After the ordeal was over, he was given command of another whaling ship, which was promptly wrecked on a coral reef off the Hawaiian Islands. After this Pollard was never again trusted with a ship, and he ended his days on shore, low down the social scale, as Nantucket's night-watchman. Vere in Benjamin Britten's opera of Billy Budd. So too were Pollard, Chase and the men of the Essex. In the Heart of the Sea is its power to suggest that tragedy is what happens when men cannot rise above themselves.
Literature feeds on something uncontainable in such stories.
Beginning in adventure and ending on the shores of hell, they stand for all lives in which everything goes wrong, where men are powerless to halt their slide into moral squalor. Philbrick's book is more than a piece of elegantly written maritime history or an illuminating addition to the story of Melville's artistic development. It is a compelling study of the infinite human meanings of the sea itself.