Odd Marine Facts: Why Sperm Whale Heads are Built Like Battering Rams
At the end of Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick, after doing battle with Captain Ahab and drowning him, the white whale turned it malevolence on the whaling ship itself. Ramming the Pequot at high speed, the whale sent its tormentors to a watery grave with only one survivor, the story’s narrator, Ishmael. While the tale is often thought of as an allegory, it is in fact based on two very real incidences of whales in the South Pacific sinking whaling ships, the Essex and the Ann Alexander. A survivor of the Essex sinking, Owen Chase, wrote a memoir of…