- When Ahab disembarks from the Samuel Enderby, he splinters his ivory leg.
- One of Ahab’s peculiarities is that he tends to take very careful care of his whalebone leg—because right after the Pequod set sail, he had an accident in which it stabbed him in the groin.
- He blamed all the pain caused by this wound on Moby Dick, who, of course, caused him to lose his leg in the first place.
- This groin-stabbing accident was the reason that Ahab stayed in his cabin like a hermit during the beginning of the Pequod’s voyage.
- Ahab gets the ship’s carpenter to make him a new leg out of some of the sperm whale jawbone the Pequod has collected so far on its voyage.