In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

What a powerful book. This book drew lots of emotion out of me and I developed lots of empathy for the whalers and their families, plus the slaughtering of the whales added to my wanting of the whaling industry of today totally stopped. Its totally inhumane, gross and horrible. I feel for the whales too. Great action and historical truth about the whale ship Essex and her crew and their families in Nantucket.In the Heart of the Sea The Tragedy of the whaleship Essex is a page burner. Read it in 1 1/2 day. No boring parts...a fascinating read. This was the true story Herman Melville based his epic great novel Moby Dick on. Nathaniel Philbrick wrote a fascinating true historical book on the tragedy that befalls the crew on the whale ship Essex. 1819 the whale ship Essex and her 20 man crew leave Nantucket island for a 1 1/2 year regular whaling voyage. Unfortunately the Essex is rammed twice by an estimated 85ft Sperm Whale. The Essex is capsized and later sinks. The crew abandon ship in 3 small whaleboats with only a few hundred pounds of hardtack for food and luckily several nautical sighting instruments. LOTs of mistakes are made by Captain George Pollard, first mate Chase and a man named Joy in charge of their respective whaleboats. The captain had originally the right idea to head for an island but was swayed by the other officers because of fears of cannibals on islands to head for South America. We see the tragic dilemma of missing the right winds, missing closer islands with no cannibals and having to travel thousands of miles and running out of food and water. The men are forced to become cannibals and eating their dead friends and one time a young man ( Captain Pollard's nephew) draws a lot and is killed and eaten. Strange and suspect that the first eaten were all the black sailors. INMO the true Nantucket natives kept to themselves and became the hawks to prey on the blacks who seemed to get sicker first. The blacks had the poorer food on the Essex and developed less body fat to sustain them in their hunger and lack of food shipwrecked at sea. This to me was a very emotional tragedy story not a true adventure story. If you can't feel for these people you have no emotions. Two partial boats with a few survivors are rescued after a few months at sea...most dead and eaten by the survivors. One boat found with only 4 skeletons. Three men are left on a small island with only their wits to capture the little food on the island and a spring that goes out under the tide so little or no water, are later rescued. You can imagine what the different families on Nantucket went through after hearing about the Essex sinking and later the survival stories related to cannibalism. Gives me the horrors just thinking about it. Just look at all the 5 star reviews. Lots of other reviewers thought this was a great book. If you want a book that will pull on your emotions and let you develop deep empathy toward the whalers and their families this is the book for you. Again INMO this is not a true adventure book but a deeply emotional tragedy. Also lots of great nautical whaling history before and after the Essex tragedy. 5 stars

This is a wonderful book. Unfortunately the Kindle version is seriously deficient. Only location numbers are provided, but no page numbers until the Epilogue at the end of the book which is listed as page 102 of 226. The photos begin on page 109 but jump to page 226 between two photographs! The table of contents does not provide page numbers or location numbers and the 3x3 grid of pages provides only a dash, "-", instead of page numbers or location numbers until the Epilogue on page 102 when they suddenly appear. Clearly no one made any effort to proof the Kindle version.

“With its huge scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed. . . . it was too late for a change of course. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, the whale struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cathead on the port bow.” A reader confronted with this description might be forgiven for assuming that it could only have come from Herman Melville’s massive 19th-century novel <i>Moby Dick</i>. Where else in the world would you find such an incredible, far-fetched idea as a giant whale attacking a ship? But as unlikely as it may seem, the scene is not fiction but taken from Nathaniel Philbrick’s non-fiction account of the sinking of the whaleship <i>Essex</i> on November 20, 1819. <i>In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex</i>, published in 2001, is a gripping and sometimes appalling rendering of the story of the first Nantucket whale ship ever to be sunk as a result of an attack by a whale (though not the last). And the original accounts of the story, spreading in the years following the event, were, in fact, the inspiration for Melville’s novel, published in 1851. The great 19th-century novelist even becomes an important thread in Philbrick’s narrative. <i>In the Heart of the Sea</i> is both gripping storytelling and agonizing analysis of the desperate lengths starving castaways on the high seas have gone to in history to survive. The dreadful realities of the <i>Essex</i> survivors during three months at sea in small boats include violent storms, deadly heat, starvation, cannibalism, drawing lots for execution, and more. Though Philbrick lays bare the suffering of the men, their courage, will to live, determination, and perseverance are inspiring. It’s easy to see why <i>In the Heart of the Sea</i> won the National Book Award. The story is gripping, the research is extensive, and the writing powerful.

An exciting true story that inspired Moby Dick. I couldn't stop reading. One of my favorites.

A great story of survival on the seas. I enjoyed this book and was amazed by the depths to which these men sank. The writer did a great job pulling his information from all sources available for a story 180 years old. When there was disagreements as to stories, this was pointed out. By now you have probably heard the main part of the story: massive whale attacks and sinks ship, men are put in small whaling ships and set out on the sea to travel over 2,000 miles with crude navigational devices spending over 90 days on the sea. This book really describes in detail the depths the human body will go to from a physical and mental standpoint. The book becomes so engrossing you can't put it down. I do most of my reading at night but started reading early over breakfast right as the issue of cannibalism came up. Not my best move as it is studied in depth. This writer does a good job of relaying the journals kept and then translating the physical and mental effects to later studies done on starvation, particularly the Minnesota study done in the 1940s. The crew eventually splits into four groups and it's interesting to see what happens to the four groups. I particularly found it interesting they were able to determine what happened to the three crew members left on an island after refusing to get back in the whaling boat. Overall, I think you will enjoy this book. If you like this book, I strongly encourage you to read Endurance about the journey of Shackleton. It's very similar and mesmerizing how they survived in extreme cold. I normally don't like period piece books but this is very good and I strongly recommend. If you like books of adventure and survival, this is a good book for you.

First, let me dispatch any brooding reader from his or her fence-sitting about whether this book is worth the purchase price and time needed to read it through: it's all that and more, and more still. You will find yourself so drawn into this narrative that I suspect you will be overwhelmed, as I was, by an intense desire to have plentiful stores of water and food nearby while you read it. With one exception, I have never before read a work of historical nonfiction which held my interest like In the Heart of the Sea (the exception was Jeff Shaara's The Glorious Cause). You will repeatedly find yourself on the verge of total astonishment at the plight these men endured. Philbrick builds a mood of unrelenting gloom and horror and the book ends up reading more like a Stephen King novel than a history book. I feel totally comfortable recommending this book on the merits of the writing quality alone, because the writing is exceptional. So many new history books attempt to modernize the standard historical monograph by giving their books narrative structures, but in so doing, the writers end up taking something important and objective away from the reading experience. Philbrick doesn't do this, and I think he succeeds with his narrative precisely because he has two first-hand accounts of the disaster and because of the sensation this story caused and the flurry of press and ancillary writing generated regarding the Essex at the time. Of course, the existence of a talisman like Moby Dick certainly helped, as was Philbrick's oft-mentioned research into other whaling and sea disasters, most notably Captain Bligh and his troubles with The Bounty. It all comes together to give Philbrick's narrative weaving and artistic license an air of truth and detached journalistic reality, as though Philbrick himself had been present with the Essex survivors. Appertaining to its value as historical scholarship, In the Heart of the Sea seems to be as rigorously vetted and researched as anyone could expect given the limited information and catatonic delirium which, at nearly all points along the voyage, must have gripped the Chase and Nickerson, the two principle sources of information. In addition to his account of the doomed Essex voyage, Philbrick introduces readers to the unusual economy and personality of Nantucket. As a Folger descendant (the family name is mentioned several times in the book, and indeed, one of the owners of the Essex was named Folger), the geneological value of this brief adumbration about the town is fascinating. Furthermore, at the end of the book, the reader is greeted by what I perceive to be the most lucid, readable notes section that I have ever encountered before in any book and, as a result, this section stands as a useful tool and free bonus to the interested reader. I am quite hesitant to offer and critical remarks of this book at all, for fear someone reading this review might notice only that I had a criticism at all and would, without reading any details, forego purchase. My only criticism of the book is Philbrick's repeated injection of contemporary survival psychology. This was at times helpful, but I usually found these instances distracted me from the darkness and terror Philbrick had so carefully and successfully drawn me into. I wished he would have simply left the reader to commiserate with the Essex crew instead of, by including this running psychological commentary, being tacitly reminded that this was only a book. Again, not an issue at all. Buy the book. Thank you.

In the Heart of the Sea is an addicting read mostly because I was horrified and had to know what happened next. This story honestly sounds made up but it is not. As nail biting as the story itself was, it was written like a historical textbook. I know this story happened a long time ago, but using "perhaps" a lot dragged the story down. He uses lots of dates and what feels like info-dumping of historical details that don't seem relevant to the story. Some information felt like showing off how much research he did. Right whales, sperm whales - I learned a lot about whales. I enjoyed the clever similarities in the history pointed out by the author that I might not have otherwise noticed. For example, the female dominated society in Nantucket from all the missing whalers is similar to the female dominated society of the whales. The whaleship Essex slowly died and sunk just like the whales they hunted did. Speaking of whales, the description of hunting and killing the whales was very graphic. You don't have to be an animal lover to find the way that they hunted these whales extremely sad. It was also very disturbing to read about the cannibalism and insanity among the sailors that came from being lost so long at sea. Journaling at sea helped the Captain maintain his sanity, but not everyone was so lucky. I thought it was interesting how much journaling can help people cope with tragedy. Overall, it was fascinating to see the historical story that inspired Moby Dick that I knew nothing about before reading this book.

While a lively education in the history and culture surrounding America's fledgling whaling industry and Nantucket's early 19th century Quaker society, at it's heart this is a harrowing and horrific tale of starvation and survival on seas that are anything but "pacific". The whaleship Essex, 15 months into an expected journey of three years, is head-butted and sunk by a sperm whale, an unprecedented and bizarre attack that inspired Herman Melville's classic "Moby Dick." Left at a point in the Pacific that could not be further from land, the twenty crewmembers board three leaky whaleboats with limited food and freshwater. While south Pacific islands to west are more easily reached via the prevailing winds, Captain George Pollard yields to the officers' fears of cannibalistic natives and makes the ill fated decision to tack easterly for the west coast of South America. Some ninety days of searing sun and pounding gales later, the battered, ulcerated, and skeletal survivors miraculously reach a precarious safety, delirious and gnawing like junkyard dogs on the bones of their recently departed shipmates. There is a natural fascination with tales of survival against incredible odds - an especially macabre fascination when survival is dependant on using fellow your travelers for sustenance. Author Philbrick plays this hand well, resisting sensationalism and treating a sensitive and highly emotional topic with dignity and empathy for both the survivors as well as their victims. In prose that is sparse and authoritative, Philbrick spices his story with topics as far ranging as sperm whale anatomy and the physiology and psychology of starvation and dehydration. He succeeds in capturing that rare combination of historical fact that is educational while at the same time as riveting as the best pop thriller. "In the Heart of the Sea" is a brutal and bloody tutorial of the industry that was the backbone of the US economy, and the risks and sacrifices made by the men who farmed the floating oil fields of the oceans - and of the women they left behind. In short, a gripping slice of American history well researched and compassionately told - a worthy recipient of a National Book Award that shouldn't be missed.

Just could not put the book down , engaging and entertaining . Loved every page of it .

The origins of Moby Dick! Highly recommended. The perfect companion of Ron Howards' movie In The Heart Of The Sea

One of the best books about the sea ever written. The courage and fortitude of these whalers was beyond magnificent. The author relates every excruciating detail of their epic voyage of survival but in a very suspenseful manner. Must read!

This was easy to read and full of information about people and whaling. I loved it. It's a good book to kill some time with and it's pretty well written.

Well, as the Americans would say when confounded by something " oh my Gad!" I just could not put this book down as it is so well written and fascinating tale . Almost thought of it as fiction but the intriguing details of Nantucket and the past whaling industry plus the facts that this tale is an account of a very real trip makes it non- fiction. I am old enough to remember when in U.K there was an attempt to make fresh whale meat available but we ended up offering it to the cat and dog as none of our family liked it. Ponged a bit plus was bright red? Yuck! The story told though is based on what survivors told about this nightmarish trip on the Essex to catch whales for the oil etc , sailing out of Nantucket and being the first ship to be attacked by a living monster bull whale plus details of the effects of the industry on the quaint port which was their base. Wow! No holds barred so be prepared for nauseating details of chopping up of whales plus inevitable cannibalism that the survivors had to sink to in order to exist out in the vast ocean. It is a bit stomach churning and it pulls no punches but the author is not trying to glamorise characters or shock readers. It is just an account really of a few courageous survivors of a rather unseaworthy whale ship sunk in a disastrous situation.Well worth reading! I found it far better than the original book ,Moby Dick by Melville and the Gregory Peck film. ( the film of this title by the way far outstrips that one). Would also recommend to young readers maybe still at school who want to read actual fact history of such places and how community life was for Quakers in the last century woven into a jolly good yarn.