In the Heart of the Sea

Summary

On November 20, 1820, a sperm whale attacked and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the nearest land. Twenty men were left alive in three small whaleboats with enough provisions for perhaps sixty days. The nearest inhabited land was the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles to the west, but the survivors were afraid of what they believed to be cannibals on those islands. They chose instead to sail east, toward South America, a journey of roughly 3,000 miles. Only eight men survived, and their survival required choices that haunted them for the rest of their lives.

The story of the Essex was already known to literate Americans when Herman Melville encountered it as a young sailor and used it as the factual core of Moby-Dick. Nathaniel Philbrick went back to the primary sources, including the first-officer’s account published in 1821 and the cabin-boy’s account, kept secret for decades, that was discovered in a Nantucket attic in the twentieth century, and reconstructed the story in its full, terrible detail. In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2000 and has become the standard account of one of the most extraordinary survival stories in the history of the sea.

The book covers not only the survival ordeal but also the history of the Nantucket whaling industry, the culture of the Essex’s crew, and the psychological dimensions of what the survivors faced and what they did. It is a short book that contains an enormous amount, and Philbrick manages the compression without appearing to rush.

Character Arcs and Development

Owen Chase, the first officer, is the book’s central figure: a man of extraordinary physical endurance and practical intelligence who kept himself and seven others alive through ninety-five days at sea and then lived with what that survival had required for the rest of his life. Philbrick traces his trajectory from ambitious young officer to survivor with a particularity that gives the book its emotional depth.

Captain George Pollard is the more tragic figure. He survived the ordeal of the Essex, commanded another ship, wrecked it on a reef in the Pacific, and eventually returned to Nantucket as a night watchman, unable to trust himself at sea again. His fate is a measure of what the experience cost those who survived it.

The ship’s cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, kept his account of the ordeal secret for decades, apparently unable to bring himself to publish what he had seen and done. His manuscript, discovered long after his death, provides Philbrick with the most intimate account of the experience and also its most disturbing details.

Pacing

The book moves with the urgency that the material demands. Philbrick establishes the world of Nantucket whaling with enough historical depth that the reader understands what has been lost when the Essex goes down, and then follows the survivors through their ordeal with a pacing that respects both the speed of deterioration and the terrible slowness of ninety-five days at sea without food. The chapters covering the final weeks of the ordeal, when the survivors were doing things they would never speak of, are handled with remarkable restraint: Philbrick describes what happened without lingering, which is the correct approach to material this extreme.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The book’s deepest question is: what does survival require, and what does the answer reveal about humanity? The Essex survivors faced starvation at sea, and the choices they made to survive are described honestly. Philbrick contextualizes those choices with historical examples of what other survival situations have required, and he refuses to judge the survivors by standards that apply in comfortable circumstances rather than extremity. This is the right approach and a difficult one to execute without either excusing or condemning.

There is also a meditation on risk and the culture that created it. Nantucket’s whaling industry required young men to leave for years at a time in small wooden ships to hunt the largest animals in the ocean. The risk was known and accepted; the industry was built on it. The Essex’s destruction was not a random catastrophe but the outcome of a risk that the entire community understood and took collectively. Philbrick explores what it meant to live in a community organized around that acceptance of danger.

Style and Voice

Philbrick writes with the clarity and restraint of an author who trusts his material. He does not need to dramatize what is already dramatic; he needs to document it with enough precision that its reality is felt. He is excellent at the physical world of the sea: the heat, the thirst, the hallucinations of dehydration, the false hope of rain that fails to come. The historical research is thorough and the sourcing transparent, but the book reads like narrative, not scholarship.

Verdict

In the Heart of the Sea is one of the finest works of narrative nonfiction published in recent decades, and the best account of the Essex disaster available. It is a book about extremity, about what human beings are capable of when all other options are exhausted, and about the long aftermath of survival. It earns its National Book Award. Readers who respond to it should follow it with Moby-Dick, which will be a different reading experience for knowing the real story.

Five stars: extraordinary narrative history and a meditation on survival that lingers long after the reading is done.

What is the connection between the Essex disaster and Moby-Dick?

Herman Melville encountered the story of the Essex as a young sailor and used it as the factual core of Moby-Dick, published in 1851. He read Owen Chase’s account of the disaster and was so affected by it that he tracked down Chase’s son years later to borrow the copy and annotate it. The central incident of Moby-Dick, a whale attacking and sinking a ship, is taken directly from the Essex disaster. Philbrick’s book is in some ways the true story that Melville fictionalized, and reading them together deepens both.

What happened to the Essex survivors?

Eight of the twenty original crew members survived. Owen Chase returned to whaling, suffered from nightmares for the rest of his life, and hoarded food obsessively in his old age. Captain George Pollard commanded one more ship, wrecked it, and spent the rest of his career as a night watchman in Nantucket, unwilling to trust himself at sea. Thomas Nickerson, the cabin boy, lived a long life but kept his account of the ordeal hidden until near his death. None of the survivors spoke publicly about what they had done to survive.

How long were the survivors at sea?

The survivors drifted and sailed in open whaleboats for approximately ninety-five days before the last survivors were rescued. During that time, they crossed from the central Pacific toward the coast of South America. The survivors endured extreme thirst, starvation, sun exposure, and, in the final weeks, the deaths of crewmates whose bodies they consumed to survive. The physical ordeal was extraordinary by any standard.

Why did the survivors sail away from the Marquesas Islands?

They were afraid of cannibalism. The Marquesas were the nearest inhabited land, roughly 1,200 miles to the west, but the sailors had heard accounts of cannibalistic practices among Pacific island peoples and chose the much longer route east toward South America rather than risk landing on a Polynesian island. The irony that this choice led to them practicing the very thing they feared is one of the most haunting elements of the story.

What primary sources did Philbrick use?

Philbrick drew on Owen Chase’s account published in 1821, which had been the standard source for the story, and on Thomas Nickerson’s account, written in the 1870s and kept secret until a Nantucket researcher discovered it in an attic in the 1980s. Nickerson’s account, which Philbrick had access to through the Nantucket Historical Association, provided the most intimate and disturbing details of the ordeal and allowed Philbrick to reconstruct the story more fully than previous accounts had managed.

Has this book been adapted?

Yes, Ron Howard directed a film adaptation, also titled In the Heart of the Sea, released in 2015 and starring Chris Hemsworth as Owen Chase. The film takes liberties with the historical record, as film adaptations typically do, but it captures the broad outlines of the story. The book is considerably more detailed and historically accurate, and readers interested in the actual events will find more in the book than in the film.

Is this appropriate for younger readers?

The book describes the deaths of sailors at sea and the desperate measures the survivors took to survive, including cannibalism. Philbrick handles these elements with restraint rather than graphic detail, but the subject matter is serious and the events disturbing. Most mature high school readers can handle the content, and the book is frequently assigned in American literature and history courses, often in conjunction with Moby-Dick. Parents of younger readers should read it first before making a judgment.

What was Nantucket’s whaling industry like in 1820?

In 1820, Nantucket was the center of the American whaling industry, which supplied the whale oil that lit homes and businesses across the Atlantic world. The industry required voyages of two to three years to the Pacific, where sperm whales were most abundant. The work was extraordinarily dangerous and required young men, many of them teenagers, to leave their families for years at a time. The economy of Nantucket depended almost entirely on this industry, and its culture was organized around the sea in ways that shaped every aspect of life on the island.