14 November: Moby Dick

14 November is Great White Whale Day: in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published. 10 things you might not know about it:

1. The book opens with the famous line, “Call me Ishmael”. The narrator, Ishmael, is a member of the crew of the whaling ship Pequod. The captain is Ahab, hell bent on bringing down a Whale which had bitten his leg off at the knee on a previous trip. Ahab’s false leg is made from a whale’s jawbone. Ishmael describes the natural history of whales and day to day life on board a ship with a multicultural crew – their routines and encounters with other ships.
2. Many writers base their characters on real life people. Herman Melville was no different, although in his case, it was real whales. Two of them, in fact. A real life albino whale, over 70 feet long, used to shadow whaling boats. As long as they didn’t attack him, he was fine, but at the first sign of an attack he’d fight back. The whale was nicknamed “Mocha Dick” after an island near where he was first seen. When the whalers finally got him, there were 19 harpoons in his side. Why Melville decided to change the whale’s name to Moby isn’t known. It wasn’t as if the whale was going to sue for libel! In 1820 another whale succeeded in sinking a whaling ship leaving the crew stranded in lifeboats for four months. By the time they were rescued, most of them had died and they’d had to start eating each other.
3. Just three months before the novel was published, a ship called the Ann Alexander was sunk by a whale. While the story would have been written by then, the coincidence wasn’t lost on Melville, who wrote in a letter at the time: “I make no doubt it is Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his capture after the sad fate of the Pequod … I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”
4. There is, as well, at least one human character based on someone real. Captain D’Wolf, who first appears in chapter 45, and said to be the narrator’s uncle, is based on Melville’s uncle, one Captain John D’Wolf II, who used to regale the young Herman with tall tales about his adventures, claiming that he’d sailed to Russia and crossed Siberia on a dogsled.
5. Some time later, a fan of the book, called Gordon Bowker, who was setting up a Coffee house business, almost called the company after Ahab’s ship, Pequod. Until his business partner, Terry Heckler, commented, “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod.” So they named it after the first mate instead – Mr. Starbuck. Starbuck also gave his name to a character in the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Both Moby Dick and Battlestar Galactica also have characters called Boomer, although I could find no mention that the name Boomer was lifted from Moby Dick, but it’s possible.
6. Another influence on Melville was fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived just six miles away. Melville was a big fan of Hawthorne, even comparing him to Shakespeare (the Bard being another massive influence on Melville’s writing). The two writers met in 1850, and presumably Melville showed Hawthorne his work in progress, for after the meeting, he re-wrote the whole thing, and dedicated the final novel to Hawthorne. Hawthorne returned the favour by giving Melville’s books very positive reviews.
7. Moby Dick wasn’t a best seller during Melville’s lifetime. Only 3,715 copies were sold. Not as many as another of his novels called Typee, which sold three times that. Melville gave up on writing for a living and got a job as a customs inspector. It was only after he died and his obituary mentioned that he was the author of a book called Moby Dick that people became interested. Not that it was easy to find any of his novels – they’d all been out of print for almost 20 years. When an author called Carl Van Doren found a copy at a second hand book shop, over 25 years later, he raved about it, calling it “one of the greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world” and it took off from there.
8. A prehistoric sperm whale which had huge teeth (up to 36cm long) was named Livyatan melvillei by palaeontologists, in honour of the author.
9. The British edition was heavily censored. The Victorian editors removed, for example, any suggestion that God wasn’t perfect, criticisms of the British and their royal family, and, surprise surprise, all descriptions of the sex life of whales. They also removed the epilogue, for no apparent reason, in which the story of how Ishmael survived is told. It’s possible the publishers simply lost it.
10. The novel has been made into several films, TV and radio shows with John Barrymore, Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart taking on the role of Ahab. Stewart would go on to reference the novel in another of his famous roles, that of Star Trek’s Captain Picard, who quotes it as he sets out for revenge against The Borg: "And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it."

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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