Captain Ahab is a major character - arguably an antagonist - within Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick.
Character[]
The captain of the Pequod during Ishmael's narrative, Ahab lost his leg (which he had replaced with a whalebone prosthetic) after an encounter with the white whale Moby-Dick. Due to this, Ahab became extremely hateful towards the whale - with most of his time spent seeking out the whale for revenge. Ahab is a devout Quaker.
Ahab is described as looking "like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness" and being made of bronze and "shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus". In the same chapter, it is stated that Ahab has a scar that is said to "[Thread] its way out from among his grey hairs, and continu[e] right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappear[s] in his clothing, you [see] a slender rod like mark, lividly whitish. It resemble[s] that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it...leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded."[1]
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History[]
Presumably born in or around Nantucket, Ahab was named after the Biblical Ahab by his crazed widowed mother. Shortly after turning eighteen, Ahab first voyaged in the ocean as a harpooneer. On his fourth voyage, Ahab married a woman with whom he had a son. According to Captain Peleg, Ahab gained a college education alongside voyaging "among the cannibals" and saw "deeper wonders than the waves" during his sea-voyages.[2]
Peleg - a future co-owner of the Pequod - voyaged alongside Ahab (then captain of the Pequod) as a mate. While in the waters around Japan, the ship was caught in a typhoon. Though the crew thought the ship would be lost in the storm with all hands on deck, the captain and his mate saved their crew by making temporary masts and sailing into a port to repair their ship.[3] While rambling to Ishmael, Elijah (a former member of the Pequod's crew), states:
But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy.[4]
While off the waters of Japan, Ahab's leg was bitten off by a white whale known as Moby-Dick. Ahab had a prosthetic leg constructed out of the bones of a whale.
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