Herman Melville hardly mentions the tide until the final — the 135th — chapter of
Moby-Dick. As Captain Ahab at last faces his doom, he tells Starbuck: "Some men die at ebb tide, some at low water, some at the full of the flood." He is issuing a rational refutation of a traditional shore-dweller’s belief that people only die when the tide is going out.
Yet we should not be surprised that this seafaring classic skimps on tidal detail. In
Sailing Alone Around the World, too, Joshua Slocum largely confines his discussion of tides to when he is at anchor or when he comes close to the shore rounding some cape or other. For it is not, as you might think, out at sea where the effect of the tide is most felt. It is along the coast that we think we know so well that the tide is most visible, most affecting — and most terrifying...