Personal Experiences influenced Moby Dick

Melville sailed on a whaler, and the book is made out of it. He shipped aboard the Acushnet out of Fairhaven in January 1841, spent eighteen months in the Pacific fishery, and jumped ship in the Marquesas. That is where the working detail comes from: the watches, the ranks, the boats, the mechanics of cutting in and trying out, the crew drawn from everywhere on earth. It is also where the anger comes from, since he wrote about the conditions aboard more than once and did not have to imagine them. He read Owen Chase's account of the sinking of the Essex at sea, and met Chase's son on another whaler in the Pacific. The two facts that the novel is built on reached him in person rather than in a library.