Herman Melville
(1819-1891)
Charles Travis
Moby Dick or the White Whale (1851) the classic American novel by whaling veteran Herman Melville, is composed of 132 chapters. Each offers a unique eco-tonic or maritime dioramic space, a sense of place, personage, geography of a ship orecosystem representation of nineteenth century whaling. Moby Dick's cartographic chain maps a fateful whaling voyage starting with Ishmael’s arrival in New Bedford in Chapter II to the Pequod’s sinking in the South Pacific after encountering the Great White Whale, Captain Ahab's death and Ishmael’s rescue by the Rachel in the novel’s Epilogue. Utilizing GIS, MAXQDA/A.I., software, corpus linguistics, and other techniques this project sources M.F. Maury and C.H. Townsend's Whaling Logbook data and Dutch Weather Logbook data from the Historical Climatology database. This data is then mapped and contextualized within the narrative spaces of Moby Dick.
Charles Travis
M.F. Maury a nineteenth century U.S. Naval Officer and the "Father of Oceanography" (top) and Historian and Oceanographer C.H. Townsend (bottom) transcribed whaling log books, leaving us a record of Cetacea extractions from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The video at the left maps and animates the location, frequency and numbers of Pacific Sperm (Physeter macrocephalus) strikes and landings between 1790 and 19010.
Data Source: Whaling History
Source: Historical Climatology, Dagomar Degroot, and Steven Ottens. Dataset from Climatological Database for the World's Oceans. Washington, DC: Historical Climatology, 2018. GIS data formatted by Charles Travis.
A Stranded Spermaceti Whale (Catodon Macrocephalus)
John Karst
Johnson's Household Book of Nature, 1880