Ahab's Rolling Sea

In this "invigorating study," a maritime historian delves into the environmental and scientific concerns beneath the surface of Melville's epic tale (Nature).

One of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is also a landmark of nature writing. In conversation with the works of Emerson and Thoreau, this epic of the sea draws on Melville's own travels to the Pacific. The author spent more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851.

Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow's nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species.


King compares Ahab's and Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab's Rolling Sea offers new insight into a cherished masterwork, its adventurous author, and our own evolving relationship with the briny deep.