Melville’s Primary Reference for Moby Dick
BEALE, Thomas. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale ... To Which is Added, A Sketch of a South-Sea Whaling Voyage. London: John van Voorst. 1839.
8vo. Contemporary half calf with marbled sides, rebacked, gilt morocco lettering-piece relaid to spine; pp. [iii]–vi, [7]–12, 393, bound without half-title; wood-engraved frontispiece and 2 wood-engraved plates, wood-engraved illustrations in the text; a few minor abrasions to corners; internally remarkably clean and fresh; ownership inscription of Brian Birley Roberts to front free endpaper and his posthumous bookplate to front pastedown (see below).
Second edition, considerably revised and expanded, of this monumental early work on sperm whales by ship’s surgeon Thomas Beale, the edition owned by Herman Melville and his ‘primary source book … in composing the cetological section of Moby Dick’ (Vincent, p. 128).
Melville acquired a copy of Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale – procuring it from London through Putnam’s in New York – on 10 July 1850, annotating it throughout and adding checkmarks in the margins to note his progress. Indeed, Beale’s work receives explicit mention in Moby Dick, in which it is praised as one of ‘only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in their attempt’, and Beale’s drawings of the sperm whale are characterised ‘by great odds’ as ‘the best’. The first edition had been published in 1835 in an edition of only 133 copies.
‘From its first appearance Beale’s book has been recognized as an essential reference for studies of whales and whaling. It provides for the sperm whale and the British Southern whale fishery, a handbook similar to that supplied for the Greenland Right whale and the Northern whale fishery by William Scoresby junr in his An Account of the Arctic Regions […] Beale was one of the first observers, if not the first, to provide an accurate description of the sperm whale’s appearance, habits, and general biology’ (1973 reprint, p. v).
Provenance: Polar ornithologist and researcher Brian Birley Roberts (1912–1978) organised and led the Cambridge University Expedition to Vatnajökull in Iceland in 1932 whilst an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, as well as the Cambridge University Expedition to the Scoresby Sund in East Greenland in 1933. In 1946 he joined Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute as a part-time research fellow, and was ‘often thought to be the éminence grise of the UK’s Antarctic policy and also of the founding of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty’ (Polar Record 52.6 (2016)).
Chavanne 1006; Denucé 1254; Sabin 4108; Spence 105. See Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby Dick (1949).
SKU: 2118252