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Whaling Upwards

Ethan Rutherford’s debut novel escapes the shadow of Moby-Dick Friedrich von Martens, after Louis Garneray, Pêche du Cachalot, c. 1834-1835. | National Gallery of Art

North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford. Deep Vellum, 2025. 386 pages.

That the United States was ever reliant on large-scale commercial whaling now seems absurd.  Whaling hasn’t disappeared—the International Whaling Commission put a moratorium on the practice in 1982, but Norway, Iceland, and Japan all maintain small yet active commercial whale fisheries in defiance of the ban. Compared to the peak of American whaling in the 1850s, however, the modern industry is a barely noticeable blip, struggling to stay afloat amid multifront attacks from international regulators, animal rights groups, and general low demand for whale products (primarily the meat, usually eaten as a novelty). The total number of whales killed commercially in 2022 numbered in the high hundreds; in 1853, America alone slaughtered and processed over eight thousand.

This decline’s causes are obvious. The “big three” whale products—whale oil, spermaceti oil, and whalebone—were originally indispensable materials in the production of machine lubricant, lamp oil, and the ever-fashionable corset, respectively. With the explosion of petroleum production in the late nineteenth century, however, people could grease their cogs, light their homes, and constrict their rib cages for a fraction of the price they were paying for whale products. To make matters worse, frenzied over-whaling in the mid-1800s led to significant depletion of whale populations in the formerly fertile Atlantic fisheries, driving whaling crews further and further toward the punishing extremes of the earth by the end of the century in pursuit of increasingly meager bounties. The story of American whaling’s decline is familiar: How many industries of old were brought to their knees by the oil boom? Less recognizable to the modern American, though, are the social and cultural effects the presence of a large-scale whaling industry would have had.

Whales are fascinating. Larger than any living creature past or present and in possession of advanced cognitive faculties, the extent of which biologists are only just beginning to appreciate, whales have deservedly enjoyed a semi-mythical status as powerful leviathans in practically every society that’s encountered them. If whales are the stuff of legends, then even more legendary was the process by which they were hunted down, hauled from the sea, hacked to pieces, and brought home to grease the wheels of society. How strange it must have been for an innocuous purchase of lamp oil or evening wear to bring regular consumers face-to-face with the platonic man-versus-nature exchange, the triumph of human ingenuity over the spirits of the deep. Whereas most contemporary Americans can’t even guess what continent their granola bars are made on, our nineteenth-century counterparts would have been surrounded by household objects that loudly announced themselves as “whale,” seeing the mythical, even the beastly, beneath the fabric of polite society.

It’s with an intense awareness of this juxtaposition that debut novelist Ethan Rutherford enters the world of nineteenth-century whaling in North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, out now from Deep Vellum. The novel, set amid the decline of American whaling in the late 1870s, follows the journey of the Estherand its captain, Arnold Lovejoy, as the crew embarks on a yearslong whaling journey, attempting to reap the fruits of the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea whaling grounds and make contact with the stranded crew of the Dromo, another whaler that sank there, crushed in the ice.

To capture not only the facts of a narrative as foreign as the whaling voyage, but also its affect, is a deeply difficult task for any author in 2025, when we are more removed than ever from the material and symbolic grammar that would allow a novel like North Sunto appear “naturally.” It is only through a focused effort to inhabit an older, beastlier worldview that Rutherford manages to pull off the feat, laying aside the formal and ethical strictures that govern contemporary literature in the hopes of communing with those of the nineteenth century. This is a demanding task in its own right—made all the more so by predominating literary trends that take a very different approach to the historical.

Most great literature is attuned to its influences and understands its position within a larger historical context; what might be uniquely contemporary, or at least uniquely postmodern, is novelists’ current obsession with not just revisiting the past but rewriting it. Recent years have seen an explosion of reimaginings and retellings of classic novels, alongside a record number of sequels, prequels, and remakes in Hollywood and a deluge of “interpolations” of older pop songs topping the Billboard charts. In literature, the extent of this rewriting impulse is visible from the trade romance shelves at Barnes and Noble to highbrow award contenders. A few, like Percival Everett’s James, are genuine literary achievements which make the best of this often-unfortunate trend, applying modern literary and political frameworks to historical narratives without ignoring, overwriting, or dismissing the formal value of the source material. A larger portion, like Madeline Miller’s hit Iliad retelling, Song of Achilles, are entertaining yet curiously inert, using their source texts to dress up safely contemporary narratives and taking little time to engage with the beautifully foreign logic that drove the originals.

The persistence of this trend is due at least in part to an increasingly risk-averse publishing industry’s capitalization on the name recognition of classics to drive sales for novels that might not otherwise stand up on their own. But there must also exist some societal logic driving this impulse in the first place. Some might chalk it up to lazy or hubristic authors unable to view classic literature as anything other than a vessel for their own tired tropes, or, more charitably, to the notion that modern readers are unable to connect with historical forms and thus require someone to present the works of the past to them in “their own language.” Those with a more materialist inclination might invoke Fredric Jameson, citing the contemporary compulsion to rewrite the literature of old as evidence of postmodern culture’s alienation and fragmentation, and the degradation of narrative possibility that results. In other words, maybe we just can’t tell stories like we used to.

Whatever the causes, the ubiquity of this trend sets certain expectations in any modern reader, who may be understandably apprehensive when encountering North Sun for the first time. To write a whaling novel—a genre already dominated by a singular pillar—amid our backward-looking literary landscape brings an author into dangerous territory. Moby-Dick is a fact, and any spinner of a modern whale tale must reckon with questions of whether and how the legacy of the whaling novel will be broached. It is Rutherford’s prudent decision to avoid explicitly entering into this territory that both grants his novel a chance at greatness and also imbues the entire thing with a pronounced yet generative sense of déjà vu.

It’s no surprise that two well-researched whaling novels should tread much of the same ground, given that they draw from the same raw material. Still, the parallels in plot and detail are something Rutherford (and anyone with a cursory familiarity with American literature) would surely have been aware of. In defiance of the current fashion, however, North Sunchooses to let this clear intertextuality simply exist rather than trying to draw the readers’ attention to it with overt commentary. Take, for instance, Moby’s famous tryworks passage, which paints the rendering of whale fat on the decks of the Pequodas a demonic ritual: “Standing on [the tryworks] were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers . . . With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, til the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.” Now consider this passage from North Sun, which similarly ritualizes the tryworks:

The heat generated by the tryworks at midship is infernal. The glistening blubber, chopped and hauled from below, is placed by tongs into the pots’ open mouths. One man stirs and with his skimmer pulls pieces of crunchy skin to the surface; these he plucks from the radiant oil while the men find the boys and push them to the foredeck. “Down the hatch!” “Open open!” “For tradition, for luck!”

Rutherford avoids reworking Melville’s hellacious imagery, instead using the rendering of whale fat to demonstrate the sailors’ corruption of the Esther’s cabin boys, forcing them into a literal communion with the spirits of the deep. Still, reading passages like the above that skirt so close to Melville’s territory without acknowledging it in any way—whether explicitly or as shoddy pastiche—made me feel, for a moment, as though I’d been transported to an alternate, Dick-less universe. The effect is uncanny.

As the crew of the Esther set off through the dried-up whaling grounds of the North Atlantic, settling in for what they understood would be a yearslong voyage, my eyes kept jumping ahead in anticipation of the sudden surfacing of a white whale (maybe there would be a calf this time? Son of Moby-Dick has a nice ring to it). But as the Esther continued its journey through the formidable Drake passage and into the Pacific, I began to understand that I could lower my guard. North Sunsteers clear of temptation, and Rutherford takes full advantage of the freedom his commitment to originality grants him to lead the novel into far stranger and more intriguing territory than its opening act might suggest.

North Sun overflows with gnomic symbolism, taking shape across short yet immensely lucid episodic chapters that range in length from a few pages to a few sentences. Many characters are introduced, but the complex relations between the hundred or so men of the Esther areevoked more through the mood and metaphors of Rutherford’s bare and rhythmic prose than through traditional expository modes. Upon the introduction of Thule, a surprise guest on the voyage, we get a characteristically sparse discussion of the men’s reaction:

It is the captain’s business, and the crew won’t question it. They are an empty hold on an empty ocean; they know their jobs and their place. It isn’t the strangest thing to have a gentleman aboard. “A surprise, that’s all.”

In a distant, third-person voice that sometimes loosely follows the captain, sometimes the two brothers serving as the ship’s cabin boys, and sometimes nobody in particular, North Sun’s narrative winds through the consciousnesses it details in an almost Homeric fashion, a sense compounded by its frequent bardic interjections—“Heavenly days! Behold!” begins the novel; when whaling grounds approach, the narration entreats us to “Rise.”

As the ship moves toward its eventual destination in the Arctic, the broad strokes of a plot begin to take shape from this poetic ether. But absent are many of the discursive and conversational aspects of the realist novel. The sparsity of Rutherford’s prose—at once grounded in the vocabulary and descriptive sensibilities of the period it inhabits, yet stripped bare of practically all of the humanelements that typified the literary style of the time (a true protagonist, a discursive internal monologue)—reconfigures the narrative into what could most fittingly be called a tale. North Sun is more folkloric than novelistic, more récitthan roman, a characterization reinforced by the deeply allegorical and mythical territory toward which the novel progresses.

Omens abound and are reported as such, with no opinion given as to their veracity or lack thereof. A black bird follows the ship. A hat blows overboard. A sailor plunges to his death from the riggings. As the northward journey continues, these auspices come to a head, and North Sunplunges deeper into the supernatural and the disturbing. The narrative begins to narrow its focus onto Eastman, a hulking, perplexingly grey-skinned sailor who has risen to the top of the informal hierarchy of the ordinary seamen, thanks to his terrifying aura. After being flogged for the crime of mutilating a sailor’s corpse, something demonic in him is unleashed, “his heart black in a way that cannot be accounted for.” In the novel’s most gut-wrenching passages, it is later made apparent that Eastman has begun to sexually abuse the cabin boys, adding to their pain by marking them with stigmata on their hands and feet. Soon thereafter, in their traumatized state, the boys are visited by the figure of Old Sorrel, a bird-faced, human-bodied creature of the deep who speaks in riddles (“Everything has two handles: one by which it may be carried, the other by which it can’t.”), conjuring visions for the boys and whispering in the ears of Eastman to keep his evil at bay:

He hangs from the yard and watches as they help the blacksmith at his grindstone. He strides the deck amidst the bustle of men, untying their knots, unseen by all but them. And sometimes the long days on the water pass without the boys seeing him, or any sign of him, at all. Yet, even when they cannot see him, they know he is there, and watching—for his presence has settled the ship.

Old Sorrel remains a fixture for the remainder of the novel. Yet even with the arrival of the explicitly unreal, the narrative tone remains unchanged; he is described with the same delicate disinterest as any of the other characters.

Finally, the Esther reaches the Chukchi Sea, where it continues to fish for whales among massive ice floes while Captain Lovejoy and his first mate set off to find the stranded crew of the Dromo. Meanwhile, Old Sorrel’s meddling grows more and more frequent and his intent more suspicious. People die; sanities take leave. A violent and confusing denouement between Lovejoy and the Dromo’s captain leads into an unexpected fourth act and both Old Sorrel and the sea settle into their truest, most punishing natures. By the novel’s final scenes, in which the boys return to New Bedford and grow old among the decay of an increasingly irrelevant whaling industry, few questions as to the nature of the magical events they encountered have been answered. The only certainty is that the sea is no closer to being vanquished by man.

North Sunhas no fear of the supernatural and feels no need to cloak it in vagueness or humor. Despite this, its persistently poetic, disengaged, and matter-of-fact prose defies its categorization as genre fiction: Rutherford treats these otherworldly forces not as a spectacle but as a simple fact. Old Sorrel is certainly an allegorical figure, a personification of the cruel forces of nature that whalers discovered could be exploited but never truly dominated—yet he is just as real as each of the novel’s humans are. Like the folk tales that comprise the tradition the noveldraws on, from TheOdysseyto Little Red Riding Hood, the question of whythe supernatural appears feels irrelevant; these stories emerged from societies that gave credence to the magical, whose relationship to the unknown allowed it to be personified in the form of fairy-tale monsters. The world has changed, though, and our contemporary society’s hyperconnectivity and rejection of the inexplicable has blocked the gaps through which writers used to see the mystical in the everyday.

It is the awareness, and perhaps the resentment, of this fact that is ultimately responsible for a novel like North Sun. Rutherford is far from the first author to attempt to reject the cultural modes of his time and ground his narrative in the logic of an earlier period. Perhaps the most famous proponent of the trend was Italo Calvino, who entered similar territory with novellas like The Cloven Viscount, trading his postwar Italian environs for those of the sixteenth-century romance. But Rutherford’s tale is rooted in more perplexing and more poignant soil. For the brief period when the American whaling industry overlapped with modern industrial society, this strange and beautiful juxtaposition wove the spirit of great mythological beasts into the fabric of global capitalism, creating a shaky balance between the forces of human endeavor and those of indomitable nature. North Sun’s ultimate tragedy, and its genius, however, derives from its knowledge that just as quickly as this balance arose, it was brought crashing down by the inexorable tide of progress. With the death of whaling came the fall of one of the last bastions of myth in our society; the novel merely allows us a posthumous glimpse into its final days.