In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (Penguin, 2007)
by Nathaniel Philbrick
USA, 2000
According to my receipt, I bought this book on May 19th, 2010, right about the time I was polishing off Moby-Dick, so keen on reading about the real-life incident that had inspired Melville's novel that I'd forgotten that I'd already read Philbrick's National Book Award winner years before. Talk about a creaky memory! In any event, revisiting In the Heart of the Sea this past week was a great pleasure. Philbrick's a natural as a storyteller, and this nonfiction story of his--what happened to the crew of the Nantucket whaleship Essex in 1820 after it was deliberately rammed and sunk by an 85-foot bull sperm whale "with the vindictiveness and guile of a man" (xiii)--has no shortage of built-in drama with its tale of three months adrift at sea, survival cannibalism, and the like. While Philbrick's reconstruction, largely based on an examination of the first-hand accounts of Essex survivors Owen Chase and Thomas Nickerson, rightly stresses that the work's a tale of survival rather than a tale of adventure, it's more a riveting than a sobering affair as a reading experience. If part of what makes it so compelling has to do with the nature of the story itself, another part of it has to do with the nature of the questions Philbrick asks of his sources: in specific, why were the African-American seamen the first to be eaten by their white shipmates and why did the Nantucket natives survive in greater numbers than the non-islanders? While I have no explanation for how I could forget that I'd read such an, um, memorable piece of popular history writing before, at least I can now assure those of you who have yet to read this book that it holds up to multiple readings just fine. (http://www.penguin.com/)
Nathaniel Philbrick
*Note: Nicole at bibliographing has a way interesting page on the theme of Maritime Literature here. Recommended.*
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