The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby-Dick | History | Smithsonian The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby-Dick The whaler Essex was indeed sunk by a whale—and that's only the beginning smithsonian.com March 1, 2013 In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined. From This Story How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr.

was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman. Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.” Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. To Bennet, the tale was like a confession.

Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. “But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the recollection,” Pollard told the missionary. “I hardly know what I say.” The trouble for Essex began, as Melville knew, on August 14, 1819, just two days after it left Nantucket on a whaling voyage that was supposed to last two and a half years. The 87-foot-long ship was hit by a squall that destroyed its topgallant sail and nearly sank it. Still, Pollard continued, making it to Cape Horn five weeks later. But the 20-man crew found the waters off South America nearly fished out, so they decided to sail for distant whaling grounds in the South Pacific, far from any shores. To restock, the Essex anchored at Charles Island in the Galapagos, where the crew collected sixty 100-pound tortoises.

As a prank, one of the crew set a fire, which, in the dry season, quickly spread. Pollard’s men barely escaped, having to run through flames, and a day after they set sail, they could still see smoke from the burning island. Pollard was furious, and swore vengeance on whoever set the fire. Many years later Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland, and the fire was believed to have caused the extinction of both the Floreana Tortoise and the Floreana Mockingbird. Essex First Mate Owen Chase, later in life. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex had harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what the crew called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-old first mate, had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while Pollard went whaling. It was Chase who spotted a very big whale—85 feet in length, he estimated—lying quietly in the distance, its head facing the ship.

Then, after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for the Essex, “coming down for us at great celerity,” Chase would recall—at about three knots. The whale smashed head-on into the ship with “such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces.” The whale passed underneath the ship and began thrashing in the water. “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury,” Chase recalled. Then the whale disappeared. The crew was addressing the hole in the ship and getting the pumps working when one man cried out, “Here he is—he is making for us again.” Chase spotted the whale, his head half out of water, bearing down at great speed—this time at six knots, Chase thought. This time it hit the bow directly under the cathead and disappeared for good. The water rushed into the ship so fast, the only thing the crew could do was lower the boats and try fill them with navigational instruments, bread, water and supplies before the Essex turned over on its side. Pollard saw his ship in distress from a distance, then returned to see the Essex in ruin. Dumbfounded, he asked, “My God, Mr.

Chase, what is the matter?” “We have been stove by a whale,” his first mate answered. Another boat returned, and the men sat in silence, their captain still pale and speechless. Some, Chase observed, “had no idea of the extent of their deplorable situation.” The men were unwilling to leave the doomed Essex as it slowly foundered, and Pollard tried to come up with a plan. In all, there were three boats and 20 men. They calculated that the closest land was the Marquesas Islands and the Society Islands, and Pollard wanted to set off for them—but in one of the most ironic decisions in nautical history, Chase and the crew convinced him that those islands were peopled with cannibals and that the crew’s best chance for survival would be to sail south. The distance to land would be far greater, but they might catch the trade winds or be spotted by another whaling ship. Only Pollard seemed to understand the implications of steering clear of the islands.

(According to Nathaniel Philbrick, in his book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, although rumors of cannibalism persisted, traders had been visiting the islands without incident.) Thus they left the Essex aboard their 20-foot boats. They were challenged almost from the start. Saltwater saturated the bread, and the men began to dehydrate as they ate their daily rations. The sun was ravaging. Pollard’s boat was attacked by a killer whale. They spotted land—Henderson Island—two weeks later, but it was barren. After another week the men began to run out of supplies. Still, three of them decided they’d rather take their chances on land than climb back into a boat. No one could blame them. And besides, it would stretch the provisions for the men in the boats. Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby-Dick from the 1820 whale attack on the Essex. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By mid-December, after weeks at sea, the boats began to take on water, more whales menaced the men at night, and by January, the paltry rations began to take their toll.

On Chase’s boat, one man went mad, stood up and demanded a dinner napkin and water, then fell into “most horrid and frightful convulsions” before perishing the next morning. “Humanity must shudder at the dreadful recital” of what came next, Chase wrote. The crew “separated limbs from his body, and cut all the flesh from the bones; after which, we opened the body, took out the heart, and then closed it again—sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed it to the sea.” They then roasted the man’s organs on a flat stone and ate them. Over the coming week, three more sailors died, and their bodies were cooked and eaten. One boat disappeared, and then Chase’s and Pollard’s boats lost sight of each other. The rations of human flesh did not last long, and the more the survivors ate, the hungrier they felt. On both boats the men became too weak to talk. The four men on Pollard’s boat reasoned that without more food, they would die.

On February 6, 1821—nine weeks after they’d bidden farewell to the Essex—Charles Ramsdell, a teenager, proposed they draw lots to determine who would be eaten next. It was the custom of the sea, dating back, at least in recorded instance, to the first half of the 17th century. The men in Pollard’s boat accepted Ramsdell’s suggestion, and the lot fell to young Owen Coffin, the captain’s first cousin. Pollard had promised the boy’s mother he’d look out for him. “My lad, my lad!” the captain now shouted, “if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.” Pollard even offered to step in for the boy, but Coffin would have none of it. “I like it as well as any other,” he said. Ramsdell drew the lot that required him to shoot his friend. He paused a long time. But then Coffin rested his head on the boat’s gunwale and Ramsdell pulled the trigger.

“He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would say, “and nothing of him left.” By February 18, after 89 days at sea, the last three men on Chase’s boat spotted a sail in the distance. After a frantic chase, they managed to catch the English ship Indian and were rescued. Three hundred miles away, Pollard’s boat carried only its captain and Charles Ramsdell. They had only the bones of the last crewmen to perish, which they smashed on the bottom of the boat so that they could eat the marrow. As the days passed the two men obsessed over the bones scattered on the boat’s floor. Almost a week after Chase and his men had been rescued, a crewman aboard the American ship Dauphin spotted Pollard’s boat. Wretched and confused, Pollard and Ramsdell did not rejoice at their rescue, but simply turned to the bottom of their boat and stuffed bones into their pockets. Safely aboard the Dauphin, the two delirious men were seen “sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.” The five Essex survivors were reunited in Valparaiso, where they recuperated before sailing back for Nantucket.

As Philbrick writes, Pollard had recovered enough to join several captains for dinner, and he told them the entire story of the Essex wreck and his three harrowing months at sea. One of the captains present returned to his room and wrote everything down, calling Pollard’s account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.” Years later, the third boat was discovered on Ducie Island; three skeletons were aboard. Miraculously, the three men who chose to stay on Henderson Island survived for nearly four months, mostly on shellfish and bird eggs, until an Australian ship rescued them. Once they arrived in Nantucket, the surviving crewmen of the Essex were welcomed, largely without judgment. Cannibalism in the most dire of circumstances, it was reasoned, was a custom of the sea. (In similar incidents, survivors declined to eat the flesh of the dead but used it as bait for fish. But Philbrick notes that the men of the Essex were in waters largely devoid of marine life at the surface.) Captain Pollard, however, was not as easily forgiven, because he had eaten his cousin.

(One scholar later referred to the act as “gastronomic incest.”) Owen Coffin’s mother could not abide being in the captain’s presence. Once his days at sea were over, Pollard spent the rest of his life in Nantucket. Once a year, on the anniversary of the wreck of the Essex, he was said to have locked himself in his room and fasted in honor of his lost crewmen. By 1852, Melville and Moby-Dick had begun their own slide into obscurity. Despite the author’s hopes, his book sold but a few thousand copies in his lifetime, and Melville, after a few more failed attempts at novels, settled into a reclusive life and spent 19 years as a customs inspector in New York City. He drank and suffered the death of his two sons. Depressed, he abandoned novels for poetry. But George Pollard’s fate was never far from his mind. In his poem Clarel he writes of A night patrolman on the quay Watching the bales till morning hour Through fair and foul.

Never he smiled; Call him, and he would come; not sour In spirit, but meek and reconciled: Patient he was, he none withstood; Oft on some secret thing would brood. Sources Books: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, 1851, Harper & Brothers Publishers. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, 2000, Penguin Books. Thomas Nickerson, The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale, 2000, Penguin Classics. Owen Chase, Narrative of the Whale-Ship Essex of Nantucket, 2006, A RIA Press Edition. Alex MacCormick, The Mammoth Book of Maneaters, 2003, Carroll & Graf Publishers. Joseph S. Cummins, Cannibals: Shocking True Tales of the Last Taboo on Land and at Sea, 2001, The Lyons Press. Evan L. Balkan, Shipwrecked: Deadly Adventures and Disasters at Sea, 2008, Menasha Ridge Press.

Articles: “The Whale and the Horror,” by Nathaniel Philbrick, Vanity Fair, May, 2000. “Herman Melville: Nantucket’s First Tourist?” by Susan Beegel, The Nantucket Historical Association, ”Herman Melville and Nantucket,” The Nantucket Historical Association, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, “Biography: Herman Melville,” American Experience, PBS.org, “No Moby-Dick: A Real Captain, Twice Doomed,” by Jesse McKinley, New York Times, February 11, 2011. “The Essex Disaster,” by Walter Karp, American Heritage, April/May, 1983, Volume 34, Issue 3. “Essex (whaleship),” Wikipedia, ”Account of the Ship Essex Sinking, 1819-1821., Thomas Nickerson, Like this article?

Moby Dick Summary | GradeSaver Moby Dick Summary Buy Study Guide The novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville is an epic tale of the voyage of the whaling ship the Pequod and its captain, Ahab, who relentlessly pursues the great Sperm Whale (the title character) during a journey around the world. The narrator of the novel is Ishmael , a sailor on the Pequod who undertakes the journey out of his affection for the sea. Moby Dick begins with Ishmael's arrival in New Bedford as he travels toward Nantucket. He rests at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford, where he meets Queequeg , a harpooner from New Zealand who will also sail on the Pequod. Although Queequeg appears dangerous, he and Ishmael must share a bed together and the narrator quickly grows fond of the somewhat uncivilized harpooner. Queequeg is actually the son of a High Chief who left New Zealand because of his desire to learn among Christians.

The next day, Ishmael attends a church service and listens to a sermon by Father Mapple , a renowned preacher who delivers a sermon considering Jonah and the whale that concludes that the tale is a lesson to preacher Truth in the face of Falsehood. On a schooner to Nantucket, Ishmael and Queequeg come across a local bumpkin who mocks Queequeg. However, when this bumpkin is swept overboard, Queequeg saves him. In Nantucket, Queequeg and Ishmael choose between three ships for a year journey, and decide upon the Pequod. The Captain of the Pequod, Peleg , is now retired, and merely owns the boat with another Quaker, Bildad . Peleg tells them of the new captain, Ahab, and immediately describes him as a grand and ungodly man. Before leaving for their voyage, Ishmael and Queequeg come across a stranger named Elijah who predicts disaster on their journey. Before leaving on the Pequod, Elijah again predicts disaster. Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, where Captain Ahab is still unseen, secluded in his own cabin.

Peleg and Bildad consult with Starbuck , the first mate. He is a Quaker and a Nantucket native who is quite practical. The second mate is Stubb , a Cape Cod native with a more jovial and carefree attitude. The third is Flask , a Martha's Vineyard native with a pugnacious attitude. Melville introduces the rest of the crew, including the Indian harpooner Tashtego , the African harpooner Daggoo . Several days into the voyage, Ahab finally appears as a man seemingly made of bronze who stands on an ivory leg fashioned from whalebone. He eventually gets into a violent argument with Stubb when the second mate makes a joke at Ahab's expense, and kicks him. This leads Stubb to dream of kicking Ahab's ivory leg off, but Flask claims that the kick from Ahab is a sign of honor. At last, Ahab tells the crew of the Pequod to look for a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow: Moby Dick, the legendary whale that took Ahab's leg.

Starbuck tells Ahab that his obsession with Moby Dick is madness, but Ahab claims that all things are masks and there is some unknown reasoning behind that mask that man must strike through. For Ahab, Moby Dick is that mask. Ahab himself seems to recognize his own madness. Starbuck begins to worry that the ship is overmatched by the mad captain and knows that he will see an impious end to Ahab. While Queequeg and Ishmael weave a sword-mat for lashing to their boat, the Pequod soon comes upon a whale and Ahab orders his crew to their boats. Ahab orders his special crew, which Ishmael compares to "phantoms," to their boats. The crew attacks a whale and Queequeg does strike it, but this is insufficient to kill it. Among the "phantoms" in the boat is Fedallah , a sinister Parsee. After passing the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod comes across the Goney (Albatross), another ship on its voyage. Ahab asks whether they have seen Moby Dick as the ships pass one another, but Ahab cannot hear his answer.

The mere passing of the ships is unorthodox behavior, for ships will generally have a 'gam,' a meeting between two ships. The Pequod does have a gam with the next ship it encounters, the Town-Ho. Ishmael interrupts his narration to tell a story that was told to him by the crew of the Town-Ho, just as he would tell it to a circle of Spanish friends after his journey on the Pequod. The story concerns the near mutiny on the Town-Ho and its eventual conflict with Moby Dick. The Pequod does vanquish the next whale that it comes across, as Stubb strikes a whale with his harpoon. However, as the crew of the Pequod attempts to bring the whale into the ship, sharks attack the carcass and Queequeg nearly loses his hand while fending them off. The Pequod next comes upon the Jeroboam, a Nantucket ship afflicted with an epidemic. Stubb later tells a story about the Jeroboam and a mutiny that occurred on this ship because of a Shaker prophet, Gabriel , on board. The captain of the Jeroboam, Mayhew, warns Ahab about Moby Dick.

After vanquishing a Sperm Whale, Stubb next also kills a Right Whale. Although this is not on the ship's agenda, the Pequod pursues a Right Whale because of the good omens associated with having the head of a Sperm Whale and a head of a Right Whale on a ship. Stubb and Flask discuss rumors that Ahab has sold his soul to Fedallah. The next ship that the Pequod meets is the Jungfrau (Virgin), a German ship in desperate need of oil. The Pequod competes with the Virgin for a large whale, and the Pequod is successful in defeating it. However, the whale carcass begins to sink as the Pequod attempts to secure it and thus the Pequod must abandon it. The Pequod next finds a large group of Sperm Whales and injures several of them, but only captures a single one. Stubb concocts a plan to swindle the next ship that the Pequod meets, the French ship Bouton-de-Rose (Rosebud), of ambergris.

Stubb tells them that the whales that they have vanquished are useless and could damage their ship, and when the Rosebud leaves these behind the Pequod takes them in order to gain the ambergris in one of them. Several days after encountering the Rosebud, a young black man on the boat, Pippin , becomes frightened while lowering after a whale and jumps from the boat, becoming entangled in the whale line. Stubb chastises him for his cowardice and tells him that he will be left at sea if he jumps again. When Pippin (Pip) does the same thing again, Stubb remains true to his word and Pip only survives because a nearby boat saves him. Nevertheless, Pip loses his sanity from the event. The next ship that the Pequod encounters, a British ship called the Samuel Enderby, bears news of Moby Dick but its crewman Dr. Bunger warns Ahab to leave the whale alone. Later, Ahab's leg breaks and the carpenter must fix it. Ahab behaves scornfully toward the carpenter. When Starbuck learns that the casks have sprung a leak, he goes to Ahab's cabin to report the news.

Ahab disagrees with Starbuck's advice on the matter, and becomes so enraged that he pulls a musket on Starbuck. Although Ahab warns Starbuck that there is but one God on Earth and one Captain on the Pequod, Starbuck tells him that he will be no danger to Ahab, for Ahab is sufficient danger to himself. Ahab does relent to Starbuck's advice. Queequeg becomes ill from fever and seems to approach death, so he asks for a canoe to serve as a coffin. The carpenter measures Queequeg for his coffin and builds it, but Queequeg returns to health, claiming that he willed his own recovery. Queequeg keeps the coffin and uses it as a sea chest. Upon reaching the Pacific Ocean, Ahab asks Perth the blacksmith to forge a harpoon to use against Moby Dick. Perth fashions a harpoon that Ahab demands be tempered with the blood of his pagan harpooners, and he howls out that he baptizes the harpoon in the name of the devil.

The next ship that the Pequod meets is the Bachelor, a Nantucket ship whose captain denies the existence of Moby Dick. The next day, the Pequod slays four whales, and that night Ahab dreams of hearses. He and Fedallah pledge to slay Moby Dick and survive the conflict, and Ahab boasts of his own immortality. Ahab must soon decide between an easy route past the Cape of Good Hope back to Nantucket and a difficult route in pursuit of Moby Dick. Ahab easily chooses to continue his quest. The Pequod soon comes upon a typhoon on its journey in the Pacific, and while battling this storm the Pequod's compass moves out of alignment. When Starbuck learns this and goes to Ahab's cabin to tell him, he finds the old man asleep. Starbuck considers shooting Ahab with his musket, but he cannot move himself to shoot his captain after he hears Ahab cry in his sleep "Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last." The next morning after the typhoon, Ahab corrects the problem with the compass despite the skepticism of his crew and the ship continues on its journey.

Ahab learns that Pip has gone insane and offers his cabin to the poor boy. The Pequod comes upon yet another ship, the Rachel, whose captain, Gardiner, knows Ahab. He requests the Pequod's help in searching for Gardiner's son, who may be lost at sea, but Ahab flatly refuses when he learns that Moby Dick is nearby. The final ship that the Pequod meets is the Delight, a ship that has recently come upon Moby Dick and has nearly been destroyed by its encounter with the whale. Before finally finding Moby Dick, Ahab reminisces about the day nearly forty years before in which he struck his first whale, and laments the solitude of his years out on the sea. He admits that he has chased his prey as more of a demon than a man. The struggle against Moby Dick lasts three days. On the first day, Ahab spies the whale himself, and the whaling boats row after it. Moby Dick attacks Ahab's boat, causing it to sink, but Ahab survives the ordeal when he reaches Stubb's boat. Despite this first failed attempt at defeating the whale, Ahab pursues him for a second day.

On the second day of the chase, roughly the same defeat occurs. This time Moby Dick breaks Ahab's ivory leg, while Fedallah dies when he becomes entangled in the harpoon line and is drowned. After this second attack, Starbuck chastises Ahab, telling him that his pursuit is impious and blasphemous. Ahab declares that the chase against Moby Dick is immutably decreed, and pursues it for a third day. On the third day of the attack against Moby Dick, Starbuck panics for ceding to Ahab's demands, while Ahab tells Starbuck that "some ships sail from their ports and ever afterwards are missing," seemingly admitting the futility of his mission. When Ahab and his crew reach Moby Dick, Ahab finally stabs the whale with his harpoon but the whale again tips Ahab's boat. However, the whale rams the Pequod and causes it to begin sinking. In a seemingly suicidal act, Ahab throws his harpoon at Moby Dick but becomes entangled in the line and goes down with it.

Only Ishmael survives this attack, for he was fortunate to be on a whaling boat instead of on the Pequod. Eventually he is rescued by the Rachel as its captain continues his search for his missing son, only to find a different orphan. SparkNotes: Moby-Dick: Plot Overview Plot Overview Context Character List Ishmael, the narrator, announces his intent to ship aboard a whaling vessel. He has made several voyages as a sailor but none as a whaler. He travels to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he stays in a whalers’ inn. Since the inn is rather full, he has to share a bed with a harpooner from the South Pacific named Queequeg. At first repulsed by Queequeg’s strange habits and shocking appearance (Queequeg is covered with tattoos), Ishmael eventually comes to appreciate the man’s generosity and kind spirit, and the two decide to seek work on a whaling vessel together. They take a ferry to Nantucket, the traditional capital of the whaling industry. There they secure berths on the Pequod, a savage-looking ship adorned with the bones and teeth of sperm whales.

Peleg and Bildad, the Pequod’s Quaker owners, drive a hard bargain in terms of salary. They also mention the ship’s mysterious captain, Ahab, who is still recovering from losing his leg in an encounter with a sperm whale on his last voyage. The Pequod leaves Nantucket on a cold Christmas Day with a crew made up of men from many different countries and races. Soon the ship is in warmer waters, and Ahab makes his first appearance on deck, balancing gingerly on his false leg, which is made from a sperm whale’s jaw. He announces his desire to pursue and kill Moby Dick, the legendary great white whale who took his leg, because he sees this whale as the embodiment of evil. Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast and declares that it will be the prize for the first man to sight the whale. As the Pequod sails toward the southern tip of Africa, whales are sighted and unsuccessfully hunted. During the hunt, a group of men, none of whom anyone on the ship’s crew has seen before on the voyage, emerges from the hold. The men’s leader is an exotic-looking man named Fedallah.

These men constitute Ahab’s private harpoon crew, smuggled aboard in defiance of Bildad and Peleg. Ahab hopes that their skills and Fedallah’s prophetic abilities will help him in his hunt for Moby Dick. The Pequod rounds Africa and enters the Indian Ocean. A few whales are successfully caught and processed for their oil. From time to time, the ship encounters other whaling vessels. Ahab always demands information about Moby Dick from their captains. One of the ships, the Jeroboam, carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom for anyone who threatens Moby Dick. His predictions seem to carry some weight, as those aboard his ship who have hunted the whale have met disaster. While trying to drain the oil from the head of a captured sperm whale, Tashtego, one of the Pequod’s harpooners, falls into the whale’s voluminous head, which then rips free of the ship and begins to sink. Queequeg saves Tashtego by diving into the ocean and cutting into the slowly sinking head. During another whale hunt, Pip, the Pequod’s black cabin boy, jumps from a whaleboat and is left behind in the middle of the ocean.

He goes insane as the result of the experience and becomes a crazy but prophetic jester for the ship. Soon after, the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby, a whaling ship whose skipper, Captain Boomer, has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick. The two captains discuss the whale; Boomer, happy simply to have survived his encounter, cannot understand Ahab’s lust for vengeance. Not long after, Queequeg falls ill and has the ship’s carpenter make him a coffin in anticipation of his death. He recovers, however, and the coffin eventually becomes the Pequod’s replacement life buoy. Ahab orders a harpoon forged in the expectation that he will soon encounter Moby Dick. He baptizes the harpoon with the blood of the Pequod’s three harpooners. The Pequod kills several more whales. Issuing a prophecy about Ahab’s death, Fedallah declares that Ahab will first see two hearses, the second of which will be made only from American wood, and that he will be killed by hemp rope. Ahab interprets these words to mean that he will not die at sea, where there are no hearses and no hangings.

A typhoon hits the Pequod, illuminating it with electrical fire. Ahab takes this occurrence as a sign of imminent confrontation and success, but Starbuck, the ship’s first mate, takes it as a bad omen and considers killing Ahab to end the mad quest. After the storm ends, one of the sailors falls from the ship’s masthead and drowns—a grim foreshadowing of what lies ahead. Ahab’s fervent desire to find and destroy Moby Dick continues to intensify, and the mad Pip is now his constant companion. The Pequod approaches the equator, where Ahab expects to find the great whale. The ship encounters two more whaling ships, the Rachel and the Delight, both of which have recently had fatal encounters with the whale. Ahab finally sights Moby Dick. The harpoon boats are launched, and Moby Dick attacks Ahab’s harpoon boat, destroying it. The next day, Moby Dick is sighted again, and the boats are lowered once more. The whale is harpooned, but Moby Dick again attacks Ahab’s boat. Fedallah, trapped in the harpoon line, is dragged overboard to his death.

Starbuck must maneuver the Pequod between Ahab and the angry whale. On the third day, the boats are once again sent after Moby Dick, who once again attacks them. The men can see Fedallah’s corpse lashed to the whale by the harpoon line. Moby Dick rams the Pequod and sinks it. Ahab is then caught in a harpoon line and hurled out of his harpoon boat to his death. All of the remaining whaleboats and men are caught in the vortex created by the sinking Pequod and pulled under to their deaths. Ishmael, who was thrown from a boat at the beginning of the chase, was far enough away to escape the whirlpool, and he alone survives. He floats atop Queequeg’s coffin, which popped back up from the wreck, until he is picked up by the Rachel, which is still searching for the crewmen lost in her earlier encounter with Moby Dick.

More Help Moby-Dick | Uncyclopedia | Fandom powered by Wikia Publisher: Various Melville's Encyclopædia of Whales and Whaling ( Latin for "Melville's Encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling") is an English - language encyclopaedia written by the American Herman Melville . First published in 1851 in London , the reference work is viewed as having the definitive word on all things related to whales and the whaling industry . Moby-Dick, the name of a whale sometimes prominent in the contents of Melville's Encyclopædia, has traditionally been an alternate title . Contents [ show ] History Cover art for Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific, inadvertently revealing a critical deception: the whale is actually more grey than white . Several events in or during Melville's life influenced him to write a work on natural history, and in particular on whales and whaling. For instance, after a career largely spent on school-teaching, he spent 18 months on a voyage that he later said began his life.

This was on the whaling ship Acushnet, which he called "my Yale College and my Harvard ", presumably because they made him just as sick as did a sea voyage. Indeed, the most significant event in that voyage turned out to be his desertion from the ship, which led to adventures with natives of extremely remote islands . Melville later recorded these in his best-seller novels Typee and Omoo, viewed by contemporaries and by most modern literary critics as the high point of his fiction-writing career . Presumably that was what he meant when he said that his life began with that voyage, since whaling seems to consist mostly of looking for squirts of water and creatures that make them—not the most life-changing experience. The most bizarre of all inspirations, however, might be the allegedly successful harpooning of an albino sperm whale , Mocha Dick, named so because all of his spermaceti was supposed to have been replaced with caffè latte [1] . Melville, being a tea drinker, thought this obsession with coffee absurd , and decided that it symbolised impeccably the futile nature of man's pursuit of the mysterious.

These factors, combined with Melville's desire to branch out into non-fiction following Nathaniel Hawthorne 's extremely, extremely painfully detailed biography of 17th-century Bostonian Hester Prynne , ultimately led to the writing of Melville's Encyclopædia. Contents and features Articles Engraving of a whaleship at sea, from a 1979 edition of Melville's Encyclopædia. This image is highly inaccurate, since whaleships, while followed by sharks seeking the meat of a dead whale or by other whaleships desirous of a rendezvous, were not followed by a giant body of text saying "Whaleship at sea". The encyclopaedia consists of 42 articles, in the form of what may be considered essays by Melville attempting to tackle a certain aspect of whales, the industry out to exploit them, or the history of either. Select editions are accompanied by wood engravings for readers who, rather than admire the masterfully crafted prose of Melville with its stylised language, extensive symbolism, and stark raving madness, would prefer to look at the pretty pictures .

Subject matters treated include: While the 42 articles are obviously erudite , articulate , and comprehensive , they are arranged in a highly unconventional manner for a work of natural history knowledge . The arrangement is certainly not by alphabetical order , category , or even average customer review . Hidden narrative? Instead, the articles are inexplicably separated by large sections that seemingly have no relation to descriptions of whales or of the whaling business. When spliced together, these sections appear to form a frame narrative for the entire encyclopaedia, concerning a captain attempting to catch a white whale . While completely irrelevant to the rest of the Encyclopædia, we will nonetheless, in the interest of scholar ship , delve further into this inscrutable inclusion. Encyclopaedic content As a matter of fact, the frame narrative itself also has titbits of whales and whaling; indeed, some of them may very well have been articles themselves were it not for their anecdotal nature, which is the only distinguishing factor between the articles and the narrative chapters.

For instance, Melville has the narrator describe a whaler, Queequeg, who is native to a remote Pacific island: “ When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth. ” —"Ishmael", segment leading up to "Nantucket" Using the technique of immersive learning , Melville thus gives the reader a picture of savage Pacific islander life, hierarchy, and savageness that is completely factual and not at all racially insensitive in stereotypically portraying the noble savage .

However, at least half of the narrative does not even contain this subtle form of education, and instead consists of idle philosophising, contemplation and character study. The sensible reader will realise that since the narrative is fictional, such drawn-out segments have no meaning to the overall work of the Encyclopædia and thus may be safely ignored. However, this article being an esoteric study of the work, we shall regrettably examine the rest of the narrative as well. Non-encyclopaedic content The remainder of Melville's Encyclopædia is the simple story of a monomaniac attempting to catch a whale, but laden with symbolic and philosophical tediousness . Set in contemporary (i.e. 1850s) Nantucket and Pacific waters—although the names of the characters mostly seem to establish a setting of the ancient Middle East and the Red Sea —the plot follows a whaling ship named after a doomed Native American tribe, and features its crew: Ishmael, the mysterious, tall, dark, and presumably handsome narrator of the novel. Of course, this last point is unknown since he scarcely explains why he's even in the story, let alone on the Pequod.

"Ishmael" is the narrator of the story, and a former schoolteacher who boards the Acushnet Pequod out of a desire for adventure , and of questionable judgement since he boards a ship named after a doomed Native American tribe. His presence does not drive the story; he is an outright literature geek and is of little use aboard the voyage. In addition, his name signifies exiles, outcasts, and, in general, losers . All this considered, Ishmael's sole reason for existence, it may be safely said, was for Melville to insert himself into the story. Ahab is the captain of the Pequod, and believes that the White Whale is the focus of evil itself, largely because it tore his leg off. He is also of questionable sanity, since he believes an occupational hazard to be possessed by the Devil . Another incident to substantiate his madness is his question, "is Ahab, Ahab?", since Ahab is, unfortunately but clearly, Ahab .

Starbuck is the first mate of the Pequod, and was reportedly based on the man who harpooned Mocha Dick and made a fortune operating a coffee chain that was derived from the whale's latte and not named after a doomed Native American tribe . He serves as a foil to Ahab with the viewpoint that the White Whale is simply an innocent albeit unreasonable creature of nature . He is also of questionable sanity, since he still blindly follows a man who believes an occupational hazard to be possessed with evil. Despite being given the opportunity to kill Ahab and turn the ship around, Starbuck simply chickens out just so that Ishmael can wax poetic about life and death and revenge and the image of Ahab and Moby-Dick sinking together into the deep ocean, entangled together by Ahab's harpoon and passion for vengeance—all of which is completely irrelevant to whales and whaling . Stubb and Flask are an A-list comedy duo on the level of Abbott and Costello , Fry and Laurie , and Laurel and Hardy , and are on the Pequod for no conceivable reason. Therefore, they are also of questionable sanity.

The harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo and Fedallah are personifications of various racial stereotypes . This means that Melville is of questionable sanctity . In these sections, Melville follows extremely dramatic, exaggerated, poetic, and outright mad language: “ Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league . . . . Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death! ” —Captain Ahab, segment between articles "The Mast-Head" and "The Whiteness of the Whale" The narrative as a whole is admirably written , and raises various salient metaphysical and otherwise philosophical points. However, all of this bears no relevance to the main body of Melville's Encyclopædia and so, outside of the brief examination conducted in the past few sections, may be completely ignored.

Melville's Encyclopædia today Melville's Encyclopædia has received strong criticism for becoming increasingly outdated . No revisions were ever made to the content after the original 1851 publication, which means that subsequent editions still fail to cover modern, relevant, prominent topics such as the scarce need for whale oil , the worldwide ban on commercial whaling , and very attractive ( possibly biased ) actresses who oppose international whaling and should definitely be discussed because they are very attractive . However, keeping Melville's Encyclopædia up to date no longer appears to be one of Melville's top priorities. Since the encyclopaedia's publication, Melville has since moved on to fiction novels and short story collections—a drastic shift from this non-fiction opus—and as late as January 2017 , appears to be a little lethargic . Market share of whaling encyclopaedias from the years 1853-2009. Competition With the decline of whaling as a viable or legal commercial venture, Melville's Encyclopædia has seen little competition in the way of the whaling encyclopaedia market.

Initially, the Encyclopædia Britannica attempted a venture into the market in 1890 with the Encyclopædia Balaenarum (Latin for "Encyclopaedia of Whales"), a 13-volume encyclopaedia with far more thoroughly researched and sensibly arranged articles compared to those in Melville's Encyclopædia; however, its market share never rose above 10%, and the venture finally folded after the management realised how very few captains wanted to bring a 13-volume encyclopaedia on board, let alone read it . Today, Melville's Encyclopædia remains a dominant force, consistently maintaining 100% market share in the US and UK whaling encyclopaedia markets. Nevertheless, the Encyclopaedia of Wales have admitted that an estimated 14.3% of their customers each year buy the publication believing it to be about whales [2] .

Alternative interpretation In the early 20th century, modernist literary critics began to examine Melville's Encyclopædia as a work of art—not in the sense that Marcel Duchamp makes a urinal a work of art and then laughs at everyone who does treat it like a work of art, but in the sense that works of art composed as works of art are seen as works of art. In fact, most people today view Melville's Encyclopædia not as an expertly researched and thoroughly written reference work on the whaling industry, but rather as one of the Great American Novels . Many—though fortunately not all—schools have switched from using the text as an intermediate textbook in whaling courses, to using it as a novel exemplary of American Romanticism. Obviously, however, all of this is in grave error ; such people have made the mistake of confusing the frame narrative for the main portion of the text . Most literary critics, however, agree that the narrative was an unnecessary attempt to transition between the articles, in an experimental encyclopaedic format that was never seen again.

Melville's chief aim in writing the text, after all, was to be educational and definitive , and to record history as he saw it; and that such a goal would even dare to be attempted through fiction would be something only romantics would argue for . See also Moby-Dick published - Nov 14, 1851 - HISTORY.com Publisher A+E Networks On this day in 1851, Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, is published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: “Call me Ishmael.” Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop. Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and as a young man spent time in the merchant marines, the U.S. Navy and on a whaling ship in the South Seas. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, a romantic adventure based on his experiences in Polynesia.

The book was a success and a sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847. Three more novels followed, with mixed critical and commercial results. Melville’s sixth book, Moby-Dick, was first published in October 1851 in London, in three volumes titled The Whale, and then in the U.S. a month later. Melville had promised his publisher an adventure story similar to his popular earlier works, but instead, Moby-Dick was a tragic epic, influenced in part by Melville’s friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels include The Scarlet Letter. After Moby-Dick‘s disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn’t paying the bills so in 1865 he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for 20 years. Melville died in 1891, largely forgotten by the literary world. By the 1920s, scholars had rediscovered his work, particularly Moby-Dick, which would eventually become a staple of high school reading lists across the United States.

Billy Budd, Melville’s final novel, was published in 1924, 33 years after his death. Related Videos Herman Melville . Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World . WGBH American Experience | PBS Other Biographies When Herman Melville died in 1891, his death was noted in only one local newspaper, which carried a brief description of the "long forgotten" author. Not until the early 20th century was Melville's novel Moby Dick first recognized as a literary masterpiece and touted as a cornerstone of modern American literature. Born to a New York City merchant in 1819, Melville fought for a greatness that would not be realized during his lifetime. Melville's father supported his seven children importing French dry goods, but in 1830 he decided to try his luck in the fur business in Albany, NY. Within two years, the family was bankrupt and Herman's father died suddenly. Melville and his siblings left school to work in the family fur and cap business, with Melville working several other jobs as well -- filling in teaching positions at local schools, working on his uncle's farm, and clerking in a local bank.

Despite these difficulties, Herman Melville read extensively on his own, consuming mythology, anthropology, and history. He was fascinated with Shakespeare's poetic devices and their ability to capture an audience. He was also raised hearing the thrilling story of the whaleship Essex, which was attacked by a whale and sunk when Melville was just a year old. Melville's captivation with the terrifying grandeur of whales, the audacity of whalers, and the relationship between the two would be a motivating factor behind his writing. In 1839, at the age of 20, Melville took his first voyage across the Atlantic sea as a cabin boy on the merchant ship the St. Lawrence. After this expedition and a year exploring the West, Melville joined the crew of the whaling ship Acushnet in January of 1841. The thrilling adventure that occurred during the next three years would satiate his desire for excitement and provide him with his material for his first three novels. After a year and a half aboard the Acushnet, Melville and a fellow seaman deserted the ship, only to be captured by cannibals in the Marquesas Islands, the Typee.

Although Melville was treated well, he sought rescue on the Australia whale ship Lucy Ann when it arrive on the Marquesas a month after his capture. On the Lucy Ann Melville traveled to Tahiti, where his unusual journey continued when he, along with the crew, committed mutiny by refusing their duty. Briefly jailed, Melville escaped and sailed to the nearby island Eimeo, where he worked on a potato farm. More than five months after deserting the Acushnet, Melville's adventures were not over. Tiring of life on Eimeo, he joined the crew of whaler Charles and Henry, where he worked as harpooner. When the Charles and Henry anchored in Maui Island five months later in April of 1843, Melville took up work as a clerk and bookkeeper in a general store in Honolulu. In August, 1843, Melville enlisted in the US Navy and embarked on the final leg of his journey, working as a seaman on the Navy ship United States through the Pacific. In October 1844, Melville returned to his mother's house determined to write about his adventures.

His subsequent writings borrowed from his own experiences as well as other peoples' fantastic stories that he heard during his travels. Because of his extensive experience as a seaman and a whaler, his descriptions of life out at sea were comprehensive and unflinchingly accurate. Melville was also able to communicate the fear and terror of a whale hunt, a feat that would make his greatest work, Moby Dick, a literary tribute to the whaling industry. His first manuscript, a tale in which the narrator, Tommo, is captured by Typee cannibals, was initially rejected in the United States because publishers refused to believe the validity of the story. The story was finally accepted in London, where Melville's older brother, Gansevoort, was working for the American Legation. Typee was published in Britain in February of 1846 to favorable reviews. Lauded for its ethnographic focus exploring the relationship between a New Englander and a foreign culture, Melville's story gained even more popularity after one of Herman's former crewmates came forward to validate its factual base.

This new based-on-a-true-story status coupled with Americans' high interest in maritime adventures, helped Typee sell over 6,000 copies in two years when it was published in the U.S. In the midst of his initial years as a profitable author, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts and a close family friend. The chief justice, Lemuel Shaw, would later support Melville in the late 1850s during his financial struggles. With his new bride, Melville moved to New York City to live with his younger brother, mother, and four sisters in late 1847. Despite these crowded quarters, Melville was able to continue writing, and he finished two more novels within two years. Encouraged by his success with Typee, Melville published Omoo in 1847, a story inspired by his time in the Polynesian Islands of Tahini and Eimeo. Omoo was just as successful as Typee, and Melville immediately began work on his third installment of his maritime adventures, Mardi and a Voyage Thither.

Published in 1849, Mardi was not as successful as his previous two books, a fact credited largely to his increased use of allegory and a more farfetched storyline. From 1849 to 1850, Melville wrote two more novels, Redburn and White-Jacket, both of which he later claimed to write simply for the money and the prestige. These attempts to inflate his image as an author won him general acclaim and the novels were modest hits. Melville moved on to his most prolific endeavor yet -- a story about one man's need to conquer and kill a great white whale. Melville had first thought of the idea after reading a 1839 article by Jeremiah N. Renolds entitled "Mocha Dick: Or, the White Whale of the Pacific." While he drafted what would become the novel Moby Dick, Melville met and befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had recently published the literary masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne provided Melville with precious feedback on his manuscript, and encouraged him to change his current draft, a detailed account of whaling, into an allegorical novel.

In October 1851, The Whale, printed later as Moby Dick, was published in London. The allegorical undertones that Melville cultivated throughout the novel picked up on the link between whaling and a mid-19th century emerging American identity. The story centers around the narrator Ishmael, a sailor on the whaleship Pequod. The ship captain, Ahab, has lost his leg to Moby Dick on a previous expedition, and he is motivated to the point of derangement by revenge for the whale's life. Powered by this plot, Melville's Moby Dick spun the parable of the hunt for the great white whale as an emblem of the human condition and the reckless expansion of the American republic. Despite Melville's high expectations for Moby Dick, literary critics largely disregarded the novel. Many critics were impressed with the detailed account of whaling voyages, but during Melville's entire lifetime, the book sold only 3,000 copies. Interest in maritime adventures was dwindling as Americans were setting their imaginations towards the potential in the West. After the disappointment of Moby Dick's reception, Melville faced a battle against obscurity and financial ruin for the remainder of his life.

In 1852, he wrote Pierre, a psychological romance based on his own childhood, but a negative critical reception and a poor sales performance cost him a significant amount of his savings. He turned to short pieces and poetry, publishing several pieces in Putnam's Monthly Magazine from 1853 to 1854. The general public ignored his short novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), and Melville entered a period of darkness and depression. A trip to Europe to visit his friend Hawthorne in October 1856 did little to lighten his melancholy over a lost dream of literary fame. He toured the country from 1857 to 1860, giving lectures on various topics such as "Statues in Rome," "The South Seas," and the vague subject of "Traveling." In 1863, Melville moved back to New York City where he later found a job as a customs inspector on the New York docks. Throughout his following 20 years as a dock worker, Melville continued writing, publishing the poem Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War in 1866.

The chronological piece included depictions of all types of soldiers from both sides of the war, rendered accurately from a trip to the war front to visit his cousin the year before. Despite being considered among the best poems of the 19th century, Battle-Pieces sold a meager 486 copies. Further heartache befell Melville when his oldest son, Malcolm, committed suicide in 1867. Again Melville turned to travel to gain perspective and possible writing material. His 1876 poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land drew upon his experiences in Europe and the Holy Land and set a baseline for a theme of religious crisis. Melville continued to pen poetry throughout these later years, printing John Marr and Other Sailors privately for friends and family in 1888. Melville was working on the manuscript of Billy Budd, Foretopman, a story about a sailor falsely accused of involvement in mutiny, when he died of a heart attack on September 28, 1891. In the 1920s, literary scholars began to identify Moby Dick as a work that commented upon larger issues of the American experience in the 19th century.

Critics increasingly recognized Moby Dick as one of the greatest pieces of American literature, and they began to discuss the allegorical implications at long last. The novel has been described as both an allegory to the push west (the prairie being the sea) and the Gold Rush (the gold being the whale), and it has been taught in classrooms worldwide for its successful combination of philosophical speculation, Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging while moving an intelligent and authentic, albeit fantastic, plot. Today, Moby Dick is a staple of many high school curriculum reading lists, and a 1956 film version by John Huston introduced the story into popular culture. In Moby Dick and his other works, Melville was able to incorporate stories of adventure with examinations of many inherently American themes: religion versus science, human limitations and emerging technology, and truth versus American myth. The ramifications that Americans can take from reading Melville center around the immoral manifestation of the democratic ideal that Americans were facing during the height of the whaling industry and one that we still battle with today.

Question: What is the name of the whaling ship that is the focus of the classic Moby Dick?
Answer: Pequod