Moby Dick (1998 miniseries) of Starbuck to stop chasing Moby Dick because the ship is operating at a loss and the quest for the sperm whale could end in everyone's death. Queequeg engages in passive resistance by completing refusing to do any work on the ship and throws down his harpoon. At the end, Ahab dies in his attempt to kill Moby Dick. The whaling ship sinks. Patrick Stewart took the lead role shortly after making a striking reference to the book, and quoting from it, in "". Gregory Peck appeared as Father Mapple more than 40 years after he played Ahab in the
Moby-Dick data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, "Natural History of the Sperm Whale" (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850. "In scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of [this source] to the composition of "Moby-Dick" surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is known to have drawn." According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings. Melville followed Beale's grouping