"In Leviathan, the first one-volume history of American whaling in many decades, historian Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the epic battle between man and the sea - and, in this case, between man and beast - an often-violent struggle that animates the imagination and stirs our emotions." "Beginning his engrossing narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614, Dolin traces the rise of this burgeoning industry - from its rapid expansion in the colonial era to its golden age in the mid-1800s, when the sails of America's whaleships whitened the seven seas. As Dolin shows, American whale oil lit the world and greased the gears of the Industrial Revolution. Baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion. Spermaceti, from sperm whales, produced amazingly brilliant and clean-burning candles, while ambergris gave perfumes great staying power." "Leviathan teems with fascinating vignettes, from the Pilgrims' frustrating encounters with whales to the candle wars that pitted eighteenth century New England industrialists against one another, to the heroic cruise of Captain David Porter and the USS Essex, in which Porter and his men valiantly protected American whaleships during the War of 1812. Then there is the violent tale of Cyrus Plumer, a notorious troublemaker whose mutiny on the whaleship Junior is retold. Among the most amazing accounts is that of the Shenandoah, a Confederate raider, which burned twenty-five of the twenty-nine Union whaleships it captured, most after the Civil War had already ended.

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, we witness the agonizingly slow death of an American industry, as the discovery of oil, tragic disasters in the Arctic, and changes in female fashion combined to transform the American whaleman into an historical relic. The final scene comes in 1924, as the whaleship Wanderer, wrecked on the shore of Cuttyhunk Island, provides the last glimpse of a bygone era."--BOOK JACKET.