In 1834, seventeen years before the publication of Moby-Dick, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson shared a coach with a sailor who told of a whale (and a white whale at that) known for bashing up whaleboats with its jaw. The seaman claimed that a whaleship had been fitted out of New Bedford called the Winslow or the Essex, he wasn’t sure which, to kill this whale and that the creature had been finally dispatched off the coast of South America. One can only wonder if Emerson recorded a garbled account of how Owen Chase, the new captain of the Winslow and the former first mate of the
...more
