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

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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. But his spirit of enquiry and experi- Arbesman admiring the reaction–diffusion model that dictates a ment stood him in good stead as far as leopard’s spots.

INNOVATION Motley inventors

TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY John Browning welcomes a collective portrait of creators that puts life stories first.

n enthusiast’s book about enthusiasts, The Tinkerers: The underpinnings of The Tinkerers surveys a motley collec- Amateurs, DIYers, Microsoft Windows, tion of US innovators whose creations and Inventors Who Myrhvold now sees Make America Aare changing the world — or so their makers his role in promoting Great hope. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of the ALEC FOEGE innovation as largely myriad forms innovation can take. Basic Books: 2013. financial and legal. Moby-Dick author Herman Melville. Alec Foege’s book is a useful contribution 224 pp. $26.99 Foege’s approach to understanding our era, repeatedly trans- contrasts with the literary immortality is concerned. formed by innovation that has generated books on innovation that take the ‘grand His allusive style chimed with a new pages and gigabytes of analysis in the abstract, theory of creativity’ route, knocking the century of discovery, and twentieth-cen- but surprisingly little on the inventors them- sharp edges off individual histories to fit tury experimentalists of literature such selves. Foege redresses the balance, covering them in. Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf a crew that ranges from Thomas Edison to Come From (Riverhead, 2010) fits inspiration reappraised him as a modernist who lived Silicon Valley whizz-kids. He tries to let his into seven categories, including hunches and before modernism was invented. inventors describe in their own words what happy accidents. Clayton Christensen’s The Melville’s masterpiece also resonates they thought they were doing, and why. Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business powerfully with today’s scientific con- Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and School Press, 1997) divvies up the world of cerns. Moby-Dick contrasts the glory various medical devices, falls closest to the innovation according to its impact on busi- of the whale with the threats posed by mould set by Edison. Based in New Hamp- ness strategy. Fascinating though such books humanity. Melville even seems to antici- shire, he has used the cash flow from licens- often are, this abstract point of view was more pate the effects of a changing environ- ing his automatic syringe, dialysis machine valuable 50 years ago than today. ment. In the moving chapter ‘Does The and other medical innovations to invent Then, innovation was managed. Much Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? — Will He solutions to whatever takes his fancy — such of it happened in government-funded set- Perish?’, Melville wonders about a flooded as a wheelchair that can navigate steps. Saul ups such as Bell Labs and DARPA (the future, but sees the whale as triumphant, Griffith puts a more modern spin on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects spouting “his frothed defiance to the model. His “do tank”, Squid Labs in Alameda, Agency), or at big corporate-funded labs like skies”. Yet by the time his book finally California, spins off companies rather than IBM and Dow Chemical. President Dwight came into its own, Melville’s vision had licences — including Howtoons, a website D. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, turned into a nightmare for the whale. featuring educational cartoons, and Makani worried that “a government contract becomes In 1961 alone, more whales died — Power, which uses airborne wind turbines to virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity”. nearly 75,000 — than in the entire span harvest the energy of high-altitude winds. And so powerful were the managers of that of Yankee whaling. With faster ships Meanwhile, Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s funding that he followed his warning about and grenade harpoons, new species had former head of technology, takes new models the military–industrial complex with another come within the hunters’ remit: the blue of innovation to a logical extreme. Instead of about the “scientific-technological elite”. and fin whales of the South Atlantic and creating his own inventions, his company, Nearly 30 years ago, Steven Levy’s book Southern Ocean. And, like Scoresby, the Intellectual Ventures, buys, finances and Hackers (Anchor/Doubleday, 1984) inspired “hip-booted cetologists” (as D. Graham creates a large patent portfolio, which it then a generation with the idea that ideas born Burnett describes them in his The Sound- licenses to others. He argues that this inspires of subversion are often more powerful than ing of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans a broad swathe of creativity. Some, in turn, those blessed by management. Today, innova- in the Twentieth Century, University of argue that it encourages a profusion of pat- tion is popping up all over the place: garages; Chicago Press, 2012), entered a complicit ents and could merely mire innovation in ‘hack-spaces’; bedrooms. Nobody is manag- arrangement with the modern whaling legal uncertainties and lawsuits. ing the process. So everybody’s story matters. industry to inform their conclusions on Foege doesn’t provide any solutions, or Few of those stories have yet been told, whale anatomy, breeding and migration. even take a strong stance in that debate. For making those that have the exceptions. One It is telling, perhaps, that no one has writ- better or worse, The Tinkerers feels like a example, Walter Isaacson’s biography of ten a follow-up to Moby-Dick to celebrate prototype — a bit rough and ready, created Steve Jobs, sparked a global debate about that particular adventure. ■ as much to point towards interesting ques- how to manage innovation grounded in tions as to provide answers. To be truly repre- life rather than theory. But the exceptions Philip Hoare is the author of Leviathan, sentative, the choice of profiles should at least should become the rule. Innovators’ his- or, The Whale. His new book, The Sea have included some innovators in biology or tories need to be written. For all its flaws, Inside, is due out in June. He is co-curator medical science, and some working in cor- Foege’s book is a step in the right direction. ■ of the Moby-Dick Big Read (www. porate laboratories. But the hotchpotch does mobydickbigread.com), an online project capture a range of approaches and motiva- John Browning is a freelance journalist and hosted by Plymouth University, UK. tions. Kamen seems to like solving problems. consultant. He was formerly an editor at The e-mail: [email protected]. Griffith wants to create a greener, smarter Economist and Wired. co.uk world. And although he contributed to the e-mail: [email protected]