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If you're familiar with Herman Melville's classic, "Moby-Dick," you know that the title character -- an enormous white whale -- destroyed a whaling ship commanded by Captain Ahab. That set the obsessive Ahab off on his fabled quest to wreak revenge on the creature that upended his life.

And now it appears that a much-later group of maritime adventurers have uncovered the real-life vessel that served as Melville's inspiration for Ahab's quest. Melville modeled the character of Ahab on one Captain George Pollard, and researchers have found what they believe is the wreckage of the ship Pollard commanded two years after a whale felled his first whaling ship. But Pollard's second ship ran afoul of the weather instead of an enormous symbol of nature's impersonal tampering with human fate (as was the case with Ahab's famed craft, The Pequod). During a night storm some 600 miles off the coast of Hawaii, Pollard's ship --The Two Brothers -- struck a coral reef, capsized and sank.