Since author Herman Melville in 1850 wrote about a fictional whale attack on a fishing vessel in his famous novel, everyone has wondered whether whales really attack ships.
Finally the question is moot – they do.
Scientists from University of St. Andrews in Scotland have aerial drone footage showing sperm whales using their heads as virtual ramrods.
In Moby Dick, a whale head-butts a fishing boat in 1820 off the Galápagos Islands, destroying the 90-foot vessel.
In an amazing juxtaposition of history, now a modern drone is confirming something that everyone wondered for centuries was reality or fiction.
The answer is now verifying that Melville knew far more perhaps than even he realized, making him a man ahead of his time.
Whales are actually mammals, so because they breathe air they need to occasionally surface.
The only remaining question now, really, is why a whale would attack a whaling ship as one did in Moby Dick.
The answer to that one may be too obvious.
Sperm Whales Caught Head-Butting Each Other, Confirming 175-Year-Old ‘Moby Dick’ Mystery
By Ted Cohen
Whales are highly intelligent. They are smart enough to treat us well when we treat them well – and to respond with violence, when provoked by hunters with harpoons. Witness the centuries-long relationship that Australians and Tasmanians developed with orca (killer) whales – the whales hunting collaboratively with the fishermen for seals and other whale species. The orcas even protected the men if their boat sank in shark-infested waters. Several books tell this story, and historical societies in those communities have photographs from the 1930s showing this collaboration. Fascinating!
Moby Dick was fiction. However, the Essex was not. We already knew that whales rammed ships.