A wandering sailor signs onto a Nantucket whaler and finds it commanded by a one-legged captain who has turned the whole voyage into a hunt for the white whale that took his leg. Around that obsession Melville builds something far stranger than a sea story — a whole encyclopedia of whales, ropes, and men, threaded with sermons, stage directions, and a narrator forever wandering off to think. It flopped in its own century and now reads as the great American novel: the story of a man who would rather drag his crew to the bottom than admit the sea owes him nothing.