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Acclaimed writer Philip Hoare confronts our fascination with one of the most mysterious animals in the ocean, the whale. Travelling in the footsteps of Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the great American novel, he visits the whaling ports of New England. New Bedford was once the richest city in the USA, and the island of Nantucket is where the whaling industry began. Hoare searches for the truth behind the story of Moby-Dick and draws an eerie parallel between Captain Ahab's crazed pursuit of the great white whale and today's war on terror. He enters a world haunted by a bloody and violent past, and, in the three mile-deep waters of the Atlantic, has his own encounter with the legendary sperm whale.