Published on 18 October 2025
There’s a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes strip – almost certainly my favourite – where Hobbes comes upon Calvin, hands down in the creek, and asks him what he is up to. Calvin responds that he is looking for frogs. “Why?,” Hobbes asks. “I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.” In the final panel, Calvin adds as an addendum: “My mandate also includes weird bugs.” Rarely have I felt so understood by a piece of art.
While reading the epic historical nautical fiction Aubrey/Maturin series written by Patrick O’Brian, most well known as the inspiration for the feature film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World featuring Russell Crowe, I came upon an interesting exchange in one of the middle books. Steven Maturin, the naturalist, doctor, and spy, walks into Capt. Jack Aubrey’s cabin waving a manuscript, exclaiming that the author of it had sailed the very waters that they were now traversing, but that he could not for the life of him figure out what bird he meant by “haglet”. I didn’t know what haglet meant, either. I looked it up.
And I was confused. I stumbled upon some rather dry essays of Melvilliana, which tried to identify the haglet which Melville wrote about in his poem, The Three Haglets, about a doomed ship whose sinking was preceded by three eerie birds flying over the boat. The authors of the essays had decided that the most likely bird was the Great Shearwater, or maybe just a generic shearwater. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Great Shearwaters were white. And the references they used were obscure, too.
So I wrote a response. It turned into a roughly 5,000 word essay, where I broke down all of the references to haglets that I could find across ornithological and nautical literature. I borrowed books from the Montpelier library. I searched through obscure online archives. I endured looking at Tristanian philately collections. And my essay showed that, out of all of the birds called haglets over the ages, it is most likely that the Sooty Shearwater was the bird that Melville might have had in mind. This was new to the literature.
So I submitted it to Leviathan: The Journal of Melville Studies. Astoundingly, it was accepted with revisions. Those made, it was printed. And, recently, published, as:
Littauer, Richard. “The Sooty Shearwater as Melville’s Inscrutable Haglet.” Leviathan 27.2 (2025): 90-101. https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2025.a970199
The article is not available for free – it is unfortunately under a paywall. However, an early draft of it is available here, and I am of course happy to email a copy to anyone who asks.
I am proud of this essay. Mostly, of the fact that I got to cite Patrick O’Brian in published writing. Also of my use of the word ‘inscrutable’, which, like all of my uses of that word, is a reference to Calvin. But also of the fact that I have published a literary essay in a literary journal. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a poet. Not knowing how, I enrolled in a college degree in English Literature. Somewhere along the way that dream changed, and I find myself now curiously in the Computer Science department.
And now I appear to have flown around the globe, and come back to the roost I started from. It feels good to know that that dream never really stopped flying.
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