Free The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld by Justin Hocking

way back to the city on a Sunday before a long, dull workweek in the Pit, I can almost feel him in the car with me, riding shotgun, silent and sullen—sick with his own failure—especially in the urban wasteland that is the eastbound turnpike through Yonkers and the South Bronx.
    Weeks later, on a solo surfing trip up to Cape Cod, I make a similar pilgrimage to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a fascinating repository of nineteenth-century maritime artwork, scrimshaw, harpoons, and various whaling implements, plus a half-scale re-creation of a successful whaling ship, the Lagoda . The museum makes concrete much of what I’ve gleaned about the historic whaling industry from reading and rereading Moby-Dick . What most intrigues me—but is given somewhat short shrift by the museum—is the industry’s gross unsustainability. In two or three hundred years, U.S. whaling corporations fished out entire oceans and severely depleted the global whale population, cutting a critical lifeline for many indigenous peoples, who had harvested whales sustainably for two thousand years or more. Whereas native peoples in Asia and the Americas had a deep reverence for the whale, nineteenth-century Americans had a more entrepreneurial attitude toward whaling. After being tapped for spermaceti oil and ambergris and stripped of blubber, immense sperm whale carcasses were dumped unceremoniously back into the sea. Baleen from right whales was used to make hoop skirts and corsets (also known as “whalebone prisons”); ambergris was a key ingredient in the production of perfume, the same substance that Melville’s contemporary Walt Whitman “knew and loved,” but ultimately considered a useless vanity.
    Aside from indulging American superficiality, by and large the most profitable aspect of the whale was oil—whaling was, in fact, the original “Big Oil” industry. In 1853, just two years after the publication of Moby-Dick , the industry had its most successful season: eight thousand kills rendered hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and netted $11 million. Spermaceti was used as a clean, clear-burning, Benjamin Franklin–endorsed lamp oil and illuminant, providing light for the developed world. And like its dirty, crude oil descendant, whale oil lubricated the furious machinery of the industrial revolution. In Call Me Ishmael , Charles Olson writes, “So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby-Dick , consider whaling. Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop … the whaleship as factory, the whaleboat the precision instrument.”
    As America grew, so did the demand for whale oil, but soon demand outpaced supply. As whale populations dwindled—as we reached a kind of nineteenth-century Peak Whale—voyages to distant seas like the South Pacific and even the Arctic became necessary. The New Bedford museum evokes this era with a series of haunting, sublime paintings of whaling ships dwarfed by icebergs. Two-year voyages became the norm, as did the increasingly dehumanizing and dangerous aspects of life aboard a whaler. In the mid-1800s close to one-third of all American whaling hands deserted their ships—just as Melville abandoned the Acushnet . Another death knell for the industry was the discovery of petroleum near Titusville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1850s. Originally developed as a cheaper replacement for whale oil, petroleum soon inundated the modern world, its omnipresence fueling the rise of the automobile, petrochemicals, and plastics. 1
    My next stop at the Whaling Museum is the auditorium, where an educational film called “The City That Lit the World” plays on a constant loop. Though it occasionally references Moby-Dick , the film is narrated in an un ironic tone of nostalgia and patriotism, as if ridding the ocean of whales was a national pastime of which every red-blooded American should be proud. And while largely attributing the