The Pequod — a crew from everywhere, bound for one end.
The Pequod carries a crew from everywhere — Nantucket Quakers at the top, Polynesian, Wampanoag, and African harpooners in the boats, Manxmen, Spaniards, Maltese, Tahitians, and Long Islanders below. The ship is named after a New England Native nation the Puritans had massacred two centuries earlier. Almost everyone aboard is dead by the final page.
The monomaniac. His monomania — revenge on the white whale who took his leg — converts the entire apparatus of a whaling ship into a personal weapon. Nantucket Quaker, long-experienced master. Has a scar running down one side of his face that may go from crown to sole. Has a leg of carved whalebone. Dies in the three-day chase when the line of his own harpoon catches him round the neck.
The moral voice. A man of courage in his own line of business — "no fearless fool" — but unable to override Ahab's authority. In Chapter 132, The Symphony, Ahab has his most human conversation of the voyage with Starbuck, almost relenting. He does not. The following morning the chase begins.
Cape Cod man, second mate, the novel's easy-going foil to Starbuck's gravity and Ahab's obsession. Smokes a pipe constantly; kills whales professionally and without philosophical trouble. His whale-steak supper in Chapter 64, cooked at midnight while the crew processes the whale alongside the ship, is one of the novel's great comic sequences.
Martha's Vineyard man, third mate. The most literal of the three officers — to Flask, a whale is a fat chance for oil and a bonus, nothing more, nothing metaphysical. He rides on Daggoo's shoulders during hunts so he can see over the waves. He dies with the ship.
Prince of Kokovoko, harpooner to Starbuck's boat. Tattooed from head to foot with a pattern that Ishmael reads as a kind of cosmological treatise. Religiously serious in private, in ways Melville treats with a respect almost no non-Christian received in nineteenth-century American fiction. His coffin saves Ishmael.
Wampanoag Indian from Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, harpooner to Stubb's boat. In the closing paragraph of the novel, Tashtego is still nailing the Pequod's flag to the mainmast as the ship sinks under him — a hawk caught by the hammer he is swinging, dragged down with the mast.
Enormous African harpooner, Flask's boat. Flask stands on his shoulders to see over the waves during whale hunts — a detail Melville describes without comment. Daggoo has been at sea since boyhood; he has no land-address anywhere.
The narrator. Gives the reader his alias on the first line. Ships as a green hand — the lowest rank, for no wages, only a lay (a fraction of the voyage's oil profits). His voice shifts register throughout the book, from lyrical to mock-scholarly to frightened, and this instability is part of Melville's point about who we trust to tell us things.
The white sperm whale. Appears in person only in Chapters 133-135. Before that he is rumour, legend, reported sightings, and the subject of Ishmael's long meditation in Chapter 41. The novel refuses to say what he means. He swims away from the wreckage of the Pequod at the end.
The cabin boy who falls overboard and is left alone in the open Pacific while the boat pursues a whale. Recovered but broken. Speaks in fragments after. Ahab adopts him as a companion in the closing chapters, and the relationship is the novel's most tender.
The Parsee (Persian Zoroastrian) harpooner whom Ahab has smuggled aboard the Pequod as part of his own private boat crew, concealed until the first lowering. Prophesies to Ahab that he will die in ways that seem impossible — and that turn out, in the closing chase, to be exactly what happens.
Introduced in Chapter 3 as a large, deep-browed sailor who has just returned from a four-year voyage and signs onto the Pequod the following day. Given a farewell elegy in Chapter 23 and then never mentioned again. Melville seems to have had plans for him and changed them.