IN A SPERM WHALE'S JAWS

Edited by George C. Wood '34h. Hanover: Friends of the Dartmouth Library, 1954. pp. $2.00.

This terse account of what is probably the only non-fictional escape out of the jaws of a sperm whale will raise the question in many minds: "Did Melville somehow get wind of it?" Conceivably Captain Wood's cruel true injury could have been the prototype of Ahab's worse fictional maiming. The event occurred on March 4th, 1849, on the Off Shore Ground in the far Pacific. MobyDick was begun about a year later. Melville's correspondence indicates that an early draft, which he had hoped to complete in 1850, was worked over for another year because of new information and a new concept. The far-wandering Albert Wood did not bring his own story to Nantucket until after the novel's publication, but any homeward bounder might have carried it sooner from Papeete, where Wood's shipmates had left him under the care of a French surgeon.

If only for the coincidence, In a SpermWhale's Jaws will belong henceforth in any respectable Melville collection. It may provide a partial clew to the mysterious evolution in manuscript of the leviathan of 19th Century fiction.

There are other reasons for possessing it. One does not often find, so compactly presented, the bones and thews of a great story which imagination can flesh out for itself. Captain Wood dictated his brief account to his son Charlie, but forbade him ever to publish it. A shipmate, who later became Inspector of Customs in Boston, provided the Wood family in 1895 with a transcript of the log he had kept on the day in question, and excerpts following. Captain Wood's grandsons, who did not inherit the injunction which restrained their father, now have released the two documents which are published by the Friends of the Dartmouth Library with a biographical introduction by George C. Wood, Professor of Belles Lettres. The account is appropriately illustrated with a portrait from a daguerreotype of Captain Wood and vigorous wood cuts by J.J. Lankes.