Mocha Dick
I happened to flip through one of the books in the reserve collection that was about the real-life sperm whale that was the inspiration for the Moby Dick whale. “Mocha Dick”, a huge pale sperm whale that attacked multiple whaling ships, was around during Melville’s time period and had a notorious reputation among American and European whalers. The whale was known for chasing whaling ships off of other dead whale’s bodies, as well as for smashing multiple whaling ships, sometimes seemingly unprovoked. The whale was finally killed when it was too old to fight back, and it was found to have nineteen old harpoons in its side from past fights with whalers.
What I did not know, and what I found most interesting, was that Mocha Dick had an encounter with three European whaling ships during which one of the European captains made a vow to hunt Mocha Dick down, even at the expense of his ship and crew. That same captain ended up empty handed, with a broken ship and several lost crew members when Mocha Dick proved to be too much for the three ships. I thought that this was an interesting insight into the “actual” backstory of the killer sperm whale that Melville would have heard sailors’ stories of.
I think this is so fascinating! I’m always interested in where authors get their inspiration from, and I think discoveries like this allow us as readers to do detective work and uncover possible sources of influence for historical authors like Herman Melville. The similarity in names of both the real and fictitious whale that you described is uncanny. Even the story of Mocha Dick feels as if it could mirror the story of Moby Dick as we continue on in our reading. I think it is highly possibly that Melville had knowledge of this infamous story and could have used it in some way as inspiration for his own novel.
That is interesting and it seems very plausible that Melville got some inspiration from the writings on Mocha Dick. To me the idea of Melville getting his ideas from elsewhere however seems to make the book a little bit less iconic in my eyes. But I guess we can’t know for sure whether they were his own ideas or not.