Chapter 9: Status Quotidian: Microhistory and the Study of Crime

The spirit of microhistory is perhaps best captured in the sentiments of Captain Ahab, the crazed antagonist of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Throughout the tome, Ahab struggles to describe the eponymous white whale, finding his command of language hardly able to do justice to ‘that inscrutable thing’. He tells his chief mate, Starbuck, that he can only describe its artifice, as ‘all visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks’, with greater truths yet to be uncovered. Ahab's desire is to see behind the mask, to understand the whale and, therein, catch a glimpse of some fact about the universe itself. ‘If man will strike, strike through the mask’, Ahab implores, stressing the importance of looking just beyond the pasteboard.¹ To an oceanographer, such a perspective would make little sense. The Atlantic Ocean, upon which Ahab sails, is an unimaginably complex system that directs and proscribes much of the movement of life on earth, whereas the whale is but an infinitesimal speck within. Ahab sees something uniquely important within that whale, however, and believes he can only capture that importance up close.