Pequod (Moby-Dick) the ship's affairs to these two." Peleg served as first mate under Ahab on "Pequod" before obtaining his own command, and is responsible for all her whalebone embellishments. The depiction of life aboard the ship was based on Melville's own experiences in whaling (specifically aboard the "Acushnet" in the 1840s) and thus can be taken in many ways as representative of mid-19th-century Nantucket whaling. 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,
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