In the heart of the sea : the tragedy of the whaleship Essex

Format:

Book (regular print)

Title:

In the heart of the sea : the tragedy of the whaleship Essex

Uniform Title:

Revenge of the whale

Author:

Philbrick, Nathaniel.

ISBN:

9780670891573

9780141001821

9780606365741

9780143126812

9780613338202

Publication Information:

New York : Viking, 2000.

Physical Description:

xvi, 302 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Contents:

Preface: February 23, 1821 -- Nantucket -- Knockdown -- First blood -- The lees of fire -- The attack -- The plan -- At sea -- Centering down -- The island -- The whisper of necessity -- Games of chance -- In the eagle's shadow -- Homecoming -- Consequences -- Epilogue: Bones.

Summary:

In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm 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 travel over 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 a timeless account of the human spirit under extreme duress, but it is also a story about a community and about the kind of men and women who lived in a forbidding, remote island like Nantucket. -- Dust jacket.

Program Information:

Accelerated Reader AR UG 8.8 14.0 45207.

Reading Counts RC High School 11 18 Quiz: 31543 Guided reading level: NR.

Corporate Subject:

Essex (Whaleship)

Essex (Whaleship) (OCoLC)fst00548306

Subject(s):

Essex (Whaleship)

Shipwrecks -- Pacific Ocean.

Survival.

Geographic Term:

Pacific Ocean.

Genre:

True adventure stories.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Monmouth Public Library	910.9164 Philbrick, N. 2000	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Dallas Public Library	910.9164 Philbrick	Searching... Unknown
Searching... McMinnville Public Library	910.452 Philbrick	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Silver Falls Library	910.9164 PHILBRICK	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stayton Public Library	910.9164 PHILBRICK	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West Salem Branch Library	910.452 Philbrick 2000	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Woodburn Public Library	910.9164 PHILBRICK	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

From the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye , the riveting and critically acclaimed bestseller and a major motion picture starring Chris Hemsworth, directed by Ron Howard

"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.

Author Notes

Nathaniel Philbrick was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 11, 1956. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Brown University and a master's degree in American literature from Duke University. In 1978, he was Brown University's first Intercollegiate All-American sailor and he won the Sunfish North Americans in Barrington, Rhode Island. After graduate school, he worked for four years at Sailing World magazine. Afterward, he worked as a freelancer for a number of years and wrote/edited several sailing books including Yachting: A Parody.

After moving to Nantucket in 1986, he became interested in the history of the island and wrote Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People. In 2000 he published In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. A motion picture of the book was released in December 2015. His other books include Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition; Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War; The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution; Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, and In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (5)

School Library Journal Review

YA-In 1819, the Essex, a Nantucket whaleship carrying a crew of 20, began what all thought would be a normal, two-year voyage. Instead, after a year and a half of near-disasters, the ship was rammed by a sperm whale and sank in the Pacific. All hands got off in three whaleboats and were at sea for three unbearable months of short rations and little fresh water, leading to the death by starvation of some and the killing of others to provide food. One boat disappeared and the two remaining eventually became separated. When rescued off the coast of Chile, only five men were still alive, including the captain and first mate, as well as three rescued later from an island. Philbrick brings the era to life, giving readers a rounded picture of the whaling industry and its society. Relying mainly on two survivors' detailed accounts, one of which has just recently been found, he fleshes out the tale in an exciting manner that sweeps readers along. He includes modern medical knowledge of the physical and mental effects of starvation on humans. The book concludes with tales of other shipwrecks, a description of how the survivors lived the rest of their lives, and an introduction to the recent work of the Nantucket Whaling Museum. The contrast between today's touristy island paradise and yesterday's hard life will not be lost on teens.-Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publisher's Weekly Review

With woody intonation and a suitably somber cadence, Tony Award-winning actor Herrmann reads this chilling tale of the Essex, a whaling ship that was sunk in the middle of the Pacific by an 80-foot sperm whale in 1820. The story would come to mark the mythology of the 19th century as the Titanic did the 20thÄHerman Melville, for one, based Moby Dick on certain key elements of the tragedy. In Philbrick's spare, well-paced version, we learn much about how Nantucket's culture was affected by the whaling industry boom, from its economy to its social habits. But the horrific heart of the narrative details the fate of the 20 sailors who attempted to sail several thousand miles back to Chile using only three pathetic open boats. Reaching home 93 days later, only eight sailors survived the ordeal of thirst, starvation and despair. Near the tape's end, Herrmann delivers one of the finest funereal orations ever offered on behalf of seamen. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 10). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Review

A vivid account of a 19th-century maritime disaster that engaged the popular imagination of the time with its horrors of castaways and cannibalism. Just west of the Gal pagos Islands, the Nantucket whale ship Essex was struck on November 20, 1820, by an 85-foot bull sperm whale. Yet the sinking was only the beginning of a fantastic voyage, narrated with brio and informed speculation by Philbrick, director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. For three months the 20 men who escaped the Essex drifted in three smaller open boats, enduring squalls, attacks by sharks and another whale, starvation, dehydration, madness, and despair, capped by eating the flesh of comrades who had begun to die off'and, in one instance, casting lots to see who would be killed and eaten next. When eight remaining castaways were retrieved off the coast of Chile, they had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific'farther than both William Bligh's post-Bounty voyage and Ernest Shackleton's trek to South Georgia Island nearly a century later. An account by first mate Owen Chase provided fodder for, most famously, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which took Chase's description of the whale's 'decided, calculated mischief' as its central motif. Philbrick uses Chase's narrative and an unpublished memoir by the ship's cabin boy, as well as recent medical and psychological discoveries, to limn the terror of men faced with their most elemental fears. He also brings to life the Quaker-dominated society of Nantucket, including its ambivalence toward African-American sailors and its short existence as a microcosm of an emerging America: 'relentlessly acquisitive, technologically advanced, with a religious sense of its own destiny.' A gripping chronicle of an epic voyage of hardship and survival that deserves to be as well known now as it once was. (16 pages b&w illustrations) (First serial rights to Vanity Fair; author tour)

Booklist Review

Given the recent popularity of true-life adventure sagas, Viking is probably correct in anticipating major interest in this accessible narrative of the tragic 1820s whaling voyage whose central disaster was the violent encounter with a sperm whale, which inspired the climactic scene in Melville's Moby Dick. Philbrick, director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies and champion sailboat racer, is well qualified to describe the issues raised by the Essex's final whale hunt. Those issues included Nantucket's unusual commercial, religious, and social characteristics; the class and racial aspects of Nantucket whaling; whaleboat crewmen's responsibilities and the maritime conditions they faced; types of whales that Nantucketers chased; the work involved in transforming the carcasses of these huge mammals into casks of oil; types of leadership appropriate at different stages of a disaster; and the biological and psychological effects of starvation, dehydration, and cannibalism. 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. --Mary Carroll

Library Journal Review

After the Essex is splintered by an 80-ton sperm whale in 1820, her crew tries to reach South America in three small boats. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Preface: February 23, 1821	p. xi
Crew of the Essex	p. xvii
Chapter 1 Nantucket	p. 1
Chapter 2 Knockdown	p. 28
Chapter 3 First Blood	p. 44
Chapter 4 The Lees of Fire	p. 62
Chapter 5 The Attack	p. 77
Chapter 6 The Plan	p. 92
Chapter 7 At Sea	p. 104
Chapter 8 Centering Down	p. 123

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Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (5)

School Library Journal Review

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

Table of Contents