Safe Return Doubtful

American Historic Fiction – Published March 2025

Set in 1878, the last years of the American whaling industry, this is the story of the doomed expedition of a fictional whale vessel. At first, life on board the Esther mirrors, intentionally I think, that on the Moby Dick; long periods of boredom and loneliness interspersed with exciting and violent chases, and the odd strange event.

Aside from hunting whale, of which few remain having been largely hunted to extinction, the expedition has another purpose, to find and retrieve the wayward son-in-law and heir to the head of a large whaling company who lost his own ship in the ice of the Chukchi Sea.

Soon though, comparisons to Ahab’s voyage cease and Rutherford concentrates on the assortment of oddball characters that make up the crew. Arnold Lovejoy is recruited as captain, and promised all sorts of riches if he succeeds in retrieving a mysterious golden egg from the captain of another stricken vessel, despite coming off the back of a disastrous previous expedition. The ship’s owners, have a shady business, making candles from spermaceti, found in the head cavities of the whales. The crew have little social interaction and are all nasty pieces of work, in it for their gain, a theme Rutherford returns often to.

Innocence is represented by two young cabin boys whose perspectives are relied on throughout the narrative, which moves, in its second half, into the realms of fantasy, and more often, into horror. Indeed, I was reminded of Dan Simmons, though this, if anything, is darker, and a tough read at times.

For a debut novel, this is an astonishing work, centred mainly around the theme of exploitation, but provoking many other things to ponder on finishing it.

My GoodReads score 4/5