boggy, soggy, squitchy… Map or The Whale?

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boggy, soggy, squitchy… Map or The Whale?

By Larry Laliberte

Over the past four years, the William C. Wonders Map Collection has crafted collection engagement tours, workshops, and displays that situate our collection of printed maps, and their containers, through various thematic lenses. In 2022, we began conducting map library tours that drew upon Henri Lefebvre’s production (conceived, perceived and lived) of space. In 2023, in-person workshops were added that placed maps under the gaze of hauntology. In 2024, the display Amiskwaciwâskahikan / ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ / Edmonton area and beyond 5000+ years of history was set up for Geography Awareness week. In May of 2025, the staff utilized the tops of 31 map cabinets to curate Map a-day-in May (a thirty-one cabinet display), focusing on Women in Cartography.

This fall, map staff began to investagate how printed maps might be used as a visual input for ekphrasis, a poetic device, allowing verbal art to represent visual art (Becker, 1995). One of the examples  was the ekphrasis Herman Melville employed in his novel Moby Dick; or, The Whale, to describe Ishmael’s encounter with an oil painting as he enters the Spouter-Inn at the start of Chapter 3. It jolted me to read it again, especially alongside E.W. Leach’s description of ekphrasis as a “symbolic amplification of theme”[1](Leach, 1988). Which is also an astonishing description of what a map is. This re-awakened the life-long relationship I have had with Moby Dick; or The Whale. Had I found another spatial in the story? Was there “map” in the oil of the painting? A map that required endeavoring, in order to manifest it?

boggy

The first encounter with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; or, The Whale was a Saturday night. A kid staying up late, raptured on caffeinated soda, sugars and savories. Then the 1956 movie Moby Dick materialized on television. What a cinematic moment, as captain Ahab pointed to a chart, his index finger slapping upon islands labeled Bikini and Mulgrave.[2] 

Like many map librarians, that kid was enthralled by cartography. The excitement as the National Geographic arrived in the mail, and soon after the insert map was affixed to a wall. Also on hand, a thirty-volume encyclopedia set (tactile Wikipedia) that provided access to maps of every country, city and historical event. Maps that were often accompanied by plastic overlays (tactile GIS).

So I was drawn in as Ahab, in a calm, confident voice (just above a whisper) said “this way, the humpbacks go…the blue, the right…the spermaceti” (Scripts, 2025). Eyes fixated as Ahab traced the chart with his fingers, along ocean currents predicting the movements of the white whale corresponding “to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows” (Melville, 1930). Voice and gestures, reinforcing a deep adoration for maps, that would guide me for a lifetime “the blood pumping in my veins from heart to hand” (Scripts, 2025).[3]

Captain Ahab pointing at “The Chart”[4]

soggy

The next spatial encounter with The Whale occurred fifteen years later in a second hand book store Happenstance revealed a 1956 pictorial map by Everett Henry showing the Voyage of the Pequod. Ecstatic, my own index finger traced the vivid trek that set out on Christmas day from Nantucket. Traversing the Atlantic Ocean, oscillating round the Horn of Africa, sailing to the South Pacific Ocean, and ending where Ahab obtains his comeuppance and Ismael, buoyed by a coffin-canoe, “floating on a soft and dirgelike [map][1] .” (Melville, 1930)

Ismael alone survives in the coffin canoe (Henry, 1956)

Map now in hand, feet pivoting to cluttered shelves of disorderly books assembled by the author’s last name. I had yet to read the book. To the M’s, eyes scanning past Machiavelli, Mann, Márquez, Maugham and there after Milton—Melville. A 1930 Modern Library copy, illustrated by Rockwell Kent.[5] Reading the novel, and following Henry’s map over the next week, put me in a trance. A spellish memory that has not dissipated with time.

So there it sat, a tomb of a book residing on a shelf, squeezed between Benchley’s Jaws and Homer’s Odyssey. The pictorial journey of the Pequod tacked on the wall, and a notebook filled with scribbled quotes and passages from the book. Except, where printed red ink was used to draw attention to when the word map appeared.

  • Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are. (Chapter 12. Biographical)
  • Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. (Chapter 14. Nantucket)
  • Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. (Chapter 54. The Town-Ho’s Story)

Also included, two hand scribed passages plucked from Chapter 44 The Chart.

  • No mention of Bikini Atoll?
  • Ahab does not take care of his chart’s “wrinkled roll of yellowish” stored in a “locker in the transom” (Melville, 1930).[6] 

However, I skipped the footnote. Missing the reference to a chart that was under production. Melville, though immersed in his writing of the novel, was aware of the chart through an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851 (Melville, 1930).

squitchy

That 1851 chart would be the next spatial churn. Now a map/GIS librarian at the University of Oregon, I received a reference question related to whaling history, which led me to the Whale Chart by M.F. Maury, published in 1851 – the same year Moby Dick was released. The next day, the novel propped upright, reading the details of the footnote, with the whale chart atop a map cabinet bathed in natural light, thinking, a fitting end.

Portion of Whale Chart by M.F. Maury showing the legend

This intervening quiescence[7] lasted until 2023. Now the GIS/map librarian at the University of Alberta, a researcher inquired about map examples that capture anthropogenic processes as a result of the Columbian Exchange.[8] The University of Alberta Library’s William C. Wonders Map Collection cabinets beckoned. Four cabinet drawer draws later, Map Illustrating the Extermination of the American Bison, showing the decimation of the American bison by 1889. Jens Munck’s Map of Churchill Harbour, an early example of tree felling. Henry Youle Hind’s Map of part of the Valley of Red River North of the 49th Parallel, its intent inscribed right on the map “vast wet prairie easily drained” (Hind, 1858). Also included the Whale Chart by M.F. Maury. However, while searching for related articles, a lodestone appeared. Julien Nègre’s, The World in a Footnote: Examining Ahab’s Chart in Chapter 44 of Moby-Dick. Published in 2022, Nègre works out from a single footnote to contouring vast spatialities. Capturing the depth of scale unfolding during the voyage, Nègre writes:

“Moby-Dick takes place at widely different scales and in the interplay between the subparts and the whole, the footnote and the text, the textured details of the map and the global scope of the hunt” (Nègre, 2022).

The calibrated surface of the earth (Melville, 1930)

map or the whale

While looking into ekphrasis to use during an in-person, tactile spatial literacy workshop for GIS Day 2025[9], the Leviathan returned.  With every search run, abstract skimmed, citation checked, and paper read, three examples of ekphrasis consistently turned up. Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. A splendid meditation on the beauty and truth of deep time. The Shield of Achilles, described by Homer in the Iliad. A spherical Greek cosmology projected and engraved on a flat shield. And as “the fate of the whalemen” (Melville, 1930) would have it, the oil painting Ishmael encounters after he enters the Spouter-Inn.

Ishmael enters the Spouter-Inn [image altered]. (Melville, 1930)

Unlike the clarity of the ancient urn, held in Keats hand, or the clear gaze upon a freshly forged shield, the oil painting is “thoroughly besmoked” (Melville, 1930). No one can truly ascertain what it shows. Though Ishmael doubles down for the sake of foreshadowing his narrative, and at the end tries to convince us “an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads” (Melville, 1930). No! Not after a lifetime arc of intermittent years, at once harpooned with a cartographic illumination. I cannot let Ishmael’s conclusion pass.

a symbolic amplification of theme

Through the symbolic- map as portal, map as mirror- cloaked in public domain, I leapt into the fault between the absent and present, alighting upon the textual floor comprising  Chapter 3 The Spouter-Inn, aiming to amplify a map from the oil, through transubstantiation. Thematically replacing the word painting with map, while cartographer substitutes for the artist[10]: “When Leviathan is the text, the case is altered” (Melville, 1930). No longer relying on happenstance, I overedge the neatline, and stipulate Map precede Whale. Out of the besmoked, a sketch, and a spatial ekphrasis emerges – a personal symbolic amplification of theme.

[11]On one side hung a very large map so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young cartographer, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the map over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy map truly. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous map meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the map’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to the great leviathan? In fact, the cartographer’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The map represents, like the printed red ink inscriptions in a notebook filled with scribbled quotes and passages:

  • delineated chaos bewitched
  • thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed  it
  • unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, a long, limber, portentous, black mass
  • the Black Sea in a midnight gale—the unnatural combat of the four primal elements,—a blasted heath,—a Hyperborean winter scene—the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time
  • dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast
  • indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity

The deed of symbolically amplifying the thematics (verbal and visual) through a spatial ekphrasis, provides a dexterous tool for weaving abstract, emotional, and yes, absurd poetics. Blending time and space, a cadence tamping desire paths, and daubing depictions. Provisioning the traveler with “heartbless, upfullness” (Miller, 2014), while intervening with, the internal and external “interscalar” (Hecht, 2018). To hover in the presence of the will-o’-the-whisp, and that “shadow of lines upon a wrinkled brow” (Melville, 1930), the ever fleeting, oft misleading, map.

Larry Laliberte, Maps/GIS Librarian, University of Alberta Library, llaliber@ualberta.ca

Notes

[1] A footnote in A. S. Becker’s The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis, draws attention to E.W. Leach’ s description of ekphrasis in their work The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscapes in Republican and Augustan Rome, as a symbolic amplification of theme.

[2] At the time, I was unaware that the 1956 movie was referencing Bikini Atoll where, after the second world war, the United States performed nuclear testing (“Bikini Atoll,” 2025).

[3] The 2 min. YouTube clip is a great opening when teaching “one-off” GIS data sessions.

[4] The chart that Ahab, played by Gregory Peck, points to in the 1956 movie Moby Dick is by all accounts a prop. However, there were charts of currents and whaling grounds available in the 1840s (Wilkes, 1845).

[5] To view examples of Rockwell Kent’s illustrations for the 1930 Modern Library edition see: Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak) Artist Rockwell Kent followed Moby Dick to the ends of the earth.Starting January 1st 2026, works from 1930 are free to use and remix.

[6] Over the past ten years, I have come to align “a locker in the transom” with “off site map storage”.

[7] Laramide orogeny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laramide_orogeny

[8]  One could argue that every map produced during and after the Columbian Exchange was/is anthropogenic.

[9] Terracotta True Scale: Spatial Literacies, Deep Time and Maps. A ten seat workshop that took place on GIS Day, 2025. https://ualberta.libcal.com/event/3932153

[10] Without contention, cartographers are artists of the highest order.

[11]  This passage is from CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn, and was accessed through Project Gutenberg. Beginning with the second sentence in the chapter “On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked… The passage ends with, In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents…What was altered or replaced were references to “oil painting” or “painting” with the term map. While any reference to “artist” was supplanted with the word cartographer.

References

Becker, A. S. (1995). The shield of Achilles and the poetics of Ekphrasis. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Bikini Atoll. (2025, November 09). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll 

Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak) Exploring Our Common and Uncommon Culture. (2021). Artist Rockwell Kent followed Moby Dick to the ends of the earth. Retrieved 12 OCT 2025 from https://kevernacular.com/?p=13454   

Hecht, Gabrielle. (2018). Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence. Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1: 109–141. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1445-0785

Henry, Edward Everett. (1956). The Voyage of the Pequod from the Book Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Harris-Seybold Company. Retrieved 15 OCT 2025 from https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/108w21

Hind,  H.Y. (1858). Map of part of the Valley of Red River North of the 49th Parallel to accompany a report on the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition by H.Y. Hind. Retrieved 17 OCT 2025 from https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamaps/3798821080

Hornaday, W.T. (1889). Map Illustrating the Extermination of the American Bison. Retrieved 17 OCT 2025 from https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/gw49sh

Huston, John. (Director). (1956). Moby Dick or The Whale. [Film]. Moulin Productions.

Louvel, L. (2018). Types of Ekphrasis: An Attempt at Classification. Poetics Today, 39(2), 245–263. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-4324432

Maury, Matthew Fontaine. (1851). Whale Chart by M.F. Maury A.M. Liet. U.S. Navy. (Preliminary sketch) Series F. Hydrographic Office of the US Navy.  Retrieved 17 OCT 2025 from https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/888m03 

Munck, Jens. (1624). Map of Churchill Harbour. Original manuscript and map in University Library, Copenhagen, (MS. Additamenta, No. 184). Retrieved 17 OCT 2025 from https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamaps/1128393743/

Melville, Herman. (1930). Moby Dick or The Whale. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent. The Modern Library.

Nègre, Julien. (2022). The World in a Footnote: Examining Ahab’s Chart in Chapter 44 of Moby-Dick. Miranda. No. 26 Melville’s Measures. https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.47428

Rutger H. Cornets de Groot. (2013, December 6) Moby Dick – Captain Ahab Pointing to Bikini Atoll [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3OQj94d0No 

Scripts. (2025, October 11). Moby Dick Page #4. Medium. Retrieved 28 OCT 2025 from https://www.scripts.com/script/moby_dick_13909/4

Weltzien, O. A. (1999). A TOPOGRAPHIC MAP OF WORDS: PARABLES OF CARTOGRAPHY IN WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON’S “PRAIRYERTH.” Great Plains Quarterly, 19(2), 107–122.

Wilkes, Charles. (1845). Map Illustrative of the Currents, whaling grounds by the U.S. Ex. Ex. United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842). Lea & Blanchard. Retrieved 28 OCT 2025 from https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/l0k42j 

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