Moby-Dick

Ishmael signs aboard the whaler Pequod out of Nantucket and is swept into Captain Ahab's monomaniac hunt for the white whale that took his leg, a voyage across the world's oceans toward annihilation. Melville roots the epic in the real whaling world of New England: the port of New Bedford where Ishmael meets Queequeg, the island of Nantucket where the Pequod sails, and the far Pacific grounds where the White Whale at last is found.

Ishmael

New Bedford

The Spouter-Inn

In the whaling town of New Bedford, Ishmael takes a room at the Spouter-Inn and strikes up his strange, deep friendship with the tattooed cannibal harpooner Queequeg. Melville opens on land, in the real capital of American whaling, before ever setting foot on the water, grounding the coming myth in tar, chapels and the smell of the trade.

The opening chapters

explicit Ishmael begins at New Bedford, the real great whaling port of Massachusetts, where he shares a bed at the Spouter-Inn with the harpooner Queequeg; sited in the city.

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