Still from The Sea Beast (1926), Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition. Public domain, courtesy of John Hay.

The Sea Beast, the first film adaptation of Moby-Dick, begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek.

This silent film, released in 1926, offers the story of a dreamy and handsome young harpooner named Ahab Ceeley, cut down in his prime by both fraternal and cetaceous violence. The Hollywood leading man John Barrymore plays Ahab as a valiant lover, wooing the beautiful Esther with his nautical prowess and igniting the envy of his jealous half brother, who hopes to steal Esther’s heart. The dastardly Derek stealthily shoves his sibling into the jaws of a vicious sperm whale, then convinces the now-disabled Ahab that his sweetheart could never accept him in his disfigured condition. Plunged into a steely despair, the captain focuses his hate on the legendary Moby Dick—at least until he discovers the truth. “Your worst enemy ain’t Moby Dick,” a sailor eventually informs him, “it’s your half brother, Derek.”

Warner Bros. poster for The Sea Beast, via Wikimedia Commons (left). Bess Meredyth, Motion Picture News, via Internet Archive. (right). Public domain.

Derek is not an obscure detail in Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece. He does not appear in the book at all. He was, rather, a wild departure from Melville’s text, an invention credited to veteran “scenarist” Bess Meredyth, at the behest of Hollywood producers, in a bid to add flashy, dramatic conflict to the metaphysical profundities of the novel. Movie adaptations of maritime adventures were hot in the twenties; then-familiar films such as The Sea Wolf (1920) and The Sea Hawk (1924), based on books by Jack London and Rafael Sabatini, had also featured evil brothers, and the Warners’ title change to The Sea Beast capitalized on this association. Similarly, the introduction of a romantic triangle, while a strange addition to the source text, wasn’t atypical for that era; Meredyth’s son later noted that his mother knew the love story was odd but “surrendered to the studio’s request” to introduce it. And perhaps unsurprising for Old Hollywood—though ridiculous to anyone who’s read the novel—The Sea Beast has a happy ending: Ahab manages to kill both Derek and the white whale in quick succession, and then returns to find Esther waiting for him with tears of joy.

Warner Bros. promotional booklet for The Sea Beast. Photograph by John Hay.

This was neither the first nor the last time that a movie studio would grossly distort a literary classic. But Derek is an especially unusual figure in the history of Moby-Dick, not merely because he represented such a stark departure from the book but because he played an integral role in popularizing the text in the twenties and thirties, thus cementing its enduring appeal. As late as 1980, the director John Huston complained that Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Ahab in his own 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick was unfairly criticized by viewers because “the John Barrymore version of Ahab” had “colored it forever for audiences.” And this immortal Barrymore version was the one with Derek.

George O’Hara as Derek in two stills from The Sea Beast (1926). Public domain, courtesy of John Hay.

Only a decade earlier, Moby-Dick had been relatively unknown. Melville’s reputation had dwindled to obscurity in his later years; when he died in 1891, the New York Times ran a brief notice that called him “an absolutely forgotten man.” But in 1919, when a Columbia professor serving as an editor at The Nation, Carl Van Doren, commissioned a junior colleague to write a reconsideration of Melville for his centenary, the piece extolled the extraordinary genius of an unappreciated author. Van Doren himself admired Moby-Dick, but he suspected that the dense whaling novel would never find a large audience, writing in 1921 that it was “too irregular, too bizarre, perhaps, ever to win the most popular suffrage.”

Van Doren was wrong on this point. The Nation piece led not just to a reconsideration but to a veritable rebirth. Over the next decade, critics across the country began to sing the praises of an overlooked virtuoso, and Melville’s books (whose copyrights had expired) quickly found their way back into print. Scholars now refer to this phenomenon of the twenties as the “Melville Revival,” a moment when the obscure writer suddenly became canonical and Moby-Dick became a candidate for the Great American Novel.

Warner Bros. promotional booklet for The Sea Beast. Photograph by John Hay.

Yet for all the encomiums by English professors, nothing promoted Melville’s profile more than The Sea Beast. When the film debuted in January of 1926, theaters were sold out for weeks both in the United States and abroad. During the film’s New York City run, Wanamaker’s department store hosted a Moby-Dick week with displays of whaling relics, lectures on whaling history, and performances of sea chanteys. Notably, patrons could also purchase the novel. In the silent-film era, popular movies could offer giant boosts to book sales; savvy publishers understood that viewers often wanted to read the narration and dialogue only implied on the screen. The firm Grosset & Dunlap quickly cornered the market on “photoplay” editions by reprinting literary texts alongside stills from their film adaptations and packaging them in attractive new dust jackets.

The cover of Grosset & Dunlap’s 1926 edition of Moby-Dick explicitly advertised its connection to The Sea Beast, even featuring a “signed” picture of John Barrymore as Ahab. The text itself is Melville’s novel—no Derek, no love interest, no happy ending. But the accompanying photographs suggest that readers should also be aware of the movie’s plot. One passage explaining how the cabin boy, Pip, loses his mind in the heartless immensity of the ocean is awkwardly juxtaposed next to a photo of Ahab and Derek in a tavern. The caption reads: “His Brother—‘a Treacherous, Kindless Villain’ Deceives the Unfortunate, Trusting Ahab.” 

Some readers must have been confused by this picture of an unknown character, captioned with a phrase taken, inexplicably, from Hamlet. But any concerns would surely have been assuaged by the short publisher’s preface, which argued that the Warner Bros. adaptation actually “exceeds the book” in brilliance. Melville’s shortcoming, the preface claimed, was in attributing Ahab’s insanity to a single, isolated injury—an unconvincing determinant since, of course, people lose limbs all the time without becoming maniacs. Thus, the publisher concluded, the film’s addition of a lost sweetheart and a perfidious brother was “not presumptuous meddling” but rather “a laudable act of critical explanation”—a means of making Ahab’s madness more believable. Problem solved!

Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition (left); Readers Library novelization (center); Big Little Book easy reader (right). Photographs by John Hay.

The literary tie-ins did not stop there. Following the film’s successful overseas run, a London publishing firm called the Readers Library put out its own novelization of The Sea Beast. This one was not the 1851 novel but a faithful adaptation of the 1926 film, transforming the screenplay back into book form. While the authors, Hayter Preston and Henry Savage, occasionally adopted snippets of Melville’s prose (“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”), they took special care to describe the evil machinations and “darkening brow” of Derek: “In Ahab’s utter vanquishment he was drinking joy to the very lees.” (The Readers Library later claimed, improbably, that this novelization sold some two hundred thousand copies.)

Lloyd Hughes as Derek in Moby Dick (193o). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Derek, kept alive by these new publications, didn’t disappear. In 1930, Warner Bros. put out a “talkie” remake of The Sea Beast, retitled Moby Dick, which proved another hit. They reshot the film with different actors, save for John Barrymore, who remained in his starring role. The cruel Derek, played by the hammy Lloyd Hughes, could now vocally express his malice: “I hate you,” he screams at Ahab in a climactic fraternal fistfight, “worse than you hate that whale!” 

Grosset & Dunlap promptly republished their photoplay version of Melville’s novel, substituting new stills from the 1930 film, just as ill-fitting as they’d been before. Even as late as 1934, the Wisconsin-based Big Little Book children’s series—known for its editions of Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie—released The Story of Moby Dick, an easy-to-read novelization mash-up of both the 1926 silent film and the 1930 talkie, with a still from The Sea Beast on every other page. Oddly, Ahab’s evil brother appears here as “Dereck”—perhaps to emphasize that he is pure dreck.

Even if you believe that creating a sinister sibling adds needed drama to Moby-Dick, the choice of name still rings false. Ahab, after all, is supposedly from a Nantucket Quaker community fond of Old Testament nomenclature; “Derek” is clearly a misfit, most likely introduced to play on anti-German sentiments following the First World War. 

Meredyth, though, could claim a hint of textual justification. In chapter 81 of Melville’s novel (“The Pequod Meets the Virgin”), Ahab’s mates effectively outhunt the crew of the German whaler Jungfrau, captained by a comically inept skipper named Derick De Deer. In an easy-to-miss moment, the foolish Germans row away after an uncatchably swift finback whale, mistaking it for a slower sperm whale. The chapter concludes with a gentle admonition: “Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.”

John Hay is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His writing has appeared in Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He is the editor of the Las Vegas Review of Books.