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? 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. The White Whale: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick - Neatorama Neatorama • 2 Herman Melville's epic novel was supposed to secure his fame. Instead, it sank his career. Herman Melville had everything a young author could dream of.

By the age of 30, he’d traveled the world and written five books, including two bestsellers. He’d married the daughter of a prominent judge, and he owned a beautiful farmhouse. He hobnobbed with the literati. Strangers asked for autographs. Then he wrote Moby-Dick and ruined everything. Today, the book is often hailed as the Great American Novel, an epic D. H. Lawrence called “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.” But in Melville’s time, it was a total flop. Readers couldn’t comprehend the difficult narrative. Critics dismissed it as the ravings of a madman. When Melville tried to mend his image with a follow-up, titled Pierre, the reviews were equally brutal, and the work cemented his reputation as a lunatic. At just 33, Melville was finished. When he died in 1891, at the age of 72, people were shocked—not because he’d passed away, but because they thought he’d been dead for decades. It would take half a century—and a bored academic—to resurrect the author’s legacy.

THE WRITER AT SEA In 1839, a 20-year-old Melville boarded a merchant ship docked in New York City and voyaged to Liverpool as a cabin boy. The trip kindled his spirit for adventure. Two years later, he joined a whaler named Acushnet and set off for the Pacific. That’s when he learned how terrifying a 70-foot sperm whale could be. A full-grown whale can weigh as much as eight elephants. Fifty-two teeth—each nearly the length of a bowie knife—ring its lower jaw. The fluke dwarfs the size of most minivans and can smash a small whaleboat into splinters. And while the behemoths are generally timid, over the years, they’ve given whalers plenty of horror stories to tell. Two in particular stuck with Melville. The first concerned a seaman named George Pollard Jr., captain of the whaleship Essex. In November 1820, a sperm whale attacked Pollard’s ship in the Pacific, about 2,000 miles from shore. The 85-foot-long leviathan barreled into the boat headfirst and rocked the crew to their knees.

When the men heard wood crack below, they rushed into the ship’s hold: The Essex was leaking, but the damage looked repairable. Then the whale returned. This time, the animal tore through the waves twice as fast, snapping its jaws as it thundered back into the bow. Seawater gushed in, and the ship tilted on its side. The Essex slowly slipped beneath the waves, leaving Pollard and his men lost at sea. Melville also learned about Mocha Dick, a vicious whale that had attacked at least 100 vessels and sent 20 boats to the ocean bottom. Lore of the whale fueled nightmares: Rusting harpoons protruded from its back, a ghastly reminder of how many men had failed to kill him—and died trying. In 1838, Mocha Dick attacked an American ship after its sailors killed a calf and its mother. Enraged, Mocha smashed apart one of the whaleboats, but not before a sailor managed to plant a harpoon in his back. Mocha dove and dragged the man under, but it was a mortal blow. When the whale surfaced, the sea was stained crimson. A dark clot of blood frothed from its spout.

Its last breath showered the sailors in red mist. Mocha Dick was finally dead. A decade later, Melville would attempt to make him immortal. WHALE OF A TALE After four years of hitchhiking the oceans and collecting adventures—including an escape from Polynesian cannibals and a stint in a Tahitian jail—Melville left the sea to embark on a literary journey. His first book, Typee, was an immediate bestseller, making him one of America’s most beloved adventure writers. His second, Omoo, was also a hit. Both were rollicking yarns—easy and fun to read. Inspired by these early successes, Melville became a literary machine and produced nearly a book a year. By 1849, he’d already started his sixth novel: Moby-Dick. Early drafts of Moby-Dick began like the rest of Melville’s stories, as a playful romp on the high seas. But that same year, the author made a life-changing decision: He moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he befriended author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The relationship would become one of the most intense literary bromances of all time. Melville worshipped Hawthorne.

The two spent hours together talking philosophy, literature, and life. As their friendship grew, Melville became increasingly enamored with his new mentor. When Hawthorne suggested he rewrite the merry sailor’s tale into a metaphysical monsterpiece, Melville agreed. It was time to quit penning pabulum and start crafting something literary! At Hawthorne’s urging, Melville missed his deadline. He put the manuscript aside for a while to study Shakespeare and Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Within a year, Moby-Dick was transformed. When Melville sent it to his publisher in 1851, he proudly wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as a lamb.” What he submitted was a 135-chapter tome. The story follows a sailor—call him Ishmael—aboard the Pequod, a whaleship commanded by the monomaniacal, peg-legged Captain Ahab. Looking for revenge, Ahab scours the sea for an albino sperm whale that chewed off his leg long ago. His obsession to find and fight the monster drags everyone but Ishmael to Davy Jones’s locker.

But what sounds like an adventure is a plot freighted with symbolism and wild digressions cataloging practically everything about the Yankee whaling industry. Reviews were merciless. The London Athenaeum called Moby-Dick “trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.” The London Literary Gazette said the story made readers “wish both [Melville] and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea.” The New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review charged Melville with crimes against the English language. The poor reception wasn’t entirely Melville’s fault. The British first edition accidentally omitted the epilogue. The publisher also deleted 35 crucial passages to “avoid offending delicate political and moral sensibilities.” But those excuses linger only as a footnote. Critics and fans alike had expected a wild ocean adventure. Instead, Melville gave them a 635-page philosophical brick. Just 3715 copies of Moby-Dick were sold in Melville’s lifetime. The book earned him a measly $556.37 in the United States. His popularity plummeted—and so did his bank account. “Dollars damn me,” he griped earlier to Hawthorne.

“What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.” Within a year, Hawthorne stopped writing back. Their friendship dissolved. In 1863, Melville returned to New York City and became a customs inspector. He held the job for the rest of his life, quietly writing poetry in his spare time. In 1867, Melville’s oldest son killed himself, sending the already alcoholic author spiraling into depression. The day after Melville died, his obituary appeared in just one newspaper. It was a paltry six lines long. Melville would have to spend three decades rotting in a pine box before critics realized there was more to his story. REVISITING MELVILLE—AND MOBY-DICK Things changed in 1919, when Raymond Weaver was given an assignment he didn’t want. A Columbia graduate student, Weaver was schmoozing with Professor Carl Van Doren at an annual spring dinner when they began discussing the forgotten author. Van Doren had moonlighted as the editor for The Nation and knew Melville’s 100th birthday was coming soon.

He wanted to print a short tribute in the magazine and asked Weaver to write it. Weaver was hesitant. He’d tried to read Typee in college and hated it. But after some prodding—and the promise of a paycheck—he caved. Calling the gig “child’s play,” Weaver dug through Columbia’s library looking for information. But he was quickly surprised by what he found ... and what he didn’t. Melville’s oeuvre was huge: nine novels, scores of short stories and poems—but nothing on his life. Weaver had to hunt for Melville’s personal letters and memos on his own. By the end of the chase, two years later, he had written Melville’s biography. One discovery in particular recharged scholarly interest in Melville’s work: a yellowing manuscript tucked inside a tin bread box, unearthed by Melville’s granddaughter. Recognizing it was an unpublished novella, Weaver had it printed. The work is now one of Melville’s most beloved narratives—Billy Budd. The timing couldn’t have been better. In the 1920s, academics were trying to assemble America’s literary canon.

When they rediscovered Moby-Dick, they realized it had everything they were looking for: artful prose, iconoclastic ideas, rich symbolism, universal themes. It melded fiction with fact. It was experimental. It defied genre. Critics finally understood why Moby-Dick had been so poorly received—it was 70 years ahead of its time. By the 1930s, Melville had become king of the American canon. William Faulkner hung a print of Captain Ahab in his living room. Ernest Hemingway pegged Melville as the literary genius to beat. Moby-Dick would inspire countless authors, including Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, and Robert Pirsig. The book’s cultural footprint remains deep. The story has been adapted for film more than six times and for countless staged plays. It has been referenced far and wide, from The Flintstones to a Marvel comic book to a rock song by Led Zeppelin. The phrase “white whale” is everyday business lingo. Even Starbucks pays homage, taking its name from Ahab’s first mate.

Melville and Nantucket: NHA FAQ Click on the photo for more information. Frequently Asked Questions: Herman Melville and Nantucket Herman Melville wrote his classic novel Moby-Dick (1851) without having visited the island of Nantucket. The island and its whaling history form the backbone of his novel, and indeed are central symbols in the epic journey of the Pequod in its hunt for Moby-Dick, the white whale. Melville based the essentials of his plot, and the final the climactic ramming of the Pequod, upon all that he had read about Nantucket’s whaling history, and in particular, the gruesome tale of the Nantucket whaleship Essex. After the publication of Moby-Dick, Melville finally visited the island, and met face-to-face with Captain George Pollard Jr., the captain who survived one of the most harrowing ordeals at sea in human history. In one brief chapter of Moby-Dick (1851), Chapter Fourteen, “Nantucket,” Melville wrote the definitive passage about the island without ever having visited its sandy soil: “Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it.

See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” Nantucket in a nutshell: a pile of sand, a glacial afterthought, but also a “corner of the world,” connected and connecting the small with the vast, an insignificant nothing that is part of the main. Melville went on to marvel at the whalemen who made Nantucket great: “What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it.. . .

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders.” It was not until the evening of July 6, 1852, that the author first set foot on Nantucket, visiting the place that had long haunted his imagination, and, in the tale of the ill-fated Nantucket whaleship Essex, had been a major source for Moby-Dick. In the company of his father-in-law, Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, Melville bunked down at the Ocean House at the corner of Broad and Centre streets, looking across onto Captain George Pollard’s house on Centre. The following day, Melville and the judge “dined with a friend,” commonly held to be Thomas Macy of 99 Main Street, where the men are believed to have shared a meal. Thomas was son of “the worthy Obed,” whose History of Nantucket Melville had also devoured in preparation for Moby-Dick.

The next day, Melville and the judge enjoyed an island tour by carriage “to Siasconset, & various parts of the island.” Melville described majestic Sankaty Head Light on the bluff in a letter to Hawthorne: “The air is suppressedly charged with the sound of long lines of surf. There is no land over against this cliff short of Europe and the West Indies. . . .The sea has encroached also upon that part where their dwelling-house stands near the light-house . . . in a strange and beautiful contrast, we have the innocence of the land eyeing the malignity of the sea.” Later, the visitors “passed the evening with Mr. Mitchell the astronomer, & his celebrated daughter, the discoverer of comets.” This gathering occurred at the Mitchells’ quarters above the Pacific Bank on Main Street.

Meeting the brilliant Maria Mitchell, Melville was inspired by her feminine intellectuality to pen one of his finer poems, After the Pleasure Party, in which he struggles with the question of sexuality and passion: What “Moby-Dick” Means to Me - The New Yorker What “Moby-Dick” Means to Me By November 3, 2011 The author in the Azores, among friends. For years, “Moby-Dick” defeated me. I think I was put off the book when, as a child, I watched the 1956 John Huston film on our tiny black-and-white television, at home in suburban Southampton, England. Seeing it on the ghostly cathode-ray tube, which was housed in a veneered cabinet, was more like viewing some Victorian apparatus for contacting the departed spirits, forever imprisoned behind its glass. Huston’s film promised so much—the rearing white whale, a monster of my deepest imaginings—but it delivered a wordy worthiness, quite remote from what I wanted from the story. Later, I’d look at the book itself and fail to find any way into its prose, as impermeable as that TV screen.

I didn’t know then what I do now: that “Moby-Dick” can be whatever you want it to be. It took me thirty years to discover what the book was—or what it was not. Now along comes Nathaniel Philbrick’s brilliant and provocative new work, “ Why Read Moby-Dick “—a collection of elegant essays, an eclecticism that it shares with its subject. Philbrick seeks to make us look again at the paradoxes of what he, like many others before him, acclaims as “the greatest American novel ever written.” But “Moby-Dick” is not a novel. It’s barely a book at all. It’s more an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history. It is, above all, a sui-generis creation, one that came into the world as an unnatural, immaculate conception. To my mind, there are only two other works with which it bears comparison: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818), and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847).

The former, in its own witness to one man’s obsessive interference with nature, was a direct influence on Melville, who acquired a copy on a visit to London in 1849, even as the whalish shades were beginning to swirl about in his imagination. We don’t know if Melville read Brontë’s rural, gothic creation, but its uncontained spirit—in which the wild Yorkshire moors themselves become the monster—would seem to me to be an apt fellow-traveller for the author who launched the Pequod into the mid-nineteenth century. All three books are caught between the primeval old and the impossibly new, between an abiding sense of certitude and the dissembling future. In an age of uncertain faith, then as now, “Moby-Dick” resembles a religious tract, an alternative testament.

Little wonder that one of its early set-pieces is Father Mapple’s fire-and-brimstone sermon from the prow-shaped pulpit in the Seamen’s Bethel, New Bedford, or that Philbrick takes the title for his own first chapter, “The Gospels in This Century,” from Melville’s wry and rather Wildean remark on the unsalability of his work: “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.” As he told Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and I feel as spotless as the lamb.” When I finally began reading “Moby-Dick” (had I wasted my time before then?), I found I couldn’t put it down. I’d carry about with me a tiny, Oxford World Classics edition, anonymously bound in blue cloth, to be studied chapter by chapter, like the Bible or the Koran, as I sat on the Tube or on an airplane, or in the early hours of the morning. As Philbrick exhorts his readers, ” ‘Moby-Dick’ is a long book, and time is short.

Even a sentence, a mere phrase will do.” Much of the impact of Melville’s book on any fierce new convert is implicit in that sense of time travel. Sometimes I read it and I feel like I’m going backward, fast. It reads like something that was written before books were invented, yet it is utterly modern—pre-postmodern, perhaps. It is part of its own prediction, as if it and its characters had been there all along, and had only been waiting to be written. Just as in the real New Bedford’s Bethel a pulpit-prow had to be built, in the nineteen-sixties, because so many visitors expected to find one there; and, just as Melville wrote vividly of Nantucket, an island that he had yet to visit, much of “Moby-Dick” is conjured out of the air and the sea. That’s why the book appeals so much to modern artists, like Frank Stella and Matthew Barney. Its oceanic reach and perverse digression provide endless sources of inspiration and interpretation.

In chapters such as the famously sublime “The Whiteness of the Whale”—almost hallucinatory in its associative suspension of normality and subtle obscenity—Melville takes up his theme, then takes it apart, teasing it out to impossibly filigreed tendrils, until you wonder how you, or he, got there in the first place. While reading “Moby-Dick” is a bit like being stoned, it also evokes an Asperger’s air. Ishmael will tell you everything you wanted to know about the whale, and much that he has made up. (Few books are so filled with neologisms; it’s as if Melville were frustrated by language itself, and strove to burst out of its confines.) At the same time, “Moby-Dick” stands both as a historical reference for the great age of Yankee whaling and as a work of imagination in which whales become avatars as much as they are real animals. Melville would never have finished his book today—he’d be constantly Googling “whale.” “God keep me from ever completing anything,” his existential alter ego complains.

“This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” It always astonishes me that, just as my schoolmates and I were made to wade through Shakespeare and Dickens at an inappropriate age, American high-school students are subjected to Melville’s madness, with its subversion and, to modern eyes, overtly homoerotic passages. Indeed, part of the power of “Moby-Dick” lies in its latency, its delayed, time-bomb quality. It was virtually ignored in the author’s lifetime—its first edition never sold out, and the remaining copies went up in flames in a fire in the publisher’s downtown Manhattan warehouse in 1853. Like a protean seed awaiting germination, the book needed a new element to bring it to life. As a result, when it burst into the new century, it came invested with a terrific momentum of its own—as if the world had just caught up with its fiery power. In the nineteen-twenties, this lost book was rediscovered by the Lost Generation.

And, just as it was stoked up by the dark streets of London on that 1849 visit, “Moby-Dick” owed more than a little of its rebirth to a foreign land and the British writers who led the way in its reappraisal. In 1923, D. H. Lawrence published his idiosyncratic, if not faintly crazy, “Studies in Classic American Literature.” Lawrence proclaimed Melville to be “a futurist long before futurism found paint,” the author of “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.” Lawrence’s paean was only the public eruption of a reputation already in revival. The year before, in 1922, T. E.

Lawrence, of Arabia fame, reported that “Moby-Dick” took prime position on his “shelf of ‘Titanic’ books (those distinguished by greatness of spirit),” and two years after that, in 1924, noted, “Someone is working a Melville boom, & I’ve sold all my early editions profitably.” In the summer of 1936, the aristocratic aesthete the Honourable Stephen Tennant was entertaining his friend Morgan Forster, at tea in a genteel hotel in the English Home Counties, talking avidly of Queequeg. Could Melville have ever imagined that his book would travel so far, and find such unlikely readers? In the alchemical process of critical and cultural assimilation, Melville’s monstrous creation—like Shelley’s Creature, like Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy—took on, especially through its susceptible adaptations to other media, a modern typology of Manichean and cinematic proportions.

A century and a half after it first played out, Ahab’s wanton chase was evoked in the “war on terror,” and the attempts to pursue an apparently uncatchable foe, even as it sourced an epic designed to reflect America’s first imperial venture—the getting of the oil that lit and lubricated the Western world. Yet it has an even timelier message, one that, like so many of Melville’s literary grenades, seems to have been lying in wait for us. “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?” the book asks. Although, having posed this question, Melville, a perennial contrarian, comes to a contrary conclusion, his summary is certainly predictive. Three hundred and sixty thousand blue whales died in the cetacean Armageddon of the twentieth century, reducing the world’s largest animal to a population of just a few thousand. Yet, in the wake of the moratorium on the hunting of great whales implemented by the International Whaling Commission, in 1986, whales appear to have recovered. Earlier this year, in the waters of the Indian Ocean off the tip of Sri Lanka, I saw dozens of blue whales, their thirty-foot blows as tall as houses.

That vast biomass was an Edenic sight, a glimpse of the world before “Moby-Dick.” Blue whales now swim up the Irish Sea, and last month Captain Mark Dalomba was astonished to see one from the wheelhouse of his Dolphin Fleet whale-watch boat off Provincetown, on Cape Cod. This summer, in the deep waters of the Azores, I swam with sperm whales. In the silence of their world, listening to the rhythm of their sonar clicks, feeling the scale of their social cohesion, I was more aware than ever before of the history that has passed between us. Now, as I pick up “Moby-Dick” again, prompted by Philbrick’s provocative book, I’m reminded of a salutary notion: that the whales that inspired Melville were around long before us, and may, with luck, outlive us, too. “Wherefore … we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality… .

In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s ark; and if ever the world is to be flooded again, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.” Philip Hoare is the author of “ The Whale .” He is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Marine Institute, Plymouth University, U.K., and is working on an audio edition of “Moby-Dick,” read by Tilda Swinton, John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow, and others. Photograph: Andrew Sutton. SparkNotes: Moby-Dick: Character List Character List Plot Overview Analysis of Major Characters Ishmael - The narrator, and a junior member of the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael doesn’t play a major role in the events of the novel, but much of the narrative is taken up by his eloquent, verbose, and extravagant discourse on whales and whaling. Read an in-depth analysis of Ishmael. Ahab - The egomaniacal captain of the Pequod. Ahab lost his leg to Moby Dick.

He is single-minded in his pursuit of the whale, using a mixture of charisma and terror to persuade his crew to join him. As a captain, he is dictatorial but not unfair. At moments he shows a compassionate side, caring for the insane Pip and musing on his wife and child back in Nantucket. Read an in-depth analysis of Moby Dick. Starbuck - The first mate of the Pequod. Starbuck questions Ahab’s judgment, first in private and later in public. He is a Quaker who believes that Christianity offers a way to interpret the world around him, although he is not dogmatic or pushy about his beliefs. Starbuck acts as a conservative force against Ahab’s mania. Read an in-depth analysis of Starbuck. Queequeg - Starbuck’s skilled harpooner and Ishmael’s best friend. Queequeg was once a prince from a South Sea island who stowed away on a whaling ship in search of adventure. He is a composite of elements of African, Polynesian, Islamic, Christian, and Native American cultures. He is brave and generous, and enables Ishmael to see that race has no bearing on a man’s character.

Stubb - The second mate of the Pequod. Stubb, chiefly characterized by his mischievous good humor, is easygoing and popular. He proves a bit of a nihilist, always trusting in fate and refusing to assign too much significance to anything. Read an in-depth analysis of Stubb. Tashtego - Stubb’s harpooner, Tashtego is a Gay Head Indian from Martha’s Vineyard, one of the last of a tribe about to disappear. Tashtego performs many of the skilled tasks aboard the ship, such as tapping the case of spermaceti in the whale’s head. Like Queequeg, Tashtego embodies certain characteristics of the “noble savage” and is meant to defy racial stereotypes. He is, however, more practical and less intellectual than Queequeg: like many a common sailor, Tashtego craves rum. Flask - A native of Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard and the third mate of the Pequod. Short and stocky, Flask has a confrontational attitude and no reverence for anything. His stature has earned him the nickname “King-Post,” because he resembles a certain type of short, square timber.

Read an in-depth analysis of Flask. Daggoo - Flask’s harpooner. Daggoo is a physically enormous, imperious-looking African. Like Queequeg, he stowed away on a whaling ship that stopped near his home. Daggoo is less prominent in the narrative than either Queequeg or Tashtego. Pip - A young black boy who fills the role of a cabin boy or jester on the Pequod. Pip has a minimal role in the beginning of the narrative but becomes important when he goes insane after being left to drift alone in the sea for some time. Like the fools in Shakespeare’s plays, he is half idiot and half prophet, often perceiving things that others don’t. Fedallah - A strange, “oriental” old Parsee (Persian fire-worshipper) whom Ahab has brought on board unbeknownst to most of the crew. Fedallah has a very striking appearance: around his head is a turban made from his own hair, and he wears a black Chinese jacket and pants. He is an almost supernaturally skilled hunter and also serves as a prophet to Ahab.

Fedallah keeps his distance from the rest of the crew, who for their part view him with unease. Peleg - A well-to-do retired whaleman of Nantucket and a Quaker. As one of the principal owners of the Pequod, Peleg, along with Captain Bildad, takes care of hiring the crew. When the two are negotiating wages for Ishmael and Queequeg, Peleg plays the generous one, although his salary offer is not terribly impressive. Bildad - Another well-to-do Quaker ex-whaleman from Nantucket who owns a large share of the Pequod. Bildad is (or pretends to be) crustier than Peleg in negotiations over wages. Both men display a business sense and a bloodthirstiness unusual for Quakers, who are normally pacifists. Father Mapple - A former whaleman and now the preacher in the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel. Father Mapple delivers a sermon on Jonah and the whale in which he uses the Bible to address the whalemen’s lives. Learned but also experienced, he is an example of someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness or revenge.

Captain Boomer - The jovial captain of the English whaling ship the Samuel Enderby. Boomer lost his arm in an accident involving Moby Dick. Unlike Ahab, Boomer is glad to have escaped with his life, and he sees further pursuit of the whale as madness. He is a foil for Ahab, as the two men react in different ways to a similar experience. Gabriel - A sailor aboard the Jeroboam. Part of a Shaker sect, Gabriel has prophesied that Moby Dick is the incarnation of the Shaker god and that any attempts to harm him will result in disaster. His prophecies have been borne out by the death of the Jeroboam’s mate in a whale hunt and the plague that rages aboard the ship. More Help Major Symbols in Moby-Dick Major Symbols in Moby-Dick Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List Introduction Symbols in literature are usually objects used to represent or suggest important concepts that inform and expand our appreciation of the work. Moby-Dick offers some of the most widely known symbols in American literature. Being widely known, however, does not imply that the symbols are simple or easy to understand.

Like the themes in the novel, the symbols are ambiguous in enriching ways. Father Mapple's Pulpit Father Mapple's pulpit in the Whaleman's Chapel effectively represents this former harpooner's approach to his ministry. Everything about the chapel reminds a visitor of life and death at sea. Father Mapple is the captain of the ship, the congregation his crew. The pulpit itself is shaped like the prow of a ship and features a painting of a vessel battling a storm near a rocky coast, an angel of hope watching over it. Without much effort, we can see that the pulpit represents the leadership of the pastor and implies that God himself is the pilot of this ship. Mapple's "shipmates," as he refers to the congregation, often find themselves battling storms on rocky coasts — either literally, in ships, or figuratively in the rest of their lives. They need the hope and consolation of God's grace, as represented by the angel. Mapple ascends to the pulpit by climbing a rope ladder like one used to mount a ship from a boat at sea. He then pulls the rope up after him, effectively cutting off contact with worldly matters.

In similar ways, the captain of a whaling ship assumes the pilot's role as he cuts off contact with land; the ship becomes a floating microcosm at sea. Melville makes effective use of contrast throughout the novel; here, it is between Mapple and Ahab. Mapple is an elderly but vigorous man of God who sees his role as leading his ship through rocky waters by gladly submitting to the will of a higher authority. Ahab is an ungodly man who doesn't mind wielding authority but resents submitting to it. He wears his defiance proudly. In this sense, the pulpit represents the proper position for a ship's captain, performing his duty in leading his congregation toward an understanding of performing God's will. Queequeg's Coffin The symbolism of Queequeg's coffin changes as the novel progresses. Initially, the coffin represents Queequeg's apparently impending death and his nostalgic link to his home island. The coffin is shaped like a canoe because of the custom on Kokovoko of setting the corpse adrift in such a craft. The belief was that eventually it would float over the ocean to the sky, which connects to the sea, and ultimately to one of the islands (stars) in the sky.

Queequeg saw similar canoe coffins in Nantucket, and the custom of setting the corpse adrift is widespread among sea-faring people around the world. The coffin represents ongoing life when it becomes Queequeg's sea chest after he decides not to die. It represents hope for renewal and a practical means of saving life when it is rigged to serve as a life buoy. Finally, the coffin is a symbol of hope and even rebirth when it springs from the vortex of the sunken Pequod to provide Ishmael with a means of staying afloat until the Rachel rescues him. The White Whale The White Whale is one of the best known symbols in American literature. What it represents depends entirely on who is noticing. To Starbuck, Moby Dick is just another whale, except that he is more dangerous. Early in the novel, Starbuck challenges Ahab's motives for altering the ship's mission, from accumulating oil to killing the White Whale. On the quarter-deck in Chapter 36, Starbuck calls it "blasphemous" to seek revenge on a "dumb brute . . .

that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!" If Starbuck sees anything beyond that in the whale, it is that Moby Dick represents the captain's madness and a very serious diversion from the ship's proper mission. The Samuel Enderby's captain, who has lost an arm to the White Whale, sees it as representing a great prize in both glory and sperm oil but seems very reasonable in his desire to leave the whale alone. He says to Ahab, "There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?" (Chapter 100) Ahab points out that the "accursed thing is not always what least allures." To some, the White Whale is a myth. To others, he is immortal. But one significant question is, What is the White Whale to Ahab? Ishmael grants that Ahab views the whale as an embodiment of evil. Ishmael himself is not so sure.

The narrator often sees both sides of a question, never more so than in Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale." There he tells us that Moby Dick's whiteness might represent good or evil, glory or damnation, all colors or the "visible absence of color." For Ahab's interpretation, it is helpful to consider the captain's comments in the pivotal Chapter 36. There, the captain says he sees Moby Dick as a "mask," behind which lies a great power whose dominance Ahab refuses to accept. Ahab sees that inscrutable power as evil. Some scholars argue that it is not the whale, or the force behind the whale, that is evil; the evil is in Ahab. Others see the captain as simply insane. Ahab is out of control as he rants about attacking the force behind the façade of Moby Dick. He wants to kill the whale in order to reach that force. Ahab seems to want to be a god. As great and charismatic a man as he can be in his finest moments, the captain is destructively egocentric and mad for power. To Ahab, we might conclude, the White Whale represents that power which limits and controls man.

Ahab sees it as evil incarnate. But perhaps it is just a big, smart fish. SparkNotes: Moby-Dick: Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Limits of Knowledge As Ishmael tries, in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, to offer a simple collection of literary excerpts mentioning whales, he discovers that, throughout history, the whale has taken on an incredible multiplicity of meanings. Over the course of the novel, he makes use of nearly every discipline known to man in his attempts to understand the essential nature of the whale. Each of these systems of knowledge, however, including art, taxonomy, and phrenology, fails to give an adequate account. The multiplicity of approaches that Ishmael takes, coupled with his compulsive need to assert his authority as a narrator and the frequent references to the limits of observation (men cannot see the depths of the ocean, for example), suggest that human knowledge is always limited and insufficient. When it comes to Moby Dick himself, this limitation takes on allegorical significance.

The ways of Moby Dick, like those of the Christian God, are unknowable to man, and thus trying to interpret them, as Ahab does, is inevitably futile and often fatal. The Deceptiveness of Fate In addition to highlighting many portentous or foreshadowing events, Ishmael’s narrative contains many references to fate, creating the impression that the Pequod’s doom is inevitable. Many of the sailors believe in prophecies, and some even claim the ability to foretell the future. A number of things suggest, however, that characters are actually deluding themselves when they think that they see the work of fate and that fate either doesn’t exist or is one of the many forces about which human beings can have no distinct knowledge. Ahab, for example, clearly exploits the sailors’ belief in fate to manipulate them into thinking that the quest for Moby Dick is their common destiny. Moreover, the prophesies of Fedallah and others seem to be undercut in Chapter 99, when various individuals interpret the doubloon in different ways, demonstrating that humans project what they want to see when they try to interpret signs and portents.

The Exploitative Nature of Whaling At first glance, the Pequod seems like an island of equality and fellowship in the midst of a racist, hierarchically structured world. The ship’s crew includes men from all corners of the globe and all races who seem to get along harmoniously. Ishmael is initially uneasy upon meeting Queequeg, but he quickly realizes that it is better to have a “sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” for a shipmate. Additionally, the conditions of work aboard the Pequod promote a certain kind of egalitarianism, since men are promoted and paid according to their skill. However, the work of whaling parallels the other exploitative activities—buffalo hunting, gold mining, unfair trade with indigenous peoples—that characterize American and European territorial expansion. Each of the Pequod’s mates, who are white, is entirely dependent on a nonwhite harpooner, and nonwhites perform most of the dirty or dangerous jobs aboard the ship. Flask actually stands on Daggoo, his African harpooner, in order to beat the other mates to a prize whale.

Ahab is depicted as walking over the black youth Pip, who listens to Ahab’s pacing from below deck, and is thus reminded that his value as a slave is less than the value of a whale. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Whiteness Whiteness, to Ishmael, is horrible because it represents the unnatural and threatening: albinos, creatures that live in extreme and inhospitable environments, waves breaking against rocks. These examples reverse the traditional association of whiteness with purity. Whiteness conveys both a lack of meaning and an unreadable excess of meaning that confounds individuals. Moby Dick is the pinnacle of whiteness, and Melville’s characters cannot objectively understand the White Whale. Ahab, for instance, believes that Moby Dick represents evil, while Ishmael fails in his attempts to determine scientifically the whale’s fundamental nature. Surfaces and Depths Ishmael frequently bemoans the impossibility of examining anything in its entirety, noting that only the surfaces of objects and environments are available to the human observer.

On a live whale, for example, only the outer layer presents itself; on a dead whale, it is impossible to determine what constitutes the whale’s skin, or which part—skeleton, blubber, head—offers the best understanding of the entire animal. Moreover, as the whale swims, it hides much of its body underwater, away from the human gaze, and no one knows where it goes or what it does. The sea itself is the greatest frustration in this regard: its depths are mysterious and inaccessible to Ishmael. This motif represents the larger problem of the limitations of human knowledge. Humankind is not all-seeing; we can only observe, and thus only acquire knowledge about, that fraction of entities—both individuals and environments—to which we have access: surfaces. Symbols

Question: What is the name of the whaleship in Melville's novel Moby Dick?
Answer: Pequod