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 met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection "Mosses from an Old Manse" titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in "The Literary World" on August 17 and 24. Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing "Moby-Dick"" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading". In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two