“It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.”
Thus Herman Melville wrote in 1851, in a book I bet you can guess the title of, making clear what Ahab & Co. pursued: a leviathan so cunning and cruel as to transcend flesh and blood, becoming “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.”
Melville shows up early in Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea, Hollywood’s latest riff on Moby-Dick; based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the film aims to tell the true story that inspired Melville’s novel. Here Melville is played by Ben Whishaw, who bribes grumpy old drunk Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), an Essex survivor, to tell his tale.
