Feeling alienated from everyday life, Ishmael decides to leave the city behind and sign up for a whaling voyage.

Looking for a room in New Bedford, Ishmael meets and befriends a heavily tattooed harpooner named Queequeg.

Ishmael visits the Pequod in Nantucket and signs on with owners Peleg and Bildad for a whaling voyage.

The Pequod sets sail from Nantucket on Christmas Day with Captain Ahab nowhere to be seen on deck.

After days at sea, the scarred, grey-haired Captain Ahab finally appears on the Pequod's quarterdeck for the first time.

Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mainmast and rallies the crew to hunt the white whale Moby Dick.

Ahab passes grog to every man and demands the crew cross harpoons, binding themselves in a sworn oath to kill Moby Dick.

When the first whale school is sighted, Ahab appears on deck with five previously hidden crewmen led by the mysterious Fedallah.

The Pequod's first lowering after a whale ends in failure when the boat is swamped and the whale escapes.

Stubb chases down a sperm whale and kills it with repeated lance stabs, securing the Pequod's first successful catch.

Pip falls overboard a second time and is left alone in the vast ocean, suffering a devastating mental breakdown.

Ahab orders the blacksmith to forge a special harpoon and baptizes it with the blood of his three harpooners.

The captain of the Rachel boards the Pequod and begs Ahab to help search for his lost son; Ahab refuses.

Ahab spots Moby Dick from the masthead before any other crewman and claims the doubloon reward for himself.

On the third day of the chase, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod and Ahab dies entangled in his own harpoon line.

Ishmael, restless and alienated, signs onto the whaling vessel Pequod alongside his new friend Queequeg and departs Nantucket on a three-year mission. After days at sea, the brooding Captain Ahab finally reveals himself and announces that the ship's true purpose is personal revenge against Moby Dick, the white whale that took his leg. The crew swears a blood oath to hunt the whale, while Ahab's secret stowaway crew emerges to ensure he personally delivers the killing blow. As the voyage progresses through successful hunts and ominous encounters with other ships, Ahab's obsession overrides every practical concern. In the final three-day chase, Moby Dick proves utterly unstoppable, destroying the Pequod and killing Ahab. Only Ishmael survives to tell the story.

The essential voyage of the Pequod from departure to destruction.

At the Whalemen's Chapel in New Bedford, Father Mapple delivers a sermon on Jonah's spiritual rebirth inside the whale.

Ishmael and Queequeg share a pipe at the Spouter Inn and declare themselves bosom friends, with Queequeg gifting half his money.

In bed at the inn, Queequeg tells Ishmael how he left his Polynesian island kingdom to become a harpooner.

On the schooner to Nantucket, Queequeg rescues a greenhorn who had mocked him after the man is pitched overboard.

On the wharf near the Pequod, a disfigured prophet named Elijah warns Ishmael and Queequeg cryptically about Captain Ahab.

Ishmael is surprised to find Bulkington, a rough sailor last seen at the Spouter Inn, already signed onto the Pequod.

Stubb confronts Ahab directly about the noise his peg leg makes pacing the deck at night; Ahab responds with fury.

Ahab smokes his pipe alone on deck but finds it no longer soothes him and throws it overboard into the sea.

The Pequod meets the Town-Ho and learns in secret that Moby Dick devoured a sailor named Radney during a near-mutiny.

The Pequod races the German ship Jungfrau to harpoon a large slow bull whale, winning the kill before the whale sinks.

Stubb tricks the French ship Rose-bud into releasing a rotting whale carcass and secretly retrieves a fortune in ambergris from it.

Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby reveals a prosthetic whalebone arm lost to Moby Dick and refuses to hunt the whale again.

Queequeg falls gravely ill, requests a burial canoe from the carpenter, then unexpectedly recovers and keeps the coffin as a chest.

Ahab smashes his navigational quadrant underfoot in a rage, declaring he will steer only by his own inner fire.

The Pequod passes the battered Delight, which lost five men to Moby Dick; its captain mocks the Pequod's coffin life buoy.

Before boarding the Pequod, Ishmael bonds deeply with Queequeg and attends a prophetic sermon on Jonah, receiving a dark warning from the mysterious prophet Elijah about Captain Ahab. As the ship departs, early signs of Ahab's dangerous temperament emerge in his furious treatment of Stubb and his gloomy abandonment of his pipe. The Pequod crosses paths with several other whaleships, each carrying its own cautionary tale of Moby Dick's power, while side adventures involving a German rival ship and a deceptive French whaler add dark comedy to the journey. Aboard ship, strange incidents multiply — Queequeg's near-fatal illness, Ahab's destruction of his own navigational instruments, and the grim spectacle of the wrecked Delight. These secondary events collectively map the voyage's descent from routine whaling to unavoidable catastrophe.

The people, encounters, and episodes that shaped the voyage.

As a young man, Queequeg stows aboard a departing whaleship by grabbing its deck railing and refusing to let go until accepted.

Queequeg earns a generous ninetieth lay on the Pequod by hurling a harpoon to strike a small tar spot at great distance.

After declaring the hunt for Moby Dick, Ahab broods alone at sunset that his soul is grooved to run on iron rails toward revenge.

Starbuck watches the crew revel below deck and fears his practical courage will not hold against the spiritual trials Ahab will demand.

Two crewmen on night watch hear suspicious sounds of human movement beneath the hatches, strongly suggesting stowaways are hidden on board.

Ahab's hidden crewmen, including the unsettling Fedallah, emerge onto the Pequod's deck for the first time when a whale school is spotted.

A self-declared archangel named Gabriel on the Jeroboam warns the Pequod's crew that Moby Dick is a divine being not to be hunted.

Tashtego slips and falls headfirst into a sperm whale's oily head case; Queequeg dives into the sinking mass and pulls him free.

Departing the Samuel Enderby, Ahab's peg leg splinters and nearly pierces his groin, forcing him to retreat and hide in his cabin.

Fedallah tells Ahab of a prophetic dream: Ahab will not receive a conventional funeral, and Fedallah himself will die before Ahab does.

A typhoon tears through the Pequod and three glowing balls of lightning appear on the masts; Ahab raises his harpoon and defies fate.

Finding loaded muskets in Ahab's cabin, Starbuck seriously weighs killing Ahab to save the entire crew before placing the gun back on the rack.

On the second day of the chase, Fedallah is swept overboard during the chaos of battle and lost at sea.

On the third day, Ahab sees Fedallah's corpse tangled in Moby Dick's ropes and recognizes it as the prophesied first hearse.

Ishmael alone survives the Pequod's wreck by clinging to Queequeg's sealed coffin until the searching ship Rachel rescues him.

Queequeg's remarkable origin story establishes the novel's theme of bold individuals seizing their own destinies against all odds. Once at sea, Ahab's private soliloquies and Starbuck's private fears reveal the deep spiritual tension at the heart of the ship's mission. The emergence of Fedallah and his hidden crewmen introduces a supernatural undercurrent that escalates through increasingly ominous encounters, including a narrow rescue from inside a whale's head and a terrifying lightning storm. Fedallah's prophecy about the manner of Ahab's death gradually closes off every avenue of escape as the ship's instruments fail one by one. The prophecy begins to fulfill itself during the final chase when Fedallah's corpse is spotted entangled in Moby Dick's ropes. In the end, Ishmael alone escapes destruction, saved by the very coffin Queequeg had built for his own death.