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 contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in "Moby-Dick". The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's "The Whale and His Captors" (1850), was used for two episodes in "Moby-Dick" but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use. Melville did plunder a fifth book, William Scoresby, Jr., "An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery" (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication, Melville satirized and