28,800 Toys at Sea

“Hast seen the white whale?” a Melville-loving officer aboard a research vessel asks Donovan Hohn, in his dazzling “Moby-Duck,” whenever they pass in the ship’s corridor.

“Hast seen the yellow duck?” Hohn cheerfully responds.

The answer is always no, but this hardly dampens Hohn’s enthusiasm for his Moby — a load of bath toys that plummeted off a storm-wracked container ship in the northern Pacific in 1992. The maritime misfortune was exciting for beachcombers, who would find the toys on North American coastlines for years to come, and it provided data for scientists who study ocean currents. It also spurred the map-loving Hohn, a dozen years on, to give up his Manhattan teaching gig and embark upon what could have been a fairly straightforward investigation. Where did the ducks come from, where did they drift, and why?

But Hohn isn’t a Harper’s editor (and winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize) for nothing. There’s a philosophical aspect to his quest as well — a search for a watery wilderness that would “refresh my capacity for awe” (which is why Hohn looks forward, while riding a container ship across the North Pacific in winter, “to a little Sturm and possibly some Drang”) and a desire to make a journey that would “turn a map into a world.” The duck’s world is large, it turns out, and the desire to chart it puts Hohn on seagoing vessels of varying sizes and seaworthiness with captains courageous and cranky

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