[Dngrsone]

First, I'd like to thank the computer gods for cut-and-paste...

I finished Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex Illustrated: Narrative of the most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex that Inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick by Owen Chase, which, despite the new printing date is a collection of very old stories: two books (or, perhaps one and a half, because the second one seems like it was cut off after the pertinent parts were got) written by survivors of the Essex sinking, plus a bunch of semi-related newspaper articles from the 18th and early 19th centuries mostly centering on the topic of whales who attack ships.

So, despite the language (people back then tended to take forever to get to the freakin' point when speaking or writing), the content was pretty interesting. One might even say informative, if it weren't coming from an era of journalism that cared about accuracy about as much as Herodotus did.

I mean, I would like to believe the story of sneaking up on a sleeping whale cow and milking her was true (at least the milking parts, not the trying to keep a calf as a pet part), I'm going to have to reserve judgement unless or until I run across a vetted scientific article that corroborates any of that.

Overall, the theme does suggest that whales are smart enough to infer that ships which launch boats are bad and that the more aggressive bulls were pretty intent on destroying said ships in defense with some success.

I liked the read, worth what I paid for it (nothing), but I probably won't read it again unless I'm going to cite portions for some argument in the future.

Meanwhile, I am reading Brilliance (Book one of a trilogy) by Marcus Sakey.