Edit Author: D. Graham Burnett

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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, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with ''The Sounding of the Whale'', D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even ''Nature'' was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.

A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, ''The Sounding of the Whale'' tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.

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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 of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century—one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In ''Trying Leviathan'', D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular—and biblically sanctioned—view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature—and how we know it—was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts—pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers—took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy—and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God’s creatures.

When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders—and not everyone would survive.

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Edit Author: D. Graham Burnett

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