Huge themes and subjects tackled by a book that seems to be only about one man's obsession with a whale. Melville couches moral judgments in how his characters each see the world and the task before them. And there is some laugh out loud humor too.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
I am the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. This book was sparked by a painting I own of a whaling scene. Gazing at that painting, I often wondered what it was like to go whaling. Having Moby-Dick in school, I already knew a fair amount about whaling. But the painting continued to stir my curiosity, and soon I discovered that there were libraries devoted to whaling, providing almost unlimited material for a historical narrative. This book, then, is my attempt to weave that material into a maritime tapestry that attempts to do justice to America’s rich whaling heritage.
Virtually every book on America’s whaling history focuses on men—the owners of ships and the crewmen who sailed on them. However, in the nineteenth century, women, and more specifically the captain’s wives, began appearing on whaleships in increasing numbers. Incredibly, by 1850, roughly one-sixth of all American whaling ships had these so-called “petticoat whalers” on board. Druett tells the fascinating stories of many of them, mixed in with more general whaling history.
Joan Druett offers an informed and accessible account of little known stories of wives of whaling captains who accompanied their husbands on long and arduous journeys to bring whale oil and blubber to New England. Surprisingly, by 1850 roughly a sixth of all whaling vessels carried the captains' wives. Invariably the only woman aboard a very cramped ship, they endured harsh conditions to provide companionship for their husbands, and sometimes even exerted a strong unofficial moral influence on a rowdy crew. Joan Druett provides captivating portraits of many of these wives and the difficult circumstances they endured.
I’ve had a lifelong passion for all things Arctic that began in childhood as I devoured many tragic tales of doomed Arctic explorers. This fascination later merged with concern for human impacts on this fragile ecosystem. Though I hate the cold and suffer from vertigo, I participated in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition that sailed Svalbard’s western shores. Among other experiences, I witnessed a massive glacier calving and walked on an ice floe. Determined to fully absorb Svalbard’s setting for my creative work, I spent two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen—one in the dark season and one as the light returned—and I signed on for another expedition to circumnavigate the archipelago.
I enjoy the “based on a true story” feel of this novel, even though it’s purely a product of Harding’s imagination. A historical novel set in 1616, the story centers upon a headstrong English whaler—Thomas Cave—who, on a bet, stays behind alone on an Arctic island in the Svalbard archipelago to endure the dark season. More threatening than carving out an existence in a forbidding environment is the effect of isolation on Cave, whom we see through excerpts from his diary.
I hadn’t realized until I wrote this list how possessed I am by novels set in extreme environments and also—not surprisingly—ones whose themes arise from that obsession: the nature of loneliness and the effects of isolation. I’m a fan of layered narratives as well—akin to the kind of framed narrative found in Heart of Darkness.
Cave’s diary entries are embedded within the voice of a first-person narrator who…
August, 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured high into the Arctic, but now must begin the long journey home. Only one man stays behind: Thomas Cave makes a wager to remain here, alone, until the next season. No man has yet been known to survive a winter this far north. As the light recedes and the ice begins to close in, Cave pits himself against blizzards, avalanches, bears - and his own demons. For in this wilderness that is without human history his past returns to him: the woman he had loved, the grief that drove him to the…
We approached our book, theme, and recommendations as readers and lovers of Melville’s work who were inspired by following in his footsteps to places “whole oceans away,” as he describes the Pacific in Moby-Dick. Melville traveled widely and kept up his travels throughout a lifetime of further exploration, as well as voluminous writing. We want to share the exhilaration of traveling witha writer: that is, by reading of Melville’s travels, traveling to the places he visited, and also hearing from people who know those places too. We hope our book gives readers contact with the many dimensions of global travel, in whatever form they find for themselves.
One might read Melville’s accounts of the Pacific and reckon with only literary sources and contexts for his books. Bercaw Edwards lays bare the sounds of Pacific voices, the oral sources for his work. Drawing on a wealth of popular accounts as well as theories of discourse and linguistics, she identifies three “languages” Melville learned in his Pacific travels: sailor talk, (a rich world of yarns, folklore, and tall tales), “cannibal” talk (both islanders’ stories and the narratives they inspired), and missionary talk (accounts by religious leaders in the islands). Bercaw Edwards brings deep appreciation and unforgettable zest to Melville’s work, showing his remarkable ear and memory for rich varieties of speech and what they convey about cultural encounters.
This book offers an examination of Melville's 'borrowing'.At the age of twenty-one, Herman Melville signed on the whaleship Acushnet as a common seaman and sailed from Massachusetts to the South Pacific. Upon reaching Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and spent a month ashore on this reputed 'cannibal island.' He departed as crew of another whaleship but was put ashore in the heavily missionized Tahitian islands after participating in a bloodless mutiny. Eventually making his way to Hawaii, he joined the crew of the American frigate United States and finally reached Boston in October 1844 after four years…
Some look through the glass and admire what lies beyond. I look beyond the glass and imagine what's ahead. What is an adventure? It's an encounter with the unexpected, an exquisite moment in time that can never be repeated, those memorable chapters in our personal story that cause us to go to the attic and lift the lid of the trunk. I've lived the experiences in my books because I walked the beaten paths where those stories were born and embraced the culture that colors the pages. I'm an intrepid traveler and adventurer with still a few personal chapters to write. As I look beyond the glass, I wonder… Will my trunk ever be full?
I am particularly drawn to stories about early adventures at sea.
Life on a whaling ship was difficult and bred all manner of contemptible acts by the crew. When the journey was ill-fated, like the one in this book, it pointed the spotlight directly on the tainted core of ship life.
This book introduced the greedy side of the 1800s whaling industry and told the story surrounding the doomed whaling ship and the ship’s drug-addicted surgeon. It presented the raw side of humanity and what lengths desperate men resort to in order to survive. It was shades of whaling seamen Herman Melville and John Rumell’s experiences surviving with savages.
The story was riveting and begged the question: Who are the realsavages?
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016 A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN NOTABLE BOOK 2016
A ship sets sail with a killer on board . . . 1859. A man joins a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle. Having left the British Army with his reputation in tatters, Patrick Sumner has little option but to accept the position of ship's surgeon on this ill-fated voyage. But when, deep into the journey, a cabin boy is discovered brutally killed, Sumner finds himself forced to act. Soon he will face an evil even greater than he had encountered at the…
I grew up on the tip of a peninsula jutting out into the raging Atlantic ocean. Both of my grandfathers spent their lives at sea. The power, and fear, that the ocean inspires has been a constant in my life, and most recently while working on Acadian Driftwood. Spending years working on a story so closely tied to tragedy, and the sea, I’ve consumed a lot of nautical disaster stories. While not everything on the list is a disaster (Nansen got his ship stuck in the ice on purpose) each story will make you rethink whether you ever want to head out to sea.
A small lifeboat is spotted off the coast of Chile in 1821, below the gunnels skeletal men cling to a pile of human bones. Nathaniel Philbrick opens his National Book Award-winning story with an almost incomprehensibly brutal scene and rarely takes a breath for the remaining 300-odd pages. Considered to be the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick,In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is the true story of a ship stove in by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the harrowing survival of some of its crew.
The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century - and inspiration for `Moby-Dick' - reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in December 2015, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy.
When the whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819, the unthinkable happened. A mere speck in the vast Pacific ocean - and powerless against the forces of nature - Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and her twenty crewmen were forced to take to the open sea…
I grew up and have often lived around water and ships—Norfolk, VA, Aiea, Hawaii, Savannah, Georgia—and I’ve always had a fascination with things nautical. As a cartoonist, I’m of course always on the lookout for comics that overlap with this interest. Curiously, these sorts of stories seem to be few and far between in the U.S. but more of a genre staple in Europe—France in particular. I tried to highlight here not just books that I particularly like, but books that are representative of the breadth and depth that the comics medium can offer in art style, tone, and intended audience. I hope you enjoy some of these as much as I have!
Another great nautical adventure from a stellar French cartoonist, Esteban is a sprawling tale of a Native American boy who winds up as the ship’s boy on a whaler, The Leviathan. This is a great nautical coming-of-age story with some absolutely stunning artwork—gorgeous waves, ice flows, and renderings of tall ships abound. Fortunately, it’s been translated recently and is available in English digitally.
When Esteban, a young Native American boy of just 12-years-old, presents himself to the captain of the Leviathan for the post of 'harpooner', he's the laughing stock of the whole crew. But when the captain finds out that Esteban is the son of Suzanna of the Tehuelches tribe, he decides to take him on... as ship's boy. Despite his lowly post, this is Esteban's chance to discover the sailor's life, with all its hardship and its happiness, and maybe even a chance to prove what he's made of!
My passion for old-school genre fiction began as that of a writer learning to write. What started out as self-education soon turned into a love of all things thrilling and fantastic. I was able to truly enjoy reading, something I felt discouraged from in school (beyond the classics and a few exceptions). I discovered a great many works and writers in my studies who I look up to now, for they taught me some key ingredients, from creating intelligent, dynamic heroes to captivating world-building to, above all else, well-paced prose, whether in action, dialogue, or exposition. These five are not only great teachers; they are simply great fun.
I always had a love of all things maritime growing up, so it’s no wonder that, upon discovering an audiobook version read by none other than literary maverick Harlan Ellison, I fell madly for this icon of nautical adventure. It has everything you could want: the archetypal mad genius Captain Nemo, the ornate submarine Nautilus, exotic creatures and locales, and a unique cast of “guests.”
From the touching dedication of servant Conseil to our narrator, Professor Aronnax, to the forthright harpooner Ned Land, this exploration of uncharted waters and unwilling captives paints as vivid a picture of a life and world unseen as it does the costs of leading such a life. Few tales earn classic status quite like this one.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus, as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax after he, his servant Conseil, and Canadian whaler Ned Land wash up on their ship. On the Nautilus, the three embark on a journey which has them going all around the world, under the sea.
Before becoming a writer I was widely acknowledged as a successful radio station executive, a business relying heavily on audience and other numerical information. That earned me the nickname “Data” (from Star Trek). Having written an article about a Black whaling captain for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine I became intrigued about how this could have occurred in the years of slavery and began buying and reading books on whaling to find that answer. About 100 such books resulted in my book on 50 some men who had attained that lofty rank; today I’m up to about 180 and/or I can attest I’ve read fundamentally all of the books on the subject.
Author Hohman’s classic treatise offers readers the most complete—and interesting and readable—history of the business of whaling that is so vitally important, having been published in literally the year of the last working American whaleship (The Wanderer). It offers a rare contemporary history of the fifth largest industry in America—and the third largest in its home state of Massachusetts.
This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.
I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
This book tells of Indigenous resistance to white colonizers in northern Alaska and the fierceness of a mother’s love as she fights to save her daughter from kidnapping.
Lily Tuzroyluk’s voice is fresh and utterly compelling. She writes of a place she knows. This book both broke my heart and thrilled me.
In the spring of 1893, arctic Alaska is devastated by smallpox. Kayaliruk knows it is time to light the funeral pyres and leave their home. With her surviving children, she packs their dog sled and they set off to find family. Kayaliruk wakes with a bleeding scalp and no memory of the last day. Her daughter was stolen by Yankee whalers, her sons say. They begin chasing the ship, through arctic storms, across immeasurable distances, slipping into the Yankee whalers' town on Herschel Island, and to the enemy shores of Siberia. Ibai, an African American whaler, grew up in New…
