Moby Dick (1956 film) eyes. The head apparatus which could move like a rocking horse was employed when actors were in the water with the whale. Gregory Peck's last speech is delivered in the studio while riding the white whale's hump (a hole was drilled in the side of the whale so Peck could conceal his real leg). The "Pequod" was portrayed by, appropriately, the "Moby Dick". Built in England in 1887 as the "Ryelands", the ship came into the hands of the film industry in the 50s, and was also used in "Treasure Island". It was destroyed by fire in Morecambe, England in
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