The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Philip Hoare
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 0061976202
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Unpredictable and amusing and informative and original, cavorting between biology, history, travel writing, and memoir.”
—Mark Kurlansky
The Whale by Philip Hoare is a enthralling and eye-opening literary leviathan swimming in similar bestselling waters as Cod and The Secret Life of Lobsters. Winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, The Whale is a lively travelogue through the history, literature, and lore of the king of the sea—the remarkable mammals that we human beings have long been fascinated with, from Moby Dick to Free Willy. Bestselling author and naturalist Bernd Heinrich calls it, “a moving and extraordinary book,” and Hoare’s sparkling account of swimming with these incredible behemoths will delight whale and wildlife aficionados, lovers of the sea and sea stories, as well as the socially and environmentally conscious reader.
in warmer temperatures it began to ooze. Re-pressed, this was ‘spring-strained’ oil. After a third and final pressing, a brownish mess remained; heated with wood shavings and potash, it clarified like butter, and the result made pure white wax. It also made fortunes. Kezia Coffin was scion of one of Nantucket’s first families, a ‘she-merchant’ famous for her fine clothes, the forbidden spinet she played, and the opium she was reputed to use. She began selling pins, but her merchandising business
private plane on the long narrow field next to the Whale Belt, while the whale looked on, in an ever more dilapidated state. It endured the decades, exposed to the pouring rain, the freezing frost, the blanching sun, neglected in the nettles and long grass, awaiting the day it would be revived. On a late summer’s day in 1996, the bones were exhumed by Michael Boyd, zoologist and historian. Like Melville before him, Boyd was assisted in his task by Beale’s description in The Natural History of the
top of the world. In Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, a sixteen-year-old stowaway sails on a mutinous whale-ship out of New Bedford. After murder and shipwreck, Pym and his companions are forced ‘to this last horrible extremity’–to dine on their young shipmate, Richard Parker. Poe’s tale–which Melville must have read–was inspired by the fate of the Essex; it also had a strange reverberation forty years later, when the survivors of
within the sound of the King’s Road. It was an event that became a kind of global circus entertainment. An animal used only to the booms and clicks of its cousins in the open sea was suddenly subject to the confinement and cacophony of one of the world’s largest and noisiest cities. Disorientated and distressed, the northern bottlenose whale moved up and down stream with the tides, its flukes flapping furiously, its curiously baby-like head rising plaintively out of the water while people
whaler sailed out of New Bedford. The trade had long been in decline; Charles Chace, one of few remaining whaling captains, refused to take ‘New England’ boys (that is, white men) as apprentices, knowing that they would be enrolling in a dying industry. The whaling city had turned to cloth rather than cetaceans. Textile mills lined its river banks, employing labour imported from Lancashire as well as the Azores, and steamships ferried tourists to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard–prettier places