Read Moby Dick first, then this one, which brings Melville to life in a modern-day exploration of the white whale legend.

This is an interesting exploration of the legend behind Moby Dick, namely a white whale that was capable of being Captain Ahab's protagonist.
Tim's narrative and journey retrace some of Herman Melville's steps and casts some doubts about the truth of Melville's life. Much of the whaling related information may have been borrowed from others.
His portrayal of some of the primitive communities surviving on whale and big-fish hunting were interesting. There was a good portrayal of the effort needed to hunt in this way, and the risks.
Be warned
The later stages of the book contain quite graphic descriptions of hunting, catching, killing and dis-membering whales, whale sharks and manta-rays. Whilst these appear to be honestly and factually told, some readers may find these sections upsetting.

The book starts out promising and creates great expectation of adventure with the reader, however we quickly end up in the weeds and have trouble understanding why we spent a whole section of the book with diving fisherman on a remote island in the Philippines. As well, there are glaring spelling mistakes. The author has such great potential as a writer if only he had a more diligent editor to keep him on point and focused.

Great true life adventure.

Excellent read. I have not read Moby Dick but still enjoyed this book. His descriptions of the whale hunters is great

I wanted to love this book so much being a huge fan of the source material, Moby Dick. I found the first half of this book interesting but by the time I got to the third island I had checked out. I can't put my finger on why but it didn't do what the Voyage of St. Brenden did for me.

I feel hoodwinked. A more appropriate title would have been HOW MY SUMMER VACATION CAN BE TENUOUSLY LINKED TO HERMAN MELVILLE. If he was in search of Moby Dick then he missed the boat. Less than a tenth of the book pertains to "the white whale". As a travelogue with an occasional literary aside it was well-written and if it had been packaged as such I would probably give it three stars.

It was a good read delved into what's left of primitive whaling culture. Easy to read and interesting to read about other ways of life.

I don’t much like travel books and I don’t know exactly why this is. Perhaps it is because travel writers strike me as being in the midst of an on-going existential crisis, constantly a’roving in order to fill an insatiable and desperate maw. Their frantic hithers and thithers make me uncomfortable. Or perhaps the fact the average travel writer takes on a heartiness and condescension towards us landlubbers that I find hard to take. Perhaps I’m just jealous. Or there’s the fact that I only like traveling after I’m back home – otherwise I’m a nervous wreck…

This being said, despite being a travel book, In Search of Moby Dick was quite good. My one major specific complaint (rather than my genre complaints noted above) is the rather pumped up “reason” behind it, the whole “search for the white whale” business. I’m certain there are white sperm whales out there – they are albinos and they are rare, rare enough for old sailor’s tales and Polynesian creation myths, etc. Mystery solved. But Severin, no doubt bending to the implacable will of editors who insist that every non-fiction book has to have some kind of a whodunnit suspense aspect tacked on to it insisted that Severin add cliff-hangers throughout. All sorts of books are written this way these days. It’s a plague.

Despite the corny “search,” this is really a well-written and intelligently organized book with little by way of waste and unnecessary authorial posturing. I couldn’t believe how tight the prose often was – he’s almost as good as Jon Krakauer. During the chase scenes (whales, sharks, rays), I couldn’t put the book down. Reading landscape and action (or combat) descriptions can be either tedious or confusing, and Severin was neither. Here’s the layout: Severin hops about the Pacific, looking for white whales and peppering his narrative with quotes from 19th century whaling authorities (Melville, mostly, or Melville’s sources, and the Essex wreck survivors). This blending of travel and literature is well done. The places Severin goes depressed the hell out of me – he perhaps conveys poverty better than anyone I’ve ever encountered, which made for some uncomfortable reading for well-insulated me.

The stories are astonishing. There is an island in the Philippines called Pamilacan where the last of the “whale jumpers” dwell. Whale jumpers don’t use harpoons – harpoons get lost too easily and are considered a luxury. Instead, a guy jumps off the boat with a hook and hand-delivers the barb. Then the rest of the crew gets drug around by the whale until it is exhausted, they gradually jab it to death, just like the Nantucket whalemen of the 1800s. These days whales are not (legally) hunted anymore of Pamilacan, but they still go after giant rays this way. Pamilican is a dreadful place – there is no fresh water on it, for one, but the fishing is lucrative enough for them to just barely subsist. Severin describes a lunchtime transaction involving a handful of tiny, multi-colored reef fish that are carefully cleaned and grilled – think of five guys eating eight goldfish. Or the little kids dipping a broken plastic bottle on a string into the briny trickle at the bottom of a ruined well in order to get a bucket full of non-potable brackish water they give to the minuscule pigs found here and there, tethered together with ropes through their ears (perhaps a bucketful after a day’s worth of dipping). This is dreadful stuff, despite the fact the islanders are close enough to civilization to be somewhat dialed in to the rest of the world – they use motors sometimes, and currency. And they gamble a lot, cockfighting, mostly, which Severin describes in depressing detail. But I’d gamble a lot too if I had to dive after manta rays with a hand-held hook or struggle all day for bucketful of water I couldn’t even drink. Or I’d leave. Or kill myself.

The best part of the book is towards the end, when Severin spends several weeks with the Lamalera islanders – the Lamalera islanders are the last native sperm whale hunters and Severin tells their story without any “noble savage” rhetoric. They live in abject poverty on a tiny, somewhat barren island in Indonesia, and they do things entirely the old-fashioned way – with sewn-together boats and hand-forged harpoons. There’s nary an outboard motor or store-bought rope to be found. Although they do use harpoons, they are so light (bamboo shafts) that the harpooner, much like the Pamilacan islanders, usually dives off the boat with his harpoon to give the thing enough weight to pierce the whale’s skin. Everything is very, very basic. As Severin tells it, the Lamalera islanders ain’t got nothing but their whales (and the occasional shark, ray, and teensy-weensy flying fish). They are in real peril, half starved, paddle their boats really, really hard, and use crappy tools. The slaughter of the whales is indeed heartbreaking, but for the first time ever I came to understand the whole “bond” between hunter and hunted…or I understand it as much as I ever will. The Lamalera whalers have songs, rituals and superstitions that do not appear to have been muddled around by the pieties and cliches that you see in movies about buffaloes and Native Americans (for instance). Some of their whale myths and songs even seem to convey a twinge of regret or bad conscience over killing the whales (or perhaps I’m sentimentalizing the situation). The way the kill is taken, divided up and otherwise dealt with show a level of cultural cohesiveness that I think is very rare in the world today, even among peoples living far from civilization. Thanks to Severin’s account, I wound up being very impressed by these people, by their industry, suffering and overall humanity. And so, as much as I’m a save-the-whales guy, I think the Lamalera islanders should be allowed to continue their ways (which won’t last much longer anyway – the youngsters are leaving the island for better opportunities further up the Indonesian archipelago). There’s a million-plus sperm whales in the world (according to Severin – Wikipedia says a couple hundred thousand). The Lamalerans take around a dozen a year, 25 in a good year, 3 in a bad one. I want to mention too that Severin does a fine job describing the animals he encounters (often dead or dying animals). His sympathy for the hunters he is with is in uncomfortable balance with the sympathy he feels for the animals they kill. He struck me as being a kind of old-fashioned nature lover, before the PC set in.

The pursuit of a story lead to an unintentionally funny bit towards the end. Since Severin is constantly on the hunt for white whale stories, he asks a lot of white whale questions. The Lamalerans pick up on this and, big surprise, the white whale stories he hears start coming in fast and furious. Towards the end I think there is an entire fleet of them cruising off shore (but, you know, ten years ago or so). Amusingly, Severin reports these tales without much by way of skepticism. To his credit, this might be a testament to his respect for the people he meets on his travels.

This book had been on my reading list for a long time. Sadly it did dissapoint. It was a bit hard to read and i could not keep my attention to the story.