Walk Moby-Dick, Nantucket to the Pacific

Three oceans after one whale

Ishmael signs aboard a whaling ship with a captain who has no intention of returning full of oil. A global hunt across three oceans, bound to a madman's vengeance. Melville knew the route; he sailed it himself on the Acushnet a decade before he wrote it down.

The Pequod sails from Nantucket in winter, crosses the Atlantic, rounds the Cape of Good Hope and runs east across the Indian Ocean. It passes through the Sunda Strait into the Pacific, weathers a typhoon off Japan, and finds the whale at last on the equator. It is one of the longest routes in the library, and the ship keeps meeting other whalers along the way, each asked the same question.

Melville knew the route because he had sailed it. In 1841 he shipped out on the whaler Acushnet, a decade before he wrote the book. He gives no distances, so the 17,500 miles here are an estimate of the Pequod's track across the real oceans. It is a long book and a long walk, and Bematist lets you set the pace.