By Marc Songini.

St. Martin’s Press. 432 pages. $25.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

This fascinating, sprawling, richly detailed book is as big and epic as its subject, the whaling era of New Bedford and Nantucket, with harrowing tales of murder and marauders, civil war and predators, fleets frozen in place in the Arctic Ocean, starvation, deserters, madness and mayhem. This is the real stuff that Melville mined for Moby-Dick.

Marc Songini, a Boston-area journalist who’s written for the Globe and the Herald, not only has done tons of research but obviously loves his material. He relishes the horrendously dangerous and exhilarating hunt for the whale, complete with harpoons, lances, bomb guns, monkey ropes, boiling blubber — and the crimps who drug men and then kidnap them to haul them aboard the great whalers.

He focuses on the whaling career of Thomas William Williams, who hailed from Wethersfield, Conn., to underscore this massive tome. He was a taciturn fellow who brought his wife, Eliza, along. Many of their children were born aboard ship, one while it was cruising the South Pacific, another while it was being assaulted by ice floes and violent storms near Point Barrow, the northernmost extension of Alaska.

Songini’s dramatic eyewitness stories chill the soul, especially when at one time in the winter of 1871, 32 doomed ships were frozen off Alaska and Siberia in the Arctic Ocean, as their crews scurried across the ice, aided and hindered by local natives, fearing starvation and certain death. Cannibalism haunts all such journeys into hell.

This intense and riveting book also relishes the odd detail and yarn. Whalers dump a bucket of water on corpses about to be tossed overboard “to keep the deceased’s ghost from haunting the ship.” If a Chukchi man in Siberia caught his wife cheating, he sliced off a piece of her nose. The dead were cast off for dogs to eat.

Medicines were primitive, not to mention lethal. One Nantucket captain needed bottle #13 to help a sick mate, but it was empty, so he combined bottles #6 and #7 and cured him “of life itself.” One Captain Barker was freezing to death, so “the [Chukchi] headman’s wife removed the master’s wet boots and stockings and placed his frozen feet between her breasts to restore warmth.”

The Lost Fleet revels in the triumphs and mourns the demise of the whaling era in America. It is a lively, suspenseful, mesmerizing book.