Author : Graham Faiella
Publisher : The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 16,26 MB
Release : 2003-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780823945054
Traces the process and influences behind the writing of Herman Melville's novel, "Moby Dick," which was published in the 1850s and based on the author's own experience at sea.
Author : Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 45,70 MB
Release : 2008-07-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0393066665
A Los Angeles Times Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 A Boston Globe Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 Amazon.com Editors pick as one of the 10 best history books of 2007 Winner of the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History "The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation." —Nathaniel Philbrick The epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," Herman Melville proclaimed, and this absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. Eric Jay Dolin begins his vivid narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614. He then chronicles the rise of a burgeoning industry—from its brutal struggles during the Revolutionary period to its golden age in the mid-1800s when a fleet of more than 700 ships hunted the seas and American whale oil lit the world, to its decline as the twentieth century dawned. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs. Containing a wealth of naturalistic detail on whales, Leviathan is the most original and stirring history of American whaling in many decades.
Author : Nathaniel Philbrick
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 19,69 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0007241798
The Number One best-selling, epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the 19th century, beautifully reissued.
Author : Nancy Shoemaker
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 42,87 MB
Release : 2015-04-27
Category : History
ISBN : 1469622580
In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.
Author : Carol Borden
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 15,97 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Education
ISBN : 0557958393
Science fiction, fantasy, comics, romance, genre movies, games all drain into the Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful articles about disreputable art-media and genres that are a little embarrassing. Irredeemable. Worthy of Note, but rolling like errant pennies back into the gutter. The Cultural Gutter is dangerous because we have a philosophy. We try to balance enthusiasm with clear-eyed, honest engagement with the material and with our readers. This book expands on our mission with 10 articles each from science fiction/fantasy editor James Schellenberg, comics editor and publisher Carol Borden, romance editor Chris Szego, screen editor Ian Driscoll and founding editor and former games editor Jim Munroe.
Author : Peter Cook
Publisher :
Page : 32 pages
File Size : 20,91 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9780531163993
Describes the inglorious life of a boy from Nantucket who in 1819 joins the crew of a whaling ship, including freezing trips to the Arctic, carving scrimshaw, boiling whales for oil, and sinking ships.
Author : Herman Melville
Publisher :
Page : 633 pages
File Size : 40,84 MB
Release : 1979
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Herman Melville
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 47,51 MB
Release : 2012-03-12
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0486114341
A masterpiece of storytelling and symbolic realism, this thrilling maritime adventure and epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and vengeful sea captain, against the great white whale that came to dominate his life.
Author : Briton Cooper Busch
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 25,86 MB
Release : 2021-10-21
Category : History
ISBN : 0813184754
"I just begin to find out that whaling will never do for me and have determined to leave the ship here if possible." That sentiment, expressed by a foremast hand aboard the ship Caroline in 1843, is one shared by many of the whalemen in this fascinating book. Interest in Herman Melville's Moby Dick has contributed to a substantial literature on the history and lore of the industry. But not until now has the vast body of surviving whaleship logs and journals been used to paint an encompassing picture of the difficult but colorful life aboard nineteenth-century American whaling vessels. Briton Cooper Busch, author of a definitive history of the American sealing industry, in this book only incidentally discusses the actual chase for whales. His focus instead is the life of whalemen at sea, and particularly the harsh discipline that kept men aboard through long and often dispiriting years. Busch depicts the complex social world aboard ship, defining and detailing such issues as crime and punishment, competing racial elements, the social distance between officers and men, sexual behavior, and the role of women aboard ships. For oppressed, discouraged, or simply bored whalemen, several escapes existed, from the rarest of all mutiny through labor protests of various types, to individual desertion or appeal to an American consul abroad. To each of these topics Busch devotes a chapter. He also provides glimpses of those occasional moments of relief such as a Fourth of July celebration and such somber moments as a death at sea. Fascinating details and original quotations from individual whalemen make this book more than a study of general trends. For anyone with even a casual interest in whaling, it is indispensable.
Author : Richard J. King
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 21,1 MB
Release : 2019-11-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 022651496X
Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, 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. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. 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 not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.
