![]() ![]() was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.Īnd on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. ![]()
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