Thinking big

NEW BEDFORD -- From Homer to Herman Melville to Tom Clancy, stories of men and the sea have always been in fashion. In that broad category, one of the newer moneymaking niches is narrative history for the general reader. There was Dava Sobel's 1995 bestseller, "Longitude," about the invention of a clock that would work accurately at sea. Two years later came Mark Kurlansky's "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World." In 2000, Nathanial Philbrick 's best-selling "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex " retold the real-life drama that inspired Melville's epic novel, "Moby-Dick."

Publishers are always trying to find the new author who can reach that salty audience, and editors at W. W. Norton think they've found him in Eric Jay Dolin of Marblehead. Dolin's first book with a major publisher, "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America," which will be released Monday , has the sweep Melville had in mind when he wrote, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."

"Leviathan" tells the great saga, from Captain John Smith's 1614 attempt to hunt whales off the North American coast through the last ill-fated voyage of the whaleship Wanderer, wrecked on Cuttyhunk Island in 1924. Over that time, American whalers ranged the oceans from the tropics to the Arctic, killing hundreds of thousands of whales, discovering exotic places and peoples, lighting homes and streets on several continents, and making huge fortunes for ship owners, especially in Massachusetts.

At 45, Eric Jay Dolin has spent much of his life thinking about the sea. "Early on," he said in an interview at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, "I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau," the great French underwater explorer and filmmaker. Growing up in Long Island, in his school days he became fascinated by shellfish. He studied biology at Brown University, at first supposing that he would become an academic malacologist. In graduate school at Yale and MIT, he switched to the field of environmental policy, writing his 1995 PhD dissertation on legal aspects of the cleanup of Boston Harbor.

One thing he learned was that he didn't want to be a professor. Since earning his doctorate, he has mixed writing with environmental work. "I've been all over the place, trying to find myself," he said. He worked for the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, and now the Marine Fisheries Service, based in Gloucester. Meanwhile, he has written several books on environmental subjects, mostly with small publishers, none of them big sellers.

Bored with his previous job writing accident reports for the NTSB in Washington, Dolin and his wife, Jennifer, longed to return to New England, where he had gone to college and she had grown up. They moved with their two kids to Marblehead in 2002, so he could take the job as a policy analyst with the Fisheries Service and she could work for the regional office of the EPA. (She now works in the private sector.) Casting about for a book topic, he began to read about whaling and soon became hooked -- or harpooned.

But what to write? When he visited the library of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Dolin was astounded by the thousands of books, row upon row, that had already been written on the subject. Like the doctoral student he once was, he pondered the flood of existing scholarship and decided to narrow his focus. He had been amazed to read that whale oil was the most profitable export from the American colonies to England before the American Revolution, so he proposed to literary agent Russell Galen a book about whaling in the Colonial era.

Right off the bat, Galen rejected the idea. Dolin, he thought, needed to think big.

"The problem is not the experience people will have when they read the book," Galen said in a phone interview from New York. "It's to get them to notice it, to pick it up. The idea of ending the narrative at the moment that the nation was born seemed to doom it to the less-interesting. There is something about whaling that calls for a mighty or epic treatment."

So Dolin set to work telling the complete story, as best he could in one medium-size (373 pages) book. More than the story of whale-hunting, to a large extent it became the story of America. "Whaling provided a backbone for a view of American history," said Dolin, including trade and international politics, personal wealth, class and race, art, romance, and worldwide exploration. It's about a time when the little island of Nantucket, and later the city of New Bedford, were world centers of oil production. It's a story of bravery, horrifying deaths, shipwrecks, mutinies, and desperate voyages of survival. Finally, it's a story of wars -- the Revolution, War of 1812, and Civil War, all of which interacted dramatically with the whaling industry.

"We wanted a book that the family and the eager reader can take to the beach, be entertained, and learn about American history," said Robert Weil , Norton's executive editor.

Galen and Weil see Eric Jay Dolin as a serious historical writer with a storytelling gift, and the potential to become the next David McCullough, Philbrick, or David Halberstam. Based on that expectation, Weil has signed Dolin to a two-book contract, the first of which will be a history of the North American fur trade. For his part, Dolin is quitting his day job to become a full-time writer.

Dolin avoids retrospective moral judgments about the killing of whales, and does not venture into present-day issues of conservation. Twentieth-century international whaling was a far greater threat to the survival of the great whales, he says, than the Yankee whalers in their wooden ships. "In a single year," Dolin said, "factory trawlers could take as many whales as a Yankee whaler took in a decade."

For the investors, ship owners, and captains of old, whaling was all about money. For the crew who stalked the whales, it was all about vast stretches of crushing boredom punctuated by brief, terrifying, face-to-face encounters with the jaws of death.

"There aren't many things in the world that can evoke such awe and fear in the heart of man as a whale encountered in its element," Dolin said, by a handful of human beings "in a small whaleboat with one inch of wood between you and a 60-ton animal. How horrific it would be to be in a boat smashed to smithereens by the flukes of a right whale or the jaws of a sperm whale. They weren't out there to get trophies, but to make a living."

But for present-day readers, lovers of maritime adventure, snug by the fireside or safe on a beach with the mighty sea at a distance, the quest is for a smashing read, a book that takes you around the world and across the centuries, wondering what's over the next horizon, or the next page.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.