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Men and Whales by Richard Ellis (1-Jun-1999) Paperback Paperback

by Richard Ellis (Author)

3.7 8 ratings

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The shadowy figure of Leviathan has haunted the dreams of humans for millennia, figuring in the folklore, literature, and religion of many cultures. Richard Ellis, a noted marine artist and the author of many popular books on oceanographic topics, here offers an in-depth but readily accessible study of the human quest to understand whales--a quest that often found expression in hunting them. The whale road led the ancient Basques, Ellis writes, to cross the Atlantic 500 years before Columbus; it spawned a great New England-based industry that helped the United States to become a seagoing power in the 19th century (and that produced one of America's greatest novels, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick); and it ultimately led to conflicts between nations, as some industrial powers sought to protect the great marine mammals while others continued to hunt them nearly to extinction. Ellis's book is among the finest in the library devoted to cetaceans; he packs an astonishing array of folklore, anthropology, history, and science into these 500 richly illustrated pages (and the photographs and drawings alone are worth the book's price). Noting with regret that "most of the accumulated knowledge of the animals has come from those who have killed them," Ellis overlooks nothing that even remotely touches upon these giants of the deep, and the well-written story that emerges is full of respect and affection for humans and whales alike. --Gregory McNamee

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B013J9NVYA

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3.7 8 ratings

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3.7 out of 5

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Jab688

its a big big book

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2018

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I never knew what whaling was really about and this book starts at the beginning and goes to modern times. One take away, the whalers were not after the meat just the fat for oil. I never thought they would not harvest the meat too.

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Shinery.

Repetitive but well illustrated.

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

Extremely repetitive.

Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2017

Verified Purchase

Good book and lots of pics.

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Ryan V

Good book.

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

Very interesting book and artwork.

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2015

GREAT!!

A well-referenced and comprehensive work in need of a fact-checker

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2014

With Men & Whales (1991), Ellis, a marine biologist, painter, and prolific writer, provides the most comprehensive account of the history of whaling ever published. In thirteen chapters, Ellis introduces you to the whales hunted (each of which include a painting done by Ellis himself), man's first encounters with whales, early Icelandic and Basque whaling, open-boat whaling from shore, the rise of Yankee sperm whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bowhead, right, and gray whaling (the last of which involved hunting whales in lagoons), the introduction of modern hunting techniques by Thomas Welcome Roys and Svend Foyn, aboriginal whaling, modern whaling in the Antarctic and elsewhere, the beginnings of the International Whaling Commission and the subsequent "whaling olympics" that resulted from it, the trade's decline through over-exploitation and the following anti-whaling movement, and finally whaling after the moratorium and how our perceptions of whales have changed (e.g. the chapter includes a section entitled "California's Love Affair with the Gray Whale", which chronicles the rise of the whale watching industry off California). Most chapters end with an interlude, detailing such things as social life aboard a 19th century whaleship, belugas, narwhals, fashion as it relates to the whaling industry, etc. The book includes several simple maps (some more useful than others) and a number of black-and white paintings, drawings, and photographs illustrating various aspects of our relationship with whales, from their exhibition to their death at our hands.

I would've given this book five stars had it not been for Ellis's maddening habit of making countless strange little mistakes (a problem in many of his other books), resulting in him contradicting not only his sources but at times himself. For example, the entire section on the Spitsbergen whaling dispute is full of these little inaccuracies, including getting the number and nationality of ships wrong (he claimed the English met a German vessel off Bear Island in 1612 when the first German ships didn't reach Spitsbergen until the 1640s, and apparently completely forgot about the French vessels there in 1613) as well as dates (the Dutch first came upon Jan Mayen in 1614, not 1611; he also gave the wrong date for the second Dutch wintering - 1635-36 instead of 1634-35 - and claimed the first crew that overwintered all died when in fact the first crew survived and it was the second crew that had perished). Ellis claims that there were "well over a thousand men" at the Dutch whaling settlement of Smeerenburg (where the above-mentioned men had wintered) by 1622, but then quotes a Dutch archaeologist who states it had only about 200 inhabitants at its peak. In another section, in the caption of a photo showing the Akutan whaling station, he states that the station was located in the Pribilof Islands, even though the station is named for the very island it is on, which is in the Aleutians. I could give a number of other instance of minor mistakes like this (e.g. giving the date of the establishment of the first modern whaling station in Newfoundland as 1888 instead of the proper 1898), but these should illustrate my point well enough. In summary, despite being the best introduction to the history of whaling there is, it is still far from perfect.

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