Mocha Dick: The Legend and the Fury by Brian Heinz (review)

This exquisitely illustrated picture book tells the story of the legendary giant white sperm whale Mocha Dick, from his first recorded encounter with a whale ship in 1810 off the coast of Chile—depicted through a tangle of teeth and splintered oars and appalled men—through his fatal blow to the port bow of the Essex in 1820 and his enduring reputation in subsequent decades as a hunted, mutilated terrorizer of ships, to his last, fatal battle in 1850. Melvilleans may experience a flash of surprise when the story, after presenting the sinking of the Essex, follows the whale rather than the ill-fated sailors, but this rhetorical decision suits both the constraints of a children’s book (how young is too young to talk about cannibalism?) and Heinz’s development of Mocha Dick as a living, intelligent being worthy of respect, including his own narrative arc. Well-told as the story is, what makes the book sing are its dynamic, color-saturated illustrations, created using a process Enos designed in the early 1960s and has dubbed “linocut collage.” For each of a picture’s individual components (e.g., waves, a whale, a shirt, an eye), he cuts the image in relief on a linoleum block, inks it, prints it out on colored paper, dries it, cuts it out, and collages it into the final image. The results are luminous, distinctively hued illustrations with the fine lines of scrimshaw and of woodblock prints. The pictures are also funny: Mocha Dick seems to chortle to himself as he swims away from the Essex, sailors gesticulate and gape as they tell the story of the white whale. Though featuring Mocha Dick rather than his fictional doppelgänger, the book deserves a place of honor in the halls of Moby-Dickrelated art.