In Moby-Dick Ishmael tells of seeing the skeleton of a sperm whale assembled in a grove of palm trees on a South Pacific island. “How vain and foolish,” he says, “for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton.. . . Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.” But, as the survivors of the Essex came to know, once the end has been reached and all hope, passion, and force of
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