Moby Dick: The 19th-Century novel that challenged our fear of the 'monstrous' whale

Now 175 years old, US author Herman Melville's classic is the ultimate tale of man vs whale – but in fact, it questions why humans have been so terrified of these great sea creatures.

Across time and place, we have seen animals as friends, collaborators, pests, gods, idols and demons – and our view of them is constantly shifting.

In my new book, The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom, I trace the emotional story of our relationships with animals, and reflect on how storytelling has impacted how we treat them. In many ways, our shared futures look bleak, with wildlife populations declining by 73% between 1970 and 2000. Yet the relationship between humans and one creature in particular – the whale – should give us hope. In ancient and medieval times whales were conflated with sea monsters and the devil, but now they're an animal many of us long to see and save. 

And one seminal moment in the whale's reappraisal came 175 years ago with the publication of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: an epic, great American tale of man vs whale, whose tragic hero Captain Ahab's fixation on the titular white sperm whale leads to his death. The story is narrated by Ishmael, a sailor who joins Ahab's whaling mission looking for money and adventure. On board, however, Ahab announces the real reason for the trip: vengeance. He wants to chase down and kill Moby-Dick, who bit off his leg on a previous voyage. 

But Melville did not share Ahab's animosity for the sea creature. Instead his story invites readers to question where human fears about "monstrous" animals come from – and whether those fears say more about us than them.

The real story that inspired Moby Dick

By the time Melville published Moby-Dick, in the mid-19th Century, the hunting of whales, or whaling, had expanded into a major commercial industry. Whalemen set out on dangerous voyages to kill whales and harvest their blubber for "train oil", used to lubricate the machines of the industrial revolution and light the "fat lamps" of swelling cities.

The US east coastal town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, where Moby Dick begins, became the whaling capital and earned its nickname, "The City That Lit the World". The whalers learnt about whales through direct observation, while scientists had specimens to dissect. Taxonomy divided whales and other animals into neat categories based on anatomical differences and evolutionary history. Finally, it seemed, humans had illuminated even the shadowy underwater realm.

Yet some whales still challenged these ideas about the predictability of the natural world. On 20 November 1820, a sperm whale struck down The Essex whaling ship in the southern Pacific Ocean. Twenty men escaped on three boats, endured around three months at sea, succumbing to starvation and dehydration, and then, as two written survivor accounts tell it, eventually resorting to cannibalism. Among the survivors was senior crew member Owen Chase, whose account of what happened inspired Moby Dick.

Certainly the real-life tragedy – and the great fictional story it inspired – placed the very unlikely possibility of a whale attack in the collective imagination like never before. The odds of a whale........

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