Duck!

The New York Times book review podcast from a few weeks ago featured a book called Moby Duck. Or, to use its correct name: 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. 

I think we can all agree that the full title, which is too long for even Amazon.com to handle, is a bit of a mouthful.  The short version, on the other hand, is one of my favourite ever book titles. 

Author Donovan Hohn is quick to point out that "it wasn't just ducks."  There were green frogs, blue turtles and red beavers too.  The  toys were in transit between China, where they were manufactured, to the US to be sold when the container ship they were on ran into a storm.  The crate they were in fell overboard and broke open, essentially turning the North Pacific ocean into a giant bath tub.

Eleven years and 7000 nautical miles later, one of the ducks turned up, sitting on top of a pile of seaweed in Maine.  Word spread among the international beachcombing community, after Eben Punderson (inspired by some ocenographers who, several years earlier had tracked the drift patterns of a container-load of Nike sneakers* which had met a similar watery fate) placed a classified ad in a local paper looking for people who had found them.  Dozens of people replied, and ever since then the ducks, and the turtles, and the beavers and frogs have been showing up all over the place.

Hohn is a high school English teacher by trade and first heard of the ducks when one of his students wrote about them for a homework assignment; he was so captured by the story, and curious about the people interested in them, that he left behind his job and his pregant wife, and set off to join the search and find out more.  His book (reviewed here) sounds fascinating; there's this Harper's article as well, which gives a taster. 

(As an aside, and because Google insists on correcting search terms, I am now desperate to see Moby Dick: The Opera .)

*insert "S.O.S - save our soles" related joke here.