The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket fleet of warships, of a sailor's corpse at sea on the North Atlantic "off Madaket" (which is a harbor on Nantucket Island) and its reburial with military honours, ending with the gun salute. It also makes the first reference to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, specifically to the fictional character Captain Ahab. Throughout the poem, Lowell uses the fate of the fictional Pequod, the whaling ship in Moby Dick, as a metaphor for the fate of Warren Winslow and his fellow Navy crewmen of the "Turner" during World War II. Section II introduces the Quaker graveyard in Nantucket and Lowell's cousin, and
Anti-whaling best way to conduct a subsistence hunt was to employ a single modern whaling ship, the "Zevezdny", to catch whales on behalf of the Siberian native people. Instead of the average 10 to 30 whales historically claimed in one year, after 1955 the quota rose to nearly 200 gray whales and international observers were not permitted. On August 9, 1981, Paul Watson led a new crew, aboard the "Sea Shepherd II", from Nome, Alaska into the territorial waters of the Soviet Union. When the activists arrived at the Soviet whaling station village of Loren they quickly discovered that the whaling