By: Jos Sances

Medium: Screenprint
Year: 2022
Image Size: 15 x 20 inches
Image Size: 18 x 24 inches
Edition of 18

In Pequod, artist Jos Sances offers a visually powerful interpretation of a climactic moment from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Rendered with meticulous detail, the scene depicts the doomed whaling ship Pequod sailing into a stormy harbor beneath a brooding sky. A giant, ominous bird of prey looms over the ship, silhouetted against a glowing full moon—within which we glimpse the skeletal figure of death. A beacon from a lighthouse futilely cuts through the darkness, illuminating the ship’s path toward destruction.

Quoting directly from Melville's text, the print includes the line:
“…then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”
This haunting passage underscores the print’s emotional gravity and its literary source, capturing Ahab's madness and the ship's doomed fate in visual form.