Book: In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is, as the full title reveals, about the harrowing events surrounding the sinking of a whaleship named Essex.  This alarming and well-written piece of non-fiction concerns a maritime event that was as well known in the 19th century as the Titanic disaster is today.  And there is little to wonder about the story's erstwhile fame.  I finished this book a week ago and it still follows me around, creeps into my thoughts, demands that I pay some attention to it.  I knew I wouldn't be able to start reading anything else in earnest until I wrote this review and processed the whole thing a little bit.

Essentially, in 1820, several thousand miles off the west coast of South America and well into the Pacific, a sperm whale, purposefully, struck and sunk the Essex.  The crew, 20 men, piled into three small whaleboats - the 25-foot low-draft vessels carried by the larger whaleship and normally used for pursuing and harpooning whales.  At the end of a nearly 3-month ordeal, there would be 8 men left alive, 3 recovered from an uninhabited island in the Pacific and 5 recovered from two of the whaleboats.  There are oh so many appalling, thrilling and morbidly fascinating details to convey about this story, but one should read them.  Philbrick has done a wonderful job and it is his method I would most like to discuss.

In order to reconstruct the fascinating saga of the Essex, Philbrick draws heavily from narratives penned by two of its survivors - the first mate, Owen Chase, and the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson.  Additionally, Philbrick examines more general cultural sources of the period in order to present a really complete picture of this moment in history when whale oil still powered the industrial revolution, when Nantucket was the bustling center of whaling, and when whalers were just beginning to follow their quarry into the vast Pacific Ocean.

Ever since I read Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, I have been an absolute sucker for good microhistory.  Very few historical methods (with the exception of good old, traditional narrative history) put you in the moment and in the minds of individuals the way microhistory does.  Philbrick's microhistorical retelling of the Essex saga painstakingly reconstructs the context of the ship, its crew and of the whaling industry in general.  First, he draws a picture of life on Nantucket at the zenith of whaling while also providing a history of how it became the center of that industry.  Next, he moves on to life on the ships themselves and what the work of whaling actually entailed.  And then, Philbrick begins his recounting of the Essex's last voyage and what occurred in the wake of its sinking.

As I indicated above, I won't be spilling many beans about what happened to these unfortunate men after the whale sank their ship, but suffice to say its retelling gives Philbrick opportunity to reconstruct for his reader such details as what happens to a human body suffering from extreme thirst or how cannabilism by necessity (that is, non-ritualized cannablism) is usually performed and psychologically dealt with.

In dropping his readers into the world of the crew of the Essex, Philbrick opens up questions about, among other things, man's exploitation of nature, of the connection between commerce and religion, of the way xenophobia prefigured man's movement around the globe and the human ability to withstand some really spectacular adversity.

I devoured this book in a relatively short amount of time and bothered Nick daily by sharing some of its more morbid details.  It is definitely a book that hangs around and needles you after you've read it.  In fact, I rather spontaneously painted a picture of the Essex in the moments before its sinking.  It was only after this cathartic exercise that I was able to move on to other reading...a novel about a serial killer, as it happens.  *deep breath*

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