Science: Captain Ahab Avenged

The title role in Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick is played by a white sperm whale that got one of Captain Ahab’s legs—and eventually got the whole of him. Moby Dick himself escaped triumphantly, and flesh & blood whalers have claimed that nothing like him was ever harpooned before or since.

Last week the whale ship Anglo Norse put in at Elizabeth, N.J., with photographs of a real Moby Dick: an albino sperm whale harpooned off Peru several months ago by Gunner Henrik Nilsen. The whale was a 56-ton patriarch, all milky white with a bluish tinge around the tail. Gunner Nilsen struck first, lived to see his prey cut up and rendered.