Reviews
Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick by Richard J. King (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2019, 464pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, isbn 978-0-22651496-3; $30pb) 2019 marked the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth. His classic novel Moby-Dick has been adapted for a variety of media, and literary scholars have spent entire careers analyzing every line on every page. Yet, surprisingly, until now, no one has explored the elements of nature in the book. Richard King’s brilliant and beautiful new book fills this void. Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a tour-de-force of everything maritime. King combines personal seafaring experiences with literary and historical analysis of Moby-Dick. Despite a focus on whales, he covers marine life on and around the oceans, from seabirds to swordfish. The living ocean itself is a major character in a complex story about the rise of the Anthropocene (the present era in which human activity has predominantly shaped our climate), ecological degradation, and climate change. Readers will also find a rich biography of Melville that elevates the writer above Charles Darwin. There is a discussion of 19th-century naturalists and ordinary mariners who informed the writing of Moby-Dick. Shipping and navigation feature prominently in Ahab’s Rolling Sea, as well. Readers concerned about the environment and those interested in maritime literature and history would be cheating themselves by not reading this book. It is impossible to provide a comprehensive overview of the 31 chapters in Ahab’s Rolling Sea without filling the pages of this entire magazine. The book opens with a two-page map of the world depicting Melville’s actual seafaring travels and the fictional track of the Pequod, the whaling vessel in Moby-Dick. The chapters are beautifully designed with map headers cropped from the larger version. I have never seen this style before. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the environmental aspects of Moby-Dick. King details Melville’s seafaring
career and global travels, which included and literature in Ahab’s Rolling Sea. Most mutiny and jail time in Tahiti. King calls authors would struggle to combine oceanMelville a “natural philosopher” because ography with literary analysis. Nevertheless, he was “so clearly interested in the implica- King does this often and well. tions of scientific developments,” but he The book could have done a better job did not pursue scientific endeavors in any with the business of whaling. King needed formal capacity. King makes the case that to further explore the linkages between Melville beat Darwin to the whalers and the rise of industrial capitalism punch by decentering people in in the United States. Jeffrey Bolster details the great chain of being a full these connections in Mortal Sea. For Bolster, ten years before the publication the depletion of life in the oceans began in of Origin of Species. King ex- the 19th century with manufacturing and plains that in Moby-Dick “Ahab mass-production. This was right around the rages against the reality that time that Melville wrote his famous novel. God might not have chosen hu- Having said this, no single author can be mankind above all, after all. The expected to get at every angle of a story. sperm whale, the animal, might King has done more than anyone to explore be equal the eyes of God, TheinGlencannon Pressthe environmental dimensions surrounding maybe even favored.” King then the greatest novel ever written about seafar4 col. inches (2.25 x 4.5 inches) goes on to describe each of the ing. For that, and for doing his part to try right hand page,and bottom fish, mammals, Prefer and birds in Melville’s save theright. planet from climate change, novel. we are all in his debt. King rightly believes the novel can be Christopher P. Magra Knoxville, Tennessee used as a vehicle to get at 19th-century ideas about the environment. Melville wrote Note: Richard J. King is the author and ilabout the “wonders of the ocean.” King lustrator of our regular feature “Animals in contextualizes these wonders with encyclo- Sea History”. pedias, narratives of mariners and naturalists, popular science books and academic THE GLENCANNON scientific papers that explored geology, PRESS marine biology, meteorology, navigation and oceanography throughout the 1800s. Maritime Books King nicely demonstrates that Melville read these treatises and incorporated larger scientific debates in a ripping good yarn. The author also wants to critique the NEW! Anthropocene. He sees Ahab as a stand-in All AmericAn Troopships for “Big Oil” and man’s “ceaseless quest for by Capt. Walter W. Jaffee fossil fuels.” He reads Moby-Dick as “a blue fable that decenters man” and reveals “how Every vessel that flew the messing with the forces of the natural ocean world will end poorly for humans.” King American flag and carried recounts the story of a young girl who went fighting men to and from the to sea on an oceanographic research ship battlefield. Troop transports who thought she saw a whale in the middle from the Spanish American of the ocean, out in the middle of nowhere. War through the Vietnam War. As the ship got closer to the sighted object, it turned out to be a Styrofoam cooler. He More than 360 pages. Availasks the reader, “Does this sight shatter able December 1, 2019. everything she thought about the wild and pristine sea beyond the hand of Homo saFREE Catalog 1-510-455-9027 piens?” His answer is clear: “I’m telling you Online at that it does; it does, it does, it does.” www.glencannon.com King is a very talented scholar. There is philosophy, theology, science, history,
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