In the Heart of the Sea

In the earlier half of the nineteenth century, the island of Nantucket was one of the whaling capitals of the world. The great sperm whales of the Pacific had long been the lifeblood of the close-knit Quaker community that was Nantucket. The whaleship Essex, which left Nantucket in 1819, was just one of many similar ships that left the island each year. But the disaster that struck the Essex fifteen months after it left its home port was anything but ordinary. The 238-ton Essex was destroyed by a whale. The ship's story, which was the inspiration for Hermann Melville's Moby Dick, is told in detail in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

Philbrick, who won the National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, draws on survivors' accounts of the disaster to reconstruct what really happened. Relying principally on the narratives of first mate Owen Chase, cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, and Captain George Pollard, Philbrick pieces together the puzzle. On November 20, 1820, more than a year after setting out from Nantucket, the Essex was rammed by a sperm whale in the South Pacific. The ship's crew members crowded into the vessel's three small whaleboats with what provisions they were able to gather. Rather than sailing for nearby islands, where they feared they would be attacked by cannibals, they decided to head for South America -- which lay more than 1,000 miles away across the open ocean.

In their rickety whaleboats with limited provisions, the men of the Essex knew that they had small chance for survival. And the mistakes that they made along the way decreased their chances even further. Yet they had little choice other than to take what fate had given them. In the end, as Nathaniel Philbrick reveals, a few of the Essex's crew would be lucky enough to survive -- but even they had to pay a price.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is a masterpiece. As a work of history, it is thorough -- Philbrick uses all of the sources available to him, both primary and secondary, and uses them well. And Philbrick's writing is incredible -- though the story that he tells is extraordinary, his prose is equal to it. "The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure," Philbrick explains. "It is a tragedy that happens to be one of the greatest true stories ever told." And Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex certainly qualifies as the greatest telling of it.

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