In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

I grew up in Michigan and have devoured just about every book that has been published on the Big Blow, a huge storm that blew over the Great Lakes in 1913 and destroyed more than a dozen ships and killed hundreds of people. I've read about the Christmas Tree Ship, the tipping over of the Eastland (which tipped over while tied to the dock and still killed more than 800 people!  - forget the Titanic, the Eastland is the real Hollywood story!), and I've poured over Edmund Fitzgerald lyrics and books. Generally speaking, I like my maritime disasters to be focused on the Great Lakes, but I like a good book about what happens on a boat,

(Sidenote: I feel a bit like June Diane Raphael on the hilarious podcast How Did This Get Made? in the episode on "Con Air" in which she noted that she likes movies that take place on planes because the stakes are so much higher.  It was hilarious when she said it, but not so much when I type it out.)

especially when what happens on a boat shows me a side of life I have never considered to be even the remotest part of my own life.  It doesn't necessarily HAVE to be about a disaster, but usually it is.

Anyway, Philbrick's well-researched book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex fits my interests really closely and I can't believe I hadn't heard of it (particularly in light of the fact that it was the basis of  2015 Ron Howard movie) until quite recently. I should have counted the number of times I said "CRAZY" as I read this book because I said it A LOT.

Back in the late 1700 and early 1800s, Nantucket was the world's center for whaling. Whales were prized for the oil that they could provide for energy.  Nantucketers had generational experience building ships and piloting them through the Pacific to harvest sperm whales. This book spins the tale of woe of the whaler Essex that set sail from Nantucket with 21 men on board in 1819. The Essex was attacked by a sperm whale, which was unheard of because sperm whale were relatively peaceful animals, and the ship sank, leaving the 20 men left (one man had deserted while at port earlier in the journey) in three whaleboats, which were the boats attached to the whaler that the crew would use to get close to whales to kill them. By the end of the ordeal, which took more than three months after the sinking of the Essex, the men had suffered from dehydration, starvation, and resorted to eating the bodies of their dead crewmates.  There were eventually eight survivors.

This book weaves together a history of Nantucket with narratives written down by two  of the survivors (first mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson) to tell this grueling tale of tragedy. In the section on the aftermath, Philbrick paints a startling picture of how the survivors were never really able to fully recover from their experiences and how it followed them around, both physically and emotionally, for the rest of their lives.

And Philbrick does all of this so well. From talking about how the wives on Nantucket were left alone for years on end while their men were out at sea, controlling households, finances, and their own sexual pleasure to discussing how rank the deck of the Essex must have been with the smell of whale carcasses, hogs and tortoises running loose on the deck, tar, and the smell of the men themselves, this book was absolutely riveting. I don't usually talk about non-fiction in such glowing terms, but I just had such a magically transporting time while reading it. 

This is the story that Melville used as inspiration for Moby Dick and it kind of made me want to read it, although I've heard the endless descriptions of whaling are tough to get through.

Regardless, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex was an excellent, excellent read.  If you're into shipping and sailing stories, give this one a shot. It won't disappoint!