"Ahab's Trade tracks the rise and fall of this first truly global industry and tells the stories of the men who made it. Although they whaled in American, British, French, Australian and New Zealand ships, their calling made them citizens of a separate, closed and isolated world quite unlike that even of other seamen.". "This book describes that world and its unique pressures. Most whalemen dealt with those pressures, but some were unhinged in ways that made Captain Ahab's obsession with the white whale seem like a minor eccentricity." "The good, the mad and the ugly: they are all here to tell their stories and describe a way of life so strange that its survival into our century is almost incomprehensible."--BOOK JACKET.