In 1952, the US government detained Trinidadian socialist C. L. R. James on Ellis Island for four months. The official reason was that James threatened the “morals of the people of the United States.” More likely, it stemmed from the red company the author had kept since immigrating in 1938, the same year he published his seminal book The Black Jacobins.

Rejecting an immigration officer’s suggestion to “drink [his] Papaya juice” in the Caribbean, the fifty-one-year-old subsisted on milk and bread and fought his deportation order. As he awaited the court’s decision, James drafted a long essay on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which he mailed, along with a plea for citizenship, to every member of Congress. It had no effect, and he was deported the following summer.

But James soon published the Ellis Island essay as a proper book: Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. There, he describes Melville’s 1851 novel as the “grandest conception that has ever been made to see the modern world . . . and the future that lay before it.” For him, the book’s fateful whaling voyage was the first to conjure the madness that would subsume civilization a century later: a “world of massed bombers, of cities in flames, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Today, James’s reading of Moby-Dick resonates even more strongly, as we face not only bombers and burning cities but rising oceans.