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. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow." "With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed-at least six knots.
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