Moby Dick Coin Moby Dick Coin Known in the numismatic world as a "Moby Dick Coin", the Ecuadorian 8 Escudos doubloon, minted in Quito, Ecuador, between 1838 and 1843, is the one ounce of gold "sixteen dollar piece" Captain Ahab nails to the mast of the "Pequod", promising it to the first man who "raises" Moby-Dick. The coin is first mentioned in Herman Melville's novel "Moby-Dick", in Chapter 36 "The Quarter Deck" and later at length in Chapter 99 "The Doubloon". It is often confused as a Spanish doubloon, but this coin was not struck by the Spanish crown or endorsed by the
Moby-Dick mention of the composition of what became "Moby-Dick" is the final paragraph of the letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850: Some scholars have concluded that Melville composed "Moby-Dick" in two or even three stages. Reasoning from a series of inconsistencies and structural developments in the final version, they hypothesize that the work he mentioned to Dana was, in the words of Lawrence Buell, a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure, but that reading Shakespeare and his encounters with Hawthorne inspired him to rewrite it as "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions". Bezanson objects that the letter