Which whaling ship did Herman Melville sail on in 1841?

The whaling ship Herman Melville sailed on in 1841 was the Acushnet.

Melville joined the Acushnet as a “green hand,” or inexperienced ordinary sailor, after traveling to New Bedford to seek a whaling voyage. The ship left port on January 3, 1841, beginning the seafaring experiences that later informed several of Melville’s books, especially Moby-Dick.

The Acushnet was a real vessel, unlike the Pequod, which is the fictional Nantucket whaler commanded by Captain Ahab. Melville’s voyage took him around Cape Horn and through the Pacific whaling grounds. He encountered other whalers, observed the labor of hunting and processing sperm whales, and later drew on those memories for his fiction.

The voyage also connected Melville to the story of the whaleship Essex. During a mid-ocean meeting with another vessel, William Henry Chase gave him an account of the Essex disaster, in which a sperm whale sank the ship in 1820. That experience and reading helped shape Moby-Dick’s maritime world, though the novel is not a straightforward autobiography.