“THAR SHE BLOWS! Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s sprawling masterpiece, is the epic story of a whaling ship, the Pequod, in search of a white whale notorious for sinking whalers. The ship’s captain, Ahab, pursues his singular obsession to destroy Moby-Dick, who took his leg on a previous voyage, while the book’s narrator, Ishmael, provides keen observations of his monomaniacal captain, his crewmates, whaling, and cetology (the study of whales). Melville could write of life on a whaling boat with such rich detail because he had spent eighteen months aboard the Acushnet on a whaling voyage to the South Seas—where he jumped ship, spent time with alleged cannibals, participated in a failed mutiny, and escaped a Tahitian jail. In fact, Melville (1819–1891) was much better known during his lifetime for Typee and Omoo, two crowd-pleasing South Seas adventures based on his real-life experiences. Take this Moby-Dick quiz to see whether you’re an old salt like Ahab or a green hand like Ishmael.
1. What is the name of Ishmael’s bedfellow and the Pequod’s chief harpooner, a native of the fictitious Polynesian island Kokovoko?
2. What type of whale is Moby-Dick?
3. True or false: Moby-Dick was based on an actual white whale nicknamed “Mocha Dick.”
4. What town—the whaling port from which the Pequod departs in Melville’s novel—holds a Moby-Dick reading marathon every year?
5. What American science-fiction writer cowrote the screenplay for John Huston’s 1956 film version of Moby-Dick?
ANSWERS
1. Queequeg.
2. A sperm whale—the only whale type known to have deliberately sunk ships.
3. True. Mocha Dick was a massive white sperm whale who roamed off the coast of Chile in the mid-nineteenth century and who had a reputation for destroying boats.
4. New Bedford, Massachusetts. The marathon lasts about twenty-five hours!
5. Ray Bradbury of Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 fame.