Pequod (Fictitious Whaleship in Moby Dick) 1851

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The Pequod is a fictitious 19th century Nantucket whaleship that appears in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by American author Herman Melville. The Pequod and her crew, commanded by Captain Ahab, are central to the story, which, after the initial chapters, takes place almost entirely aboard the ship during a long three-year whaling expedition in the Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific oceans. Most of the characters in the novel are part of the Pequod's crew, including the narrator Ishmael.

The ship is first encountered by Ishmael after he arrives in Nantucket and learns of three ships that are about to leave on three-year cruises. Tasked by his new friend the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg - or more precisely, Queequeg's idol-god, Yojo - to make the selection for them both, Ishmael, a self-described "green hand at whaling" goes to the Straight Wharf and chooses the Pequod.

It is revealed that the Pequod was named for the Algonquian-speaking Pequot tribe of Native Americans. The Mashantucket (Western Pequot tribe) and Eastern Pequot tribe still inhabit their reservation in Connecticut.

The Pequod has endured the years and the elements, but not without sustaining damage. The ship is three-masted, like most Nantucket whalers of the time, but all three masts are replacements, taken on when the originals were lost in a typhoon off Japan.

The Pequod is not unlike Ahab in this respect, since many of the rest of these missing elements have been replaced by the bones of the whales she hunts. She is not a new vessel, and with age would usually come some veneration and respect, which Ishmael tries to convey by using several historical references in his description of her. But in the Pequod's case this has been negated by the thick veneer of barbarity that has been overlaid onto the ship in the form of fantastic scrimshaw embellishment. Far from enjoying mere utilitarian replacements out of available whalebone, she has been ornately decorated, even to the whale teeth set into the railing that now resemble an open jaw. Like a fingerbone necklace on a cannibal, these adornments are clear evidence of the Pequod's prowess as a successful hunter and killer of whales.

Uruguay 2001, S.G.2687, Scott: 1912.

Source: Wikipedia.