In the Heart of the Sea

Nathaniel Philbrick

It is said that the bulk of Melville's _Moby-Dick_ came from Melville's perusal of the account of Essex first mate Owen Chase; the Essex's siege and ultimate destruction by an eighty-five-foot sperm whale is the first (and perhaps only) known account of a sperm whale attacking a large ship without being in any way provoked. At the end of the nineteenth century, grammar school children were taught about the Essex disaster in much the way today's grammar school children are taught about the FDR administration; however, as time has gone on, the amazing story of the Essex and its survivors has fallen by the wayside.

In the 1980s, a manuscript by the boat's cabin boy was found, unpublished, in an attic. While it held up most of Chase's narrative, it did shed some light on a few things that had previously been in the dark, and between the two accounts, a full tale came out. Philbrick put them together, added some other information, and the result is In the Heart of the Sea.

The whale attack which is the climax of Melville's six-hundred-page monster is over and done with a third of the way into this book, for the whale's attack on the Essex is only the beginning of this story. Perhaps Melville didn't want to get into the more gruesome aspects of life adrift in a small boat for ninety-three days (even longer than both Shackleford and Bligh, whose voyages after being set adrift are almost legendary), or perhaps he didn't want to seem exploitive; tales of South Sea cannibalism were rampant when Melville was writing, and to add it to his book may have seemed like an attempt at trendiness. (Perhaps he just thought it was too bloody long. Naah.) In any case, the real story happens after the whale. Seventeen men escaped the Essex in three whaling boats. which they modified into small schooners. By the time they were rescued, almost all of those seventeen had died, and the majority of those bodies became the food that sustained the remainder.

Philbrick paints a gruesome picture, but he does it in such a way that it doesn't seem sensationalized. He follows a graphic discussion of what happens to the body during the progressive stages of dehydration with the party stumbling upon a small South Pacific island where they find a spring and some turtles to eat, for example. We are shown the effects of various things, and then we're shows why we're being shown. It's simple, it's step by step, it's easy reading, and it doesn't have the same overbearing presence as does Moby-Dick. (It also doesn't stop for two hundred pages to tell us how to kill, skin, and eat a whale, thankfully.) Well-planned, well-executed, and quite nice all the way around.