Pequod (Moby-Dick)

Pequod
Captain	Captain Ahab
Type	Whaling ship

The Pequod is a fictional 19th-century Nantucket whaling ship that appears in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by American author Herman Melville. The Pequod and her crew, commanded by Captain Ahab, are central to the story, which, after the initial chapters, takes place almost entirely aboard the ship during a three-year whaling expedition in the Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific oceans. Most of the characters in the novel are part of the Pequod's crew, including the narrator Ishmael.

Ishmael encounters the ship after he arrives in Nantucket and learns of three ships that are about to leave on three-year cruises. Tasked by his new friend, the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg (or more precisely, Queequeg's idol-god, Yojo), to make the selection for them both, Ishmael, a self-described "green hand at whaling", goes to the Straight Wharf and chooses the Pequod.

It is revealed that the Pequod was named for the Algonquian-speaking Pequot tribe of Native Americans. The Mashantucket (Western Pequot tribe) and Eastern Pequot tribe still inhabit their reservation in Connecticut.

The Pequod has endured the years and the elements, but not without sustaining damage. The ship has a quarterdeck and a forecastle and is three-masted like most Nantucket whalers of the time, but all three masts are replacements, taken on when the originals were lost in a typhoon off Japan.

...
Wikipedia