'The frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain'... The crew of the whaling ship the Pequod is bound by its Captain Ahab to a single, bloody goal: the killing of the whale Moby-Dick, the giant albino that has taken his leg and on which he has sworn vengeance. Driven, perhaps doomed, by his dangerous monomania, they sail in pursuit of the monster. Moby-Dick is the greatest novel of the sea ever written and one of the most expansive feats of imagination in fiction. Melville unforgettably crews the Pequod, and at the book's mad, raging heart, Ahab's quest for the white whale is one of the most powerful symbols in literature.