In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
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Product Description
The suffering of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an mad sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival. Nathaniel Philbrick uses small-known documents-including a long-lost account written by the ship’s cabin boy-and penetrating details about whaling and the Nantucket community to reveal the chilling events surrounding this epic maritime disaster. An intense and mesmerizing read, In the Heart of the Sea is a monumental work of history forever placing the Essex tragedy in the American past canon.Amazon.com Review
The appeal of Dava Sobel’s Longitude was, in part, that it illuminated a small-known piece of history through a series of captivating incidents and engaging personalities. Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea is certainly cast from the same mold, examining the 19th-century Pacific whaling industry through the arc of the sinking of the whaleship Essex by a boisterous sperm whale. The tale that inspired Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick has a lot going for it–derring-do, cannibalism, rescue–and Philbrick proves an amiable and well-informed narrator, providing both context and detail. We learn about the importance and mechanics of blubber production–a vital source of oil–and we get the nuts and bolts of harpooning and life aboard whalers. We are spared neither the nitty-stark of open boats nor the sucking of human bones dry.
By sticking to the tried and tested Longitude formula, Philbrick has missed a slight trick or two. The epicenter of the whaling industry was Nantucket, a tiny island off Cape Cod; most of the whales were in the Pacific, necessitating a huge journey around the southernmost tip of South America. We never learn why no one ever tried to make an alternative whaling capital somewhere nearer. Similarly, Philbrick tells us that the tale of the Essex was well known to Americans for decades, but he never explores how such legends fade from our consciousness. Philbrick would no doubt answer that such questions were beyond his remit, and you can’t exactly accuse him of skimping on his research. By any standard, 50 pages of footnotes impress, though he wears his learning lightly. He doesn’t get bogged down in pretentious detail, and his narrative rattles along at a nice pace. When the storyline is as excellent as this, you can’t really question for more. –John Crace, Amazon.co.uk
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Personally I thought this book was dried out and dull. I had to read this book for my English class and I did not delight in it. It seemed like it took 50 pages to tell about how the character was hungery. I am no practiced in novels, but I have read plenty of more enjoyable and worthwhile books. On a excellent note, there was a lot of appealing facts on whaling, sailing, and survival. I probably loved learning all the facts more than the storyline itself.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
‘In the Heart of the Sea’ is a classic tale of sailors stranded at sea. But it does have some gruesome parts that classic tales like ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘Two Years before the Mast’ don’t have. For instance there is much death and cannibilism. The tale is told by a narrattor and is about how the Nantucket whaleship, the Essex, is wrecked by a sperm whale and how they must survive in three whaleboats with built up sides. The tale is right and what the book, Moby Dick, is based on.This book is very imformative but I did not like the way it was written and it dragged in many parts. I would not recomend this book.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Nathaniel Philbrick has written a research paper and had it published as a novel. The book has 302 pages, which includes 64 pages of notes, bibliography, acknowledgements and pointer.
The tale is appealing and worth the read, but one thing that struck me as odd in the authors referral to the black members of the ship’s crew as “African Americans”. Keep in mind that this tale occurred in 1820. I hardly reflect that the use of the politically right term African American was even conceived at that time. The leader also seems to want to erect the case that because the black members of the crew were the first to die, that there may have been racial reasons for this to occur. He discusses the difference in body stout content between blacks and whites, and the closeness of the Nantucket Quakers, which may have accounted for the whites being treated differently while trying to survive at sea. The possibility of racism is raised a couple of times, but then quickly dismissed.
I would recommend that unless you have a burning desire to read this book immediately, that you wait for the paper back edition. It is sure to be a better value.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Agreed its aim to inform, not just to tell a excellent tale (in the style of Moby Dick), the book has three fatal flaws: Philbrick’s ignorance of both sailing and whaling, and his simplistic view of human psychology. Here are examples of some of the fake assumptions Philbrick employs about sailing: in the 1820’s a whale ship’s captain would continue carrying a large, hard to reef, light-air sail with a storm approaching in the Gulf Stream while reefing additional sails; an early 1800’s whale ship will come back from a 90 degree knockdown; when caught over-canvassed in a storm, some captains prefer to come up head into the wind rather than falling off and running before the wind; first-time members of the crew remain “green” after months at sea; the ship’s carpenter cannot erect a whaleboat; the ship’s carpenter can repair a whaleboat that was smashed to bits. Etc. These small mistakes about sailing go on and on. There are also copious “small” mistakes made when describing whaling. The “killer” mistake occurs when Philbrick writes that in the 1820’s so much whaling was in the works that the Pacific was dotted with the carcasses of dead whales. This, when even a brief amount of research reveals that one of the huge problems faced by whalers was keeping a dead whale afloat. As these small errors mount up, the reader ceases to be able to take anything Philbrick says about either sailing or whaling seriously or, by analogy, anything he says about Nantucket, its history and its people. If the tale were not open as if to provide information about both this might not matter. But as it is, it does. Then there are the predictable one dimensional stereotypes that are Philbrick’s cast of character’s. Any adult who thinks this is a dose or reality probably cannot be convinced otherwise, though if you are in this group, I suggest comparing the character development in this “National Book Award” novel with, say, character development in Graham Greene’s “A Burnt Out Case,” for example.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
You can’t tell is a fantastic tale when the tale is real, here the writer tells us a real tale and he writes things to compare the reality of that tale with additional tales, if you are writing a real tale you don’t have to compare it with anything, just tell the tale and that’s it.
In the additional hand your will read many times that it was a sunny day, then a rainy day, the a storm day, you just get tired of reading the same in all the chapters.
In the main tale you will learn that when happened a human tragedy, this tragedy is because were made several errors, not just one, and that was what happened to this crew.
For ME, the last chapter is the epilogue and the epilogue doesn’t have to be written.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5