whale Fisheries,” 3.

30 Staff, “Nomad Whale Spotted Back in the Strait of Gibraltar,” Gibraltar Chronicle, 20 July 2016, http://chronicle.gi/2016/07/nomad-whale-spotted-back-in-the-strait-of-gibraltar/; Ruth Esteban, 13 March 2018, pers. comm.; Renaud de Stephanis, 24 March 2018, pers. comm. See also E. Carpinelli, et al., “Assessing Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) Movements within the Mediterranean Sea through Photo-Identification,” Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems (special issue) 24, no. S1 (July 2014): 23–30.

1 The Pythagorean maxim includes not eating beans, which seems to have been a known producer of flatulence as far back as the ancient Greeks. Melville’s use of “head winds” is a nice pun, too, as this refers to winds at the bow, but also, of course, a toilet at sea. Stubb makes another fart joke later (352–53).

2 Lawrence, “17 September 1849,” Logbook of the Commodore Morris.

3 Dana, 262–64. He back-pedaled on whalemen as poor sailors in a later edition.

4 Vincent, 220.

5 Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), 69–74; Anders O. Perrson, “Hadley’s Principle: Understanding and Misunderstanding the Trade Winds,” History of Meteorology 3 (2006): 17, 30. As early as 1735, Englishman George Hadley had put forth a paper for the Royal Society titled “On the Cause of the General Trade Winds,” the first coherent explanation as to why these winds blow in the direction they do, but he couldn’t quite get at it either.

6 Moby-Dick, 557, 564.

7 Moby-Dick, 564. Melville seems to have had little knowledge or interest in nineteenth-century debates over the physics and causes of trade winds, yet Ahab does mention here the poles in relation to wind.

1 For more on Melville and Romanticism, see Rachela Permenter, “Romantic Philosophy, Transcendentalism, and Nature,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 266–81. See also Bender, Sea-Brothers.

2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834),” in The Annotated Ancient Mariner, ed. Martin Gardner (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 47.

3 Melville did not mention sea snakes in Moby-Dick, but he might have seen them himself during his Pacific travels, and he surely, like Coleridge, read about sailors catching and eating them. See, e.g., James Colnett, A Voyage to the South Atlantic and Round Cape Horn Into the Pacific Ocean, for the Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries . . . (London: W. Bennett, 1798), 124; Bennett, vol. 2, 68; and John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 49–50, 478–79.

4 Moby-Dick, 549; Lawrence, “12 Nov 1849,” and “15 Jan 1850,” Logbook of the Commodore Morris.

5 Moby-Dick, 180–81; Typee, 223.

6 On the biology of gulls and interactions with humans, see John Eastman, Birds of Field and Shore: Grassland and Shoreline Birds of Eastern North America (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), 80–81, 88–89, 95–96; Kenn Kaufman, “Herring Gull, Larus argentatus” and “Ring-billed Gull, Larus delawarensis,” Audubon Guide to North American Birds, accessed 31 January 2019, http://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/herring-gull and http://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/ring-billed-gull.

7 Moby-Dick, 234.

8 Moby-Dick, 234. John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton, vol. 1 (Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1834), 118; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 103. In “The Encantadas” (1854), published only a few years after Moby-Dick, Melville quoted a line from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) that included “the cormoyrants with birds of ravenous race.” See Prose Pieces, 133; “Cormorant, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), www.oed.com/view/Entry/41582.

9 Moby-Dick, 190.

10 Derek Onley and Paul Scofield, Albatrosses, Petrels & Shearwaters of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 32–34, 122, 124; Graham Barwell, Albatross (London: Reaktion, 2014), 14; “Northern Royal Albatross,” New Zealand Birds Online (accessed 16 April 2018), www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/northern-royal-albatross; Robert Cushman Murphy, Oceanic Birds of South America, vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan/American Museum of Natural History, 1836), 541–43.

11 Lowes, 222–28; Coleridge, “Mariner,” 47–48; George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (London: J. Senex, 1726), 72–74.

12 Lowes, 227; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1834), 174. Emphasis mine; it’s a pun, people!

13 Moby-Dick, 190; Martin, 45.

14 Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1968), 74; Gabrielle A. Nevitt, Marcel Losekoot, and Henri Weimerskirch, “Evidence for Olfactory Search in Wandering Albatross, Diomedea exulans,” Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA 105, no. 12 (25 March 2008): 4578–79; Murphy, Oceanic Birds of South America, vol. 1, 544; Barwell, 95–96; William M. Davis, Nimrod of the Sea; or, The American Whaleman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874), 42.

15 Murphy, Oceanic Birds of South America, vol. 1, 546. See also “An Albatross Brought the News,” Sailors’ Magazine and Seaman’s Friend 63, no. 7 (July 1891): 216–17.

16 Dana, 43. His comment on “Rime” in the revised edition was in Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, English copyright ed. (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1869), 35; Browne, 207; Olmsted, 101–2, 111. For Melville’s use (or not) of Olmsted, see Vincent, 210; Madison, The Essex and the Whale, 89; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources,107. See also Gurdon Hall, “1 December 1842,” Log of the Charles Phelps 1842–1844, Mystic Seaport Log 141. Albatrosses do have a gizzard—a grinding area of their stomach—but it’s just a relatively small one.

17 “Gony, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), www.oed.com/view/Entry/79920; Mary Brewster, “She Was a Sister Sailor”: The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845–1851, ed. Joan Druett (Mystic Seaport: Mystic, 1992), 31.

18 Martin Walters, Bird Watch: A Survey of Planet Earth’s Changing Ecosystems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 123–24; Kevin T. Fitzgerald, “Longline Fishing (How What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You),” Topics in Companion Animal Research 28 (2013): 151; see Orea R. J. Anderson, et al., “Global Seabird Bycatch in Longline Fisheries,” Endangered Species Research 14, no. 2 (2011): 91–106. On the current status of the 22 species they evaluate, search “Albatross,” in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Version 2018–1, accessed 15 September 2018.

19 Scott Shaffer, “Albatross Flight Performance and Energetics,” in Albatross: Their World, Their Ways, ed. Tui De Roy, Mark Jones, and Julian Fitter (Auckland: David Bateman, 2008), 152–53; Carl Safina, “On the Wings of the Albatross,” National Geographic 212, no. 6 (December 2007): 91–92, 97.

20 Henry T. Cheever, The Island World of the Pacific (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), 52–63. Madison argues that Melville’s note in Moby-Dick is lifted directly from Cheever’s account, in Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 213.

21 Robert Louise Chianese, “The Tales We All Must Tell,” American Scientist 104, no. 4 (July-August 2016): 212, www.americanscientist.org/article/the-tales-we-all-must-tell.

22 Melville, Journals, 4.

1 Moby-Dick, 237. Herman Melville, Mardi, and A Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), 55. See his later “The Maldive Shark” (1888), in Herman Melville, Published Poems, ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 2009), 236, 739–40; Vincent, 210–11; Olmsted, 95, 146; Bennett, vol. 2, 274–77.

1 Moby-Dick, xxv; Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “The Drowned Mariner,” Western Literary Messenger: A Family Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, Morality, and General Intelligence, 6 (Buffalo: Clement and Faxon, 1846), 344.

2 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology . . . , vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), 207, 208. Melville purchased this edition in 1847 (Sealts, 171).

3 Edith A. Widder, “Bioluminescence and the Pelagic Visual Environment,” Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology 35, no. 1 (March 2002): 2–4; “Noctiluca scintillans,” Phyto’Pedia, accessed 31 January 2019, https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/research/phytoplankton/dinoflagellates/noctiluca/n_scintillans.html; Steve Miller, 8 August 2018, pers. comm.

4 E. Newton Harvey, A History of Luminescence: From the Earliest Times Until 1900 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1957), 534–37; Widder, 1–26; Julian C. Partridge, “Sensory Ecology: Giant Eyes for Giant Predators?” Current Biology 22, no. 8 (2012): R269; Séverine Martini and Steven H. D. Haddock, “Quantification of Bioluminescence from the Surface to the Deep Sea Demonstrates Its Predominance as an Ecological Trait,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 45750 (2017): 1–11. For more on early exploration of bioluminescence, see, e.g., Arthur Hassall, “Note on Phosphorescence,” Annals and Magazine of Natural History 9, no. 55 (London: R. and J.E. Taylor, 1842), 78.

5 Beale, 205–6; Olmsted, 72–73, 159–60; Bennett, vol. 2, p. 320–21. Bennett’s below-decks whale was probably covered in bioluminescent bacteria.

6 Moby-Dick, 193.

7 Matthew Fontaine Maury, Explanations and Sailing Directions to accompany the Wind and Current Charts, 7th ed. (Philadelphia: E. C. and J. Biddle, 1855), 174–75. The substance of these milky seas wasn’t hypothesized until 1985, when a research vessel sampled a glowing swath of the Arabian Sea and found that in addition to copepods and dinoflagellates and dozens of other zooplankton species there were numerous luminous bacteria Vibrio harveyi that had colonized on decaying organic matter floating at the surface. See David Lapota, et al., “Observations and Measurements of Planktonic Bioluminescence in and around a Milky Sea,” Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 119 (1988): 55. For the first image of milky seas, see Steven D. Miller, Steven H. D. Haddock, Christopher D. Elvidge, and Thomas F. Lee, “Detection of a Bioluminescent Milky Sea from Space,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, no. 40 (4 October 2005): 14181–84; and P. J. Herring and M. Watson, “Milky Seas: A Bioluminescent Puzzle,” Marine Observer 63 (1993): 22–30.

8 Moby-Dick, 234; Coleridge, “Mariner,” 57, 75.

9 Melville, White-Jacket, 106; Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1969), 244; Mardi, 121–23; Moby-Dick, 193–94, 309. See also Melville’s end to “Commemorative of a Naval Victory” (1866); and J. E. Bowman, “Remarks on the Luminosity of the Sea,” Magazine of Natural History 5, no. 23 (January 1832): 1–3.

1 Moby-Dick, 243.

2 Interview with Linda Greenlaw conducted on 8 May 2017.

3 Mardi, 104–5. See also E. W. Gudger, “The Alleged Pugnacity of the Swordfish and the Spearfishes as Shown by Their Attacks on Vessels,” Memoirs of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 12, no. 2 (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1940), 215–315; Cuvier, The Class Pisces, Pl. 27, 187–88, 351–52, 642; Sealts, 170; Cuvier, Melville’s Marginalia Online; Parker, 146; Bennett, vol. 1, 272; Heflin, 137, 204; Harry L. Fierstine and Oliver Crimmen, “Two Erroneous, Commonly Cited Examples of ‘Swordfish’ Piercing Wooden Ships,” Copeia 2 (1996): 472–75; John Cruickshank, “Letter to Peter Amber, 29 October 1832,” Natural History Museum, London, courtesy of Oliver Crimmen; Parker, vol. 1, 679, 685; Henry G. Clarke, The British Museum: Its Antiquities and Natural History, a Hand-book Guide for Visitors (London: H. G. Clarke and Co., 1848), 21.

4 Matt Rigney, In Pursuit of Giants: One Man’s Global Search for the Last of the Great Fish (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2017), 247, 312; Hsing-Juin Lee, Yow-Jeng Jong, Li-Min Chang, and Wen-Lin Wu, “Propulsion Strategy Analysis of High-Speed Swordfish,” Transactions of the Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences 52, no. 175 (2009): 11; B. Collette, et al., “Xiphias gladius,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2011/2016, www.iucnredlist.org/details/23148/0.

5 Cuvier, The Class Pisces, 351. Melville did not comment on this in his copy, which makes you wonder if he ever read it; Osborn, “19 January 1844”; Logkeeper, “26 March 1846,” Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1845–1849.

6 Beale, 48–50; Robert Weir, “1 August 1856,” Journal aboard the Clara Bell 1855–1858, Mystic Seaport Log 164.

7 Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 59; Richard Ellis, Swordfish: A Biography of the Ocean Gladiator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39–40, 61–90. On a billfish stuck into a pipeline, Christopher Helman, “Swordfish Attacks BP Oilfield in Angola,” Forbes (14 March 2014), www.forbes.com/.

8 Moby-Dick, 282; Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007), 276–78, 323; Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities,” Nature 423, no. 6937 (15 May 2003): 280–84; Julia Lajus, “Understanding the Dynamics of Fisheries and Fish Populations: Historical Approaches form the 19th Century,” in Oceans Past, 175–87.

9 Beale, 211–12.

10 Beale, 212; David R. Callaway, Melville in the Age of Darwin and Paley: Science in Typee, Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Clarel (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1999), 151.

11 Linda Greenlaw, Seaworthy: A Swordboat Captain Returns to the Sea (New York: Penguin, 2011), 106, 111.

12 Moby-Dick, 206; Walter Scott, The Antiquary, vol. 1 (New York: Van Winkle and Wiley, 1816), 124. See also Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 76.

1 Starbuck, 377.

2 Moby-Dick, 272.

3 Moby-Dick, 210 (Melville’s italics), 334; Noah Webster, The American Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Chauncey A. Goodrich (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1848), 150; Samuel Johnson, H. J. Todd, Alexander Chalmers, and John Walker, Johnson’s English Dictionary (Philadelphia: Griffith & Simon, 1844), 156.

4 “Krill, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), www.oed.com/view/Entry/104465; “Plankton, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), www.oed.com/view/Entry/145123.

5 Mathew Fontaine Maury, Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: C. Alexander, 1852), 251; Isaac J. Sanford, “8 December 1840,” Log of the Jasper 1840–1841, New Bedford Whaling Museum ODHS Log 359; Elihu Gifford, “8 February, 1836,” Log of the America, 1835–1838, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Log 933, America, 1836. Two other journals of Gifford’s, which are bound with this one, have at the end of each of their last entries: “Copied for Lieut Maury.” New Bedford Whaling Museum, Log 933, America. For other uses of brit, see Martin, 41, 172; Wright, Meditations from Steerage, 7; Scammon, 54; Dudley, “An Essay,” 262; and Joel S. Polack, New Zealand: Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures [. . .], vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), 402.

6 John P. Harrison, ed., “An 1849 Statement on the Habits of Right Whales by Captain Daniel McKenzie of New Bedford,” American Neptune 14, no. 2 (1954): 140; Charles Haskins Townsend, “Chart C. Distribution of Northern and Southern Right Whales Based on Logbook Records Dating from 1785 to 1913,” in “The Distribution of Certain Whales as Shown by Logbook Records of American Whaleships,” Zoologica 19, no. 1 (New York: Society of the Zoological Park/Kraus Reprint Co., 3 April 1935), 53. The abstract log of the Acushnet makes no mention of seeing any baleen whales on their way around and up to the Galápagos, however. See also Starbuck, 376–77, and Heflin, 67–68.

7 Robert Kenney, 7 January 2017, pers. comm.; the sei whales are the only baleen whales that employ both strategies; Takahisha Nemoto, “Feeding Pattern of Baleen Whales in the Ocean,” Marine Food Chains, ed. J. H. Steele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 241–52. Laist (33–34) divides baleen whales into three feeding strategies: continuous ram feeding (skimming), lunge feeding (gulping), and suction feeding (a sort of benthic vacuum, unique to gray whales). For discussion of the physics and current theories regarding the evolution of right whale skim feeding, see Laist 34–51.

8 Moby-Dick, 334.

9 Reeves, et al., Guide, 194, 198; Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 1, 457, vol. 2, 416.

10 Robert Weir, “24 November 1855.” For more on Weir and his journal, see Dyer, Tractless Sea, 247–56.

11 Moby-Dick, 334. See Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 1, 457; Vincent, 256; Rebecca Kessler, “Written in Baleen,” Aeon (28 September 2016), https://aeon.co/essays/the-natural-history-of-whales-is-written-in-their-baleen; Kathleen E. Hunt, et al., “Baleen Hormones: A Novel Tool for Retrospective Assessment of Stress and Reproduction in Bowhead Whales (Balaena mysticetus),” Conservation Physiology 2, no. 1 (1 January 2014), doi.org/10.1093/conphys/cou030.

12 This interview with Robert Kenney was originally conducted on 7 March 2017, then revised in collaboration. See also D. E. Gaskin, The Ecology of Whales and Dolphins (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), 67; and Laist, 45, 49.

13 J. Mauchline, The Biology of Calanoid Copepods, in Advances in Marine Biology, vol. 33 (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998), 1; Stephen Nicol and Yoshinari Endo, “Introduction to Euphasiids or Krill,” Krill Fisheries of the World (Rome: FAO, 1997), www.fao.org.

14 Christy Hudak, 26 April 2017, pers. comm. For common colors of plankton, E. J. Slijper, Whales, 2nd ed., trans. A. J. Pomerans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 255–57.

15 Darwin, Journal of Researches, vol. 1, 21. See also Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 29–30; and “Whales,” Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 27, 296.

16 Beale, 61, 189; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online. See also Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 44.

17 Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 2, plate 16.

18 Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 1, 469.

19 William Scoresby Jr., Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale-Fishery (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1823), 353.

20 W. A. Watkins and W. E. Schevill, “Right Whale Feeding and Baleen Rattle,” Journal of Mammalogy 57, no. 1 (1976): 62–63.

21 Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 1, 179–80. See also Bennett, vol. 2, 175–76.

22 Bennett, vol. 2, 183.

23 Moby-Dick, 64; on Americans living on farms, Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 11; Obed Macy, The History of Nantucket (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1835), 33 (Macy’s italics); Jack Scherting, “Tracking the Pequod along The Oregon Trail: The Influence of Parkman’s Narrative on Imagery and Characters in Moby-Dick,” Western American Literature 22, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 3–15.

24 In 2011 Matt Kish illustrated “Brit” brilliantly in his Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Portland: Tin House Books, 2011), 266. For a period comparison of the whale to the elephant that Melville read, see Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 54. For the deception of the surface and Transcendentalism, see Ward, 182.

1 Herman Melville, “To Nathaniel Hawthorne [17?] November 1851, Pittsfield,” Correspondence, 213.

2 Moby-Dick, 276.

3 Clyde F. E. Roper and Elizabeth K. Shea, “Unanswered Questions about the Giant Squid Architeuthis (Architeuthidae) Illustrate Our Incomplete Knowledge of Coleoid Cephalopods,” American Malacological Bulletin 31, no. 1 (2013): 109–22; Vincent, 223–27; Moby-Dick, 274.

4 Richard Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid (New York: Penguin, 1999), 257–65; Jonathan Ablett, “The Giant Squid, Architeuthis dux Steenstrup, 1857 (Mollusca: Cephalopoda): The Making of an Iconic Specimen,” NatSCA News 23 (2012): 16.

5 All quotations in this chapter are from the interview with Jon Ablett during my visit to the Natural History Museum between 31 May to 1 June, 2016, then revised in collaboration.

6 Julian C. Partridge, “Sensory Ecology: Giant Eyes for Giant Predators?” Current Biology 22, no. 8 (2012): R268–70; T. Kubodera and K. Mori, “First-Ever Observations of a Live Giant Squid in the Wild,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272 (2015): 2585; N. H. Landman, et al. “Habitat and age of the giant squid (Architeuthis sanctipauli) inferred from isotopic analyses,” Marine Biology 144 (2004): 685.

7 See K. S. Bolstad and S. O’Shea, “Gut Contents of a Giant Squid Architeuthis dux (Cephalopoda: Oegopsida) from New Zealand Waters,” New Zealand Journal of Zoology 31, no. 1 (2010): 15, 18; Ronald B. Toll and Steven C. Hess, “A Small, Mature Male Architeuthis (Cephalopoda: Oegopsida) with Remarks on Maturation in the Family,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 94, no. 3 (1981): 756; and Roper and Shea, 114–15.

8 C. G. M. Paxton, “Unleashing the Kraken: On the Maximum Length in Giant Squid (Architeuthis sp.),” Journal of Zoology 300, no. 2 (2016): 82; Charles Paxton, 21 September 2016, pers. comm.; Michael J. Sweeney, “Records of Architeuthis Specimens from Published Reports,” National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian (2001): 1–131; Charles Paxton, 12 September 2016, pers. comm. See also Clyde F. E. Roper, et al. “A Compilation of Recent Records of the Giant Squid, Architeuthis dux (Steenstrup, 1857) (Cephalopoda) from the Western North Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico,” American Malacological Bulletin 33, no. 1 (2015): 78–88; Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid, 80–92; Richard Ellis, “Architeuthis—The Giant Squid: A True Explanation for Some Sea Serpents,” Log of Mystic Seaport (Autumn 1994): 35–36; Kubodera and Mori, “First-Ever Observations,” 2583–84; Mark Schrope, “Giant Squid Filmed in Its Natural Environment,” Nature News (14 January 2013), doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12202.

9 Roper, et al. “A Compilation of Recent Records of the Giant Squid,” 80; and Roper and Shea, 114.

10 Nelson Cole Haley, Whale Hunt: The Narrative of a Voyage by Nelson Cole Haley, Harpooner in the Ship Charles W. Morgan, 1849–1853, 3rd ed. (Mystic: Mystic Seaport, 1990), 219–23.

11 Lukas Rieppel, “Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos Craze: Credibility, Identity, and Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Natural History,” in Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, ed. Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 144–47; Eugene Batchelder, A Romance of The Sea-Serpent, or The Ichthyosaurus, 4th ed. (Cambridge: John Bartlett, 1850), 127, 135–37; Parker, vol. 1, 746; Clyde Roper, 10 January 2017, pers. comm.; Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid, 10–30; Charles G. M. Paxton, “Giant Squids Are Red Herrings: Why Architeuthis Is an Unlikely Source of Sea Monster Sightings,” Cryptozoology Review 4, no. 2 (Autumn 2004): 10–16.

12 Clyde Roper, 10 January 2017, pers. comm.

13 Moby-Dick, 277. See Pontoppidan as quoted, abridged, in John Knox, ed., A New Collection of Voyages, Discoveries and Travels, vol. 4 (London: J. Knox, 1767), 100–102; and Erich Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway (London: A. Linde, 1755), 212–13; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 3rd ed., edited by Hershel Parker (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), 216n4. See also Paxton, “Giant Squids Are Red Herrings,” 13.

14 See, for example, Colnett, 171. So far I’ve only found one illustration of a squid in a logbook or journal by a nineteenth-century whaleman, but this was of a small flying squid. Martin, 67 (in the back of the original journal), 175.

15 Moby-Dick, 282.

16 Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 51; Beale, 8, 66. See also Olmsted, 156, and Logbook of the Annawan 1848–1850, New Bedford Whaling Museum Log 16; Karen Evans and Mark A. Hindell, “The Diet of Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus) in Southern Australian Waters,” ICES Journal of Marine Science 61, no. 8 (2004): 1313–29; and M. R. Clarke and P. L. Pascoe, “Cephalopod Species in the Diet of a Sperm Whale (Physeter catodon) Stranded at Penzance, Cornwall,” Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 77, no. 4 (1997): 1255–58.

17 Bennett, vol. 2, 175; Olmsted, 156; Beale, 63; Joseph Banks, Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, ed. Sir Joseph D. Hooker (London: MacMillan and Co., 1896), 65. The Banks specimen is now classified as the Dana octopus squid (Taningia danae). You can see this beak today in an old bottle of preservative on display at the Hunterian Museum in London.

18 Beale, 59–60; Clyde Roper, 10 January 2017, pers. comm.

19 A. Fais, et al., “Sperm Whale Predator-Prey Interactions Involve Chasing and Buzzing, but No Acoustic Stunning,” Scientific Reports 6, no. 28562 (24 June 2016): 1–13. Clyde Roper is also dubious of this theory.

20 Clarke and Pascoe, 1256.

1 Moby-Dick, 110, 169, 542.

2 Moby-Dick, 127, 190, 308–9, 498. Melville read of this derivation in part in Cuvier, The Class Pisces, 632–33.

3 Moby-Dick, 293.

4 Moby-Dick, 293. See also “Brit,” 273, for the first comparison of sharks to dogs.

5 Moby-Dick, 293.

6 Moby-Dick, 302.

7 Moby-Dick, 302. See especially Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Gordon Pym: or, Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Famine . . . (London: John Cunningham, 1841), 40–41. See also Parker, vol. 1, 370; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 110.

8 Moby-Dick, 573.

9 Moby-Dick, 321.

10 Olmsted, 5. His dissertation was titled “Dissertation on the Use of Narcotics in the Treatment of Insanity” (New Haven: Yale University, 1844), Archives T113 Y11 1844.

11 Michael P. Dyer, “Francis Allyn Olmsted,” Searchable Sea Literature, 2000, sites.williams.edu/searchablesealit/o/olmsted-francis-allyn/.

12 Olmsted, 170, 355; W. Storrs Lee, “Preface to the New Edition,” in Olmsted, vii–x.

13 Olmsted, 146.

14 Olmsted, 184.

15 Robert Weir, “22 August 1855.” On 1 Aug 1856 Weir drew a “shovel-nosed shark,” meaning a hammerhead, and a “bone shark,” meaning a whale or basking shark. He described both species, including that the hammerhead is “said to be perfectly harmless though it has a loathsome appearance.”

16 Beale, 276; Colnett, 89.

17 Browne, 130–31.

18 Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 76; Brewster, 343; Davis, 248–49; William B. Whitecar Jr., Four Years Aboard the Whaleship (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864), 146–47.

19 The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, “Squalidæ,” The Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 22 (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1842), 391–93; Samuel Maunder, The Treasury of Natural History, or A Popular Dictionary of Animated Nature, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), 605; Good, 11, 185; Todd Preston, “Moby-Dick and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” Melville Society Extracts 129 (July 2005): 3–4. On the longest white shark, David A. Ebert, Sarah Fowler, and Marc Dando, A Pocket Guide to Sharks of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 110.

20 Cuvier, The Class Pisces, 634.

21 Mardi, 39.

22 Mardi, 40. David Ebert, “Help Crowdfund Shark Research: Jaws, Lost Sharks, and the Legacy of Peter Benchley,” Southern Fried Science (22 June 2016), www.southernfriedscience.com; Ebert, et al., 5; David Ebert, 16 November 2017, pers. comm.; Bennett, vol. 1, 165.

23 Ebert, pers. comm.; Marcus Rediker, “History from below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 291–92.

24 All quotations in this chapter are from the interview on 16 December 2017 with David Ebert at Moss Landing, CA, with subsequent correspondence for clarification and fact-checking.

25 In August 1912, naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy observed in the Atlantic sharks around a dead sperm whale: “Some were washed back into deep water badly mutilated but still able to swim, and these, even though their entrails were hanging out of the side of a body that had been cut away, would turn again toward the whale, bury their teeth, twist, yank, and swallow. I believe, though I am not quite certain, that one or more of these insensate fish were taking food in at the mouth and immediately losing it through a stomach that had been severed by a blubber spade.” Murphy, Logbook for Grace, 71.

26 Bolster, 101; J. D. Stevens, R. Bonfil, N. K. Dulvy, and P. A. Walker, “The Effects of Fishing on Sharks, Rays, and Chimaeras (Chondrichthyans), and the Implications for Marine Ecosystems,” ICES Journal of Marine Science 57 (2000): 476–77. On historic reports see, e.g., Roberts, 73–75, 242–57.

27 Greenlaw, Seaworthy, 153.

28 Roberts, 283; Myers and Worm, 282; Ewa Magiera and Lynne Labanne, “A Quarter of Sharks and Rays Threatened with Extinction,” IUCN, 21 January 2014, www.iucn.org/content/quarter-sharks-and-rays-threatened-extinction; J. Stevens, “Prionace glauca,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2009, www.iucnredlist.org/details/39381/0; I. Fergusson, L. J. V. Compagno, and M. Marks, “Carcharodon carcharias,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2009, www.iucnredlist.org/details/3855/0; J. Denham, et al., “Sphyrna mokarran,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2007, www.iucnredlist.org/details/39386/0.

29 Mary Schley, “Off-Duty Deputies Save Shark Bite Victim,” Carmel Pine Cone, 1 December 2017, 5A, 23A.

30 Chris Fallows, Austin J. Gallagher, and Neil Hammerschlag, “White Sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) Scavenging on Whales and Its Potential Role in Further Shaping the Ecology of an Apex Predator,” PLOS One 8, no. 4 (2013): 5; Sheldon F. J. Dudley, Michael D. Anderson-Reade, Greg S. Thompson, and Paul B. McMullen, “Concurrent Scavenging off a Whale Carcass by Great White Sharks, Carcharodon carcharias, and Tiger Sharks, Galeocerdo cuvier,” Fishery Bulletin 98, no. 3 (2000): 646–47.

31 Chris Fallows, 4 December 2017, pers. comm.

32 Zoellner, 220.

33 John Stauffer, “Melville, Slavery, and the American Dilemma,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 218.

34 Moby-Dick, 60, 89, 143, 321.

35 Zoellner, 220–25.

36 Moby-Dick, 295.

37 Rediker, 286–88, 291–95. Melville likely read of this painting, but never saw it. See Robert K. Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 63, 212, 588, 608.

38 Cuvier, The Class Pisces, 632. See also Ishmael’s line in “The Whiteness of the Whale” about “giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe” (189). See analysis on Melville and race, particularly in relation to Pip and Queequeg, in Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

39 Moby-Dick, 492.

1 Moby-Dick, 298.

2 Moby-Dick, 445.

3 Sandy Oliver, 13 December 2017, pers. comm.; Creighton, 125–26. For a humorous account of foul bread see Henry Eason, “28 May 1860,” Logbook of the USS Marion 1858–60, Mystic Seaport Log 902; Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Lecture, 5 April 2016, Mystic Seaport; Typee, 3; Simon Spalding, Food at Sea: Shipboard Cuisine from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 88–89; Sandra L. Oliver, Saltwater Foodways (Mystic: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1995), 105–6; Omoo, 202.

4 Moby-Dick, 262. On Colnett’s whale illustration see Frank, Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery, 26–27. For Melville’s reading of Colnett, see Madison, The Essex and the Whale, 221; Parker, vol. 1, 723; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 70.

5 “Giant Tortoises,” Galapagos Conservancy, www.galapagos.org/about_galapagos/about-galapagos/biodiversity/tortoises/. See, for example, P. P. van Dijk, A. G. J. Rhodin, L. J. Cayot, and A. Caccone, “Chelonoidis niger,” The IUCN Red List of Threated Species, 2017, www.iucnredlist.org/details/9023/0; Moby-Dick, 242; Heflin, 100–102; Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 72–75; Colnett, 73, 158.

6 Colnett, 107–8, 123.

7 Lawrence, 4 April 1850, 14 August 1850, 6 December 1850, etc., Logbook of the Commodore Morris 1849–1853.

8 Creighton, 127; Osborn, “15 October, and 4, 10, and 12 November, 1851, et al.”

9 Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 44; Weir, “16 April 1856”; Jones, Meditations from Steerage, 16; Moby-Dick, 144, 298; Olmsted, 92.

10 Moby-Dick, 299; Browne, 62–63. See also Olmsted, 65–66.

11 Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 1, 463, 475–76; Bennett, vol. 2, 167, 232; Moby-Dick, 388; Martin, 79.

12 Colnett, 80; Murphy, Logbook for Grace, 72.

13 Severin, 158–162; Nancy Shoemaker, “Whale Meat in American History,” Environmental History 10, no. 2 (April 2005): 273. For images of the current sperm whale processing at Lamalera, see “Dividing the Whale among the Villagers,” Photovoices International, www.photovoicesinternational.org. For more on the historical accuracy of “The Whale as a Dish,” see Moby-Dick, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1952), 757.

14 Shoemaker, 278–79. For an example of early twentieth-century whalemen eating whale meat see Murphy, Logbook for Grace, 118, etc., and see Olmsted, 92–93, for Ishmael-like ideas about prejudices against whale meat; Moby-Dick, 30. Also, 284.

15 Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (New York: Penguin, 1987), 166; Shoemaker, 276–77.

16 Moby-Dick, 143–44.

17 Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 22; “Status of Whales,” and “Population Estimates,” International Whaling Commission (2018), https:/iwc.int/status; J. G. Cook, “Balaenoptera acutorostrata,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2018, www.iucnredlist.org/species/2474/50348265.

18 Moby-Dick, 157; “Whale Friendly Restaurants,” IceWhale, icewhale.is; “Visiting Iceland? Help us Keep Whales off the Dinner Menu,” Whale and Dolphin Conservation, us.whales.org/campaigns/visiting-iceland-help-us-keep-whales-off-dinner-menu.

19 Jonny Zwick, director, Breach (Side Door Productions, 2015). For more on this debate, see Karen Oslund, “Of Whales and Men: Images of Iceland and the North Atlantic in Contemporary Whaling Politics,” in Images of the North: Histories—Identities—Ideas, ed. Sverrir Jakobsson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 91–101; Larissa Kyzer, “Whale Meat Popular among Tourists,” Iceland Review (15 June 2017), icelandreview.com/news.

1 Moby-Dick, 134, 266. See also Frank, Melville’s Picture Gallery, 73, 77.

2 Moby-Dick, 333–34.

3 Scoresby, Cheever, and Beale, for example, all do not use the term callosity or callosities. See also “Callosity, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2016), www.oed.com/view/Entry/26461; Laist, 273; Kenney, “Right Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 817–18; Victoria J. Rowntree, “Callosities,” EMM, 3rd ed., 157–58.

4 Bennett, vol. 2, 169; Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 60; Jon Seger and Victoria J. Rowntree, “Whale Lice,” EMM, 3rd ed, 1051–54; Juan Antonio Raga, Mercedes Fernández, Juan A. Balbuena, and Francisco Javier Aznar, “Parasites,” EMM, 3rd ed, 685.

5 Dagmar Fertl and William A. Newman, “Barnacles,” EMM, 3rd ed., 75–77; James E. Scarff, “Occurrence of the Barnacles Coronula Diadema, C. Reginae, and Cetopirus Complanatus (Cirripedia) on Right Whales,” Scientific Reports of the Whales Research Institute 37 (1989): 130. Neither Bennett or Darwin use the Coronula scientific name in the books that Melville read before 1851.

6 Fertl and Newman, "Barnacles," EMM, 3rd ed., 75; Kenney, “Right Whales,” EMM, 2nd ed., 964; Rowntree, “Callosities,” EMM, 3rd ed., 158; Bennett, vol. 2, 164–65.

7 Weir, “9 December 1855.” See also Martin, 79, and Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 186.

1 Justin T. Richard, et al., “Testosterone and Progesterone Concentrations in Blow Samples Are Biologically Relevant in Belugas (Delphinapterus leucas),” General and Comparative Endocrinology 246 (2017): 183–84.

2 Bennett, vol. 2, 151; Beale, 16–17.

3 Justin Richard, 26 October 2016, pers. comm., with details refined in subsequent discussions and emails.

4 Moby-Dick, xxii; Bennett, vol. 2, 174; Vincent, 292–93. See also Barbara Todd, Whales and Dolphins of Kaikōura, New Zealand (Nelson, NZ: Nature Down Under, 2007), 20.

5 Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 125–26.

6 Moby-Dick, 222. See also Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 92.

7 Moby-Dick, 139, 162; Eschricht as cited in Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 126.

8 J. J. Rasler, 9 August 2016, 7 October 2017, pers. comm.

9 Moby-Dick, 232–33.

10 Moby-Dick, 372; Annalisa Berta, James L. Sumich, and Kit M. Kovacs, Marine Mammals: Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Elsevier, 2006), 155; Reeves, et al., Guide, 28; J. G. M. Thewissen, John George, Cheryl Rosa, and Takushi Kishida, “Olfaction and Brain Size in the Bowhead Whale (Balaena mysticetus),” Marine Mammal Science 27, no. 2 (April 2011): 282–94; Takushi Kishida, et al., “Aquatic Adaptation and the Evolution of Smell and Taste in Whales,” Zoological Letters 1, no. 9 (2015): 1–10.

11 Moby-Dick, 370.

12 Beale, 43–44; “Whales,” Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 27, 294 (rewritten from Beale). See also Wright, Meditations from Steerage, 6; William A. Watkins, et al. “Sperm Whale Dives Tracked by Radio Tag Telemetry,” Marine Mammal Science 18, no. 1 (January 2002), 55; Ladd Irvine, Daniel M. Palacios, Jorge Urbán, and Bruce Mate, “Sperm Whale Dive Behavior Characteristics Derived from Intermediate-Duration Archival Tag Data,” Ecology and Evolution 7 (2017): 7834; Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 152.

13 Colin D. MacLeod, “Beaked Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 82; Peter L. Tyack, et al., “Extreme Diving of Beaked Whales,” Journal of Experimental Biology 209 (2006): 4238, 4246–48; George Edgar Folk Jr., Marvin L. Riedesel, and Diana L. Thrift, Principles of Integrative Environmental Physiology (Bethesda, MD: Austin & Winfield, 1998), 400; Scoresby, Arctic Regions, vol. 2, 249–50. See also Charles W. Morgan, “Address before the New Bedford Lyceum,” 19, who repeated Scoresby’s calculations directly; Beale, 92; Paul J. Ponganis and Gerald Kooyman, “How Do Deep-Diving Sea Creatures Withstand Huge Pressure Changes?,” Scientific American (2 May 2002), www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-deep-diving-sea-cr/.

14 Moby-Dick, 357, 371; Paul Ponganis, 8 February 2018, pers. comm.; Paul J. Ponganis, “Circulatory System,” EMM, 3rd ed., 192–93; Berta, Sumich, and Kovacs, Marine Mammals, 244; “Whales,” Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 27, 284–85; Beale, 103–5, 106.

15 William E. Damon, Ocean Wonders: A Companion for the Seaside (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1879), 175–76. See also Philip Hoare, The Whale (New York: Ecco, 2010), 12.

16 Moby-Dick, 310, 340.

17 Moby-Dick, 449; Bennett, vol. 2, 167–69. See also Haley, 250.

18 J. B. S. Jackson, “Dissection of a Spermaceti Whale and Three Other Cetaceans,” Boston Journal of Natural History 5, no. 2 (October 1845): 10–171.

19 On “sea canaries,” see Henry Lee, “The White Whale” (London: R. K. Burt & Co., 1878), 3. Oddly, Melville does not mention belugas in Moby-Dick at all—perhaps the whiteness was too close to home—unless he was referring to them as the “Iceberg Whale” in “Cetology.” Melville would never have seen a beluga in person by 1851, but he definitely saw an illustration of this species in Scoresby’s narrative as well as in the “Whales” entry of his Penny Cyclopædia.

20 Stefan Huggenberger, Michel André, and Helmut H. A. Oelschläger, “The Nose of the Sperm Whale: Overviews of Functional Design, Structural Homologies, and Evolution,” Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 96, no. 4 (2016): 783–84, 793.

21 Bennett, vol. 2, 224; Dale W. Rice, “Spermaceti,” in Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, ed. William F. Perrin, Bernd Würsig, and J. G. M. Thewissen, 2nd ed. (New York: Academic Press, 2009), 1098–99.

22 Bouk and Burnett, 436; David Littlefield with Edward Baker, “Oil from Whales,” in Heflin, 231–40.

23 Moby-Dick, 338.

24 Beale, 54.

25 Gerhard Neuweiler, The Biology of Bats, trans. Ellen Covey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140–41; Wright, Meditations from Steerage, 5.

26 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “Bill Schevill,” Woods Hole Currents 1, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 6–7; Berta, Sumich, and Kovacs, Marine Mammals, 279; B. Mohl, et al. “The Monopulsed Nature of Sperm Whale Clicks,” Journal of The Acoustical Society of America 114, no. 2 (August 2003): 1143; Huggenberger, et al., 790, 795.

27 Richard Sears and William F. Perrin, “Blue Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 113.

28 Although the term “carpenter fish” is often written, I’ve yet to find any nineteenth-century source by or about whalemen that actually uses this phrase or even mentions sounds through the hull.

29 Moby-Dick, 331; Bennett, vol. 2, 159, 180; and Beale, 114–15, but none of these sources mention any plug or membrane in baleen whales.

30 Moby-Dick, 283; on whalemen and sperm whale vision, see Davis, 169–70; and Wright, Meditations from Steerage, 6; Marta Guerra, 2 January 2008, pers. comm.; Severin, 198.

31 See Huggenberger, et al., 794–96.

32 Moby-Dick, 379.

1 Adrienne Wilber, 5 August 2017, pers. comm.; Riley Woodford, “Sperm Whales Awe and Vex Alaska Fisherman,” Alaska Fish and Wildlife News (August 2003), http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=61; BBC (film), “Sperm Whales and Fishing Boats,” Alaska: Earth’s Frozen Kingdom, 27 January 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02htrqb.

2 Whitehead and Rendell, 3–7, 11–12, 153–57, 252–54.

3 Kathleen Dudzinski, Lecture, 8 December 2016, Mystic Aquarium; Jason N. Bruck, “Decades-Long Social Memory in Bottlenose Dolphins,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280, no. 1768 (7 October 2013): 1–6.

4 Moby-Dick, 199, 348–50, 549; Beale, 29–30, 79. For other whalemen who saw sperm whales as more intelligent, see, for example, Wright, Meditations from Steerage, 6.

5 Susanne Shultz, “Whales and dolphins have rich cultures—and could hold clues to what makes humans so advanced,” The Conversation, 18 October 2017, https://theconversation.com/whales-and-dolphins-have-rich-cultures-and-could-hold-clues-to-what-makes-humans-so-advanced-85858; Kieran C. R. Fox, Michael Muthukrishna, and Susanne Shultz, “The Social and Cultural Roots of Whale and Dolphin Brains,” Nature Ecology and Evolution 1 (2017): 1699–1705; Whitehead, “Sperm Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 919; Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 622–23. See also Samuel L. Metcalfe, Caloric: Its Mechanical, Chemical and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1859), 540–46.

6 Parker, vol. 1, 689; Richard Dean Smith, Melville’s Science: “Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 127–28; Sealts, 193; Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 97; Darwin, Journal of Researches, vol. 2, 203–4; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin Voyaging, vol. 1 (London: Pimlico, 2003), 161; The Darwin Human Nature Project, “Darwin and Phrenology,” Darwin Correspondence Project Blog, 24 November 2010, https://darwinhumannature.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/darwin-and-phrenology. On phrenology and physiognomy as connected to Typee, see Otter, Anatomies, 30–38.

7 John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. by Thomas Holcroft, 5th ed. (London: William Tegg & Co., 1848), 217–18, 304.

8 J. G. Spurzheim, M. D., Phrenology, or the Doctrine of the Mental Phenomena, 5th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), 223.

9 On sources, see Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 74; Vincent, 266–67.

10 Moby-Dick, 347.

11 Moby-Dick, 311–12.

1 Moby-Dick, 403. See also Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 34.

2 Moby Dick, 407.

3 Beale, 133; Dudley, “An Essay,” 262, 265–69; Dale W. Rice, “Ambergris,” EMM, 2nd ed., 29.

4 Moby-Dick, 407–9.

5 Robert Clarke, “The Origin of Ambergris,” Latin American Journal of Aquatic Mammals 5, no. 1 (June 2006): 11. See also Robert Clarke, “A Great Haul of Ambergris,” Nature 174, no. 4421 (1954): 155–56; Christopher Kemp, Floating Gold (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 96.

6 Kemp, Floating Gold, frontmatter; R. Clarke, “The Origin of Ambergris,” 11–13; Dr. [Zabdiel] Boylston, “Ambergris Found in Whales,” 33, no. 385 [1724] in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [1665–1800], vol. 7 (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1809), 57. The latter was quoted in full in Beale, 131–32.

7 Beale, 135. See also “Proceedings of the Society for the Communication of the Useful Arts in Scotland: Antediluvian Ambergris,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 15 (April–October 1833): 398; Vincent, 317–26; Kemp, Floating Gold, 144; Christopher Kemp, “Ambergris,” EMM, 3rd ed., 24. See also Bennett, vol. 2, 226.

8 Beale, 132; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online; Mr. Payne, “Ambergris,” American Journal of Pharmacy 9, no. 4 (1844): 296 (Payne cites both Beale and Bennett); Kemp, Floating Gold, 80. See also Hoare, The Whale, 393–99.

9 William H. Griffith, 29 March 1913, Journal aboard the Charles W. Morgan, 1911–1913, Log 157, Mystic Seaport; Starbuck, 148.

10 Ambergris NZ, Ltd, accessed 17 January 2019, www.ambergris.co.nz/buy-ambergris.

11 Hasan Shaban Al Lawati, “Omani Fishermen Net a Fortune in a Catch,” Times of Oman (2 November 2016), http://timesofoman.com/article/95707/OmanPride/.

12 Moby-Dick, 409.

1 William Shak[e]speare, The Tempest, in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1837), Act 1, Sc. 2, 23; Shakespeare, Melville’s Marginalia Online; Sealts, 213.

2 See Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 53–55; and Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009), 1–13.

3 See Herman Melville, “To Evert A. Duyckinck, 24 February 1849, Boston,” Correspondence, 119–20.

4 On the cabin boy on the Acushnet, Parker, vol. 1, 697.

5 Moby-Dick, 414.

6 Moby-Dick, 295, 522, 535.

7 Dobbs, 145–46; Bennett, vol. 1, 95; Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), 170.

8 Darwin, Journal of Researches, vol. 2, 260–81; Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, being the first part of the geology of the voyage of the Beagle (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1842); Dobbs, 5, 254–56; Janet Browne and Michael Neve, “Introduction,” in Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Penguin, 1989), 20; Omoo, 62–63; Typee, 155; Harvey, “Science and the Earth,” 73–74.

9 Anonymous, “The Drowned Harpooner,” Casket 2 (February 1827): 65; Martina Pfeiler, Ahab in Love: The Creative Reception of Moby-Dick in Popular Culture, Habilitation thesis, TU Dortmund, Germany (May 2017), 85–87.

10 B. D. Emerson, ed., The First Class Reader (Philadelphia: Hogan and Thompson, 1843), 56; Emerson, “The Uses of Natural History,” 12.

11 Relics from the Wreck of a Former World; or Splinters Gathered on the Shores of a Turbulent Planet (New York: Henry Long and Brother, 1847), 8, 12.

12 Omoo, 162; J. E. N. Veron and Mary Stafford-Smith, Corals of the World, vol. 3 (Townsville: Australian Institute of Marine Science, 2000), 280–91; “National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa and Rose Atoll Marine National Monument,” National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, accessed 31 January 2019, www.marinesanctuary.org/explore/american-samoa/.

13 Damien Cave and Justin Gillis, “Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find,” New York Times (15 March 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/great-barrier-reef-coral-climate-change-dieoff.html; Terry P. Hughes, et al., “Global Warming and Recurrent Mass Bleaching of Corals,” Nature 543 (16 March 2017): 373; Dennis Normile, “Survey Confirms Worst-Ever Coral Bleaching at Great Barrier Reef,” Science, 19 April 2016, http://www.sciencemag.org/news.

14 Omoo, 192. Melville seems to have actually learned this from William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches (1831). See David Farrier, Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London (New York: Routledge, 2007), 13–15.

1 Moby-Dick, 419.

2 Moby-Dick, 20.

3 Interview with Michael Dyer was originally conducted on 6 January 2017, then revised in collaboration after later visits and correspondence.

4 Hjörtur Gisli Sigurdsson, 29 March 2017, pers. comm.

5 Moby-Dick, 416.

6 Moby-Dick, 388; Bennett, vol. 2, 178.

7 Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 271–77; Moby-Dick, 391–93; Sarah L. Mesnick and Katherine Ralls, “Mating Systems,” and “Sexual Dimorphism,” EMM, 3rd ed., 587, 590, 848, 1116; Koen Van Waerebeek and Bernd Würsig, “Dusky Dolphin,” EMM, 3rd ed., 279; Reeves, et al., Guide, 24; Kenney, “Right Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 819–820; Dudley, “An Essay,” 260.

8 Tom Dalzell, The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English (New York: Routledge, 2009), 283; “Dick, n. 1,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1895/1989), www.oed.com/view/Entry/52255.

9 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 354, 294; Moby-Dick, 463. See, for example, Herbert N. Schneider and Homer B. Pettey, “Melville’s Ichthyphallic God,” Studies in American Fiction 26, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 193–212; Harry Slochower, “Freudian Motifs in Moby-Dick: The White Whale: The Sex Mystery,” in Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts, 1851–1970 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970), 234–37; Leland S. Person, “Gender and Sexuality,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 231–246; and for connections of Ahab to the Fisher King myth, see Christopher Sten, Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996), 67–68; Robert Shulman, “The Serious Functions of Melville’s Phallic Jokes,” American Literature 33, no. 2 (May 1961): 179–194. See, e.g., Moby-Dick, 550.

10 See, for example, Amy S. Greenberg, “Fayaway and Her Sisters,” in “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and The Pacific, ed. Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2007), 17–30; Caleb Crain, “Melville’s Secrets,” Leviathan 14, no. 3 (October 2012): 6–24; Matthew Knip, “Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville’s Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk,” ESQ 62, no. 2 (2016): 355–414.

11 Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick? (New York: Viking, 2011), 88. Shakespeare spelled it “archbishopricke,” but it seems ending with a “c” was more common. “Prick, n. 12b,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2007), www.oed.com/view/Entry/151146; “Archbishopric, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2007), www.oed.com/view/Entry/10308.

1 This interview with Ewan Fordyce was conducted on 15 March 2018, then revised in collaboration.

2 Moby-Dick, 452–53; Reeves, et al., Guide, 241.

3 Edward O. Wilson, “Introduction,” The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, by Nancy Pick and Mark Sloan (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 1; Mary Sears, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 23 May 2017, pers. comm.; Invoice to Museum of Comparative Zoology, 17 July 1891, from Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology Archives; Emerson, “The Uses of Natural History,” 4. See also Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume IV, 1832–1834, 406.

4 Sealts, 222; Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849] (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1894), 323. Notably different in Melville’s quotation is that Thoreau uses “skeleton” while Melville uses “specimen.” Melville traveled up to New Hampshire during his honeymoon with Elizabeth Shaw, but there is no record that he stopped here. In 1847 the Manchester museum opened its third floor space, below a theater, for its collections, and then seems to have closed only a few years later. Nobody knows what became of the whale. Jeffrey Barraclough, 8 March 2018, pers. comm.; L. Ashton Thorp, Manchester of Yesterday: A Human Interest Story of Its Past (Manchester, NH: Granite State Press, 1939), 332–33. See also Leyda, 255–58; William Henry Flower, “On the Osteology of the Cachalot or Sperm-Whale (Physeter macrocephalus),” Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 6 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1868): 309–10.

5 Moby-Dick, 454; Beale, 80, 82; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online.

6 Jane Walsh, “From the Ends of the Earth: The United States Exploring Expedition Collections,” Smithsonian Libraries, 29 March 2004, www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/usexex/learn/Walsh-01.htm.

7 John Rickards Betts, “P. T. Barnum and the Popularization of Natural History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 3 (June–Sept 1959): 366; J. B. S. Jackson, 138–39.

8 William S. Wall, “History and Description of the Skeleton of a New Sperm Whale” (Sydney: W.R. Piddington, 1851), 2–5.

9 Wall, 5, 33; Beale, 84; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 394.

10 Wall, 21, 23, 24.

11 The Holy Bible . . . Together with the Apocrypha (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1860), 648. See Janis Stout, “Melville’s Use of the Book of Job,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (June 1970): 69–83. For other biblical connections to “A Bower in the Arsacides,” see A. Baker, Heartless Immensity, 35–38; Wilkes, vol. 5, 14–15.

12 J. Baker, “Dead Bones,” 91–95; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Naturalist,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, vol. 1, 1833–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 79.

13 Mark D. Uhen, “Basilosaurids and Kekenodontids,” EMM, 3rd ed., 78–79; Richard Owen, “Observations on the Basilosaurus of Dr. Harlan (Zeuglodon cetoides, Owen),” Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 2nd series, vol. 6 (London: R. and J. E. Taylor, 1842), 69–79; “Hydrarchos Advertisement,” The Encyclopedia of Alabama, 2018, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/m-8529; Rieppel, 139–161.

14 Moby-Dick, 457; Foster, 50–54; R. D. Smith, Melville’s Science, 136, 301; Harvey, “Science and the Earth,” 73–74. For Melville’s earlier engagement with geology, see for example, Typee, 155, and Mardi, 414–18. On Owen and the basilosaurus, see Gaines, 11, and Richard S. Moore, “Owen’s and Melville’s Fossil Whale,” American Transcendental Quarterly 26 (1975): 24.

15 Moby-Dick, 457.

16 Melville seems to have combined Agassiz’s ice age theory with Lyell’s one that icebergs deposited and transported large boulders and carved landscapes. Foster, 61–62.

17 Foster, 50.

1 Moby-Dick, 460. Melville took Lacépède’s figures not from the original book in French, but from Scoresby (Vincent, 365).

2 “Five Wicked Whales,” 35; Beale, 15; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online; Davis, 188; Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 254–55; Stuart Frank, Ingenious Contrivances, Curiously Carved: Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Boston: David R. Godine, 2012), 54; Clifford W. Ashley, The Yankee Whaler, 2nd ed. (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938), 73. On overestimates of bowhead whale lengths, see Scoresby, Arctic Journals, vol. 1, 449–54. Also Tyrus Hillway, “Melville and Nineteenth-Century Science,” PhD diss. (New Haven: Yale University, 1944), 100.

3 Bennett, vol. 2, 154; Reeves, et al., Guide, 241. See also Ellis, The Great Sperm Whale, 97; Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 8, 328; Berzin, 16, 30.

4 Elizabeth Schultz, “Melville’s Environmental Vision in Moby-Dick,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7, no. 1 (2000): 102.

5 Christopher F. Clements, Julia L. Blanchard, Kirsty L. Nash, Mark A. Hindell, and Arpat Ozgul, “Body Size Shifts and Early Warning Signals Preceded the Historic Collapse of Whale Stocks,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, no. 0188 (2017): 1–6. See also Berzin who in 1971 recognized the mean length was decreasing (30). For debate on the reliability of this study see Phillip J. Clapham and Yulia V. Ivashchenko, “Whaling Catch Data Are Not Reliable for Analyses of Body Size Shifts,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 2 (May 2018): 756; and the authors’ reply: Christopher F. Clements, et al., “Reply to ‘Whaling Catch Data Are Not Reliable . . . ,’” Nature Ecology & Evolution 2 (May 2018): 757–58. I had help thinking about this from David Laist, 14 August 2018, pers. comm.

6 Moby-Dick, 460.

7 On numbers of whales killed per voyage, see, e.g., Wilkes, vol. 5, 493, and the whaleship Pocahontas (1844–46) in Dyer, Tractless Sea, 70.

8 Moby-Dick, 461.

9 Moby-Dick, 461–62.

10 Moby-Dick, 462; Smith, Reeves, Josephson, and Lund, “Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail,” 1; Jennifer A. Jackson, et al., “An Integrated Approach to Historical Population Assessments of the Great Whales: Case of the New Zealand Southern Right Whale,” Royal Society Open Science 3 (2016): 11; Elizabeth A. Josephson, Tim D. Smith, and Randall R. Reeves, “Depletion within a Decade: The American 19th-Century North Pacific Right Whale Fishery,” in Oceans Past, 133–47; Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 48; Bowles, “Some Account of the Whale-Fishery of the N. West Coast and Kamschatka,” 83. I’m not sure where Ishmael got his number of 13,000 North Pacific right/bowhead whales killed each year by American whaleships, but it’s not absurd for what was known in the 1840s. Scarff (2001) as cited and discussed in Randall R. Reeves and Tim D. Smith, “A Taxonomy of World Whaling,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, 91, calculated that numbers of North Pacific right whales killed by all nationalities between 1839 and 1909 to be from 26,500 to 37,000 individuals. This was on top of an estimated 30,000 bowheads killed by American whaleships alone from 1804 to 1909, as Reeves and Smith cite from Best (1987). Bowles (1845), however, as above, estimates 12,000 North Pacific right whales taken a year in just the four-month season. See, also, for barrels per year, Josephson, Smith, and Reeves, as above, 143.

11 Tim Smith, 12 December 2016, pers. comm.; Whitehead, “Sperm Whales in Ocean Ecosystems,” 330.

12 Moby-Dick, 388; Whitehead, “Sperm Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 923; Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 11–12.

13 Moby-Dick, 358, 462; Laist, 64–65; Kenney, “Right Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 820; Cheryl Rosa, et al., “Age Estimates Based on Aspartic Acid Racemization for Bowhead Whales (Balaena mysticetus) Harvested in 1998–2000 and the Relationship between Racemization Rate and Body Temperature,” Marine Mammal Science 29, no. 3 (July 2013), 424. On “fraternal congenerity,” see Zoellner, 166–90. See also Bode, 189, and “Melville’s Tendency to Lateralize,” in Geoffrey Sanborn, “Melville and the Nonhuman World,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13.

14 Agassiz and Gould, 237–39.

15 “On the Fur Trade, and Fur-bearing Animals,” American Journal of Science and Arts, ed. Benjamin Silliman, 25:2 (New Haven: 1834), 329.

16 For example, Washington Irving, Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1836), 274; Gideon Algernon Mantell, The Wonders of Geology, vol. 1 (London: Relfe and Fletcher, 1839), 117; Samuel Gilman Brown, The Works of Rufus Choate, with a Memoir of His Life, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1862), 159–60; Primack, 60–61; Moby-Dick, 153.

17 Schultz, 107–10; Francis Parkman Jr., The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849), 176, 229. By the preface to his 1892 edition, Parkman wrote that all of the buffalo were now gone, “of all his millions nothing is left but bones” (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1892), vii.

18 Beale, 151.

19 Morgan, “Address before the New Bedford Lyceum,” 15–16; Wilkes, vol. 5, 493.

20 Schultz, 106.

21 Moby-Dick, 4, 380; Schultz, 107.

22 On the monk seal, see Deborah A. Duffield, “Extinctions, Specific,” EMM, 3rd ed., 344–45; J. A. Allen, “The West Indian Seal (Monanchus tropicalis Gray),” in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 2, 1887–90 (New York: AMNH, 1890), 27–28. On salmon, Roberts, 53–56; US Fish and Wildlife Service, “Final Environmental Impact Statement, Restoration of Atlantic Salmon to New England Rivers” (Newton Corner, MA: USFWS, 1989), 11. See Catherine Schmitt, The President’s Salmon: Restoring the King of Fish and Its Home Waters (Camden: Down East Books, 2015). On North Atlantic right whales, Laist, 165–77, 262. On the gray whale, Clapham and Link, “Whales, Whaling, and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, 317–18. On South Shetland fur seals, Roberts, 107; Robert Hamilton, The Naturalist’s Library, ed. Sir William Jardine, Mammalia, vol. 8 (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, 1839), 95–96.

23 Douglas J. McCauley, et al. “Marine Defaunation: Animal Loss in the Global Ocean (Review Summary),” Science 347, no. 6219 (16 January 2015): 247.

24 On “The Try-Works,” see Dean Flower, “Vengeance on a Dumb Brute, Ahab? An Environmentalist Reading of Moby-Dick,” Hudson Review 66, no. 1 (2013): 144–45.

25 Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 20; Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 923. On uses of sperm whale oil, see Joe Roman, Whale (London: Reaktion, 2006), 131, 144–45, and Rice, “Spermaceti,” EMM, 2nd ed., 1099.

26 Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 130–31; B. L. Taylor, et al., “Physeter microcephalus,” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2008, www.iucnredlist.org/details/41755/0.

27 Whitehead and Rendell, 154–55; Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 922.

28 Laist, 262.

29 Michael Dyer, “Why Black Whales Are Called ‘Right Whales,’” New Bedford Whaling Museum Blog (13 September 2016), www.whalingmuseumblog.org; “An 1849 Statement on the Habits of Right Whales,” 140; “Active Maps: The First Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, 1841–1845,” Mystic Seaport for Educators, 2016, http://educators.mysticseaport.org/maps/voyage/morgan_first/; Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1845–49.

30 Recent genetic work has put into question how much hunting by early Basques actually affected right whales—they might have been catching more bowheads. See Laist, 136–37; Toolika Rastogi, et al., “Genetic Analysis of 16th-Century Whale Bones Prompts a Revision of the Impact of Basque Whaling on Right and Bowhead Whales in the Western North Atlantic,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 82 (2004): 1647–54; Richard M. Pace III, Peter J. Corkeron, and Scott D. Kraus, “State-Space Mark-Recapture Estimates Reveal a Recent Decline in Abundance of North Atlantic Right Whales,” Ecology and Evolution (July 2017): 1; National Marine Fisheries Service, “North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis), 5-Year Review: Summary and Evaluation,” (October 2017), 1–33; J. G. Cooke and A. N. Zerbini, “Eubalaena australis,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2018, https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/8153/50354147; J. A. Jackson, N. J. Patenaude, E. L. Carroll, and C. Scott Baker, “How Few Whales Were There after Whaling? Inference from Contemporary mtDNA Diversity,” Molecular Ecology 17 (2008): 244; Kenney, “Right Whales,” EMM, 3rd ed., 818; Richard L. Merrick, Gregory K. Silber, and Douglas P. DeMaster, “Endangered Species and Populations,” EMM, 3rd ed., 313; M. M. Muto, et al., “North Pacific Right Whale (Eubalaena japonica): Eastern North Pacific Stock,” NOAA-TM-AFSC-355 (30 December 2016), 1–9.

31 Reeves, et al., Guide, 190–93.

32 Joe Roman and Stephen R. Palumbi, “Whales before Whaling in the North Atlantic,” Science 301 (25 July 2003): 508. See also Stephen R. Palumbi, “Whales, Logbooks, and DNA,” in Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, ed. Jeremy B.C. Jackson, Karen E. Alexander, and Enric Sala (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011), 163–73.

33 Peter Kareiva, Christopher Yuan-Farrell, and Casey O’Connor, “Whales Are Big and It Matters,” in Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, 383.

34 Joe Roman and James J. McCarthy, “The Whale Pump: Marine Mammals Enhance Primary Productivity in a Coastal Basin,” PLOS One 5, no. 10 (October 2010): 1. See Elizabeth Shultz’s poem “Holy Shit!” in Ishmael on the Morgan (2015), 17.

35 Thoreau, Cape Cod, 219–20.

1 Moby-Dick, 487.

2 Onley and Scofield, 14–15; Good, 137, 192; Robin Hull, Scottish Birds: Culture and Tradition (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2001), 91.

3 W. B. Alexander, Birds of the Ocean, rev. ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 52; John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography, or An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1835), 486–90.

4 Isaac Jessup, “19 August 1849,” Logbook of the Sheffield 1849–50, Mystic Seaport Log 351.

5 Melville, “The Encantadas,” The Piazza Tales, 135–36.

6 Hull, 92–93.

7 Baron Cuvier and Edward Griffith, The Animal Kingdom, vol. 8 (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1829), 641; Bennett, vol. 1, 12–13.

1 Moby-Dick, 503. For the smashing of the quarter-boat as bad omen, see Olmsted, 24.

2 Moby-Dick, 506–7; John G. Rogers, Origins of Sea Terms (Mystic: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 49, 150. See also “Corposant” and “St. Elmo, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), www.oed.com/view/Entry/41856 and www.oed.com/view/Entry/189733.

3 Moby-Dick, 507. See R. D. Smith, Melville’s Science, 142–44.

4 Moby-Dick, 508.

5 “Tropical Cyclones in 1993,” Royal Observatory Hong Kong (1995), 14; Associated Press, “Typhoon Kills 4 in Seas off Hong Kong,” Los Angeles Times (28 June 1993), http://articles.latimes.com/1993–06–28/news/mn-8022 _1_ hong-kong; Melville also read of a typhoon off Japan, also not far from the Bonin Islands, in Beale, 269–73.

6 The barometer mention in Moby-Dick, 235.

7 “Tropical Cyclones in 1993,” 20.

8 Moby-Dick, 513, 516.

9 Webster, 491.

10 Scott Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 123. On whalemen and the Beaufort Scale, Michael Dyer, 5 April 2018, pers. comm.

11 Moby-Dick, 158, 432, 433; Chase, 27; Nathaniel Bowditch and J. Ingersoll Bowditch, The New American Practical Navigator (New York: E. & G. W. Blunt, 1851), 117–19, 318; Huler, 121.

12 Huler, 121.

13 On Maury in relation to Franklin, see R. D. Smith, Melville’s Science, 298–99. On grounding chains on whaleships, Michael Dyer, 5 April 2018, pers. comm.

14 Eason, “16 March 1858.”

15 Melville will later continue the exploration of lightning, reason, and authority in his short story “The Lightning-Rod Man” (1854).

16 Melville, Journals, 6. On Melville’s experience with storms, see Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, “Ships, Whaling, and the Sea,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 89–92.

17 Bennett, vol. 1, 4, 190; Wilkes, vol. 2, 159; Kenneth W. Cameron, “A Note on the Corpusants in Moby-Dick,” Emerson Society Quarterly 19 (1960): 22–24; Darwin, Journal of Researches, vol. 1, 49.

18 Dana, 434.

19 On storms as objective correlative, Dan Brayton, 1 July 2016, pers. comm.; Sealts, 214, 225; Shak[e]speare, “Tempest,” in Dramatic Works, 16; Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner,” 56–57.

20 On knowledge of circular storms at the time, see Bowditch and Bowditch (1851), 119.

21 Henry Piddington, The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms: being a Practical Exposition of the Theory of the Law of Storms . . . (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1848).

22 Moby-Dick, 158.

23 Weir, “24 April 1856.”

24 See Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and Kris Lackey, “‘More Spiritual Tenors’: The Bible and Gothic Imagination in Moby-Dick,” South Atlantic Review 52, no. 2 (May 1987): 37–50.

25 Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, “Global Warming and Hurricanes,” rev. 20 September 2018, www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes; Maggie Astor, “The 2017 Hurricane Season Really Is More Intense than Normal,” New York Times (19 September 2017), www.nytimes.com. See also Richard J. Murnane and Kam-bui Liu, eds., Hurricanes and Typhoons: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

1 Heflin, 42, 259–60; Starbuck as “patent chronometer” in Moby-Dick, 115; Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York, Penguin: 1996); Tamara Plakins Thornton, Nathanial Bowditch and the Power of Numbers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 73.

2 Chase, 27. There’s been some confusion over the years about the names of these tools. An octant is so named because the tool has an arc that is one-eighth of a circle; it can measures up to 45˚. A quadrant is the same size, but with mirrors it can measure 90˚. A sextant has an arc that is one-sixth of a circle, but because of the mirrors, can measure 120˚. See, for example, Bowditch (1851), 128, 133, Plate 9, incorporated here into fig. 48.

3 Moby-Dick, 501.

4 Moby-Dick, 501.

5 Moby-Dick, 501.

6 On the Chain of Being, Wilson, 136.

7 See R. D. Smith, Melville’s Science, 301.

8 If Melville did not see a compass flip for himself, he also would have read about this in Scoresby’s Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale Fishery. See R. D. Smith, Melville’s Science, 144–45.

1 Colnett, 169.

2 Colnett, 176.

3 Moby-Dick, 523–24; Vincent, 382–83.

4 Moby-Dick, 524, 532.

5 Claudio Campagna, 11 April 2017, pers. comm.; see also a compelling parallel in Olmsted, 177.

6 Moby-Dick, 150, 523; Roberts, 99–113; George W. Peck, Melbourne, and the Chincha Islands; with sketches of Lima, and a voyage round the world (New York: Charles Scribner, 1854), 191–92; Mark Bousquet, “Afterword: ‘The Cruel Harpoon’ and the ‘Honorable Lamp’: The Awakening of an Environmental Consciousness in Henry Theodore Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors,” in Cheever, The Whale and His Captors, 241; Brewster, 389. On whaling and sealing voyages combined, see, for example, log of the ship Emeline 1843–44, New Bedford Whaling Museum Log 147; Joshua Drew, et al., “Collateral Damage to Marine and Terrestrial Ecosystems from Yankee Whaling in the 19th Century,” Ecology and Evolution 6 (2016): 8181–92.

7 Beers, 191; Roman, 157.

8 Brian Clark Howard, “Haunting Whale Sounds Emerge from Ocean’s Deepest Point,” National Geographic (5 March 2016), news.nationalgeographic.com. See also Roger Payne, “Melville’s Disentangling of Whales,” in Moby-Dick, ed. Parker, 3rd ed., 702–4.

1 “To Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, 8 Jan 1852,” Correspondence, 218–19.

2 Moby-Dick, 542.

3 Moby-Dick, 190, 191, 274, 393, 497; Whitehead and Rendell, 157.

4 Victor Reinking and David Willingham, “Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin,” in Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Carl Freedman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 118. For a retelling of Moby-Dick and the historical era from a woman’s point of view, see the novel Ahab’s Wife, or The Stargazer (1999) by Sena Jeter Naslund.

5 Moby-Dick, 397. See Person, “Gender and Sexuality,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 231–46.

6 Moby-Dick, 544; Rita Bode, “‘Suckled by the Sea’: The Maternal in Moby-Dick,” in Melville and Women, ed. Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006), 181–98.

7 Moby-Dick, 545.

1 Mardi, 179, 283.

2 Moby-Dick, 548. Melville mentions tropic birds in Omoo, “The Encantadas,” and likely Typee, and it’s nearly the only seabird with long tail plumage like this. See R. D. Madison, “The Aviary of Ocean: Melville’s Tropic-Birds and Rock Rodondo—Two Notes and an Emendation,” in This Watery World: Humans and the Sea, ed. Vartan P. Messier and Nandita Batra (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 158–62.

3 Moby-Dick, 548.

4 Beale, 60–61; Beale, Melville’s Marginalia Online; See Bercaw [Edwards], Melville’s Sources, 55; Peter Mark Roget, The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation: Treatise V, Animal and Vegetable Physiology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1834), 265–66. On The Bridgewater Treatises, see Callaway, 141–46.

5 William Wood, Zoography, or, The Beauties of Nature Displayed, 3 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807), vol. 1: vii–xiv, vol. 2: 579; Roget, 30. Other authors who have used the myths of the paper nautilus for poetic effect include Alexander Pope, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jules Verne, and Marianne Moore.

6 Bernd Brunner, The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium, trans. Ashley Marc Slapp (London: Reaktion, 2011), 30–31; A. Louise Allcock, et al., “The Role of Female Cephalopod Researchers: Past and Present,” Journal of Natural History 49, nos. 21–24 (2015): 1242–43; The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, “Paper Nautilus,” The Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 17 (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1840), 210–15.

7 Brunner, 105–8.

8 Moby-Dick, 548.

1 This interview with Marta Guerra and Rebecca Bakker was originally conducted 2–5 January 2018, then revised in collaboration.

2 Todd, Whales and Dolphins of Kaikōura, 21, 26; Guerra, 7 May 2018, pers. comm. Male sperm whale populations have been in decline in the region, and the definition between “residents” and “transients” can be fuzzy.

3 For more on hydrophone distance see Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 144. For a discussion of how clangs or “slow clicks” might relate to foraging, see Nathalie Jaquet, Stephen Dawson, and Lesley Douglas, “Vocal Behavior of Male Sperm Whales: Why Do They Click?,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 109, no. 5, pt. 1 (May 2001): 2254–59.

4 A comparatively similar productive area to Kaikōura Canyon is Bremer Bay, Australia. Kaikōura is productive non-chemosynthetically, meaning it is not a hydrothermally or actively chemically driven ecosystem. See Fabio C. De Leo, Craig R. Smith, Ashley A. Rowden, David A. Bowden, and Malcolm R. Clark, “Submarine Canyons: Hotspots of Benthic Biomass and Productivity in the Deep sea,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277 (2010): 2783, 2785; National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd, “Kaikōura Canyon: Depths, Shelf Texture and Whale Dives,” NIWA Miscellaneous Chart Series, 1998, teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/31738/kaikoura-canyon-poster.

5 Guerra, et al., “Diverse Foraging Strategies by a Marine Top Predator,” 98–108.

6 Moby-Dick, 556.

7 Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 922.

8 Todd, Whales and Dolphins of Kaikōura, 7; D. E. Gaskin, “Analysis of Sightings and Catches of Sperm Whales (Physeter catodon L.), in the Cook Strait Area of New Zealand in 1963–4,” New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 2, no. 2 (1968): 260.

9 Todd, 23, 26.

10 Moby-Dick, 183.

11 Deaths by sperm whale in Moby-Dick: 180, 183 (implied head and jaws), 316–17 (Macey, tail), 257 (Radney, jaws), 438–39 (Boomer, tail).

12 Morgan, “Address before the New Bedford Lyceum,” 16; Beale, 3, 5.

13 Bennett, vol. 2, 214.

14 Bennett, vol. 2, 217; Weir, “16 November 1856,” and “9 December 1857”; Michael Dyer, “Introduction to the Art of the American Whale Hunt,” New Bedford Whaling Museum Blog (6 March 2013), https://whalingmuseumblog.org; Dyer, Tractless Sea, 250–56. See also Creighton, 67.

15 Heflin, 85, 91.

16 Reeves, et al., Guide, 242, 256–57, 422–23; Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 1095; Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 194–95; Hidehiro Kato, “Observation of Tooth Scars on the Head of Male Sperm Whale, as an indication of Intra-sexual Fightings,” Scientific Reports of the Whales Research Institute Tokyo 35 (1984): 39–46.

17 Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 193; Ellis, The Great Sperm Whale, 98; Beale, 36–37.

18 Kazue Nakamura, “Studies on the Sperm Whale with Deformed Lower Jaw with Special Reference to Its Feeding,” Bulletin of Kanagawa Prefecture Museum 1, no. 1 (March 1968): 13, 17, 19. See also Berzin, 93, 94, 274. Gender is skewed toward males, too, since the study was based on the regions where the whalemen were hunting.

19 Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 45; Dolin, 402.

20 Bennett, vol. 2, 220; Haley, 250.

21 Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 81; Parker, vol. 1, 725; Leyda, 411; Cheever, “1853 Additions,” in The Whale and His Captors, 168–69.

22 Chase, 26–27; Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 81. For more on the Essex, see Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea; David Dowling, Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America’s Most Storied Shipwreck (Hanover: ForeEdge, 2016); and Madison, The Essex and the Whale.

23 “The Whale Fishery,” No. 82 (Jan 1834), North American Review 38 (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1834), 112; Olmsted, 144–45; Madison, The Essex and the Whale, 89; Hal Whitehead and Marta Guerra, 6 February 2018, pers. comm.; Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 87, 255–56. For discussion of this and other elements of sperm whale sentience and ramming ships, see also Dowling, 141–65.

24 Correspondence, 209; Parker, vol. 1, 878; Sidney Kaplan, “Can a Whale Sink a Ship? The Utica Daily Gazette vs the New Bedford Whalemen’s Shipping List,” New York History 33, no. 2 (April 1952): 159–63. See also Cheever, “1853 Additions,” in The Whale and His Captors, 165–68; Starbuck, 123–25, 159; Andrew B. Myers, “Two More Attacks,” Melville Society Extracts 29 (1977): 12; and the account of the whaleship Osceola in which a sperm whale rammed the bow, knocking off the cutwater, and biting at the copper sheathing with his teeth, see A. Howard Clark, “The Whale-Fishery,” in The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode, 5:2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 261–62; in addition, see the 1902 sinking of the whaleship Kathleen, Captain Thomas H. Jenkins, Bark Kathleen Sunk by a Whale (New Bedford: H. S. Hutchinson & Co., 1902). For recent accounts, see Gregory L. Fulling, et al., “Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) Collision with a Research Vessel: Accidental Collision or Deliberate Ramming?,” Aquatic Mammals 43, no. 4 (2017): 421–29. (Video of the Fulling, et al., event is viewable in “Supplemental Material” here: www.aquaticmammalsjournal.org.)

25 Reeves, et al., Guide, 360; David Lusseau, “Why Are Male Social Relationships Complex in the Doubtful Sound Bottlenose Dolphin Population?,” PLOS One 2, no. 4 (2007): 1–8; Ingrid N. Visser, et al., “First Record of Predation on False Killer Whales (Pseudorca crassidens) by Killer Whales (Orcinus orca),” Aquatic Mammals 36, no. 2 (2010): 195; Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution, 278–81; Bennett, vol. 2, 218; Whitehead, “Sperm Whale,” EMM, 3rd ed., 922.

26 See another similar observation in Olga Panagiotopoulou, Panagiotis Spyridis, Hyab Mehari Abraha, David R. Carrier, and Todd Pataky, “Architecture of the Sperm Whale Forehead Facilitates Ramming Combat,” PeerJ (2016): 3.

27 David R. Carrier, Stephen M. Deban, and Jason Otterstrom, “The Face that Sank the Essex: Potential Function of the Spermaceti Organ in Aggression,” Journal of Experimental Biology 205 (2002): 1755, 1760–62.

28 Carrier, et al., 1762.

29 Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 131.

30 “Sunrise or sunset he will invariably die towards the sun,” wrote William A. Allen, “27 June 1842,” Journal of the Samuel Robertson 1841–46. New Bedford Whaling Museum ODHS Log 1040; Beale, 161.

31 Moby-Dick, 354–55.

32 Moby-Dick, 356–57.

33 Bousquet, 221–222; Enoch Carter Cloud, Enoch’s Voyage: Life on a Whale Ship, 1851–1854, ed. Elizabeth McLean (Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1994), 53.

34 Beers, 21, 23; Humphry Primatt, A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (London: R. Hett, 1776), 13, 237, 308–9; Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne and Son, 1789), 309. The translation of Lacépède is in Jacques Cousteau, Whales (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1988), 13; Barwell, 57.

35 Moby-Dick, 74.

36 Moby-Dick, 382, 461.

37 Lori Cuthbert and Douglas Main, “Orca Mother Drops Calf, after Unprecedented 17 Days of Mourning,” National Geographic (13 August 2018), https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/.

38 Schultz, 100, 112.

39 Moby-Dick, 385.

40 Payne, “Melville’s Disentangling of Whales,” in Moby-Dick, ed. Parker, 703.

41 Delbanco, 177; Leyda, 427.

1 See Vincent, 389, and the list of flag symbols in Osborn, “Logbook of the Charles W. Morgan.”

2 Moby-Dick, 572.

3 Moby-Dick, 539, 573; Bennett, vol. 2, 242; Vincent, 387–89. With thanks to Robert Madison.

4 Chris Elphick, John B. Dunning Jr., and David Allen Sibley, eds., The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (New York: Knopf, 2001), 167; Peter Harrison, Seabirds: An Identification Guide, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 307–8, 310; Audubon, Ornithological Biography, vol. 3, 497. See also Walt Whitman, “To the Man-of-War-Bird” (1876) in The Sea is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman, ed. Jeffrey Yang (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2017), 198.

5 Bennett, vol. 2, 243–44.

6 Walters, 18–19; Gregory S. Stone and David Obura, Underwater Eden: Saving the Last Coral Wilderness on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 45–46; David Steadman, Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Warren B. King, “Conservation Status of Birds of Central Pacific Islands,” Wilson Bulletin 85, no. 1 (March 1973): 89, 101; Ian Fraser and Jeannie Gray, Australian Bird Names: A Complete Guide (Collingwood, Victoria: CSIRO Publishing, 2013), 57; Melville, “The Encantadas,” The Piazza Tales, 134–35.

7 “Pelecanidæ,” The Penny Cyclopædia, vol. 17 (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1840), 386.

8 Melville, Typee, 10. See also his poem “The Man-of-War Hawk” (1888), Poems, 230.

1 Tuake Teema, 22 July 2017, pers. comm.; Randi Rotjan, et al. “Establishment, Management, and Maintenance of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area,” in Advances in Marine Biology, vol. 69, ed. Magnus L. Johnson and Jane Sandell (Oxford: Academic Press, 2014), 305.

2 Sea Education Association, “Whales and Tall Ships,” ed. Chris Nolan, film by Jan Witting, 4 November 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egb9ZV6E3d4; Amber Kinter and Abby Cazeault, 5, 8 August 2017, pers. comm.

3 Haley, 111–22; Smith, Reeves, Josephson, and Lund, “Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail,” 10; Erin Taylor, “A Whale’s Tale of the Phoenix Islands,” New England Aquarium Phoenix Islands Blog (March-December, 2013), pipa.neaq.org; “3 May 1852,” Logbook of the Commodore Morris, 1849–53.

4 Colnett, 28–29; Bennett, vol. 2, 172; McCauley, et al., “Marine Defaunation,” 2; Walters, 232.

5 Deborah S. Goodwin, “Final Report for S.E.A. Cruise S274,” (Woods Hole, MA: Sea Education Association, 2017), 5, 48.

6 Sandra Altherr, Kate O’Connell, Sue Fisher, and Sigrid Lüber, “Frozen in Time: How Modern Norway Clings to Its Whaling Past,” Animal Welfare Institute, OceanCare, and Pro Wildlife (2016): 1–23; “Which Countries Are Still Whaling?” International Fund for Animal Welfare (accessed 12 March 2018), https://www.ifaw.org/united-states/our-work/whales/which-countries-are-still-whaling; Rachel Bale, “Norway’s Whaling Program Just Got Even More Controversial,” National Geographic (31 March 2016), www.news.nationalgeographic.com; “Special Permit Catches since 1985,” International Whaling Commission, accessed 31 January 2019, https://iwc.int/table_permit; Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, “Japan and the Whale,” BBC News, Tokyo (8 February 2016), http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35397749; Randall R. Reeves, “Hunting,” EMM, 3rd ed., 492–96; J. G. Cook and P. J. Clapham, “Eubalaena japonica,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2018, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/41711/0; J. G. Cook, “Eubalaena glacialis,” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2018, www.iucnredlist.org/details/41712/0.

7 Shane Gero and Hal Whitehead, “Critical Decline of the Eastern Caribbean Sperm Whale Population,” PLOS One 11, no. 10 (5 October 2016): 1; Brandon L. Southall, “Noise,” EMM, 3rd ed., 642; Kathleen M. Moore, Claire A. Simeone, and Robert L. Brownell Jr., “Strandings,” 945–47, EMM, 3rd ed.

8 Whitehead, “Sperm Whales in Ocean Ecosystems,” 324–33.

9 Moby-Dick, 571, 572.

10 Leavitt, 29; see also Bennett, vol. 2, 221.

11 For more on this vortex, see Matthew Mancini, “Melville’s ‘Descartian Vortices,’” ESQ 36, no. 4 (1990): 315–27; and David Charles Leonard, “Descartes, Melville, and the Mardian Vortex,” South Atlantic Bulletin 45, no. 2 (May 1980): 13–25.

12 Chris Nolan, 5 August 2017, pers. comm.

13 Moby-Dick, 457.

14 Moby-Dick, 568.

15 Moby-Dick, 573.

16 Kennedy Wolfe, Abigail M. Smith, Patrick Trimby, and Maria Byrne, “Vulnerability of the Paper Nautilus (Argonauta nodosa) Shell to a Climate-Change Ocean: Potential for Extinction by Dissolution,” Biological Bulletin 223 (October 2012): 236–244; Goodwin, 47; Deborah Goodwin, 1 September 2018, pers. comm.; Ocean Portal Team with Jennifer Bennett, “Ocean Acidification,” Ocean Portal, Smithsonian, 2017, http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-acidification; Kevin Krajick, “Ocean Acidification Rate May Be Unprecedented, Study Says,” Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, 1 March 2012, www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events; O. Hoegh-Guldberg, et al. “Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification,” Science 318 (14 December 2007), 1737.

17 Conservation International, “Establishing the Phoenix Islands Protected Area,” (n.d.), 1; Stone and Obura, title page, 15–17; Max Quanchi and John Robson, Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Pacific Islands (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), xix; see also Dyer, Tractless Sea, 110 (the original ship name was Canton); Moby-Dick, 443; Colnett, ix; Elizabeth Dougherty, “Rise of the Reef Doctors,” BU Experts, Boston University, 2017, medium.com/boston-university-pr; Randi Rotjan, Lecture, Sea Education Association, Woods Hole, 20 June 2017.

18 Stone and Obura, 9–12.

19 Anthony L. Andrady, “Persistence of Plastic Litter in the Oceans,” 57–72, and Amy Lusher, “Microplastics in the Marine Environment: Distribution, Interactions and Effects,” 260, in Marine Anthropogenic Litter, ed. Melanie Bergmann, Lars Gutow, and Michael Klages (New York: Springer, 2015).

20 Edith Regalado, “BFAR: Plastic, Steel Wires Killed Whale in Samal,” Philippine Star, 20 December 2016, www.philstar.com. See also, for example, J. K. Jacobsen, L. Massey, F. Gulland, “Fatal Ingestion of Floating Net Debris by Two Sperm Whales (Physeter macrocephalus),” Marine Pollution Bulletin 60, no. 5 (May 2010): 765–67; Kristine Phillips, “A Dead Sperm Whale Was Found with 64 Pounds of Trash in Its Digestive System,” Washington Post (11 April 2018), www.washingtonpost.com.

21 For the Sea Education Association’s research on microplastics, see, for example, Kara Lavender Law, et al., “Distribution of Surface Plastic Debris in the Eastern Pacific Ocean from an 11-Year Data Set,” Environmental Science and Technology 48, no. 9 (2014): 4732–38. For more on our modern relationship with plastic and connections to Moby-Dick and sea literature see Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea . . . (New York: Viking, 2011); and Patricia Yaeger, “Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 523–45.

22 Steven L. Chown, “Tsunami Debris Spells Trouble,” Science 357, no. 6358 (29 September 2017): 1356; Becky Oskin, “Japan Earthquake & Tsunami of 2011: Facts and Information,” LiveScience (13 September 2017), www.livescience.com; James T. Carlton, et al., “Tsunami-Driven Rafting: Transoceanic Species Dispersal and Implication for Marine Biogeography,” Science 357, nos. 1402–1406 (2017): 1–4.

23 Schultz, 110. See also Harvey, “Science and the Earth,” 80; Randy Kennedy, “The Ahab Parallax: ‘Moby Dick’ and the Spill,” New York Times (12 June 2010), www.nytimes.com.

24 Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1929), 194.

25 Sanford E. Marovitz, “The Melville Revival,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 515–31; David Dempsey, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times, 3 September 1950, 108; Paul Lauter, “Melville Climbs the Canon,” American Literature 66, no. 1 (March 1994): 20.

26 Margaret Atwood, “The Afterlife of Ishmael,” in Whales: A Celebration, ed. Greg Gatenby (Boston: Little Brown, 1983), 210.

27 On marine mammals and culture, see Whitehead and Rendell, 269–70. Catherine Robinson Hall, 3 July 2018, pers. comm.

28 John Vidal, “Pacific Atlantis: First Climate Change Refugees,” Guardian, 25 November 2005, www.theguardian.com; The World Bank, “Water, Water, Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink: Adapting to Life in Climate Change-Hit Kiribati,” 21 March 2017, www.worldbank.org.

29 John Walsh et al., “Ch. 2: Our Changing Climate,” Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, ed. J. M. Melillo, Terese (T. C.) Richmond, and G. W. Yohe (US Global Change Research Program, 2014): 44–45, doi:10.7930/J0KW5CXT.

30 The World Bank, “Water, Water, Everywhere.”

31 Roberts, 349–62; Enric Sala and Sylvaine Giakoumi, “No-Take Marine Reserves Are the Most Effective Protected Areas in the Ocean,” ICES Journal of Marine Science 75, no. 3 (2018): 1166–68; Anote Tong, “Foreword,” in Stone and Obura, ix.

32 Kareati Waysang, c. 4 August 2017, pers. comm. See also Kayla Walsh, “Kiribati Confronts Climate Upheaval by Preparing for ‘Migration with Dignity,’” MongaBay, 11 July 2017, https://news.mongabay.com/2017/.

33 Vidal, “Pacific Atlantis: First Climate Change Refugees”; Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson, “Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees,’” New York Times (3 May 2016), www.nytimes.com.

34 Batiri T. Bataua, et al., Kiribati: A Changing Atoll Culture (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1985), 14.

35 “COP15 Kiribati Side Event—Song of the Friage Te Itei,” posted by Marc Honore, presented at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP 15, 9 December 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5wEgGZhXrw&t=5s.

36 Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5.

37 Moby-Dick, 572.

38 Rachel Carson, Under the Sea-Wind (New York: Penguin, 2007), 162. On Carson, see, e.g., Susan Power Bratton, “Thinking like a Mackerel: Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind as a Source for a Trans-ecotonal Sea Ethic,” in Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, ed. Lisa H. Sideris and Kathleen Dean Moore (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 79–93.

39 “NYC Flood Hazard Mapper,” New York City Department of Planning, accessed 31 January 2019, http://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/flood-hazard-mapper.page; Matthew Bloch, Ford Fessenden, Alan McLean, Archie Tse, and Derek Watkins, “Surveying the Destruction Caused by Hurricane Sandy,” New York Times, accessed 31 January 2019, www.nytimes.com.

NOTES

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE

NOTES TO CHAPTER TEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER ELEVEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE

NOTES TO CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOURTEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIFTEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIXTEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER NINETEEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

NOTES TO CHAPTER THIRTY

NOTES TO CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE