In Search of Moby Dick: The Quest for the White Whale

9780465076963

0465076963

Among travel and adventure writers, Tim Severin occupies a unique place in that, as Jan Morris says, he "uniquely combines in himself the gifts of the adventurer, the historian, and the litterateur." Over the years, Severin has sailed in a leather boat across the Atlantic, traveled on horseback with the nomads of Mongolia, and sailed the Pacific on a bamboo raft in an effort to re-create the storied voyages and travels of Brendan, Jason, Ulysses, and Genghis Khan. He then spun these rich adventures into literary gold, writing such classics as The Brendan Voyage. Now Severin applies his boundless skills to a quintessentially American subjectMoby Dickin an attempt to retrace the origins of Herman Melville's legendary literary creation.In In Search of Moby Dick Severin sets about determining the likelihood of the existence of one of our most iconic modern mythsthe Great White Whale. To do so he travels to Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Archipelago where the twenty-one-year-old Melville deserted his whaling ship in 1842 and began to cobble together the legends, tall tales, sea lore, and firsthand accounts garnered from the whalers he encountered, filtering all this material through his own fertile imagination to create his monumental novel. It is here that Severin begins to perceive the lush weave of fact and fiction, actual experience and extravagant yarn, that is Moby Dick, and the complex richness of Melville's tapestry becomes even clearer as Severin sails on throughout the South Pacific.