Within the article, “The Blue Humanities” by John R. Gillis, alludes to the teachings of Emerson. Gillis writes, “[T]he desire for an experience of untamed nature originated in the eighteenth century among a small group of European aesthetes, for whom the awesome power of the sea, as witnessed from the safety of land, was a powerful emotional and mental stimulant”. It truly made me realize that oceanic research is so new to humans and the level of knowledge during the era of whaling. The newfound exploration of the nature of the ocean “became a fountain of images and metaphors” with the emergence of oceanic writings such as Moby-Dick. With Melville spending time at sea and having knowledge of the ocean, he used the ocean as a metaphor. What that metaphor is, is yet to come with my reading of the book. He allows the average person, who has no ocean knowledge, to immerse themselves into the curious nature of the deep undiscovered ocean.