One of the ironies of our literature is that the great American novel, “Moby-Dick,” deals with an occupation and a way of life that have utterly vanished in America. When Herman Melville published his masterpiece, in 1851, he could hardly have imagined that his whaling epic would outlast whaling itself. The decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War were the golden age for American whalers. Of the 900 whaleships in the world, 735 were American, and whaling was the fifth largest industry in America. Nantucket and New Bedford, Mass., the major whaling ports, built little aristocracies on the profits from blubber and spermaceti and baleen. Two years after Melville’s novel appeared, writes Eric Jay Dolin in “Leviathan” (Norton, 373 pages, $27.95), the industry enjoyed its most profitable year ever: In 1853, Americans killed 8,000 whales, for a profit of $11 million.

Just 20 years later, however, American whaling had entered its death spiral. A combination of shrinking whale stocks, outmoded technology, and the disruption caused by the Civil War helped to cripple the industry. But the major culprit was the discovery of oil wells in Pennsylvania, which opened up a cheap and seemingly endless new source of fuel. Where American homes and streets had once been lit by whale-oil lamps and spermaceti candles, they now turned to coal gas and kerosene, which were cheaper and gave better light. One illustration in “Leviathan” tells the whole story: A cartoon from April 1861 shows a group of whales in tuxedos and gowns, attending a “Grand Ball” in honor of the newly discovered oil wells. “We Wail No More for Our Blubber,” reads a banner in the background.

Today’s reader, taught by decades of save-the-whales activism to regard the slaughter of whales as a particularly gruesome form of exploitation, is inclined to join the whales’ celebration. (In fact, the party was premature: As American whaling declined, Russian, Norwegian, and Japanese fleets took up the slack.) But Mr. Dolin, whose environmentalist credentials are impeccable — he is the author of the “Smithsonian Book of Natural Wildlife Refuges” — recognizes that modern taboos won’t help us understand the history of whaling. He “seeks to recreate what whaling was,” he writes, “not to address what it is or should be now.”

As Mr. Dolin makes clear, from Colonial days until the Civil War whaling was not a metaphor or a morality play — it was big business. “To the whalemen,” he writes, “whales were swimming profit centers to be taken advantage of, not preserved.” But “Leviathan” is not really an economic history. Mr. Dolin has little to say about the financial structure of the industry, or the role it played in American society. He is not out to analyze whaling so much as to tell a bunch of good fish stories: stories about killer whales and doomed ships, Nantucket plutocrats and mutinous tars. In clumsy but engaging prose, Mr. Dolin offers a colorful, fast-moving panorama — the literary equivalent of “A Whaling Voyage Round the World,” a 1,295-foot long painting that toured the country in the mid-nineteenth century. At 50 cents a head (half price for children), landlubbers could see the story of a whaler’s career — complete with half-naked Tahitian women — as the canvas moved across a pair of rollers.

So, too, reading “Leviathan,” we get lively impressions of a world that modern Americans will never see in person. Not that we should regret the lost opportunity too much. For while we tend to think of whaling as an adventurous trade for free spirits, it was actually, Mr. Dolin shows, a miserable and dangerous job, which few sailors ever willingly took twice. The history of American whaling begins literally with the Mayflower, whose passengers “saw Whales playing hard by us, of which in that place, if we had instruments and meanes to take them, we might have made a very rich returne.” The first colonists followed the American Indians in combing the beaches for cast-up whale carcasses. Soon they progressed to hunting whales offshore in small boats, and by 1702 Cotton Mather could write about “the catching of Whales, whose Oil is become a Staple-Commodity of the Country.”

But it wasn’t until around 1712 that, according to tradition, Captain Christopher Hussey set sail from Nantucket and was blown far out to sea, where he accidentally discovered a new and much more valuable species — the sperm whale. From then on, the sperm whale would become the major target of American whalers, who covered the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic in search of them. In addition to its blubber, which was rendered into oil for lighting and lubrication, the sperm whale provided the spermaceti for which it was named — up to three tons of white, waxy liquid, contained in a torpedo-shaped case in its enormous head. This could be turned into long-lasting, clean-burning candles, the light source of choice for those who could afford them.

Spermaceti is not, in fact, sperm — it’s still not known exactly what purpose it serves — though it was a natural mistake to make. In a famous chapter of “Moby-Dick,” “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Melville describes the stuff in an onanistic rhapsody:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, — Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

But as Mr. Dolin shows, the average sailor had no time for this kind of aesthetic bliss. By the golden age, whaling had become thoroughly rationalized, and whaleships were like floating factories. The only exhilarating moment in the process came during the hunt, after a whale had been spotted and the boat lowered into the sea. Once the whaleboat got close enough to its prey, the harpooner would let fly, sinking the iron missile into the whale’s side and attaching him to the boat by a long rope. The sailors then held on for dear life as the whale tried to escape, swimming and diving, and sometimes rounding on his pursuers. Once he got tired, the men pulled up close enough to finish the job with a lance, then towed the whale’s carcass back to the ship and fixed it to the side with ropes and pulleys.

Then the dirty work began, as the crew stripped off the blubber in long rolls, chopped it into squares, and fed it into a cauldron to be rendered into oil. This process, known as “trying out,” involved handling sharp knives on a grease-soaked deck while pitching in a roiling sea, and it was as disgusting and dangerous as any job in a Chicago slaughterhouse. “A trying-out scene,” according to one whaler’s account,

has something peculiarly wild and savage in it. … There is a murderous appearance about the bloodstained decks, and the huge masses of flesh and blubber lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened by the red, fierce glare of the fires. … I know of nothing to which this part of the whaling business can be more appropriately compared than to Dante’s picture of the infernal regions.

And that was when things were going well. As whale populations shrank from over-hunting, ships had to spend more and more time at sea to fill their holds with oil — sometimes as much as four years. Only a small part of that time was spent actually killing whales. The rest was endless tedium, harsh discipline, and appalling food — though never whale meat, oddly enough, which Americans refused to eat. Once a sailor got home, he usually found that his “lay,” or share of the ship’s profits, had been whittled away to nothing by fees and interest on advances. No wonder many sailors reacted like Richard Boyenton, who wrote in his journal during a voyage in 1834:

I have heard today that our capt intends prolonging this voyage 16 months longer if that is the case I hope he will be obliged to drive a Snail through the Dismal swamp in dog dayes with hard peas in his shoes and suck a sponge for nourishment he had ought to have the tooth ache for amusement and a bawling child to rock him to sleepe.

Mr. Dolin fills “Leviathan” with voices like that one, bringing the vanished world of the whaleship back to life. But he also makes room for more extraordinary and heroic tales, like those of the Essex and Ann Alexander — whaleships that fell victim to their prey, when furious sperm whales smashed them to pieces with their flukes. (The reader may be inclined to cheer for those few whales who fought back.) Then there is the Confederate raider Shenandoah, which kept raiding Northern whaleships in the Pacific until well after the end of the Civil War; and the Emily Morgan, which got trapped in the Arctic winter, forcing its crew to trek to safety over miles of ice floes; and the Christopher Mitchell, whose captain discovered to his surprise that one of his men was actually a woman; and the Junior, whose crew mutinied on Christmas 1858, after the captain unwisely gave them gin and brandy to celebrate. All these yarns help to make “Leviathan” perfect summer reading, especially if you happen to be spending the summer by the sea, or on it. Mr. Dolin leaves you grateful that you can read about whalers without having to be one.

akirsch@nysun.com