For all my whale weekly peeps who are befuddled by the town-ho's story, I'm here to help as best I can.
My good old Great Illustrated Classics edition of Moby Dick has this direct quote:
...we met another homeward-bound whaler, the Town-Ho. This time, Ahab allowed a gam, or exchange of visits. Some Town-Ho crewmen who came on board the Pequod whispered the secret of their ship to Tashtego. When he later told it to us, it sparked our interest in Moby Dick.
An officer and a sailor on the Town-Ho had gotten into a fight over an unfair order to sweep the deck. In self-defence, the sailor knocked the mate out. Others got involved and it became a mutiny.
Steelkilt, the sailor, was about to kill Radney, the officer, when a call came. Moby Dick had been sighted. Radney's boat was the first one lowered away, and as he stood spear in hand, he was washed overboard. Moby Dick clamped him between his jaws, reared up high, and then plunged down into the water.
When the whale rose again, he had some tatters of Radney's red wool shirt caught in his teeth. All four boats gave chase, but Moby Dick had disappeared.
There's more to it than that, obviously, but that's the general gist. It's a pretty simple and potent story, just told in a really convoluted way (which was definitely on purpose), hence to confusion.
Here is one thing that George Cotkin in his book Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby Dick has to say about it:
If it is a tale that reflects the presence of God and His occasional willingness to vanquish the brutal through the agency of Moby Dick, then it never reached Ahab's ears. Perhaps he would have been unable to hear it, as deaf to this possibility as the devout Catholic priest whom Galileo, in Brecht's play (Life of Galileo), begs to look in the telescope to see how the heavens work. The church man's reply was simple: even if I could see it, I could not believe it.
