The British petroleum giant BP, which leased the Deepwater Horizon to drill the well, has naturally been cast in the Ahab role, most recently on one of Al Jazeera’s blogs by Nick Spicer, who compared the whaler’s maniacal mission to the dangers of greed, “not just to a man such as Captain Ahab, but to all his crew and to the whole society that supports their round-the-world quest for oil.”

Image Credit... Mark Power/Magnum Photos

Andrew Delbanco, the director of Columbia University’s American studies program and the author of “Melville: His World and Work,” said, “It’s irresistible to make the analogy between the relentless hunt for whale oil in Melville’s day and for petroleum in ours.” Melville’s story “is certainly, among many other things, a cautionary tale about the terrible cost of exploiting nature for human wants,” he said. “It’s a story about self-destruction visited upon the destroyer — and the apocalyptic vision at the end seems eerily pertinent to today.”

Whaling was the petroleum industry of its day in the 18th and 19th centuries, with hundreds of ships plying the oceans in search of the oil that could be rendered from the world’s largest mammals. The 40-ton bodies of sperm whales could yield dozens of barrels, some derived from blubber and the rest, the most precious kind, spermaceti, from the whale’s head. The oil burned in millions of lamps, served as a machine lubricant and was processed into candles distinguished by their clear, bright flame, with little smoke or odor. In addition, whalebones could be used to stiffen corsets, skin could be cured for leather, and ambergris, the aromatic digestive substance, could be incorporated into perfumes. New England ports, the Houstons of their era, and fortunes were built with whale oil money.

At one point, the United States exported a million gallons a year to Europe, according to Philip Hoare, author of “The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea,” an obsessive disquisition on all matters cetacean, published in March. “The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner — an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth,” Mr. Hoare writes, adding the observation of the English statesman Edmund Burke to Parliament in 1775 that there was “no sea but what is vexed by” New England harpoons. While other kinds of ships sat nearly dark on the waters when the sun went down, a whaler could look like a floating Chinese lantern, the sailors luxuriating in the light produced by the fuel they carried. “He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it,” Melville wrote, rhapsodizing about an oil “as sweet as early-grass butter in April.”

But much like the modern petroleum industry — which began in the late 1850s, making it only slightly younger than Melville’s novel — whaling quickly came up against the limits of its resources. Hunting grounds near North America were wiped out by the early 19th century. And the lengths to which ships had to go to continue to find them led to the event that inspired “Moby-Dick,” the sinking in 1820 of the whaling ship Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale in the South Pacific, more than 10,000 miles from home.