Moby Dick (Willi de Waal in the Netherlands) was a beluga, or white whale, that caused a sensation in 1966 along the Lower Rhine and then in all of Germany and the Netherlands. It was named after the whale in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Moby Dick, it was later surmised, had likely been captured on the East Coast of Canada and put on a freighter and sent to a zoo in England. Shortly before landing, a storm in the English channel threw the container with Moby overboard who disappeared, before reappearing months later far up the Rhine river.