Yet I will tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat’s crew.
Ishmael, the Character, is a novice for this trip. He has not been on a whaling ship, just merchant vessels. Either, this is the author, Hermann, speaking or we are to assume Ishmael went back to sea after the end of this book and continued whaling even after being the last survivor or the Pequod.
