In the Heart of the Sea
Philbrick's factual account of the whaleship Essex tragedy in 1820, on which Herman Melville based MOBY-DICK, is proof that truth is still stranger than fiction, and sometimes just as dramatic. The Essex, after being rammed twice by a gi gantic sperm whale, took on water and sank, leaving the captain, the 1st and 2nd mates, and 17 other crewmen helplessly adrift in three small whaleboats.
They were able to find some food and water at the only island they reached, but then, except for 3 men who wished to stay there, the seamen set out again to reach South America. The 3 men barely existed on the island until they were found a month late r. But only 5 of the original 20 men on the whaleboats were rescued, after over 90 days at sea. It was cannibalism that kept them alive.
The main sources Philbrick uses in retelling the Essex story are Owen Chase, the 1st mate, Thomas Nickerson, the cabin boy, and Nantucket itself. The island of Nantucket in the early 1800s was famous for its whaling, and most of the ESSEX survi vors were from there. It was an old rumor that many young women there "pledged to marry only men who had already killed a whale."
Chase and Nickerson's contrasting accounts of their survival were later put in print and read by Herman Melville. But he favored what he learned from the ESSEX captain, George Pollard, Jr. Though Captain Pollard went back to sea soon after being rescu ed, he had to abandon his new ship, Two Brothers, when it went aground in a storm near the Hawaiian Islands. Feeling that his luck at sea had run out, he soon gave up whaling and became a lowly night watchman in Nantucket. That was his life when so ught out by Melville.
Both Chase and Pollard had to spend their last years with the guilt of cannibalism plaguing them, and the people of Nantucket did not like to talk about it. The act of cannibalism was considered by most people to be a "cultural embarrassment". However , drawing lots to see who is to be eaten is worse. Drawing lots again to see who kills the one to be eaten is even worse. But what Captain Pollard had to face after a young crew member was killed and ready to be eaten was even more trying.
Nantucket, a predominately Quaker community and seaport, known to be an abolitionist stronghold, suffered again when it learned "the first four men to be eaten had been African Americans."
Nathaniel Philbrick's excellent recreation of the Essex story is based on references dating back to the 1700s, which include The Mutiny of the Bounty, Pitcairn Island, Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, Richard Henry Dan a's Two Years Before the Mast, as well as Melville's Moby-Dick.
In The Heart of the Sea was published in 2000 and won the National Book Award for non-fiction that year.