…THAT DO BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS:
Why Moby-Dick nerds keep chasing the whale: I spent 25 hours with the superfans (John Masko, 10 Jan 2026, UnHerd)
Aside from exhaustion, the prevailing feeling as we filed out of the whaling museum, clutching our marine-themed goodie bags, was bewilderment. Moby-Dick is a bewildering book, all the more when read in a single sitting. This might be because Melville, with his penchant for turning characters into archetypes and ephemeral moments into eternal principles, is writing to persuade all peoples and all eras at once. He seems to speak directly across the ages to a reader in our own time who has asked him a question. We can imagine the young woman at a meet-the-author event with Melville’s ghost at some swell Manhattan venue: Why, she demands, would any sane person voluntarily risk his life to prowl the world’s oceans in a wooden vessel to find, kill, and disembowel huge man-eating monsters and melt their flesh down into lamp oil? And why would they further pledge their allegiance to an even bigger maniac who had resolved to subdue the world’s single deadliest sea monster or else die in the attempt?
Melville knew that even in 1850, such shots across the bow of cool-headed reason demanded a passionate defence. Even among readers living near Melville’s farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, located multiple days from New Bedford by stagecoach, and only recently connected by rail, the whaling life would have seemed utterly foreign. And so, his narrator sets out to make the irrational inevitable: to convince us that for a man of his time, or indeed of any time, there is no work more honourable or more beautiful than whaling. The most unsettling thing about Moby Dick may be that even after we witness the White Whale massacre and drown of all of Ishmael’s shipmates, we are still forced to admit that he has succeeded. That we (particularly we men) might never have the chance to live as fully or as deeply as Ishmael did.