Captain Ahab Captain Ahab Captain Ahab is a fictional character and the main protagonist in Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (1851). He is the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship "Pequod". On a previous voyage, the white whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab's leg, and he now wears a prosthetic leg made out of whalebone. The whaling voyage of the "Pequod" ends up as a hunt for revenge on the whale, as Ahab forces the crew members to support his fanatical mission. When Moby Dick is finally sighted, Ahab's hatred robs him of all caution, and the whale drags Ahab to the bottom of
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