About the book
In November 1820 the Nantucket whaleship Essex was rammed twice by a large sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific and sank. Her twenty crew took to three whaleboats and, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, chose to sail for South America instead. Three months later eight of them were alive, having eaten the dead.
Philbrick tells the story from the survivors' own accounts - the first mate Owen Chase's narrative, which Herman Melville read and drew on for the ending of Moby-Dick, and the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson's, found in an attic in 1960. The book won the US National Book Award for non-fiction in 2000 and was filmed by Ron Howard in 2015.
Notes
To come.