Though her telling travels centuries, it focusses on one tuna fisherman, Al Anderson, and one tuna, Amelia, who was caught three times, the first time by Anderson in the waters off Narragansett, Rhode Island, when she was young, weighing some ten pounds, in 2004. In “ Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” Karen Pinchin tells the story of a smaller, but not that small, fish: bluefin tuna and its human pursuers. But to believe it would happen in the ocean we know from real life requires a wild insight that at first feels fantastical: that the ocean, and its creatures, are finite. That Ahab will reëncounter the white whale (on whom he seeks revenge, for having torn off his leg) seems psychologically credible, of course, in the world of fiction.

Could a man really meet the same whale twice? Ishmael affirms that he knows of at least three instances in which a whale was harpooned, escaped, and then, after a period, “in one instance of three years,” the same whale and whaler met again.

In Chapter 45 (“The Affidavit”) of Herman Melville’s “ Moby-Dick,” Ishmael notes the need to share some preliminary information “in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds.” This is before telling the story of Captain Ahab single-mindedly seeking out that white whale.

Biggest fish caught on fishing planet