ما هو الحد الفاصل الذي يفقد عنده الإنسان "بشريته" ويتحوّل إلى وحش؟ وكيف يصل الإنسان إلى هذا الحد رغم كل هذه الإرث من الحضارة والثقافة؟
الإنسان في مواجهة الطبيعة التي لا ترحم.
في أغسطس لعام 1819، انطلق سفينة التحويت "إسّكس" حاملة على متنها 21 رجلًا ومؤنة من الطعام والشراب تكفي طاقمها لسنتين ونصف تقريبًا. كانت هذه واحدة من سفن التحويت الكثيرة التي حوّلت مدينة نانتوكت من جزيرة صغيرة إلى واحدة من أكبر المراكز لهذه الصناعة الخطيرة: صيد الحيتان.
كان ركاب السفينة مستبشرين خيرًا، لديهم أمل في العودة خلال الفترة المحددة إلى منازلهم وفي جعبتهم آلاف من براميل زيت الحوت الثمينة، وقد كانت رحلتهم هادئة وناجحة في بدايتها بالفعل، لكن الأمر لم يستمر.
يجد البحارة أنفسهم فجأة في مواجهة حوت يتصرف بغرابة، حوت هو أضخم ما رأوه في حياتهم حتى الآن، حوت لا ينتظر أن يبدأوا في مطاردته، بل تنقلب الآية ويبدأ، دون أي استفزاز منهم، في مهاجمة السفينة العملاقة.
هذه أرضه، وهو لن يتنازل عنها.
تغرق السفينة، ويهرب البحارة على متن 3 من مراكب التحويت الصغيرة، وتبدأ رحلتهم الطويلة نحو المعاناة.
وسط هذا المحيط الشاسع، حيث لا يابسة، لا طعام، لا شراب، يقضي البحارة عشرات الأيام في عرض المحيط، تلفح الشمس رؤوسهم ويتخلل الماء المالح المتناثر حول المركب جلودهم، تتيبس شفاههم ويفقدون وزنهم ويصبح البقاء حيًا ليوم آخر هو أقصى أمانيهم.
لكن الإنسان لا ييأس، وعندما يصل البشر إلى هذه المرحلة من الجوع والعطش يصبح التفكير بإنسانية رفاهية لا يمتلكونها. تُجرى القرعة، ويتم اختيار أول ضحية: الرجل الذي سيضحي بنفسه من أجل الآخرين، وعلى الآخرين أن يقتلوه ويتغذوا على لحمه ويشربوا دماءه، فلا سبيل آخر للنجاة.
كتاب يحكي قصة الإنسان الضعيف في مواجهة الطبيعة القاسية، يحكي عن حياة البحارة وعاداتهم وتقاليدهم، عن صيد الحيتان وصعوبته، عن الجانب البيولوجي والجغرافي للمحيطات الشاسعة وعن الكائنات التي تسكن تلك البقاع البعيدة التي لم يرها بشر من قبل.

من أعظم قراءات العام بلا شك.
شكرًا لـ محمد جمال على الترجمة الممتازة، وشكرًا لدار كلمات على الاختيار الموفق.


مراجعة مرئية للكتاب:

https://youtu.be/wyE7aduwU2s

#بتاع_الكتب

”I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods [500 m or 550 yards] directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of around 24 knots (44 km/h), and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship."
—Owen Chase, first mate of the whaleship Essex.

n  n

“There she blows!” was as much a part of my vocabulary as a child as “Launch the torpedoes” or “Geronimo” or “Remember the Alamo.” I wasn’t using it correctly, as I was not hunting whales in the middle of Kansas, but I did use it as a rallying cry for a charge against my childhood chums as we chased each other from one end of the farm to the other. Of course, in 1820 when a sharp eyed lad in the crow’s nest spotted a spume on the horizon, he would yell down to his crew mates, “There she blows!” and the chase would be on.

The Nantucket ship Essex was commanded by a newly commissioned captain by the name of George Pollard. The ship, an old vessel, had always been thought of as a lucky ship, given that it had returned so many profits to the owners. Much of the crew was green and were on their first whaling voyage. The ranks of Nantucket sailors had been filled out with some African Americans and some men referred to as offshore men, meaning that they were not of Quaker Nantucket stock.

Early in the voyage, they hit a squall that nearly heels them over. “For the green hands, the sound alone was terrifying: the shrieking of the wind across the rigging and then a frenzied flapping of sails and creaking of the stays and mast.” Can you imagine that sound? I’d be convinced that I was about to perish, especially when the ship begins to list. Captain Pollard does not spring into action as quickly as he should, but does finally give the right orders, and the good ship Essex rights herself.

It was a foretaste of what was going to be a disastrous journey.

In the 19th century, over 200,000 sperm whales were harvested for their spermaceti. (770,000 in the twentieth century. We always improve at killing things.) A normal sized whale will have about 500 gallons of this semi-waxy substance in their heads. When exposed to air, it turns to a semi-liquid and looks...you guessed it...like sperm. This oily substance was used to lubricate machinery during the industrial revolution and to light lamps. Eventually, this oil was replaced by lard and then by petroleum, which probably saved the sperm whale population from extinction. Yea, petroleum industry! The whalers also harvested the ambergris from the digestive tract of the whale, which was used as a fixative in perfume. Women didn’t know it, but when they sprayed those beautiful scents on their necks and wrists, they were also spraying whale digestive juice on their carefully coiffed skins.

n  n
A sperm whale, what a beauty!

In this era, they did not have harpoons that are shot out of a cannon; they had to row right up next to the whale, and someone with the right skill and strength thrust the harpoon into the side of the whale. These are large mammals, the largest toothed whale, reaching upwards of 80 feet long (now only about 65 feet which has been attributed to the excessive hunting of the largest males who, therefore, did not have a chance to pass on their genes.) and weighing 45 tons. They also have the largest known brain of any extinct or modern animal weighing in at 17 lbs. If they can avoid the harpoons of man and keep out of the reach of Orcas, they can live up to 70 years. Once the harpoon was in the whale, the sailors became the fastest moving humans on the planet as the whale would try to escape by fleeing at upwards of 27 mph while pulling the boat and crew along with it.

It is about finding that sweet spot in the harpoon so it is balanced perfectly in your hand. You can smell the whale. You can hear the grunts, groans, and farts of the rowers as they try to keep you level with the creature. Your face is slick with whale spume and sweat. You know you might only have one chance at this. You let go the thunderbolt in your hand and hope you will hear the meaty impact of a man killing a god.

It wasn’t unusual for green hands to upchuck over the side as they watched the death of a whale. Nathaniel Philbrick gives a description below that left tears stinging my eyes. There is something so majestic about a whale that even the most primitive thinkers among us must feel on some level that killing a whale is an affront against a higher power. When you kill something larger than yourself, something that displays such intelligence, you have to feel the world has been diminished.

”When the lance finally found its marks, the whale would begin to choke on its own blood, its spout transformed into a fifteen-to twenty-foot geyser of gore that prompted the mate to shout. ‘Chimney’s afire!’ As the blood rained down on them, the men took up the oars and backed furiously away, then paused to watch as the whale went into what was known as its flurry. Beating the water with its tail, snapping at the air with its jaws--even as it regurgitated large chunks of fish and squid--the creature began to swim in an ever tightening circle. Then, just as abruptly as the attack had begun with the first thrust of the harpoon it ended. The whale fell motionless and silent, black corpse floating fin-up in a slick of its own blood and vomit.”

n  n
As I was looking through Rockwell Kent’s art for Moby Dick, I was surprised how well I remembered each of the sketches even though I haven’t read the book for decades.

So they take the oil, some blubber, and the ambergris; those parts had ready value that made Nantucket in the heyday of the whaling era very wealthy. ”The rest of it---the tons of meat, bone, and guts---were simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century.” As I was reading this, even before Philbrick brought forth the comparison to the eradication of the buffalo in the same century, I was having flashbacks to Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams.

I had to stop and go read something else for the rest of the day. I needed a break to absorb what I had read and also to create some distance between myself and the horrifying images of whales dying that Philbrick so vividly shared with me.

As I did with the buffalos in Butcher’s Crossing, I also found myself rooting for the whales.

Something triggered in one whale, a monster 85 foot creature, who instead of fleeing from these puny humans turned around and crashed into them. ”Instead of acting as a whale was supposed to---as a creature ‘never before suspected of premeditated violence, and proverbial for its inoffensiveness’---this big bull had been possessed by what Chase finally took to be a very human concern for the other whales.”

n  n
Thomas Nickerson, the cabin boy and youngest member of the crew, drew this sketch of the attack.

This St. George of the deep, more dragon than man, with two mighty thrusts with his head turned the Essex into a splintered, sinking wreck. This story of the Essex is what so famously inspired Herman Melville to write his masterpiece Moby Dick. A commercial failure when released, over time has proved to be a canon of American literature. The story of the Essex has continued to be taught in American History classes, inspiring children with the tale of survival. Moby Dick may not appear on many high school syllabuses anymore. The daunting 600+ page count is simply too much for the curricula of the school system, but I did see it appear on a college syllabi not too long ago; unfortunately only excerpts were being studied.

The survival of eight crew members out of a total of twenty is harrowing indeed. A new captain used to taking orders instead of giving orders listened to some bad advice from his first and second mates. 95 days in a boat could have been shortened to mere weeks if he had stuck to his original thinking. There are some interesting discussions about the demise of all the black sailors and of most of the offshore men. In fact, the only three offshore men who survived are the ones who opted to stay on an island rather than continue in the boats. The Nantucket men stuck together, and all five who stayed in the boats who survived were Nantucket men.

Philbrick will describe the effects on the body, experiencing extreme thirst and the metabolic rates. Women and older people with lower metabolism actually do better in cold water or in cases of extreme hunger. As gallant as vigorous men like to be, giving extra rations to women and older people, they actually, logically, should be keeping those rations for themselves. Men with high muscle content, who naturally need more calories, will suffer the quickest loss of mass and will die first.

Captain Pollard is older and slightly rotund, which gives him an advantage over the younger, leaner sailors. As food and water disappear, they must resort to the most desperate of measures. ”The men were not much more than skeletons themselves, and the story that would be passed from ship to ship in the months ahead was that they were ‘found sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.’”

n  Flesh
Blood
Bone
Marrown

There is a 2015 movie based on this book that is also called In the Heart of the Sea starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, and Cillian Murphy.

n  n
I love the visual that the movie poster conveys.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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This is a fascinating book about the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that in 1819, was rammed by an enraged sperm whale and sunk in the South Pacific. The 20 crew members, in 3 small whaleboats, set out for the South American coast, almost 3000 miles away. Enduring ocean storms, blistering heat, extreme thirst and starvation, for three months, 8 men survived, having had to resort to eating their dead shipmates. Herman Melville based his novel Moby Dick on the saga of the Essex.

I read this because we had visited The Nantucket Whaling Museum last year, and found the story of the Essex so compelling. The story is complex and engaging. Philbrick gives a lot of background information about the history of whaling in Nantucket. When the Essex finally sets sail, you know it’s doomed, but you want to know what really happened. Philbrick gives almost a day by day account of the voyage. At times it felt like too much information, but you certainly get a sense of what it was like to be on that ship and in the smaller whaleboats. At times you are suffering right along with the men. It almost feels sacrilege to eat anything while you are reading this book.

The writing is so well done, it reads like a novel. You get to know the crew very well, and you are saddened when some of them perish. Philbrick mentions Moby Dick a lot, along with Mutiny on the Bounty, which was also based on actual events. (I did not know this.) The book makes you want to read both novels. I have Moby Dick and will tackle it some day. I understand that it’s not an easy read.

So for a good seafaring adventure, with a lot of history thrown in, this is a great book.

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee."
- Moby-Dick



I've been wanting to read this book for years. Patiently it sat, right behind me, waiting. I enjoyed Philbrick's Mayflower and Sea of Glory. Given how much I love Moby-Dick, I'm kinda surprised it took me so long (15 years) to read this history of the Essex.

Philbrick paces this narrative well. He patches together all the major perspectives. When the story leaves gaps, he dead reckons and is able to fill the story in with similar types of accidents, aggressive whale experiences, sailors, oil, blood, starvation, and -- well -- other episodes of cannibalism. He is able to humanize the captain, the first-mate, and the people of Nantucket (while also giving serious consideration for all the other sailors; those from Nantucket, outlanders, and black sailors too). It was a quick read, and compelling.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick is a grand and gut wrenching piece of non-fiction. In it, Philbrick recounts the 1820 incident surrounding the sperm whale attack on the Nantucket whaleship Essex and the aftermath the survivors were forced to endure. Using the first-hand accounts of young cabin boy Thomas Nickerson and First mate Owen Chase, Philbrick's knack for page-turning historical accounting are first-rate, and like his other books readers can tell his passion for the subject he has undertaken. In addition to examining Nickerson and Owen's accounts, he provides plenty of interesting background knowledge to whaling, the culture of Nantucket at that time, and plenty of notions towards what helped inspire Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. This book is greatly appreciative because it highlights a time-period in American history that is largely ignored (the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War), and filling that gap is refreshing to the overall history of the U.S. and wider world in that time period. Thank you Mr. Philbrick.

For generations, the most popular account of the sinking of the whaleship Essex was that provided by the first mate, Owen Chase. Working with a ghost writer, the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck was published within a year of the ship’s sinking. I have not yet read this short book, but I can say without a doubt that the title is apt: this is both an extraordinary and a distressing story. Philbrick’s book—a very good one—is not blessed with so apt a title. You would be forgiven for thinking In the Heart of the Sea is a nautical romance.
tt
Not so. This is one of the great survival stories. It begins where Moby Dick (which was partly inspired by this event) ends: with a whale attacking and sinking a whaleship. A polite beast, Moby Dick had the decency to kill the entire crew (excepting Ismael), whereas the whale that sunk the Essex—reportedly 85 feet, or 25 meters, long—left the men to the ravages of the open waters of the Pacific. A foolish decision to make for the coast of South America, rather than one of the closer islands in the Pacific (which the sailors feared were inhabited by homosexual savages), doomed the crew of 20 to a nearly three-month ordeal that most of them did not survive.
tt
Philbrick does an admirable job in telling this story. He provides the needed historical context, draws on the long-unpublished memoires of the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, and even does his best to explain how severe starvation and dehydration affect the body and the mind. All this serves to make the book both an interesting historical foray and a compelling study of survival in extreme circumstances. With an apter title, this book might even make a best-seller list. Oh wait…

This was a fascinating and very readable true account of the whaleship Essex and its crew which left Nantucket in 1820 only to meet with disaster fifteen months later in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I have been interested in learning more about this tragedy for some time, but honestly didn't expect to become so absorbed in this book! Having very little knowledge of the whaling industry and maritime travel in general, I was nevertheless easily able to follow the story thanks to the talent of Nathaniel Philbrick. Providing the reader with a wealth of information, Philbrick fills in gaps of knowledge in a way that is compelling rather than mundane. The background of the Nantucketers and Quakerism, the historical details of the whaling ships, the hierarchy of the ship's crewmen, the particulars of sailing, the effects of starvation and dehydration, and even superstition are brought to light as a result of the author's extensive research.

The relationships between the captain, the first mate and the rest of the crew and the characteristics of these whalers seem to reflect an intriguing culture of its own in the world of whaling. I was amazed by some of the poor decisions made by this crew throughout their journey, even prior to their ship being rammed by the massive sperm whale. The level of violence involved in actually killing and processing a whale was astounding considering the extremely pious nature of these men; but as Philbrick notes: "Nantucketers saw no contradiction between their livelihood and their religion. God Himself had granted them dominion over the fishes and the sea." At the same time, this spiritual devotion must also have given these men strength during their days at sea while they struggled to survive thousands of miles from the shores they sought for their salvation. The human survival element of this book makes it a page-turner and is quite gripping and at times even terrifying and disturbing.

This is indeed a well-written and brilliantly researched book which I recommend to anyone interested in tales of survival. After learning that this true story of the Essex and the monstrous whale that caused her demise are the inspirations behind Herman Melville's writing, I have now renewed my desire to re-read that once-formidable book Moby Dick!

4 stars

Nantucket Island - 1820. The whale ship Essex leaves this, the center of the whaling industry at that time, to make a 2 year journey to the Pacific Ocean looking for the giant sperm whale.

Before the whalers of Nantucket were forced to make such an arduous journey, they fished for whales near their coast.

"Every fall, hundreds of right whales appeared to the south of the island and remained until the early spring. So named because they were “the right whale to kill,” right whales grazed the waters off Nantucket much like seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths."

But by 1820, these whales were scarce, so the long trek to the Pacific Ocean was necessary.

"Not only was the oil derived from the sperm whale’s blubber far superior to that of the right whale, providing a brighter and cleaner-burning light, but its block-shaped head contained a vast reservoir of even better oil, called spermaceti, that could be simply ladled into an awaiting cask. (It was spermaceti’s resemblance to seminal fluid that gave rise to the sperm whale’s name.)"

As can be imagined from the title, the fate of the Essex was ugly. On November 22, the Essex was rammed by an 85 foot sperm whale and capsized. There were smaller whale boats to which the crew of 22 saved themselves. They were able to save very little food from the Essex. Their ordeal is chronicled in this book.

A review within the book states:

“In the Heart of the Sea brings a wrenching tale of death and destruction magnificently to life. In addition to being an incredibly gripping tale of survival, Philbrick’s book is an amazingly intimate and detailed look at life aboard a nineteenth-century whaling ship. Much as Melville did in Moby-Dick, the author takes the reader and makes him part of the crew.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I love narrative non-fiction and this book fits the bill.

4.25 Stars

One of the joys of going to the public library is to randomly stumble upon a book that might be of interest. The Heart of the Sea held me spell-bound for the few days it took me to read it, and at the same time introduced me to a great writer of history--Nathaniel Philbrick. He brings a new dimension into early American history, such as the whaling prowess of the Wampanoags of New England. If you and friends are on a skiff adrift at sea, who would likely perish first from hunger, or who would be killed for food? Besides explaining this, Philbrick also tells us about the grief and the vengeance that a sperm whale seems to feel when a pod of them is attacked. A very good book about the sea by an expert sailor.

Most glad to be sitting on my comfortable couch right now, not having to resort to cannibalism. I mean, there's cannibalism in this is what I'm saying, and while it's not described in extreme detail, it is *described* . I feel like I might have gotten PTSD from having to read about these people I didn't even really like (except for maybe the cabin boy) having to eat each other. So: that is my warning to you, and historical spoilers? I guess? This book climaxes in cannibalism.

But it was really interesting! And harrowing. And infuriating. It's almost as much about whaling as a historical practice, and about the island of Nantucket, as it is about this famous shipwreck that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. Another spoiler alert: whaling was a disgusting practice that encouraged men to treat intelligent animals not as living beings but product to make money off of, a natural resource that God gave them to exploit, consequences not even on their radar. Absolutely no efforts to understand the creatures they were killing beyond what was useful in the hunt, no effort to use the entire body of the whale like any other hunter might do, just dumped the carcasses into the ocean after they were done harvesting the blubber and spermaceti and ambergris. And forget about sustainability. Whaleboats were essential water-bourne factories, with all the yuckiness that implies. I mean, by the time these fuckers got on the boat, I was ready for that whale to capsize them, no matter why he actually did it. None of that judgment is in the book, by the way; it's entirely mine.

The best bit in the book was how they decided not to steer to a nearby island that was only thirty days away because of the homosexual cannibals they were afraid of finding, and then because of that decision, ended up becoming cannibals themselves (the people on that island did practice homosexuality, according to archaeology records, but I highly doubt they would have been much interested in emaciated whalers all covered in whale guts or whatever in any case).

"Only a Nantucketer in November 1820 possessed the necessary combination of arrogance, ignorance, and xenophobia to shun a beckoning (albeit unknown) island and choose instead an open-sea voyage of several thousand miles."

Anyways, this was a highly readable, informative book. I'm going to track down the movie soon, even though it seems like Chris Hemsworth was miscast. Owen Chase, the first mate, was a bit of a pill IRL, and it seems like from the trailer they're trying to turn him into this classical hero, when a lot of his decisions actually cost most of the crew their lives. We'll see, I guess! Anyway baby Tom Holland plays the cabin boy so that should be good at least.

"It was a tale of a whale-man's worst nightmare: of being left in a boat far from land with nothing left to eat or drink and perhaps worst of all......of a whale with the vindictiveness and guile of a man."

This deadly true story of the 1820 (85' long, 80 ton) whale attack on the Essex was not exactly what I expected, but oh so much more. It begins with background of Captain and crew, the unimaginable time spent away from home and how their wives coped in their absence often resorting to use of laudanum, opium and a plaster penis. (ouch!)

Anyway, a tragedy, that could have been avoided, takes survival to its ultimate limits......"For as long as men had been sailing the world's oceans, famished sailors had been sustaining themselves on the remains of dead shipmates"......as cannibalism is, for the most part, humanely described within this narrative.

While graphically vivid, IN THE HEART OF THE SEA turned out to be an exceptionally informative history lesson for me with an epilogue from Nathaniel Philbrick that says it all.....

n  "The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure. It is a tragedy that happens to be one of the greatest true stories ever told."n

MOBY DICK (1851) Now a must-read (I hope)

Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, portrays an event that influenced Herman Melville's epic, Moby Dick and in some ways seems like an extensive prologue to the novel. Philbrick's book is an extraordinarily well-researched, consistently exciting and a exceedingly well-told narrative of the doomed Nantucket whaleship. There are so many facets to In the Heart of the Sea and included among them are an overview of Quaker society at the beginning of the 19th century, the cultural milieu of the island of Nantucket including its black section, called "Guinea Town", a very specific consideration of the ageing 20 year old whaleship & its construction, the contrasting individual personalities of the 20 crewmembers, including a handful of black members, who sailed from Nantucket in 1819 on what was the final voyage of the Essex and the various factors that for a brief time caused this small New England island to be the center of the whaling universe.



Over several years, I had randomly read through sections of In the Heart of the Sea but after meeting the author when he spoke locally & provided an overview of his latest book, Valiant Ambition, a book detailing the relationship between George Washington & Benedict Arnold, I decided to read the earlier book in its entirety, finding it a riveting adventure story that among other details, enumerates shifting crew attitudes and the struggle for survival under extreme conditions after the Essex is stove (rammed) by an 80 foot bull of a sperm whale traveling at 6 knots, not once but twice. At that point, the whaleship is approximately 1,000 miles west of the Galapagos Islands. Interestingly, Philbrick points out that the rather solitary males on board the Essex followed a pattern not unlike the world of the male sperm whales they hunted. Beyond that, life at sea during their 2+ year voyages seemed to desensitize the men to "the awesome wonder of the whale".

Instead of seeing their prey as a 50 to 60 ton creature whose brain was 6 times the size or their own (& whose penis was a long as the men were tall), the whalemen preferred to think of it as one commentator called "a self-propelled tub of high income lard." Whales were described by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a 50-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the whale's habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whose constituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it--the tons of meat, bone guts--was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish & of course, sharks. The headless gray remains of sperm whales littered the Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century.

Alas, in time, the whale hunters became the whale's prey. And it would appear that Captain Pollard's democratic leadership style, this being his first command, greatly exacerbated the situation following the shipwreck because Pollard acceded to two junior crew members including the first mate, Owen Chase, heading for the much more distant shore of South America rather than west to the much closer Society & Marquesas Islands. Those just below the captain in rank feared the presence of cannibals on the much nearer islands. Paradoxically, the men in the small whaleboats eventually reverted to cannibalism following the sinking of the Essex and after many weeks at sea.

The whaleboats, the sort used for vanquishing whales after being lowered from the ship, had to deal with a plague of difficulties en route and only two of the boats were rescued by ships, though both with much-diminished crews & after 3 months on the open ocean. Luckily, one of the black seamen salvaged important nautical equipment from the captain's cabin just before the ship went down or there would have been little or no possibility of survival. However, 4 of the first 5 crew members consumed were black but this is said to be owing to a difference of body composition, with those who perished more readily yielding to starvation, as each of the black sailors died before becoming survival nourishment for those who remained. As gruesome as this tale is, Philbrick handles the grim details with poise and his prose style makes for very compelling reading! In addition of the rigors of life at sea in small boats, the men faced psychological deterioration, starvation, dehydration & hypernatremia, a condition where an excess of salt causes boils, delusions & at times made navigation and even speech almost impossible.

While the 3rd boat disappeared without a trace, the two surviving whaleboats were adrift on the Pacific Ocean twice as long as that of Captain Bligh following the historic mutiny on Bligh's ship, H.M.S. Bounty. With all of the adversity the men faced, seven of twenty did manage to survive and Nathanial Philbrick accounts for their lives following their rescue, another interesting component of his book. And unlike Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick, Captain Pollard, Owen Chase & the other survivors of the whaleship Essex, a thousand miles from land, did not have the possibility of revenge.

In the Heart of the Sea may indeed represent a very bleak nautical saga & it is definitely not to everyone's taste in books but I found it a most interesting story, spun with great craft by a gifted writer. There is an abundance of nautical detail within Philbrick's book & a glossary might have been helpful but his use of specific detail is never intrusive. *Within the book are several very helpful maps & 16 pages of B&W photos.