Introduction

'Call me Ishmael.' Whenever he grows gloomy, the young Ishmael feels he must go to sea. He befriends Queequeg, a tattooed harpooneer from the South Seas, and the two sign on the whaler Pequod. Her captain, Ahab, lost a leg to a huge white sperm whale called Moby Dick, wears a leg of whalebone, and burns for revenge. Once the ship is at sea he nails a gold doubloon to the mast and declares that whoever first sights the white whale shall have it. The Pequod pursues the whale across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean into the Pacific, and after a final three-day battle ship and crew are destroyed; only Ishmael survives. The story is interwoven with a wealth of knowledge about whales, whaling and the sea, and with meditations philosophical and theological. Coldly received in Melville's lifetime, it is now acknowledged as one of the greatest of American novels. The work is translated in several volumes.