In the Heart of the sea : the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

Locations
Call Number: Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / History / Philbrick, Nat.
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult A/V 4-week checkout	Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / History / Philbrick, Nat.	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Compact discs.
Unabridged.
Read by Scott Brick.
This is the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex, the inspiration for Melville's great classic, Moby Dick. In 1820, the Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was 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, they clung to life and, one by one, succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. When eight survivors were retrieved off the coast of Chile, they had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific.--Container.

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Absolutely wonderful (both book content and narration) submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 15, 2017, 8:28pm Ahhhh... I love a good nonfiction book that takes on all the aspects of a topic. We learn about the history of whaling in Nantucket, what it took to captain a ship, race and whaling (and why the Black sailors died and were canibalized first), sperm whales and their place in the energy economy of the early 1800's, and (of course) the events around a giant bull ramming the Essex and the harrowing journey of the survivors. This is the story that inspired Moby Dick, and it's fascinating and compelling.

I happened to listen to the audio book of this, and thought the narration was excellent. There were a couple of spots where I thought "new recording session!" because the vocal quality was different than the sentence before, but it didn't distract too much, and certainly didn't ruin my enjoyment of the whole thing.