In the Heart of the Sea

I enjoyed this book, but I have to say this: Parts of it are really gross.

In the Heart of the Sea is the true story of the shipwreck of the whaleship Essex, which sailed from Nantucket in early 1819 and eventually was attacked by a whale and sank in November of 1820.

It's quite the bizarre story, one that's inspired a fair share of fiction over the years, the most famous being Mehlville's Moby Dick.  And yet after I read it, and the more I read about the movie adaptation that recently came out, the more I think the truth is far stranger than the fiction could ever be.

There is so much here to read and understand in this book, and yet at times, the truth of the matter is quite disgusting.  After all, this is nonfiction, and it's about a whaleship -- that means author Nathaniel Philbrick is going to explain what it means to whale, and to the 21st century reader that is myself, it's a little gross.  Discussions of how blubber is sheered off and boiled down, the stomach-turning descriptions of oil and blood coating the decks of ships and soaking through the clothes of the sailors, and of course the violence that is whaling itself are all exquisitely detailed.  In another book, on another topic, I'd applaud that kind of research, and I guess in a way, I do.  But yuck.

Thankfully, that only comprises a short amount of this book's story, and thus I was able to safely skim over the nasty bits and instead focus on what was perhaps the most grueling survival story I've ever read.

The voyage itself was anything but uneventful.  The Essex was damaged in a storm just days out of Nantucket, and then it spent months struggling through rough waters before it finally rounded Cape Horn to head into the Pacific Ocean.  Once there, though resupplying was fairly standard, the crew was part of the destructive forces that eventually endangered the Galapagos tortoises as well as directly responsible for setting an entire island on fire, thus destroying a substantial amount of flora and fauna that lived there.   So many of these events seem unrelated to what eventually befell the ship’s crew after the whale attack, but as Philbrick writes, it becomes easy to see each piece of the puzzle fall into place to affect the outcome of its sailors. 

[As a side note: Philbrick also includes a massive map of the world at the time so readers can follow the location of each event as it unfolds.  It was an incredibly useful tool at times as I tried to figure out where, exactly, this ship was in the endless ocean.]

Once the Essex reached the whaling grounds in the Pacific, they set to work, and for a time, they were successful.  It didn’t last though – one day in late November, an enormous whale suddenly, and seemingly without cause, attacked the ship.  It made two passes, both times slamming into the vessel and causing extensive damage.  In fact, both First Mate Owen Chase and the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson's accounts of the attack and sinking indicate that total, the attack and the sinking took about ten minutes. 

That is shockingly little time for a ship to founder. 

A drawing of the whale attacking the Essex

The crew salvaged what they could, and then suddenly their story becomes one of survival – and an insane survival it is.  The sailors spent over 90 days trapped in three tiny whaleboats, subsisting on hardtack and ridiculously small amounts of fresh water.  Though they did once find an island, it quickly became clear that they couldn’t live on it, and so they returned to the boats, heading for South American once more.  Then, as they wasted away and their shipmates started to die, they resorted to cannibalism, a prospect that is so stomach-turning that I can barely even comprehend it. 

It’s an almost unbelievable story.  I read the section where they are stranded in about two days; I simply could not put it down (even with the gross parts).  This is a huge credit to Philbrick as a writer – I’ve read plenty of nonfiction, and not all narrative nonfiction is as captivating (both immediately and long-term) as In the Heart of the Sea.   This book gives insight into not only the events of the shipwreck, but also the whole of whaling culture as it engulfed Nantucket and its people.  Together, then, readers get this enormous, intense picture of how everything came together to create a culture that encouraged such drastic measures as whaling to gain profit as well as push men past their limits to get home. 

I originally picked up this book at a book fair a few months back, but what got me started actually reading it was the recent release of a movie adaptation.  I did not see this film, however; now that I’ve read the book, I think I’d be interested, but I’m not sure.  Everything I’ve read about the movie suggests that, really, it’s more an adaptation of Moby Dick than it is the true story of In the Heart of the Sea.  That’s a little disappointing – sure, Moby Dick is a great story, and an American classic, but it’s fiction, and this nonfiction story is far stranger a tale than Mehlville could ever create.

In addition, all the movie imagery suggests that the whale plays a much bigger role than it actually did in the tale of the Essex.  Take a look at this movie poster:

That’s a scale that’s almost impossible in nature, and definitely not one that represents the ~85 feet of whale as recorded by Owen Chase or Thomas Nickerson.  Plus, all the previews suggest that Chase is, well, chasing the whale – that’s Moby Dick, not the Essex. 

I read one review that said something like, “It’s 2016, no one wants to watch a movie about whaling.”  And yes, I can absolutely agree with that.  But if that’s all the movie is, then it missed the point of the book entirely. 

This is a story about men who faced up the hand they were dealt, tossed into the open sea by a whale for no apparent reason.  It would have been easy to give up – survival was unlikely – and yet they kept going in spite of everything.  They faced the challenges with the tools their culture had given them, and ultimately, quite a few of them survived. 

Theirs is, perhaps, a quieter type of courage – they didn’t run into burning buildings or face down enemy soldiers or any other of those big acts of courage that are so often praised in 2016.  But they accepted what happened and kept going, and that, I think, makes their story worthwhile.