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Moby-Dick Philip Hoare Tracks the Scientific Influences and Insights That Breach Throughout Herman Melville’S Epic Novel

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Moby-Dick Philip Hoare Tracks the Scientific Influences and Insights That Breach Throughout Herman Melville’S Epic Novel COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS NOAA This 1820 plate is one of a number by William Scoresby, a whaler’s son who was the first person to draw and describe whales accurately. CETOLOGY How science inspired Moby-Dick Philip Hoare tracks the scientific influences and insights that breach throughout Herman Melville’s epic novel. ore than a century and a half Moby-Dick include ‘The Sperm and deploys two contemporary authorities after it was published, Herman HERMAN MELVILLE Whale’s Head — Con- to bolster his claim: Scoresby and Beale. Melville’s Moby-Dick remains a Harper & Brothers: trasted View’ and ‘The The Natural History of the Sperm Whale 1851. Mkey cultural bridge between human history Right Whale’s Head — was the first attempt to write scientifically and natural history — expressed in the vast Contrasted View’; such sections lay out the about this deep-diving, open-ocean whale. and ominous shape of the whale. This epic whales’ physical structure with a wry mix- The result of Beale’s experiences as a surgeon novel is a laboratory of literature, created in ture of known facts and arch analogy. (In a on a British whaling ship, the book was full an age before art and science became strictly witty 2011 essay, marine biologist Harold of observations on the animal’s anatomy demarcated. Morowitz speculates on Melville as a “ceta- and behaviour. Cuvier had claimed that the Melville wrote his book — which drew cean gastroenterologist or proctologist”.) sperm whale struck fear into “all the inhabit- on his own youthful experiences on a whal- Melville’s must also be the first, and perhaps ants of the deep”, but Beale knew this whale ing ship — as a tribute to the first period of last, work of literature to feature a chapter to be “a most timid and inoffensive animal”. modern whaling in the eighteenth to mid- on zooplankton. Equally, Scoresby’s groundbreaking An nineteenth centuries, which he claimed to In the famous Chapter 32, ‘Cetology’, Mel- Account of the Arctic Regions (1820) gave be worth US$7 million a year to the fledgling ville attempts to categorize species of whale Melville insight into the other cetacean United States. At the same time, science was as he would catalogue his library, in ‘folios’. It whose numbers were decimated by whal- undergoing a sea change as the gentleman was a playful gesture that reflected the fluid ing: the bowhead (Balaena mysticetus), then scientists and polymaths of the century’s classification of cetacean species at the time. known as the common whale. Scoresby, the start gave way to more specialized and In The Natural History of the Sperm Whale son of a whaler, was a typical polymath of the professionalized successors. (1839), Beale notes that the French natural time: hunter, scientist, clergyman and mes- Melville’s attitude to, and use of, science in historian Bernard Germaine de Lacépède merist. In his early career he had received Moby-Dick was in line with the eclectic ethos claimed that there were eight species of this encouragement from Joseph Banks, and his of that period. Drawing on the work of lumi- whale; there are in fact only three: Physe- work set the benchmark for Arctic studies. naries such as William Scoresby, Thomas ter macrocephalus; Kogia sima, the dwarf Melville was particularly fascinated by Beale, Georges Cuvier and Louis Agassiz, sperm whale; and the Scoresby’s observations of an ancient Inuit Melville used contemporary knowledge of pygmy, K. breviceps. NATURE.COM harpoon embedded in a bowhead’s blub- natural history — or the lack of it — to his Accordingly, Melville For more on the ber. “Who had darted that stone lance?” own ends. pronounces earlier scientific history Melville’s narrator Ishmael wonders, imag- Seventeen of the book’s 135 chapters attempts to describe of whaling, see: ining (with slight exaggeration) that it had focus on whale anatomy or behaviour. Titles whales “all wrong”, go.nature.com/7ykg2n been thrown “long before America was 160 | NATURE | VOL 493 | 10 JANUARY 2013 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT discovered”. Science indicates that Melville may not have been far wrong. In 1999, tests on bowheads indicated that these animals Books in brief can live for at least 200 years. Of course, the greatest scientific figure of The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, the age hovers over Melville. Darwin pub- Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers lished On the Origin of Species in 1859, eight Adam Lankford PALGRAVE MAcmILLAN 272 pp. £16.99 (2013) years after Moby-Dick came out. Melville’s Are suicide bombers psychologically normal? Many psychologists, sole mention of Darwin is a quote — from including experts ‘diagnosing’ the hijackers responsible for the Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist (sic) — in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, view them as just that, albeit extracts at the start of Moby-Dick. He had exercised by a powerful sense of justice. Adam Lankford begs to read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839) differ. Self-destructive killers, he says, are already primed for suicide in preparation for his own 1854 work, The — so depressed, addicted or brutalized that it is relatively easy to tip Encantadas or Enchanted Isles — as the them over the edge. A criminal-justice specialist, Lankford presents Galapagos were then known. Melville visited compelling, well-synthesized evidence for his case. the islands in 1841, six years after Darwin’s fateful landing. Darwin’s recorded observa- tion of marine iguanas as “imps of darkness” The White Planet: The Evolution and Future of Our Frozen World seemed to set the tone for Melville’s meta- Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius and Dominique Raynaud. Translated by phoric view of the Galapagos, which he saw Teresa Lavender Fagan PRINcETON UNIV. PRESS 316 pp. $29.95 (2013) as “five-and-twenty heaps of cinders … In no Ice in all its chill Earthly manifestations has drawn thousands of world but a fallen one could such lands exist”. research scientists into the white deserts of the world. Now, three Such dark analogies are in line with a man pioneers of ice-core science — Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius and who declared all human science to be “but a Dominique Raynaud — reveal key facets of the cryosphere in a new passing fable” — and yet created a fable of translation of their sweeping overview. Moving from exploration his own. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael is a perpetu- and early science, they delve into the ice ‘archives’ and findings ally sceptical and questioning figure, a man on climate ancient and current, the rise of pollution and more. A attuned to science — a stark contrast to the nuanced and thorough look at climate change and its implications. vengeful Ahab and his pursuit of the whale that “dismasted” him. As the critic Eric Wil- son, in his essay ‘Melville, Darwin, and the The Enlightenment Vision: Science, Reason, and the Promise of a Great Chain of Being’, notes, a “primary Better Future subtext of Melville’s novel is the passing of Stuart Jordan PROmEThEuS 295 pp. $26 (2013) pre-Darwinian, anthropocentric thought, Physicist Stuart Jordan scrutinizes the afterglow of that scientific espoused by Ahab, and the inauguration of big bang, the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth a version of Darwin’s centuries. Aspects of today’s culture — medicine, scientific outlook, “Melville’s more ecological evo- democracy and technological advances — carry traces of the masterpiece lution, proffered by original vision. But Jordan shows too how mixed a legacy we face, resonates Ishmael”. from ignorance about science, a bulging population and “juggernaut powerfully Melville lived technology” to degraded ecosystems. Particularly by upholding with today’s through that process. ethics, he argues, we can collectively turn the tide. scientific US Transcendentalist concerns.” Ralph Waldo Emer- son’s essay Nature Underwater Eden: Saving the Last Coral Wilderness on Earth (1836), with its declaration of moral law at Gregory S. Stone and David Obura UNIV. ChIcAGO PRESS 184 pp. $40 the heart of the cosmos, was the new philos- (2012) ophy of Melville’s youth. But as biographer Ocean warming and acidification are bad news for corals, and more Andrew Delbanco points out, Melville read than one-quarter of fish species. So when Gregory Stone dived A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William around the remote Pacific Phoenix Islands in 2002, he was stunned Dean Howells’s Darwinian-inflected view of to see a ‘lost world’ of untouched coral beds. Here Stone, chief society. Moby-Dick itself has been seen as a ocean scientist of Conservation International, coral researcher David parody of the Transcendentalists’ ‘back-to- Obura and contributors lay out what happened next: the hard-won nature’ excesses. But Melville does more than creation of the largest World Heritage Site ever sanctioned by the lambast philosophy or use science as interior United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. decoration. He achieved a marvellous syn- thesis of his own poetic and philosophical impulse with the increasingly science-aware This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of ethos of his age. And he did so with a sense How the World Works of black humour that transcended Tran- John Brockman HARPER PERENNIAL 432 pp. $15.99 (2013) scendentalism to prove that nature — and Agent to the stars of science, John Brockman presents mind-bites its science — was much stranger and more from his stable of research heavyweights asked to name their wonderful than they had imagined. “favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation”. Try theoretical Moby-Dick failed to make any impact in physicist Freeman Dyson speculating on the putative coexistence Melville’s lifetime, and he died forgotten in of quantum and classical world views, or mathematician Samuel 1891.
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