Volume 3, Number 5 · October 22, 1964
Outside the Whale
By R.W. Flint
One Whaling Family
edited by Harold Williams
Houghton Mifflin, 401 pp., $6.95
American whalemen never said harpoon, but toggle-iron, never 'There she blows'—because how can you tell a whale's sex from a spout on the horizon?—but 'there blows' or just 'Blo-o-ows.' These things mattered. The chief vices of seafaring literature in the great days of sail were melodrama and verbosity, to feed the expectations that popular journalism had aroused. No book on whaling could take the place of Moby Dick, least of all the modest group of three first-hand narratives collected in One Whaling Family. But the fonder one is of Melville the greater one's appetite is likely to be for what you might call the nuclear evidence of whaling, as Charles Olson demonstrated in Call Me Ishmael. In this respect One Whaling Family is a very fine elixir of factuality that needed a long underground maturing. Its first half, Eliza Azelia Williams's journal of her first whaling voyage from 1858 to 1861 with her young husband, a 'lucky captain,' Thomas William Williams of Wethersfield, Connecticut, has a ripened pathos in 1964 that it would not have had in 1864. The son born to her on this voyage, William Fish Williams, became a distinguished engineer who served six years as Commissioner of Public Works in Massachusetts. Two admirable chronicles that he wrote in later life make up the book's second—and to me more interesting—half; they are as satisfying in their sobriety and obvious reliability as only the best scientific demonstration can be.
Review, 1178 words
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