In his imagination Melville lived as well as wrote Moby Dick, his great epic of whales and whaling. It tells the story of Ahab, Captain of the Pequod, and of his revenge-mission and insane pursuit of Moby Dick, the fierce white whale. Among Ahab's crew is Ishmael, a young man undergoing a gruelling rite of passage and pursuing a different salvation. As the Pequod circles the globe like a latter-day Noah's Ark, so Moby Dick ranges and digresses through space and time, through mythologies, religions and philosophies. It is Melville's great 'romance of adventure' and one of the greatest novels of all time.