Gripping. I read it straight through on a Sunday afternoon. ( )

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/2007/02... ( )

I really liked this book. It's the true story behind the novel Moby Dick. It's well written and very readable. It's an almost day by day account of the hardships of the crew, adrift at sea in 3 small boats, after the sinking of their whaling ship, the Essex, by an angry 85 foot whale. Their experiences were horrific, ie starvation and thirst. Recommended. ( )

This is an account of the 1820 sinking of the whale ship Essex by an angry sperm whale (which was later also immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby Dick) and the 93 days that the captain and crew endured on the ocean. It’s obvious that Philbrick did a yeoman’s job of research on this book. He does an excellent job of giving the reader background on Nantucket, the whaling industry, the ship, the ocean, and the crew. He was aided in his telling of the events by the fact that the First Mate and the youngest member of the crew both wrote accounts of the sinking and aftermath. Philbrick also tells the reader how each of the survivors fared in the years to come. I found this book so interesting and well written that I read it to the exclusion of the other books I was reading at the same time, which is not something I’m driven to do often. ( )

As Nathaniel Philbrick freely admits, history is replete with tales of shipwrecked castaways - and planewrecked rugger teams - eating each other. And the Essex was not the only whale boat to sink, nor even was it the only one to get rammed by a whale. Nor is N. Philbrick the only man to have written about this particular ship: leaving aside Herman Melville, Philbrick acknowledges and cites at length from three other authors who have written on the same subject, and two of them were actually on board.
So while the book rips along at a jaunty pace, and is a pleasant enough read, it's never clear what its raison d'etre is, other than to cash in on the current appetite for strange but true tales about quirky but forgetten strugglers against the conventions and odds of history (you know, Fermat's Theorem, Longitude, that sort of thing).

The learned author also fails to even consider, let alone answer, the point that, if the great offshore whaling grounds were in the South Pacific, why - instead of sailing there, around South America, from the New York region, didn't the Natucketers just up sticks and move to California? Would have saved them a lot of time, you'd think, not to mention the aggravation of rounding Cape Horn.

A worthy enough effort, but it is a bit pointless, and inevitably it pales into comparison with Moby Dick. ( )