Information AboutPequod (moby-dick) |
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Descriptions of the ship appear throughout the novel, with certain chapters devoted more specifically to the working of the ship and its crew. The depiction of life aboard the ship, although fictionalized, was based on Melville's own experiences in whaling (aboard the ''Achushnet'' in the 1840s ) and thus can be taken in man ways as representative of mid-19th century Nantucket whaling. The ship is obstensively named for the Algonquian -speaking Pequot tribe of Native Americans who inhabited New England along Long Island Sound during the 17th Century but who were annihilated during the Pequot War , "now extinct as the ancient Medes " (Ch. XVI). The reference to a doomed tribe highlights the fate of the ship and its crew in the novel. Melville somewhat based the story of the ship's ill-fated struggle with a Sperm Whale and its subsequent demise on that of the real-life Whaleship Essex . DEPICTIONS OF THE SHIP FROM THE NOVEL The ship is first encountered by Ishmael in Chapter XVI ("The Ship"), where Ishmael, after arriving in Nantucket with 's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia ." Her decks appear "ancient..worn and wrinkled , like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett (sic) bled." The ship is three-masted, like most Nantucket whalers of its day (and like the storm-tossed ship in the painting at the entrance of the Spouter Inn in New Bedford ). The three masts of the ship are recent replacements, having been cut somewhere on the coast of Japan after the previous ones were lost overboard in a Gale . The ship is owned by a partnership among the Quaker captains Ahab, Bildad, and Peleg, as well as numerous other unspecified citizens of Nantucket, in particular "widows and orphans". Peleg has served as First Mate for many years aboard her before obtaining his own command and later retiring from the sea. |
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