I know this story happened a long time ago, but using “perhaps” a lot dragged the story down. As nail biting as the story itself was, it was written like a historical textbook. This story honestly sounds made up but it is not. In the Heart of the Sea is an addicting read mostly because I was horrified and had to know what happened next. At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. 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. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale.

In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history. In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex-an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick.

In the heart of the sea philbrick