In 1835, ten-year-old Samuel P. Winegar left his family's home in rural western New York and headed east. By 1841 he was in New Bedford, Massachusetts, arguably the whaling capital of the world, where he signed on as a crew member of a whaling ship when he was not yet seventeen-years-old. For the next twenty-plus years Winegar hunted whales, sailing around the world twice and making two other trips into the Pacific. He whaled in the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, and Arctic oceans; from Australia to the Arctic, from the Sea of Okhotsk off Siberia to the Gulf of Alaska and Bristol Bay off Alaska, from the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile, to Tahiti and New Zealand in the South Pacific. He eventually worked his way up to become captain of the whaleship Julian in 1858 at the age of thirty-three and started on his last voyage. Drawing on a large number of sources, especially Winegar's logbook for the Julian, his four voyages have been reconstructed. The log of the Julian shows that Winegar was, at times, frustrated and driven to get whales, even to the point of risking his and his crew's lives after ice crushed part of the Julian's hull in the Arctic Ocean. When counseled by other captains that he should leave to get the ship repaired, he replied "that I was very much in want of a whale and should stop a day or so and try and get one, for I might as well go to the Devil a trying to get a whale as to go in port without one." Chasing Leviathan attempts to bring the life of this little known man to light. It includes numerous maps of Winegar's voyages, as well as background information about whaling in the mid-1800s.