Ahab's Rolling Sea

A Natural History of "Moby-Dick"

Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing - or even a novel of the sea.

A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction.

King then climbs to the crow's nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851 - at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab's and Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today: An expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville's narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism.

©2019 Richard J. King (P)2020 Tantor

A good dessert book after ready Moby Dick

I thought the beginning that you hear in the sample wasn’t so great, but I took a risk, and it gets a lot better. King goes through each species mentioned in Moby Dick along with some of the maritime practices and geography we see in the novel and offers interesting scientific and historical context. At his best he turns this knowledge back to the novel’s symbolism and achieves some deeper insights into the plot and characters. Sometimes the information ends up just being mildly interesting with no real bearing on our reading of Moby Dick. Nevertheless, if you are Moby Dickering, defined here as spending too much time pondering the meaning of Moby Dick, this is a good one.

a classic through a modern lens

A thorough yet easy to read book about ecology and Moby Dick. If you like either, this is the book for you.

Moby Dick is a NOVEL!

Dear Mr. King,
I was sure you forgot to read the title page where it must have said Moby Dick is a NOVEL!
In the 5th chapter you mention that it is a novel, so I have no explanation of why you wrote this book as if it was a scientific treaties.
Definition of Novel:
A STORY (a TALL TELL)...
If you treat all novels like you have Moby Dick; I am afraid you will develop a VERY strange (and wrong) view of the world around you.
The only redeeming quality of this book is to inform the reader with Melville's travels before writing Moby Dick.
God help us if you do Jules Vern next!