1850

 The year 1850: Edgar Allen Poe and John James Audubon have just died in New York City — Poe in abject poverty and Audubon in the midst of his Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.

Lieutenant M. F. Maury is at work on a map of whale distributions throughout the oceans of the world, a classic still consulted by historians and biologists today. Charles M. Scammon is sailing to California from his native Maine; soon disenchanted with digging for gold, he would find a whaling brig to command and later write one of the nineteenth century’s finest zoological studies of marine mammals. Thoreau is revising Walden.

 A journalist in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman, is writing poems that will appear in a slim volume called Leaves of Grass. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an ardent abolitionist, is writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly; when it is published the following year, Uncle Tom's Cabin helps to solidify Northern opposition to slavery, leading to the American Civil War. Nineteen-year-old Emily Dickinson begins composing verse in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing to a former schoolmate: ‘The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea — I count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!’

Herman Melville, the celebrated author of Typee, a novel based on travels aboard a whaler in the South Pacific, is whipping up his latest whaling yarn, overdue at his London publishers. After meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Berkshire Mountains, he moves to Arrowhead, a 160-acre farm near Hawthorne’s home. Melville spends all of 1850 and most of 1851 transforming his adventure into Moby-Dick.

 

       - Joe Roman, Whale (Animal Series)

 

Whale chart, finished by U. S. Navy Lieutenant M. F. Maury  in 1851