List of Moby-Dick characters
The title character is a giant, largely white bull sperm whale and arguably the main antagonist of the novel.
Peleg served as first mate under Ahab on the Pequod before obtaining his own command, and is responsible for all her whalebone embellishment.
Chapter 40, "Midnight, Forecastle," highlights, in its play manner (in Shakespearean style), the striking variety in the sailors' origins.
A partial list of the speakers includes sailors from the Isle of Man, France, Iceland, the Netherlands, the Azores (Portugal), Sicily, Malta, China, Chile, Denmark, India, England, Spain, and Ireland.
Although in fact 44 members of the crew are mentioned, in the final chapters Melville writes three times that there are 30 crewmembers.
Such is his desire to return to them that, when nearly reaching the last leg of their quest for Moby Dick, he considers arresting or even killing Ahab with a loaded musket, and turning the ship back for home.
Starbuck is alone among the crew in objecting to Ahab's quest, declaring it madness to want revenge on an animal, which lacks reason; such a desire is blasphemous to his Quaker religion.
"Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests" (Moby-Dick, Ch.
Although he is not an educated man, Stubb is remarkably articulate, and during whale hunts keeps up an imaginative patter reminiscent of that of some characters in Shakespeare.
Flask is nicknamed "King-Post" by the crew, as his physical stature reminds them of this short, strong timber that is often used to brace ships and structures.
This prophecy later comes true in the final chapter, when a harpoon rope wraps around Ahab's neck and drags him into the sea, leading to his death by drowning.
The first time out, Pip jumps from the boat, causing Stubb and Tashtego to lose their already-harpooned whale.
Tashtego and the rest of the crew are furious; Stubb chides him "officially" and "unofficially", even raising the specter of slavery: "A whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama".
Pip and his experience are crucial because they serve as foreshadowing, in Ishmael's words, "providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own".
Bulkington is a handsome, popular mariner whom Ishmael encounters briefly at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford (Chapter 3), when he has just returned from a four year long voyage.
Stubb good-humoredly takes him to task on how to prepare a variety of dishes from the whale's carcass, then has him preach an admonishing sermon to the sharks gorging themselves on its blubber.
Ahab has Perth forge a special harpoon that he carries into the final confrontation with Moby Dick.
After Ahab's prosthetic leg is damaged, he has the carpenter fashion a replacement from the sections of whalebone in storage, then calls on Perth to forge a set of fittings for it.
Like Ahab, he has replaced the missing limb with a prosthesis made of sperm whale bone, in his case a mallet.
For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints.Boomer jokingly tells a long yarn about the loss of his arm; this attitude, coupled with a lack of urgency in telling where he sighted Moby Dick, infuriates Ahab, leading Boomer to query, "Is your captain crazy?"
Ahab immediately quits the Enderby and is so hasty in his return to the Pequod that he cracks and splinters his whalebone leg, then further damages it in admonishing the helmsman.
Derick de Deer is a German captain in command of the whaling ship Jungfrau (Virgin).
De Deer is last seen pursuing a fin whale, according to Melville too swift a swimmer to be captured by 19th-century whalers.
