'Leviathan' a whale of a history lesson

LEVIATHAN: The History of Whaling in America. By Eric Jay Dolin. Norton. 479 pages. $27.95.

Other than hair-raising narratives of sea-borne warfare, nothing could form the substance of a more exciting sea story than tales of whale hunting in the days of wooden sailing ships.

Author Eric Jay Dolin has done a superb job of chronicling the rise and fall of the American whaling industry in an expansive mosaic of stories that describe every aspect of the business, including the ships, the seamen, the whales and the economy fed by whale products.

Whaling by North American Indians was first observed around 1605. New England colonists were making use of stranded whales as early as 1635 and had begun to practice land-based whaling by the 1650s, launching boats from shore to pursue animals off the beaches and in the bays. The deep-water voyages started around 1712, and by the time of the industry's twilight in the 1850s, American whaling ships were plying the globe.

Dolin gives an excellent account of the various species of whales hunted and their relative value in terms of their yield of baleen (whalebone), spermaceti, rendered whale oil, ambergris and teeth. The daily life of the seamen usually was one of grinding monotony occasionally broken by the cry of "Thar she blows," followed by the excitement of the chase, as fragile skiffs closed in for the kill. Voyages sometimes lasted as long as four years, many interrupted by tragedy. Wars, storms, groundings, encounters with hostile (and hungry) natives and occasionally angry whales annually took their toll on the fleet.

By 1861, the whaling industry was in such decline that 24 of the old whaling vessels were purchased by the federal government and towed south loaded with stones gathered from New England streets and walls. Sixteen were sunk in the Charleston Harbor channel and a half-dozen sunk in the river channel to Savannah. Soon after, another similar attempt to block the two Southern Confederate ports also ended in failure because they, like the first ships, rapidly sank in the mud and were broken up by the currents.

This is a thorough, thoughtful and well-written story of a largely northeastern industry that was at the time as important to America as was the rice and cotton produced in the South. The book contains many interesting illustrations: 76 pages of documentary chapter notes and a comprehensive bibliography are testaments to the level of scholarship that went into the description of this saga of American history.