A schoolmaster ships out of Nantucket on a whaler whose captain is hunting one particular white whale, and the voyage turns into an account of everything: how a whale is cut up, what the ropes are called, what the colour white means, and what a man owes the thing that maimed him. Melville had served on a whaler himself and jumped ship in the Marquesas. It sold badly, went out of print, and was rediscovered seventy years later. Ninety-nine plates of sea painting from 1760 to 1880, including Turner and Joseph Vernet, run through the book like the water the Pequod sails.
