In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’
The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century – and inspiration for ‘Moby-Dick’ – reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in December 2015, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy.When the whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819, the unthinkable happened. A mere speck in the vast Pacific ocean – and powerless against the forces of nature – Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and her twenty crewmen were forced to take to the open sea in three small boats. Ninety days later only a handful of survivors were rescued – and a terrifying story of desperation, cannibalism and courage was revealed…One of the greatest sea yarns ever spun, ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ is the true story of the extraordinary events that inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece ‘Moby-Dick’.
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In the Heart of the Sea
The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick
Nathaniel Philbrick
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick 2000
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Lord Wearyâs Castle by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1947 and renewed 1972 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
Frontispiece, images on chapter openings, and tailpiece by David Lazarus.
Ship diagrams © 2000 L. F. Tantillo. Maps on pages 46â7 and 179 by Jeffrey L. Ward
Motion picture artwork © 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved.
Nathaniel Philbrick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006531203
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007381814
Version: 2015-11-16
To Melissa
And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against thee: Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as a heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.
âEXODUS 15:7â8
This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale
Who spewed Nantucket bones in the thrashed swellâ¦
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
âROBERT LOWELL,
âThe Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketâ
Table of Contents
CHAPTER FOUR â The Lees of Fire
CHAPTER EIGHT â Centering Down
CHAPTER TEN â The Whisper of Necessity
CHAPTER ELEVEN â Games of Chance
CHAPTER TWELVE â In the Eagleâs Shadow
CHAPTER THIRTEEN â Homecoming
February 23, 1821
LIKE A GIANT BIRD of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.
Harvesting sperm whalesâthe largest toothed whales in existenceâwas no easy matter. Six men would set out from the ship in a small boat, row up to their prey, harpoon it, then attempt to stab it to death with a lance. The sixty-ton creature could destroy the whaleboat with a flick of its tail, throwing the men into the cold ocean water, often miles from the ship.
Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the highgrade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age. That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earthâs landmasses combined.
For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island called Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the coast of southern New England. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucketâs whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call âQuakers with a vengeance.â
It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, just a few months into what would be a three-year voyage, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. And on that February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusualâa boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The shipâs captain, the thirty-seven-year-old Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft with keen curiosity.
