ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
From Leviathan to Saint: When and Why Did Our Feelings About
Whales Change?
Kathleen A. Nolan
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick is
the true story of a sperm whale that sank a whaleship in 1820. In contrast, Farley
Mowat writes, in A Whale for the Killing, of how in the 1960’s, well after the fall of
the whaling industry, people in Newfoundland are taking great pleasure in taking gun-
shots at, and eventually killing, a whale that is trapped in the ice. Mowat wrote this
book in 1972, the same year that Greenpeace and the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection
Act of 1972 came into existence. He updated his version of the book in 2005. This
paper will explore attitudes of people about whales before and after this “paradigm
shift” of thinking about whales as being “evil boat-sinkers” (Moby Dick was based on
the Tragedy of the Essex story) to revered animals. The cultural evolution of this
thought process was most likely accelerated by our loss of dependence for whale oil
for lighting, and ambergris for perfume, as well as the tumultuous population decline
of these animals.
Whales are marine mammals. We have gone from a society that depended on whales,
especially the sperm whale, for its superior oil to one in which whales are revered for
their graceful majesty in all but a few countries that still hunt whales (Japan, Norway,
and Iceland). Philbrick (2000) describes the true story of a sperm whale that sank a
whaleship in 1820, and Herman Melville, who had journeyed on whaleboats, wrote
Moby Dick (fiction) in 1851, based on this story. “The Sperm Whale is in some cases
sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought
to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale
has done it,” says Ishmael; he then goes on to relate the story of “The Essex” with
Capt. Pollard in 1820 (Melville 248). Melville gives a short “history” of the whale in
literature, “The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who
wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who but no less a prince than Alfred the
Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian
whale-hunter of those times!” (Melville 151).
Ishmael describes all sorts of whales, from right whales (baleen) to fin whales, and
talks about whether or not they are “monsters” and whether they have teeth (sperm
whales) or baleen (right whales – so named because they were the “right whale to
hunt”; “The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are
man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall mis-
anthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in
swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished
and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back”
(Melville 183).
41