Trying Leviathan
The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
D. Graham Burnett
Winner of the 2007 Isabelle Hermalyn Book Award, New York Urban History
Winner of the 2007 New York City Book Award
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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.
"Trying Leviathan isn't just another fish story….is story is riveting, one of those wonderful obscure microcosmic matters."–Sam Roberts, New York Times
Paper | $21.95 / £14.95 | ISBN: 978-0-691-14615-7
Cloth | $32.95 / £22.95 | ISBN: 978-0-691-12950-1