The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale (Penguin Classics)
Nathaniel Philbrick'sIn the Heart of the Seadescribed the loss of the whalerEssexin the Pacific Ocean--the whale attack that inspired the climax of Melville'sMoby Dickand the horrors the crew suffered as they strove to return home. Philbrick's book sought to balance first-mate Owen Chase's classic version of theEssexdisaster against the narrative, discovered in 1981, of Thomas Nickerson, anEssexcabin boy. This volume collects these and other primary sources: letters sent back to Nantucket when the first survivors reached South America; Chase's narrative and Melville's notes in his copy of it; Nickerson's sketches, written years later, and a Nickerson letter; interviews with the ship's captain; the story of one of the men who remained in the islands near the wreck; and "memories and apocrypha." These are not literary documents; they are sailors' stories of a terrifying experience, full of maritime detail. Appropriate where Philbrick's book or other studies of nineteenth-century men at sea circulate.Mary CarrollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved