The ship in “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” is named the Grampus. Arthur Gordon Pym secretly boards the whaling vessel after his friend Augustus Barnard helps prepare a hiding place in the hold.
The Grampus is commanded by Augustus’s father and is bound for the southern seas. Pym’s stowaway adventure quickly becomes dangerous: a mutiny breaks out, supplies fail to reach him, and he nearly dies in the cramped, airless hold before Augustus reveals what has happened.
Pym, Augustus, and the sailor Dirk Peters eventually help reclaim the ship. The battered vessel then suffers further storms, flooding, and the loss of provisions. Starvation forces the survivors into one of the novel’s most notorious episodes, in which Richard Parker is selected by lot and killed for food.
Later, Pym and Peters are rescued by the Jane Guy, another important ship in the novel. That detail creates a common mix-up: the Grampus is Pym’s initial whaling vessel, while the Jane Guy carries him farther toward the Antarctic regions.