Be cautious when entering a shoreless sea of literature with a rookie sailor at your side, for you may never reach the grounds you expected—not in terms of plot, but in terms of genre. What begins as a fairly typical novel, afloat for a good while alongside Stevenson, Melville, and O’Brian, soon reveals itself as a deep dive into maritime magic realism.
North Sun, or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (Ethan Rutherford) opens somewhat clichéd—uncertain brushstrokes from a debut author searching for his voice (or his sail) among the whaling ships. By the middle, the novel mutates into a hymn to human vileness and vice. By the end, it takes on astonishing shapes: reality tangled with legends and superstitions, people revealed as dolls with foolish crab souls, and the sea becoming yet another circle of hell. Better or worse? I have no idea.
You might be swept up by the tale of an expedition where people on diverted vessels dream of the sea, and those already in the sea dream of the home shore. Or you might slam the book shut at the first mention of shipworms (they’re real and they’re revolting—and I strongly advise against looking them up). You may bristle at the captain’s obsession, feel intrigued by the mysterious passenger, or marvel at Old Sorrel’s peculiar attachment (not-so-real, though sailors of the late 19th century might argue otherwise) to the ship and certain members of its crew. But a gale is guaranteed.
Another warning: the author does not shy away from the darker corners of human nature and, with a kind of manic relish, delivers deliberately detailed depictions of cruelty—from the slaughter of walruses to the sewing shut of a dead seaman’s lips.
And while we’re on the subject of cruelty, it’s worth turning to one issue that shifts over the course of the novel from defining theme to background current. I mean whaling and its products.
Photo by The Natural History Museum/Alamy Stock Photo
Whaling, after all, was never just a backdrop of creaking masts and salt-washed decks; it was an industry as intricate as any old craft guild, complete with its own secrets, hierarchies, and hard, oily truths. A trade where men crossed half the world not for glory, but for barrels of light and lubrication—where a single good voyage could keep a city’s lamps burning through the winter. Behind every thrown harpoon stood arithmetic. A ship left port not for adventure, but for oil, wax, grease, and whatever else the ocean—begrudgingly—might surrender. And just as any sailor can tell a foremast from a mizzen by feel alone, a whaleman knew his quarry by its yield, not by its grandeur.
To say “they killed a whale” is about as meaningful as saying “they cut down a tree.” What kind of tree? For masts? For furniture? For firewood? So with whales: every species was its own ledger line, its own smell, its own risk.
The sperm whale was the ocean’s wandering treasury vault. From its vast head came the clean, nearly smokeless oil prized for lamps, and the strange milky substance—spermaceti—that refined into wax of unnervingly high quality. After boiling and separating, a single barrel of it might fetch twenty-odd dollars in the late 19th century—roughly $800–1,000 in modern money for something that burned with steady light and never sputtered.
Right whales and bowheads were another category entirely: producers of immense quantities of heavy, brown-tinged oil that smoked, smelled, and coated everything it touched, yet powered half the lamps of the industrial world. A good bowhead might yield a hundred barrels or more. Individually they weren’t worth much, but volume made up the difference—several thousand modern dollars of usable product, provided the ice didn’t crush your ship before you rendered the blubber.
Smaller creatures—belugas, blackfish, porpoises—were the petty cash of the trade. Their oil was serviceable, sometimes surprisingly good, but no captain ever set his course to chase them alone. Still, on a long voyage a barrel gained was a barrel gained.
And then there was the thing sailors whispered about: ambergris. That waxy, sweet mass found only in the guts of only 1–5% of sperm whales. A single lump could be worth more than the rest of the voyage’s cargo combined. In today’s money, this could mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a miraculous substance that perfumers treated like alchemists’ gold. Crews that found ambergris walked differently afterward.
***
The hunt for treasure, whether for gold or a colossal creature, was never a carefree pursuit. Many returned with empty holds; many more never returned at all. For centuries they have rested on the seabed, alongside the scraped-clean skeletons of the whales they once chased.
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