By Elizabeth Sulis Kim
(Credit: Getty Images)
Now 175 years old, US author Herman Melville's classic is the ultimate tale of man v whale – but in fact, it questions why humans have been so terrified of these great sea creatures.
Across time and place, we have seen animals as friends, collaborators, pests, gods, idols and demons – and our view of them is constantly shifting.
In my new book, The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom, I trace the emotional story of our relationships with animals, and reflect on how storytelling has impacted how we treat them. In many ways, our shared futures look bleak, with wildlife populations declining by 73% between 1973 and 2000. Yet the relationship between humans and one creature in particular – the whale – should give us hope. In ancient and medieval times whales were conflated with sea monsters and the devil, but now they're an animal many of us long to see and save.
And one seminal moment in the whale's reappraisal came 175 years ago with the publication of Herman Melville's Moby Dick: an epic, great American tale of man vs whale, whose tragic hero Captain Ahab's fixation on the titular white sperm whale leads to his death. The story is narrated by Ishmael, a sailor who joins Ahab's whaling mission looking for money and adventure. On board, however, Ahab announces the real reason for the trip: vengeance. He wants to chase down and kill Moby Dick, who bit off his leg on a previous voyage.
But Melville did not share Ahab's animosity for the sea creature. Instead his story invites readers to question where human fears about "monstrous" animals come from – and whether those fears say more about us than them.
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| An illustration of the sinking of the The Essex whaling ship by a sperm whale – the incident which inspired Mody Dick (Credit: Getty Images) |
The real story that inspired Moby Dick
By the time Melville published Moby Dick, in the mid-19th Century, the hunting of whales, or whaling, had expanded into a major commercial industry. Whalemen set out on dangerous voyages to kill whales and harvest their blubber for "train oil", used to lubricate the machines of the industrial revolution and light the "fat lamps" of swelling cities.
The US east coastal town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Moby Dick begins, became the whaling capital and earned its nickname, "The City That Lit the World". The whalers learnt about whales through direct observation, while scientists had specimens to dissect. Taxonomy divided whales and other animals into neat categories based on anatomical differences and evolutionary history. Finally, it seemed, humans had illuminated even the shadowy underwater realm.
Yet some whales still challenged these ideas about the predictability of the natural world. On 20 November 1820, a sperm whale struck down The Essex whaling ship in the southern Pacific Ocean. Twenty men escaped on three boats, endured around three months at sea, succumbing to starvation and dehydration, and then, as two written survivor accounts tell it, eventually resorting to cannibalism. Among the survivors was senior crew member Owen Chase, whose account of what happened inspired Moby Dick.
Certainly the real-life tragedy – and the great fictional story it inspired – placed the very unlikely possibility of a whale attack in the collective imagination like never before. The odds of a whale striking a ship are close to zero – there are only around five historical cases. Whales avoid confrontation, and incidents such as the Essex sinking are now understood as accidental collisions, or self-defence. But our fears, as Melville himself wanted to show, aren't always rational.
How Melville views the 'ancient monster' – and its human foes
As Ishamel narrates it, Captain Ahab's irrationality is boundless – he seeks retribution against the whale who caused him such a great injury. His crew, he declares, must pursue Moby Dick around the world "till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out". The suggestion is that Ahab and the other whalemen can kill whales until the cows come home, but if a whale fights back, their fury will be incommensurate.
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| Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab in the 1956 Hollywood film adaptation of Moby Dick (Credit: Getty Images) |
In reality, perhaps the terror man felt towards the whale was more about his repressed fears about his own vulnerability. Owen Chase wrote this of the whale who struck the Essex, "I turned around, and saw him… coming down apparently with twice his ordinary speed, and to me at that moment, it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect."
Ishmael is less certain than Ahab what the whale represents, pivoting between fear and reverence. But he openly conflates the whale with the sea monster of the Bible known as the Leviathan: "The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which God has created for the play of his own," he says. By the late Middle Ages, the Leviathan was explicitly identified as the whale by Christian figures like 13th-Century friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas.
Melville showed us the ancient monster, but also called this age-old framing into question, suggesting how the whale had become a receptacle for people's wider feelings about the unknown. For Ahab, the white whale is an embodiment of chaos, indifference and cruelty. "All visible objects… are but as pasteboard masks," declares Ahab.
He sees the physicality of the whale as a facade, concealing behind it a far greater, malevolent force. Ahab longs to destroy the "inscrutable thing" beyond Moby Dick's mask. This inscrutable thing he is referring to is what he presumes is an evil power in nature – call it the devil, God or fate.
Binary categorisations, such as good and evil, whether applied to animals or fellow humans, are a tempting escape from ambiguity – but these are something Melville and Moby Dick reject
Ishmael sees Ahab as loading the whale with "the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down". For millennia we have associated the act of humans slaying beasts with heroism, and these narratives are hard to shake – even if the more courageous path is co-existing with them.
Binary categorisations, such as good and evil, whether applied to animals or fellow humans, are a tempting escape from ambiguity – but these are something Melville and Moby Dick reject. Even among those whose job it was to see whales as a product at the time, whales were never one thing.
Some whalemen referred to whales as monsters; others grew sympathy or curiosity through direct observation. "I can not conceive any thing more strikingly awful than the butchery of this tremendous leviathan of the deep," wrote whaler J Ross Browne in his 1846 book Etchings of a Whaling Cruise.
The whale's makeover in modern times
Two generations on from whaling's peak, whales now mean very different things to people. Reading Moby Dick, many contemporary readers root for the whale, not the whaler. In the last century, a changing economy has seen commercial whaling pared back (though it has not ended completely – despite international bans, Norway, Iceland and Japan still whale for profit). And the mixture of fear and economic exploitation that characterised our relationship with whales in Melville's time has by and large been replaced by admiration and a desire to save them.
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| A sperm whale in the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands – today they are cherished animals (Credit: Getty Images) |
Indeed, humans now embrace the idea of whales fighting back against human cruelty: even if we still don’t know what they’re doing, our stories about it have changed. In the last few years, increased incidents of orcas, aka killer whales, ramming boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal have come to be known on social media as an "orca uprising", even though science does not yet have much evidence that their actions are intentionally hostile.
A significant point on the whale's metamorphosis in the eyes of humans came in 1967, when American biologist Roger Payne recorded whale song, and humans were moved by it. Since then, a growing body of research shows whales are capable of complex communication, once believed unique to humans. Might whales also be able to reciprocate kindness?
In my book, I relay reports of Vietnamese fishermen saved by whales which have informed their folk religion, and spoke with Nan Hauser, a whale scientist who was saved by a humpback whale. Research from marine ecologist Robert Pitman has observed interspecies altruism among humpback whales, who save marine animals like seals from orcas. For all that is unknown, these accounts and studies validate the sense that whales have an inner world which might rival our own.
Chase Coffin, from Nantucket, is a direct descendent of Owen Chase, and his family are proud of their whaling ancestry. Their feelings about whales, however, have shifted. "My family now donates every year to Save the Whales," he says. "I've been vegetarian most of my life."
Melville showed us how we make our monsters from the fear and guilt we repress within ourselves. Looking beyond our own projections, we might finally glimpse these animals' real depths.
First published at BBC, August 21, 2026
