A Page in the Life: Donovan Hohn On a cold, bright afternoon last Sunday, the American writer Donovan Hohn stood on the foreshore of the Thames, Tate Modern rising up behind him, and, like some low-rent magician, produced from his bag, one by one, a red beaver, a green frog, a blue turtle and finally, with a special flourish, a yellow duck. These four plastic bath toys, but above all the duck, have led Hohn on a quixotic adventure around the world, recounted in his new book, Moby-Duck. They are the brethren of the 28,800 other "Floatees" which plunged from a container ship into the high seas of the Pacific on January 10 1992. For five years - 2005 to 2010 - he pursued them, from the rubbish-strewn beaches of Alaska (where the lost toys first made landfall) to China (where he picked up today's pristine specimens) to the far reaches of the Northwest Passage. England was not on the itinerary, but given the expansive nature of Hohn's quest, it easily could have been. The story made the British papers in 2007, when it was predicted that any ducks that had made it through the Arctic might start washing up on our shores. Headlines hailed "Drake's Other Armada," and anticipated "The Duckirk Landings." "There were," notes Hohn with quiet satisfaction, "a lot of puns." "I finally had to cut myself off with research trips," says Hohn, who is dressed simply in jeans and a shirt and sweater combo, the only nod to his recent seafaring the anchors on the buttons of his blue jacket. From what I've heard, there's great beachcombing down in Cornwall, because it gets lots of drift that comes from the States. I also wanted to come to Lloyds, because it's still the repository for the history of shipping, and a fascinating institution, and mysterious. The book's title came to Hohn early on. "It was kind of a bad joke at first," he says. But then I started taking it seriously, thinking about how that book works. There's two different hunts in the book: the literal one, Ahab trying to find the white whale, but then there's Ishmael, who talks about swimming through libraries, searching to understand the whale. I wanted to borrow that basic structure, moving back and forth from narrative to essay. The nod to Melville also meant the book had to have a sense of epic scale and ambition. Hohn covered a lot of ground geographically, but intellectually too he ventured into deep waters. Playfully, wilfully, he diverts his narrative into discussions of ornithology, underwater storms, alcoholism in Nunavut, the history and pleasures of beachcombing, the effect of plastics on the environment. Like Melville's Ishmael, Hohn comes from "the insular city of the Manhattoes." When Hohn started writing he was also, like Ishmael, a schoolteacher, but we won't labour the comparison: "I wanted there to be a conversation with Melville's novel but I didn't want it to feel too much like there was an inside joke, some postmodern thing." The scene before us - a sandy, gravelly beach offering a selection of iron piping, broken glass and bottle tops - is familiar to him. "It looks a lot like a beach that's formed under the Brooklyn Bridge," he says. I would go down there sometimes while I was writing the book to see what was washing up in New York, and it was very similar to what you see here, this little sprinkling of mostly litter. My pulse does not quicken as I survey these mean offerings from the river, and I wonder whether Hohn too is disappointed (he does thrill to the term "mudlarking"). Frankly, it lacks the grandeur of the Alaskan and Hawaiian beaches Hohn has visited which, by virtue of the passing currents and winds and the shapes of their coastlines, attract vast drifts of rubbish. "I have to say," says Hohn, "when I've visited certain places where there were piles and heaps of flotsam by the ton, I can't help but find it a little bit beautiful. It's a bit like the old Romantic response to ruins; it feels like these are modern-day ruins, created by accident. There seems to be a kind of enchantment, too, about the ducks themselves. "It's the image of these tiny yellow playthings adrift on a wild and rough ocean," says Hohn. That incongruity is what makes the story into a riddle that has a magic to it. Everything that icon of childhood represents - hygiene, the man-made, the bathtub - all of these things are almost perfectly the opposite of our associations with the ocean, of being superhuman and unfathomable. Think even of the attitude on the toys" faces: going cheerfully where explorers go disastrously." With his myopia, his bad back, his fear of sharks, Hohn styles himself as an unintrepid adventurer. But though he is himself a father to two boys (Bruno, six, and Malachy, two), Hohn has a boyish sense of wonder about the world. Perhaps those London bricks, or that golf ball, might tell stories. "There's always a great deal of romance in the idea of beachcombing," says Hohn. It goes back to the 19th century, with messages in bottles and Edgar Allan Poe's story by that name, and that notion that you might find something on a local beach that has travelled the world. It carries with it a whiff of the faraway and the exotic. The terras incognitas don't exist anymore. But other kinds of discovery are still alive and well. Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea is published by Union Books at £20