Ishmael (Moby-Dick) morning Ishmael and Queequeg head for Nantucket. Ishmael signs up for a voyage on the whaler "Pequod", under Captain Ahab. Ahab is obsessed by the white whale, Moby Dick, who on a previous voyage has severed his leg. In his quest for revenge Ahab has lost all sense of responsibility, and when the whale sinks the ship, all crewmembers drown, with the exception of Ishmael: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” (Job) says the epigraph. Ishmael keeps himself afloat on a coffin until he is picked up by another whaling ship, the "Rachel". The name Ishmael is
Nantucket (ship) South American ports and people, as well as accounts of social encounters with other whaling wives. "Almira went a-whaling with no romantic illusions at all -- which was lucky, as the old ship was slow and uncomfortable. "I can hardly walk about, I fetch up sometimes where I start for and sometimes somewhere else," she wrote in June 1857. Captain John Deblois, the man rescued by Richard Gibbs after his ship "Ann Alexander" was sunk by a whale, carried his wife, Henrietta, on the whaling ship "Merlin", and in May 1858 she and Almira Gibbs met in one of the