Moby Dick or the White Whale (1851) the classic American novel by whaling veteran Herman Melville, is composed of 132 chapters. Each offers a unique eco-tonic or maritime dioramic space, a sense of place, personage, geography of a ship orecosystem representation of nineteenth century whaling.

Moby Dick’s cartographic chain maps a fateful whaling voyage starting with Ishmael’s arrival in New Bedford in Chapter II to the Pequod’s sinking in the South Pacific after encountering the Great White Whale, Captain Ahab’s death and Ishmael’s rescue by the Rachel in the novel’s Epilogue.

Utilizing GIS, MAXQDA/A.I., software, corpus linguistics, and other techniques this project sources M.F. Maury and C.H. Townsend’s Whaling Logbook data and Dutch Weather Logbook data from the Historical Climatology database.

This data is then mapped and contextualized within the narrative spaces of Moby Dick.