The Names Ahab and Ishmael in Early Massachusetts

Introduction—This note corrects an error in the comprehensive Explanatory Notes to Mansfield and Vincent’s scholarly centennial edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In their discussion of the novel’s opening lines and the narrator’s name Ishmael, Mansfield and Vincent write, ‘There is no instance of the name [Ishmael] in the Nantucket Vital records to 1850, just as, also understandably, there is no instance of Ahab’.¹ { ... }

¹ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York, 1952), 587.

{The full text of this paper is available from Oxford University Press. A preprint version is available on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN #2519287).}