Similarities Between Donovan Hohns and Captain Ahabs Obsession

Can you imagine if your leg was bitten off by a whale, or being on a container ship with 40 mile per hour winds and 12 foot seas. Captain Ahab and Donovan Hohn can. There are many differences and similarities between Captain Ahab and Donovan Hohns obsessions. While Donovan Hohn and Captain Ahab both had a goal that they felt needed to achieve, their goals were very different from each other. For example Donovans goal was to research 28,800 bath toys that spilled into the ocean, and he later ended up to writing a book about his journeys. Where as Captain Ahabs reason was for revenge on Moby Dick for biting his leg off. While the story of Moby Dick is a fictional story with factual information within it, Moby Duck was a nonfiction story about how Donovan Hohn tracked bath toys that had fell off of a container ship during a storm and had ended up all over the world. Also the story of the bath toys was only 20 years ago in 1993, but Moby Dick was 300 years ago in the mid 1700s when peg legs, and harpooning were still an everyday sight. Some of the similarities of these two stories were that they both were in the ocean and were on a ship with a crew that helped them achieve their goal. Also both were very passionate about what they were doing. A few more similarities are that both were chasing an animal of some sort and didnt stop until they found it and/or killed it. The last similarity is that they were both animals in the ocean that kept moving locations. Donovan and Captain Ahab both had effects of their obsessions, but were very different from one another. One of the effects of Donovans research was traveling all over the world from the northwest passage to the smoggy industrial backwater of Chinas Pearl River Delta,(Hohn, 10 February 2012) and through very rough seas tracking the bath toys where as Captain Ahab stayed in the same general area and had pretty calm seas on his hunt for Moby Dick. While there was only one Moby Dick, so therefore only one could be chased; Donovan Hohn chased many bath toys because there were over 28,000 toys in the ocean stuck in the currents of the Atlantic Ocean. I hope that you are now better aware of the events that happened with Captain Ahab and Donovan Hohn. Also that you now know of some of the similarities and differences between the causes and effects of these two phenomenal stories, about extremely passionate people trying to achieve a goal for themselves.

Hohn, Donovan. "Metamorphosis." Moby-duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers,

Environmentalists, and Fools, including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. New York: Viking, 2011. N. pag. Print.

Bogart, Shirley, and Herman Melville."Death to Moby Dick." Moby Dick. New York, NY: Baronet, 1990. N. pag. Print.

Hohn, Donovan. "Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn - Trailer." YouTube. YouTube, 10 Feb. 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.