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In the Heart of the Sea: the Epic True Story That Inspired 'Moby Dick'

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In the Heart of the Sea: the Epic True Story That Inspired 'Moby Dick' Nathaniel Philbrick In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’ Аннотация The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century – and inspiration for ‘Moby- Dick’ – reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in December 2015, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy.When the whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819, the unthinkable happened. A mere speck in the vast Pacific ocean – and powerless against the forces of nature – Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and her twenty crewmen were forced to take to the open sea in three small boats. Ninety days later only a handful of survivors were rescued – and a terrifying story of desperation, cannibalism and courage was revealed…One of the greatest sea yarns ever spun, ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ is the true story of the extraordinary events that inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece ‘Moby-Dick’. Содержание In the Heart of the Sea 5 Nathaniel Philbrick 6 Copyright 7 Dedication 11 Epigraph 12 Table of Contents 13 PREFACE 15 CREW OF THE ESSEX 22 CHAPTER ONE 25 CHAPTER TWO 61 CHAPTER THREE 83 CHAPTER FOUR 108 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. 120 In the Heart of the Sea The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick Nathaniel Philbrick Copyright William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000 Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick 2000 Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Lord Wearyâs Castle by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1947 and renewed 1972 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Frontispiece, images on chapter openings, and tailpiece by David Lazarus. Ship diagrams © 2000 L. F. Tantillo. Maps on pages 46â7 and 179 by Jeffrey L. Ward Motion picture artwork © 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. Nathaniel Philbrick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. Source ISBN: 9780006531203 Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007381814 Version: 2015-11-16 Dedication To Melissa Epigraph And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against thee: Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as a heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea. âEXODUS 15:7â8 This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones in the thrashed swell⦠This is the end of running on the waves; We are poured out like water. Who will dance The mast-lashed master of Leviathans Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? âROBERT LOWELL, âThe Quaker Graveyard in Nantucketâ Table of Contents Cover Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PREFACE CREW OF THE ESSEX CHAPTER ONE â Nantucket CHAPTER TWO â Knockdown CHAPTER THREE â First Blood CHAPTER FOUR â The Lees of Fire CHAPTER FIVE â The Attack CHAPTER SIX â The Plan CHAPTER SEVEN â At Sea CHAPTER EIGHT â Centering Down CHAPTER NINE â The Island CHAPTER TEN â The Whisper of Necessity CHAPTER ELEVEN â Games of Chance CHAPTER TWELVE â In the Eagleâs Shadow CHAPTER THIRTEEN â Homecoming CHAPTER FOURTEEN â Consequences EPILOGUE â Bones KEEP READING SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author Notes Praise About the Publisher PREFACE February 23, 1821 LIKE A GIANT BIRD of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales. Harvesting sperm whalesâthe largest toothed whales in existenceâwas no easy matter. Six men would set out from the ship in a small boat, row up to their prey, harpoon it, then attempt to stab it to death with a lance. The sixty-ton creature could destroy the whaleboat with a flick of its tail, throwing the men into the cold ocean water, often miles from the ship. Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the highgrade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age. That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earthâs landmasses combined. For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island called Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the coast of southern New England. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucketâs whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self- control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call âQuakers with a vengeance.â It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, just a few months into what would be a three-year voyage, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. And on that February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusualâa boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The shipâs captain, the thirty-seven-year-old Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft with keen curiosity. He soon realized that it was a whaleboatâdouble-ended and about twenty-five feet longâbut a whaleboat unlike any he had ever seen. The boatâs sides had been built up by about half a foot. Two makeshift masts had been rigged, transforming the rowing vessel into a rudimentary schooner. The sailsâstiff with salt and bleached by the sunâhad clearly pulled the boat along for many, many miles. Coffin could see no one at the steering oar. He turned to the man at the Dauphinâs wheel and ordered, âHard up the helm.â Under Coffinâs watchful eye, the helmsman brought the ship as close as possible to the derelict craft. Even though their momentum quickly swept them past it, the brief seconds during which the ship loomed over the open boat presented a sight that would stay with the crew the rest of their lives. First they saw bonesâhuman bonesâlittering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat were the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered with sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates. Instead of greeting their rescuers with smiles of relief, the survivorsâtoo delirious with thirst and hunger to speakâwere disturbed, even frightened. They jealously clutched the splintered and gnawed-over bones with a desperate, almost feral intensity, refusing to give them up, like two starving dogs found trapped in a pit. Later, once the survivors had been given some food and water (and had finally surrendered the bones), one of them found the strength to tell his story. It was a tale made of a whalemanâs worst nightmares: of being in a boat far from land with nothing left to eat or drink andâperhaps worst of allâof a whale with the vindictiveness and guile of a man. EVEN though it is little remembered today, the sinking of the whaleship Essex by an enraged sperm whale was one of the most well-known marine disasters of the nineteenth century. Nearly every child in America read about it in school. It was the event that inspired the climactic scene of Herman Melvilleâs Moby- Dick. But the point at which Melvilleâs novel endsâthe sinking of the shipâwas merely the starting point for the story of the real-life Essex disaster. The sinking seemed to mark the beginning of a kind of terrible laboratory experiment devised to see just how far the human animal could go in its battle against the savage sea. Of the twenty men who escaped the whale-crushed ship, only eight survived. The two men rescued by the Dauphin had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacificâfarther by at least 500 miles than Captain William Blighâs epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackletonâs equally famous passage to South Georgia Island. For nearly 180 years, most of what was known about the calamity came from the 128-page Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, written by Owen Chase, the shipâs first mate.
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