For centuries, whales have been seen in contradictory ways: as awe-inspiring and beautiful animals, but also as objects from which human beings can extract a great profit. D.H. Lawrence took the first approach in his poem “Whales Weep Not!” (1909):

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!

Consider, by contrast, this extract from Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket (1835):

In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.

Herman Melville, who includes the Macy passage among the many extracts with which he begins Moby-Dick, depicts, in his narrator Ishmael, a young whaler constantly drawn in both directions. At first Ishmael accepts the industry of whaling. But as he sees whales up close, wondrous and mysterious beings, he becomes increasingly, if inconstantly, critical of harpoon whaling and the greed for consumer products that drives it. Those products have included meat; whale oil from blubber, useful for many purposes, such as lighting lamps and making margarine; sperm whale oil, a valuable lubricant for machines and, in our own time, for intercontinental ballistic missiles; and baleen, or “whale bone,” used for corsets, combs, and countless other products.

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