Pequod (Moby-Dick) Pequod (Moby-Dick) Pequod is a fictional 19th-century Nantucket whaling ship that appears in the 1851 novel "Moby-Dick" by American author Herman Melville. "Pequod" and her crew, commanded by Captain Ahab, are central to the story, which, after the initial chapters, takes place almost entirely aboard the ship during a three-year whaling expedition in the Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific oceans. Most of the characters in the novel are part of "Pequod"s crew, including the narrator Ishmael. Ishmael encounters the ship after he arrives in Nantucket and learns of three ships that are about to leave on three-year cruises. Tasked by
History of Basque whaling to be false. The Icelandic historian Trausti Einarsson (1987) has discovered that this was a reference to twenty "foreign" ships fishing off Iceland, as the English and other nations were fishing for cod there by the early 15th century. The first mention of Basque whaling in Iceland comes from the early 17th century. Two Icelandic annals state that Basques whalers were active around the Westfjords (the northwestern peninsula of Iceland) in 1610. A third annal says three Basque ships were whaling from Strandir in 1608, while another source says that a Spanish Basque ship was whaling around Strandir in 1613