For centuries, American whalers’ basic method of capture and killing remained remarkably unchanged. JACQUES DE LOUSTAL

If, under the spell of “Moby-Dick,” you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to join workers in Arabian oil fields or on drilling platforms at sea. On the other hand, firemen, like whalers, are united by their care for one another and for the vehicle that bears them, and the fireman’s alacrity with ladders and hoses resembles the whaler’s with masts and ropes. Then, there are the armed forces, which, like a nineteenth-century whaleship, can take you around the world in the company of people from ethnic and social backgrounds unfamiliar to you. All these lines of work are dangerous but indispensable, as whaling once was, but none seem perfectly analogous. Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.

Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol. In another chapter long suspected of symbolism, Ishmael falls into ecstasy while squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti freshly bailed from the head of a sperm whale: “I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.” But, fanciful as it sounds, sperm-squeezing is attested to by another source. In an 1874 memoir, the whaler William M. Davis recalled how “luxurious” it was to wade into pots of sperm and “squeeze and strain out the fibres,” which would darken the oil unless they were removed, and added that, in the rich bath, “I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs.”

It is difficult to follow in Melville’s footsteps if you can’t tell when he’s fibbing, but there is no shortage of whaling histories for a Melville aficionado to turn to. (“Though of real knowledge there be little,” Melville wrote, “yet of books there are a plenty.”) In the latest, “Leviathan” (Norton; $27.95), Eric Jay Dolin offers a pleasantly anecdotal history of American whaling so comprehensive that he seems to have harpooned at least one fact from every cetacean text ever printed. “Leviathan” is a gentle book about a brutal industry. By ending his story when America stopped whaling, Dolin omits the most gruesome years of international whaling history, when new technology increased killing capacity approximately tenfold. He presents whaling in a more innocent age, when it was the fifth-largest industry in America and a source of national pride—in the time before ecology, as well as before steamships, as it were.

It’s hard to say who qualifies as the first American whaler. The Inuit hunted whales in the Canadian Arctic a thousand years ago, but Dolin isn’t convinced that anyone in what is now the United States did so before Europeans arrived. Basque whale hunters reached Labrador in the sixteenth century, and in 1614 John Smith, unable to return to his beloved Virginia, tried to catch whales near what is now Maine. (They got away.) The day after the Pilgrims signed their 1620 compact, whales surrounded the Mayflower, but the Pilgrims lacked whale-catching equipment, and Dolin suspects that they lit their lamps with oil from dead whales they found on the beach. The first to hunt whales and actually catch them in waters that today belong to the United States were the Dutch, off the coast of Delaware, in the sixteen-thirties. The vagueness of this prehistory says a lot about Colonial America, which had few clear political borders, but even more about whaling, which throughout its history has tended to defy them. “In whaling the natural resource (the stock of whales) was owned by no one,” the economists Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter noted in a definitive 1997 analysis of the industry. One theme to emerge from Dolin’s book is the oblique angle the history of whaling forms with political history. To whalers, nation-states were usually irrelevant and sometimes a hazard.

Once a whale washed ashore, of course, it was bound to end up as someone’s property, and whales entered early American law through the question of who owned them when they did. On Long Island, a town’s householders divvied up the oil among themselves, after paying a few shillings to the finder and something to the butcher, and sometimes surrendering the fins and flukes to local Indians for ceremonial use. In Massachusetts, Plymouth Colony taxed towns by taking a barrel of oil from every drift whale. In the sixteen-forties and fifties, colonists began to sail a few miles to kill whales spotted from shore, and, not long afterward, Colonial governments were demanding a share of the profits from these whales, too.

Serious money was at stake. When two shallops of Rhode Islanders towed home a right whale in 1662, a contemporary commented that “they had earned more than a whole farm would bring us in an entire year.” Besides oil, right whales contained baleen, a fibrous and feathery tissue in their mouths, which is probably responsible for the “strange, grassy, cutting sound” that Ishmael hears as he watches them feed. Flexible when heated, baleen, also known as whalebone, kept whatever shape it was cooled into, like plastic. It was used primarily in corsets, fashionable from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth, but it could be molded into items as various as umbrella ribs, fishing rods, and shoehorns.

The island of Nantucket happened into the business a few years later, when a skinny whale strayed into one of their harbors and wandered there for three days, long enough for the Nantucketers to forge a harpoon, paddle out, and stick it. The island upgraded its whaling in 1690 with the expertise of a Cape Codder named Ichabod Paddock, who was said to have been swallowed by a whale in whose belly he found the Devil and a mermaid playing cards for his soul. No less fabulously, around 1712 a Nantucket captain cruising for right whales near shore was supposedly blown out to the broad Atlantic in his small boat, where he made the most of his predicament by killing a sperm whale, which swims only in deep waters. The logistics of a small boat tugging a sperm whale in from the high seas are doubtful, Dolin points out, but, whatever its origins, offshore whaling was dominated by Nantucket until the early nineteenth century.

This involved the island in a certain amount of un-American activity. War interfered with profits, so, when conflict with Britain loomed, Nantucket tried to stay out of it. In 1775, when Britain moved to restrict New England’s trade and fishing rights, Nantucket won a special exemption by pleading pacifism and loyalty to the Crown. The neighbors on the mainland took note, and, once the Revolutionary War broke out, rebels seized flour and whaleboats from Nantucket and put the islanders under an embargo, suspecting them of trading with the enemy British. Some Nantucketers did indeed intend to trade with the British, and a few went so far as to base their whaleships in the Falkland Islands. Others, who stayed, won permission from Massachusetts authorities, in 1779, to ask British military officials not to raid them, a bit of diplomacy that, as an American general pointed out, was “traitorous.”