Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is Herman Melville's epic novel of the whaler Pequod and its captain, Ahab, who hunts across the oceans the white whale that took off his leg. Narrated by a young sailor who calls himself Ishmael, it mixes adventure, encyclopedic chapters on whales and whaling, drama and philosophical meditation. A failure in its time, it is now counted among the greatest American novels.
The story
Ishmael goes to sea on a whaling voyage from Nantucket, together with Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Seas who becomes his close friend. Once at sea, Captain Ahab reveals his true aim: to find and kill Moby Dick, a huge white sperm whale, and nails a gold coin to the mast as a reward for the first man to sight it.
Despite the warnings of his first mate, Starbuck, Ahab drives the ship across the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The final chase lasts three days and ends in catastrophe for the Pequod and her crew.
A sailor's experience
Melville himself sailed in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, deserted in the Marquesas Islands and spent several years in the Pacific, experiences he used in his first novels. He drew too on whaling histories and on accounts of real attacks by sperm whales.
He wrote the book in 1850–51 at Arrowhead, his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the novel is dedicated. What began as a whaling adventure grew into a vast, ambitious work.
From failure to masterpiece
The novel was published in London in October 1851 as The Whale, in three volumes, and a month later in New York as Moby-Dick. Reviews were mixed and sales poor; Melville's literary career declined and he spent many years as a customs inspector in New York.
In the 1920s, after the centenary of his birth, critics rediscovered Melville and Moby-Dick came to be seen as a great American epic. It has been adapted for the cinema, notably by John Huston in 1956 with Gregory Peck as Ahab.
Anecdotes
A narrator who drowned
The London edition left out the Epilogue, which explains how Ishmael survived the shipwreck. Some British reviewers therefore complained that the book was told by a narrator who could not have lived to tell the tale.
A coffee named after the first mate
When three friends founded a coffee shop in Seattle in 1971, they chose a name taken from the novel, that of the Pequod's first mate, Starbuck. The company's logo, a twin-tailed siren, also recalls the sea.
Frequently asked questions
Is Moby-Dick based on a true story?
Partly. Melville drew on the sinking of the whaler Essex by a sperm whale in 1820 and on stories of a fierce albino whale known as Mocha Dick.
Who is Moby Dick?
A huge white sperm whale that took off Captain Ahab's leg on a previous voyage, and which Ahab is determined to kill.
When was Moby-Dick published?
In October 1851 in London, as The Whale, and in November 1851 in New York, as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.