World-traveling whalemen stayed at sea for up to four years to fill their holds with barrels of oil, burned down from blubber right on board or scooped out of the heads of the great sperm whales. Mariners explored the South Seas, hauled aboard Galapagos turtles -- delicious, they insisted -- to extend their stores, and eventually even risked arctic ice floes in search of their overhunted prey. In the process they spun legends about killer behemoths, hostile native islanders, cannibalism (their own), and the obsessive pursuit of big kill. The industry waned only around the time of the Civil War, when hydrogen gas and kerosene were introduced and someone thought to drill 70 feet below a Pennsylvania farm for petroleum.
Eric Jay Dolin's lively and thorough history spans the rise, golden age, and decline of what was once one of New England's distinctive industries. The author of "Political Waters," a history of the pollution and cleanup of Boston Harbor, Dolin is well suited to sorting out the fish tales and the sometimes ugly truth of a violent, pressure-filled venture. He sticks mainly to the facts, providing fascinating stories when the evidence allows. And they allow often enough. In 1771 , for example, one Marshal Jenkins had his whaleboat munched by a sperm whale and found himself in the whale's mouth when she dived , only to be spit out ( whales have big mouths but small throats ) . "Legend has it that impressions of the whale's teeth were evident on Jenkins's body for the rest of his life ," Dolin writes. Four years later, a whaler spied an icebound ship off Greenland complete with a frozen crew. The captain or mate, "his face covered by a thin green patina of mold," had been sitting with pen in hand in front of the ship's logbook for 13 years.
