From the Bible's "Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?" to Captain Ahab's "From Hell's heart I stab at thee!," from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery. In the twentieth century, howe[...]

In "Moby-Dick", Ishmael declares, 'Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me'. Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one o[...]