Things you never knew about whaling

This is one of those New Yorker book reviews of very pleasing length, where you end up up feeling that you have learnt a lot of things you didn't know before, with the added benefit that it seems hardly necessary to buy the book now.

The book in question "Leviathan", is a history of American whaling.

One thing it has taught me is that there was a fair bit left out of the movie version of Moby Dick:

Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol.

It's a really interesting read. Go to it.