Leviathan; The History of Whaling in America

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 479, [1] pages. Notes. Select Bibliography. Illustration Credits. Index. Signed by the author on the title page. Eric Jay Dolin (born 1961) is an American author who writes history books, which often focus on maritime topics, wildlife, and the environment. He has published eleven books, which have won numerous awards. Dolin has worked as a program manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; an environmental consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton (MD) and Environmental Resources Limited (London); an intern at the National Wildlife Federation, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, and for Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. on Capitol Hill; a fisheries policy analyst at the National Marine Fisheries Service; a technical writer for the National Transportation Safety Board; a PEW research fellow at Harvard Law School; and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellow at Business Week. Derived from a Kirkus review: Dolin compellingly examines whaling's importance to America's early growth and wealth. The author traces the industry's development, from whale hunting by eighth-century Basques to the introduction of whale products throughout Europe by the 17th century. The American settlers saw Indians cutting up pilot whales and soon tried "drift" whaling themselves. Nantucket took the lead first in drift whaling and then in shore whaling, rowing out to harpoon leviathans swimming near the coast. The island's hardworking settlers launched sea hunting for the sperm whale and its three lucrative components: oil for clean lighting, spermaceti for medicinal elixirs and candles, ambergris as a fixative for perfumes. Dolin goes through the facets of sperm-whale hunting, detailing the life aboard whaling vessels, then moving on to describe the dangerous chase for an elusive prey, followed by the processing of its carcass. By the early 1850s, whaling entered the golden age Herman Melville depicted in Moby-Dick. The discovery of crude oil during the late 1850s produced kerosene that soon supplanted whale oil as the principal source of lamp fuel. Dolin ends with the final voyage of New Bedford's last whaling ship in 1924.