MOBY-DUCK 28,800 Toys at Sea By ELIZABETH ROYTE

The True Story of 28,800 Bath ToysLost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

“Hast seen the white whale?” a Melville-loving officer aboard a research vessel asks Donovan Hohn, in his dazzling “Moby-Duck,” whenever they pass in the ship’s corridor.

“Hast seen the yellow duck?” Hohn cheerfully responds.

The answer is always no, but this hardly dampens Hohn’s enthusiasm for his Moby — a load of bath toys that plummeted off a storm-wracked container ship in the northern Pacific in 1992. The maritime misfortune was exciting for beachcombers, who would find the toys on North American coastlines for years to come, and it provided data for scientists who study ocean currents. It also spurred the map-loving Hohn, a dozen years on, to give up his Manhattan teaching gig and embark upon what could have been a fairly straightforward investigation. Where did the ducks come from, where did they drift, and why?

But Hohn isn’t a Harper’s editor (and winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize) for nothing. There’s a philosophical aspect to his quest as well — a search for a watery wilderness that would “refresh my capacity for awe” (which is why Hohn looks forward, while riding a container ship across the North Pacific in winter, “to a little Sturm and possibly some Drang”) and a desire to make a journey that would “turn a map into a world.” The duck’s world is large, it turns out, and the desire to chart it puts Hohn on seagoing vessels of varying sizes and seaworthiness with captains courageous and cranky.

At once frivolous and freighted with cultural symbolism, the plastic duck makes a perfect subject for a writer of Hohn’s ambition. “What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart?” he asks. But both the birth and the afterlife of the duck, Hohn soon learns, are toxic. Adrift on the ocean, the toys can become coated with “persistent organic pollutants” like polyvinyl chloride, bisphenol A and phthalates. Photodegraded into smaller pieces, they can be fatally ingested by sea creatures and will endure, in swirling gyres, for years.

As the ducks drift, so drifts Hohn, from the China-based toy industry to the depths of polymer chemistry; from a history of childhood to Sesame Street’s “Rubber Duckie” and the role of animals in art; from early Arctic exploration to modern maritime disasters and the study of hydrography. Hohn is game to learn as much as he can, and his scholarship is impressive. But his real interests are far more abstract: the nature of quests, the line between fable and fact, the distinction between the natural and the man-made worlds, and the impossibility of fully understanding one’s place — to say nothing of a toy duck’s — in relation to the universe.

Presenting himself as a hapless innocent — all “I had no intention” and “I certainly never expected” — Hohn guides us expertly through the swirling currents of his own psyche, upon which so much of this book’s considerable charm depends. We learn that the author is not really cut out to chase ducks: he’s “a weakling with a bad back,” asthmatic, myopic, afraid of heights and sharks. Swimming in deep water off Hawaii inspires in him a terror that passes only after he scampers — “You might think that it would be impossible to scamper in flippers, but I can attest otherwise” — back aboard the catamaran, where he stays. Triumphant in the intellectual realm, the author quivers at, and makes great comedy of, physical danger. At one point, he hydroplanes around a slippery deck in a nighttime North Atlantic gale, sleep-deprived, hypothermic and soaked to the skin while wrestling heavy equipment and absorbing the curses of a crew boss. The nightmare ends with vomit and a 14-hour sleep.

Over and again, Hohn returns (like Melville) to the themes of memory, childhood and impending fatherhood. He ruminates upon the relationship between seeing and knowing (standing at a taffrail, he enjoys “the reunion of a thing and its word”), and the problem of translating words to images and images, like maps, into words. In following the ducks’ illusory trail, he writes, “I’ve strived to raise, if only by a megapixel or two, the resolution of my own mental model of the world.”

Why does this sort of imagining matter? Because how we imagine a place determines, among other things, how we value it, and therefore how far we may go to “save” it. In the case of trashed beaches, salvation comes either through back-end activities like feel-good citizen cleanups or, more promisingly, front-end policies that cut our use of nonessential plastics. At this point in Hohn’s narrative, the ducks aren’t a symbol or a metaphor. They are pure pollution, allowing him to deliver a nuanced critique of such cleanups and a sharp analysis of the public relations, or make-believe, behind them.

“Moby-Duck” succeeds as harebrained adventure, as a cautionary environmental tale, as a deconstruction of consumer demand, and as a meditation on wilderness and imagination. Hohn moves easily between the micro and the macro, weaving personal histories into science and industry as he roams. In the Harper’s manner, he luxuriates in extended descriptions (which sometimes spill into lengthy endnotes) of objects, oddballs and his reactions to everything he sees. Listening to an oceanographer expound, in his organic garden, on zero-waste policies and closed-loop manufacturing, Hohn writes, “My upbringing in Northern California had taught me to distrust utopian strangers who talked about ‘economic paradigms,’ no matter how tasty their bananas.” In a Chinese toy factory, he pulls a 16-year-old duck from his pocket and fits the toy into its original mold. “For a moment I half expect some sort of cosmic magic to occur — rays of yellow light to come shooting from the mold, a portal to open in the space-time continuum. Instead, I just stand there muttering, idiotically, ‘Wow. . . Wow.’ ”

At times, I reacted similarly to “Moby-Duck.” Hohn seems to have it all: deep intelligence, a strikingly original voice, humility and a hunger to suss out everything a yellow duck may literally or metaphorically touch. Naturally, he can’t, but the chase is, after all, the thing.