The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Rutherford, Ethan. North Sun, or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. Deep Vellum, 2025.

In 1878, whaling captain Arnold Lovejoy returns to New Bedford after a failed three–year voyage on the Sophie, where he brings in little oil and leaves his crew in debt. As the industry falters in the face of cheap petroleum and railroads that link the coasts, Lovejoy carries a letter to the powerful Ashley family, long–time whale oil merchants. The letter reports that their whaleship Dromo has been crushed in the Chukchi Sea, that her cargo has been cached ashore, and that her captain, Benjamin Leander, has stayed in the Arctic and intends never to return. Summoned to the Ashleys’ gloomy mansion overlooking the harbor, Lovejoy meets the patriarch Ashley, his coldly composed wife, and their daughter Sarah, whose husband is Leander.

In the candlelit library, Ashley’s son offers Lovejoy a last chance at fortune and redemption. The Ashleys have outfitted a stout whaling vessel, the Esther, for one more northern voyage. Lovejoy is to captain the ship to the northwestern grounds, fill her hold with whale oil, and, if possible, reach Leander’s remote depot, persuade him to come home, and retrieve a precious golden walrus egg that appears in the family’s paintings and lore. The younger Ashley promises Lovejoy a generous lay if he succeeds and hints at further rewards if he returns with both Leander and the egg. Lovejoy accepts, partly for money and partly to repair his damaged reputation. Before he leaves, Ashley’s son informs him that a small, unsettling man named Edmund Thule, a long–time company agent, will travel as a special passenger who will assume authority once they reach the ice.

Lovejoy inspects the Esther, an old but overbuilt bark–rigged whaler with a history of surviving pack ice and brutal seas. He takes pride in the ship’s heavy frame, midships tryworks, and copper–sheathed hull. The crew gathers around her: three mates, boat steerers, a blacksmith, a cooper, a cook, seasoned whalemen, and two nameless boys from poor backgrounds who sign on as general hands and cabin servants. Among the forecastle crowd, the boys notice three large, sullen sailors, especially Eastman, a scarred and violent man who soon dominates the sleeping space and fixes them with a predatory interest. As the Esther sails from New Bedford and heads for the Azores and then Cape Horn, Lovejoy feels both the old thrill of command and the weight of the Ashleys’ expectations.

At sea, the boys learn shipboard routines, the terror of storms, and the gruesome work of whaling. A sailor falls from the rigging and dies, and they help the cook wash and prepare the body for burial at sea. The men tuck scraps of cloth bearing their names into the dead man’s mouth to confuse an unseen being called Old Sorrel during his passage to the deep. The Esther gams with other whalers and struggles at first to find whales in overfished waters. Eventually she begins to take sperm whales and later bowheads, and the crew labors in the greasy heat of the tryworks as carcasses are stripped, boiled, and rendered down. Lovejoy broods on his earlier failure on the Sophie and worries that the whales are disappearing from the oceans just as his own livelihood depends on them.

Throughout the voyage, Thule remains aloof, but in private he praises the Esther’s strange construction and urges Lovejoy to trust the ship’s unique capacity to endure ice. As they press north toward the Bering and Chukchi Seas, the signs of the Arctic accumulate: floes, fog, and the distant pressure of the pack. The whales grow harder to catch in congested ice, and the mates experiment with bomb lances that promise quicker kills but also increase the danger, leading to horrific hunting accidents. The boys’ tasks place them at the margins of adult work and adult cruelty. They find a measure of care from the cook and smith but remain targets for Eastman, whose intimidation grows more overt in the dark of the forecastle.

As the Esther enters heavier ice, the voyage turns eerie. The ship becomes trapped in the pack with her hold nearly full, and winter closes over the men. Some of the crew sicken and lie motionless in their bunks, while others cling to routine in the galley and on deck. Thule declares that the time has come to complete the Ashleys’ special business. He orders a sledge prepared, and he and Lovejoy set out over the frozen ocean to seek the remains of the Dromo and Leander’s depot. On the ice, Lovejoy experiences visions in the fire Thule builds, glimpsing the Ashleys at home and Sarah straining to watch the Esther as if through a distant spyglass. After a grueling trek, they reach Leander’s hut, where Lovejoy finds the older captain altered by solitude and by his obsession with a glowing golden egg carved with the figure of a hatless man.

In a hallucinatory confrontation, Leander speaks in riddles, pulls his own golden teeth, and offers them to Lovejoy as if they are coins. Thule, acting as the Ashleys’ ruthless instrument, kills Leander, takes the egg, and orders the depot burned to the ground, its oil–soaked timbers roaring against the Arctic sky. Lovejoy, stunned by what he has witnessed and by his failure to save the man he was sent to retrieve, nevertheless follows Thule back across the ice, clutching a pouch of Leander’s teeth. The Esther appears at last as a frozen ship locked in the floes, her crew waiting for release.

When the pack finally breaks in the spring, the Esther escapes into leads crowded with bowhead whales. The whales seem to rise everywhere around the ship, as if they have fled here in search of safety from human hunters. Under Thule’s prodding, Lovejoy orders an intense, almost frenzied campaign of slaughter, lowering boat after boat, firing bomb lances, and towing carcasses through the leads until the Esther’s hold, decks, and rigging sag under oil and baleen. The men are exhausted and haunted, and the boys endure worsening harassment from Eastman belowdecks. At the same time, a supernatural presence takes clearer shape. Old Sorrel, a man–sized bird–creature who lives in the hold among the oil casks and shipworms, befriends the boys, tells them stories, and hints that his purpose is to sink ships like the Esther.

As disease and strain thin the crew and strange “ice sickness” claims men, including eventually Thule and Eastman, Old Sorrel’s power grows. At a climactic moment in open water, he fulfills his nature and destroys the Esther, smashing the hull so completely that, when the wreck is over, not a splinter floats on the surface. Only Lovejoy and the two boys make it into a whaleboat, carrying the captain’s red coat and the golden egg, which now hangs around the younger boy’s neck. Adrift on a boundless sea, they share rainwater, fish, and even shipworms that Old Sorrel produces, while the bird visits them in shifting forms, including a monstrous crab that has somehow become the captain’s new body. When the captain dies in the boat and the boys commit him to the sea, they are alone with each other, the egg, and the memory of the lost ship.

The egg’s power guides their small craft back toward the shipping lanes. In time, another vessel rescues them and carries them across the continent to New Bedford in 1880. There, the boys climb the hill to the Ashley mansion and deliver the golden egg and Leander’s logbook, recounting the destruction of the Dromo, Leander’s death, the burning of the depot, the Esther’s entrapment in ice, and the final wreck that left only them alive. Ashley offers no share of the Esther’s lost oil and gives them instead a decorative harpoon as a token. Sarah Ashley, who has imagined the voyage in detail and watched its progress in her mind, meets the boys in town, apologizes for what they have endured, and gives each a gold bird brooch. As the boys walk back toward the waterfront, they decide they will never go to sea again, and the novel ends with the sense that whaling’s age is closing while the scars it leaves on people, families, and oceans continue.