Whaleship Essex

Book Review In the heart of ocean the calamity of the whaleship Essex, written by Nathaniel Philbrick, recounts the mystery surrounding the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the to the south Pacific. The ordeal 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 238-ton Essex mess sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, the unbelievable happened in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged whale.Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, decided instead to sail their three tiny boats for the distant South American coast. They would eventually travelover 4,500 miles. The next three months tested just how far humans could go in their battle against the sea as, one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease and fear. This is not only a unending account of the human spirit under extreme dur ess, but it is besides a story about a community and about the conformation of men and women who lived in the remote island of Nantucket.Philbrick uses little-known documents-including a long-lost account written by the ships cabin boy-and penetrating details about whaling and the Nantucket community to reveal the chill events surrounding this epic maritime disaster. An intense and mesmerizing read, In the sprightliness of the Sea is a monumental work of history forever placing the Essex tragedy in the center of historical American maritime disasters.