throwing his pipe overboard and giving his shaving razors to the ship's blacksmith for use in forging a special harpoon he intends to use against Moby Dick. When the whale is eventually sighted, a disastrous three-day chase begins. Ahab throws his harpoon and hits Moby Dick, but its line wraps around his neck and drags him off his boat when the whale dives, drowning him. Peleg refers to Ahab respectfully as a "grand, ungodly, god-like man" but he is also nicknamed "Old Thunder". Concept and creation According to Melville biographer Leon Howard, "Ahab is a Shakespearean tragic hero, created according to the Coleridgean formula." The creation of Ahab, who apparently does not derive from any captain Melville sailed under, was heavily influenced by the observation in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet that "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself ... thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances." Whenever Moby-Dicks narrator comments on Captain Ahab as an artistic creation, the language of Coleridge's lecture appears: "at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half-wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature." All men "tragically great," Ishmael says, "are made so through a certain morbidness." All mortal greatness "is but disease." Ahab's speech combines Quaker archaism with Shakespeare's idiom to serve as "a homegrown analogue to blank verse." Ahab's death seems to be based on an actual event. On May 18, 1843, Melville was aboard The Star which sailed for Honolulu. Aboard were two sailors from the ship Nantucket who could have told him that they had seen their second mate "taken out of a whaleboat by a foul line and drowned, as is Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick." Ahab allegorically regarded Ahab's character is shaped by mythic and literary patterns that overlap and reinforce each other in such a complementary way that "the apparent irony of one allusion is frequently the truth of another." For instance, allusions to Oedipus, which flesh out Ahab's ignorance and lack of self-knowledge, are complemented by references to Narcissus, which evoke the psychological causes for his ignorance. Ahab's use of a spade for a crutch in Chapter 70, "The Sphinx," reminds the reader that he is lame, like Oedipus, and also wounded, like Prometheus. However, Ahab should