In the Heart of the Sea

In 1820, in the remotest stretch of the Pacific, an enraged sperm whale twice rammed and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex, and the twenty men who watched her go down faced a decision that decided everything: fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, they turned their three small whaleboats toward South America, thousands of miles against the wind, and by the end it was the survivors themselves who had eaten the dead. In the Heart of the Sea is Nathaniel Philbrick's reconstruction of the whole ordeal, and it earns its place beside the sea's great disaster narratives. He builds the world first, Quaker Nantucket at the height of its whale oil empire, an island theocracy of widows and absent men, with its rigid hierarchies of race and rank that would surface brutally in the boats, and then follows the Essex out, through the whaling routine rendered in fascinated detail, to the attack, told with the strangeness it deserves, and into more than ninety days of open ocean, thirst, and the drawing of lots that killed the captain's own young cousin. Philbrick had two eyewitness accounts to work from, first mate Owen Chase's polished narrative and the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson's unvarnished memoir, rediscovered in the twentieth century, and he reads them against each other and against modern survival physiology to establish what actually happened. The wreck famously seeded Moby Dick, and Philbrick traces the debt. The book won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction, became a major bestseller, and reached the screen in Ron Howard's 2015 film.