In the Heart of the Sea: Summary and book reviews of In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, plus links to an excerpt from In the Heart of the Sea and a biography of Nathaniel Philbrick.
In the Heart of the Sea The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Hardcover: May 2000,
302 pages.
Paperback: May 2001,
302 pages.
"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--at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow. . ."
In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.
In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.
In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy. At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
Booklist
For more than 150 years, the primary source of information about the Essex was a volume that first mate Owen Chase, later a successful whaling captain, prepared with a ghostwriter; a summary by the ship's cabin boy, prepared some 50 years after the wreck, was found and published in the 1980s. Philbrick draws on both, using the cabin boy's more class-conscious narrative to correct the often self-serving prose of the mate. A fascinating tale, well told.
Booklist
For more than 150 years, the primary source of information about the Essex was a volume that first mate Owen Chase, later a successful whaling captain, prepared with a ghostwriter; a summary by the ship's cabin boy, prepared some 50 years after the wreck, was found and published in the 1980s. Philbrick draws on both, using the cabin boy's more class-conscious narrative to correct the often self-serving prose of the mate. A fascinating tale, well told.
Kirkus Reviews
A vivid account of a 19th-century maritime disaster that engaged the popular imagination of the time with its horrors of castaways and cannibalism... A gripping chronicle of an epic voyage of hardship and survival that deserves to be as well known now as it once was.
Kirkus Reviews
A vivid account of a 19th-century maritime disaster that engaged the popular imagination of the time with its horrors of castaways and cannibalism... A gripping chronicle of an epic voyage of hardship and survival that deserves to be as well known now as it once was.
Thomas Farel Hefferman, author of Stove by a Whale
Nathaniel Philbrick's recreation of the first sinking of a ship by a whale and the almost unbelievable survival adventure that followed is an exhaustively researched and, from beginning to end, engrossingly told tale. His account captures the whalemen's life and Nantucket life, the behavior of whales and the behavior of the ocean, the physiology and psychology of starvation, and, in the end, the full drama of the Essex.
Richard Ellis, author of Whales and Men
Where the sinking of the Pequod marks the end of Melville's great novel, the sinking of the Essex is only the beginning of Philbrick's tale. It is history brought vividly - and agonizingly - to life by a master storyteller.
Peter Benchley, author of Jaws In The Heart Of The Sea is a true story of unimaginable horror. The source for Melville's 'mighty book' is a tale told wonderfully well by Nathaniel Philbrick.
Thomas Farel Hefferman, author of Stove by a Whale
Nathaniel Philbrick's recreation of the first sinking of a ship by a whale and the almost unbelievable survival adventure that followed is an exhaustively researched and, from beginning to end, engrossingly told tale. His account captures the whalemen's life and Nantucket life, the behavior of whales and the behavior of the ocean, the physiology and psychology of starvation, and, in the end, the full drama of the Essex.
Richard Ellis, author of Whales and Men
Where the sinking of the Pequod marks the end of Melville's great novel, the sinking of the Essex is only the beginning of Philbrick's tale. It is history brought vividly - and agonizingly - to life by a master storyteller.
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Booklist
Thomas Farel Hefferman, author of Stove by a Whale
of 5
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