Tuesday, April 3, 2018
7-8:30 pm
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville — sailor Ishmael’s account of the obsessive quest for vengeance of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, on the white whale Moby Dick that on the ship’s previous whaling voyage bit off Ahab’s leg at the knee. The basis for the work is Melville’s 1841 whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet. Additionally,the novel draws on whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The white whale is modeled on the notoriously hard to catch actual albino whale Mocha Dick, and the ending is based on the sinking of the whaler Essex by a whale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick
Quakers first moved to Nantucket and the New England shores in the 1650s to avoid persecution in England. In 1690 a Quaker from Cape Cod, Ichabod Padduck, went to Nantucket Island to instruct the islanders in the methods of whaling. Thus began some 150 years of industrial scale whaling by Quakers on Nantucket Island and the adjacent Massachusetts town of New Bedford. Vast fortunes were made as whale ships ranged the whaling grounds from the South Atlantic to Greenland, and from the coast of Chile to the South Seas. Their target was the sperm whale whose oil and spermaceti fetched high prices in the growing industrial centres of America and Europe.
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/198/Quakers-and-Whaling-
The ship owners are Quaker. The chief mate is Quaker.
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