The Volunteer, a nineteenth-century Yorkshire whaling ship, becomes the stage for a confrontation between brutal harpooner Henry Drax and ex-army surgeon Patrick Sumner, the ship's medic, during a violent, ill-fated voyage to the Arctic.

When Lyddie Berry's husband is lost in a whaling disaster, she becomes the dependent of her ruthless son-in-law, who tries to take everything she and her husband had worked for.

"Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange....

In 1841, having been shipwrecked and picked up by an American whaling ship outside Japanese territorial waters, fifteen-year-old Manjiro decides to go live in America and work towards opening trade between his country and the West.

At the first whaling feast of the season, a young Inupiat boy learns about the importance of the bowhead whale to his people and their culture. Includes facts about the Inupiat and the bowhead whale.

A little girl with a big voice who lives in a nineteenth-century whaling town finds a way to be useful and happy aboard a sailing ship.

Ishmael, a sailor, recounts the ill-fated voyage of a whaling ship led by the fanatical Captain Ahab in search of the white whale that had crippled him.

A boy keeps a diary of his experience on his first voyage aboard a sinister whaling ship.

While pursuing the stranger who ran off with Joe's basketball, Wishbone imagines himself to be the young sailor Ishmael on Captain Ahab's whaling ship chasing the great white whale, Moby Dick, across the seven seas.