In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab's whaling ship is the Pequod.
The Pequod is a fictional Nantucket whaler that carries Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, and the rest of the crew on a three-year voyage. Ishmael chooses the ship after arriving in Nantucket and inspecting vessels preparing to sail.
Although the voyage begins as a commercial hunt for whales, Ahab secretly turns it into a personal campaign against Moby Dick, the white whale that previously injured him. His obsession gradually overrides ordinary seamanship and the safety of his crew. The ship therefore becomes more than a setting: it is the center of the novel's themes of fate, authority, revenge, and dangerous monomania.
A common mix-up is confusing the Pequod with Moby Dick. The Pequod is the ship; Moby Dick is the whale. The ship's name also recalls the Pequot people, whose historical name Melville adapted for the novel.