The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850, and finished 18 months later, a year longer than he had anticipated. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, dick cake several years on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title in a single-volume edition in New York in November.
Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change to the title for the New York edition. This section’s plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage. When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck, he announces he is out for revenge on the white whale which took one leg from the knee down and left him with a prosthesis fashioned from a whale’s jawbone.
Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin, which he nails to the mast. Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into the sea before he can answer. Daggoo mistook a giant squid for the white whale—whale-lines. Fleece, at Stubb’s request, delivers a sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale’s carcass, tied to the ship, saying that their nature is to be voracious, but they must overcome it.
The whale is prepared, beheaded, and barrels of oil are tried out. Standing at the head of the whale, Ahab begs it to speak of the depths of the sea. The whale carcass still lies in the water. Queequeg mounts it, tied to Ishmael’s belt by a monkey-rope as if they were Siamese twins. Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to a yardarm opposite the sperm whale’s head. The Pequod next gams with the Jungfrau from Bremen.
Both ships sight whales simultaneously, with the Pequod winning the contest. The three harpooneers dart their harpoons, and Flask delivers the mortal strike with a lance. The carcass sinks, and Queequeg barely manages to escape. French whaler Bouton de Rose, whose crew is ignorant of the ambergris in the gut of the diseased whale in their possession. Stubb talks them out of it, but Ahab orders him away before he can recover more than a few handfuls.