One Ocean September 8, 2000. Before he wrote Moby Dick , Melville crewed on the whaleship Acushnet . During a gam in the Pacific with another whaleship, he met William Henry Chase, the teenage son of the first mate of the Essex .
Humans seem to demand that monsters exist.
The trouble is that though we have been rummaging and ransacking through the furthest reaches of this world for the past 500 years we have never managed to come up with even one, genuine, ferocious monster. Whales are the closest we ever came. For a while they seemed to fill the bill. They were enormous, fearful, and they killed people right and left. Thirty-five years ago it struck me that if, during such an attack, an animal lashed out in self defense it was hardly an indication of its viciousness.