The sailor Ishmael gets employed at the whaling ship The Pequod, which is steered by the eccentric captain Ahab. The captain is obsessed with the giant white whale Moby Dick and his mad hunt on the dangerous animal brings all the crew's lives in danger.
Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American author whose books were based on his own experiences as a sailor. Today Herman Melville is world famous for his novel "Moby Dick" but in his time the novel was ill received and quickly forgotten. Not until many years after Herman Melville's death did "Moby Dick" get rediscovered and today it is considered one of the greatest classics in American literature.
The young adventurous sailors, Tommo and Toby, abandon ship and flee into the jungle of an island in French Polynesia. But their feelings of victory will be short-lived. Because they are about to run straight into the hands of the Typee, the most feared of the battling cannibal tribes. Inspired by his own adventures, twenty-five-year-old Herman Melville wrote `Typee' (1846) as a blend of creative memoir, cultural commentary, and good story-telling. He would later tell his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of `The Scarlet Letter') that "from my twenty-fifth year I date my life". Despite being mostly recognized, today, as the author of the classic novel, `Moby Dick', `Typee' was Melville's best-selling novel in his life-time.
