Donovan Hohn, a former English teacher, became interested in the fate of a shipping container of plastic bath toys that was washed overboard in the Pacific Ocean while marking an essay written by one of his high school students. He had asked his students to practise the ‘archaeology of the ordinary’ and one had written about a toy duck he carried with him for good luck. While researching the essay the student had come across a newspaper article about the 1992 container spill. This was 2005 and the essay reported that the toys were supposed to have reached the coast of New England by 2003. The essay did not mention whether or not the toys made it to the Atlantic Ocean and Hohn found himself pondering their fate. ‘I pictured the ducks afloat like yellow pixels on the vast, gray acreage of the waves… skiing down the glassy scopes of fifty-foot swells, or coasting on through the Arctic on floes of ice’.

Hohn quit his teaching job and decided to follow the trail of the bath toys. The adventure spans from a factory in China to a ride on a container ship and a visit to a beachcombers fair in Alaska, as well as a number of other expeditions with scientists, oceanographers and environmentalists.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Hohn acknowledges that he is ‘an essayist first, a journalist second’ and Moby Duck is perhaps at its most interesting when he is contemplating notions such as the ‘borderline between the natural and the man-made’. Hohn is entranced by the cultural symbolism of yellow duck and, as the title suggests, he is also a great admirer of Melville. This book doesn’t necessarily go where you think it might but it is a great reminder of both the power and the vulnerability of the world’s oceans.