\u2026and a tale of a whale.\u00a0 I just finished \u201cIn the Heart of the Sea\u201d by Nathaniel Philbrick, an exhaustively researched account of the sinking of the Nantucket-based whaling ship Essex in 1820, the real-life inspiration for Herman Melville\u2019s classic \u201cMoby-Dick.\u201d<\/p>\n
The author paints his picture with a detailed brush. We learn much about the unique culture, racial mores, and economy of Nantucket in the early 19th<\/sup> Century, and great detail about whaling.\u00a0 I had always thought the harpoons were what they killed the leviathans with, but we learn from Philbrick they were merely anchors for harpoon lines that brought the hunters\u2019 boats close enough to stab the quarry with giant spears.\u00a0 There are many enlightening tidbits about aquatic mammal biology and behavior, how starvation and dehydration affect the human body, and more than I wanted to know about cannibalism.<\/p>\n The whale that seems to have deliberately rammed the Essex was estimated to be 85 feet long and 80 tons. The author notes that sperm whales that size aren\u2019t reported today, and theorizes that selective killing of the more profitable giant whales during this period had an effect on subsequent breeding.\u00a0 However, he doesn\u2019t think the size was exaggerated, noting that a sperm whale jawbone now in a whaling museum extrapolates to an 80-footer.<\/p>\n Its first strike rocked the ship violently enough to throw sailors off their feet and seriously damage the hull, though the damage might <\/em>have been repairable.\u00a0 But the second hit, from a fast running start, was a straight-on head butt which, all survivors confirmed, drove the 238-ton vessel backward and caved in a major portion of the bow.\u00a0 The monster whale swam off, leaving the ship mortally wounded.<\/p>\n All 20 of the crew got off the ship in one piece, salvaging some provisions, guns, and navigation equipment before the Essex went under. In \u201cMoby-Dick,\u201d that was pretty much the climax of the novel, and sole survivor Ishmael\u2019s rescue was sort of a postscript. However, the aftermath of the Essex\u2019s sinking is really the heart of \u201cIn the Heart of the Sea.\u201d In more than three months on the ocean in those little whaling boats, a dozen men died, most winding up in the bellies of the surviving eight.<\/p>\n There are lessons galore in this grim narrative of survival.\u00a0 There are understandable navigation errors and choices which 20\/20 hindsight shows to have been questionable, and in perspective, being led astray by GPS will never seem quite so bad again after reading this. There was also a lesson about hesitation and balancing competing harms: After the initial ramming, the first mate spotted the stunned whale at the stern of the ship, and had a perfect shot to kill it, the great lance in hand. However, he made the conscious decision not to, fearing that in its death throes the huge tail might tear the rudder off the ship.\u00a0 He would later decide that spearing the beast would have been the lesser of two evils.<\/p>\n Damn. Now I gotta see the movie of the same name, which I hear was well made but so depressing it was not a success in the theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2026and a tale of a whale.\u00a0 I just finished \u201cIn the Heart of the Sea\u201d by Nathaniel Philbrick, an exhaustively researched account of the sinking of the Nantucket-based whaling ship Essex in 1820, the real-life inspiration for Herman Melville\u2019s classic \u201cMoby-Dick.\u201d The author paints his picture with a detailed brush. We learn much about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}