Following a couple of well-received story collections, Ethan Rutherford makes an audacious leap as a novelist. In this seafaring saga, cadences that recall Melville or Coleridge are suffused with an environmentalist urgency and existential dread.

Aboard the Esther, we enter an environment like that of Captain Ahab’s whaler in “Moby Dick”: one rife with strange events, exciting yet violent chases, and stretches of boredom and loneliness. We watch men who profit from the riches of the industry and, in so doing, determine the course and value of human lives and those of the sea creatures lurking below.

The setup is relatively straightforward. In 1878 Massachusetts, during the waning days of the whaling industry, Arnold Lovejoy arrives in New Bedford with a letter for the Ashleys, the leading family of whaling.

“As businesspeople they were ruthless,” Rutherford writes. “As whalers, they’d had no equal.” The letter says that one of their ships had been crushed by ice, and that its captain has chosen not to return. It turns out that the captain is the Ashleys’ son-in-law, and that his wife, whom Lovejoy meets at the house, is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. He falls instantly in love.

The Ashleys commission Lovejoy, a seafaring captain himself, to voyage in search of the lost ship and captain. Having long felt more at home at sea than on land, he complies. His mixed feelings about his mission are further complicated by the mysterious Edmund Thule, the family’s emissary, who might have a mission of his own.

They embark on their voyage, with a ragtag crew including a couple of orphans, ages 10 and 12, whose rites of passage will increasingly become a focus of the novel. They are prey for a predatory crew member, in a novel that becomes increasingly focused on prey and predators.

Lovejoy is an imperious commander, treating his crew as if he were their god, although sometimes he feels more like a whale. Is he a pawn of Thule’s? Is Thule a pawn of the Ashleys? Who is pulling the strings and to what end? Amid bad weather and considerable bloodshed, the voyage proceeds into the heart of oceanic darkness, where the true nature of the mission unfolds.

The sea is stunning, but riddled with hidden dangers. The whalers must respect the perils of the journey, and the wildness of their seemingly tame and timid prey. A lack of respect spells defeat. In seeking to take down the great beasts of the sea, the men simply destroy themselves. They take from the natural world and from each other, unaware of the collective and personal costs of such ruthless exploitation.