In The Heart Of The Sea Book Summary

871 Words4 Pages
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick is a nonfiction book based on the tragedy of the whaling ship Essex that inspired Herman Melville’s well known novel, Moby Dick. Nathaniel Philbrick is a sixty-one year old american author. He has one multiple awards for his nautical novels, including but not limited to In the Heart of the Sea. He enjoys sailing in Nantucket, writing and spending time with his wife at their home in Boston, MA. In the Heart of the Sea was written for the purpose of showing how physically and mentally harmful the event was for survivors. The book itself is split into three sections, however I only analyzed the second section containing the story. The story begins describing the crew members all together and after…show more content…
Within the first few days of desertion, first mate Owen Chase describes how weak the men have already become from lack of nourishment. He remembers, “‘Hunger and thirst, and long inactivity, had so weakened us, that in three hours every man gave out’” (Philbrook 133). Even within the first few days, Chase describes the men becoming increasingly weaker. As time progressed, Chase and his men became weaker with each day that passed without proper resources. After a little more than five months at sea, Thomas Nickerson, a knowledgeable cabin boy on the same lifeboat as Chase recounts, “‘We were so feeble,’ Nickerson wrote, ‘that we could scarcely crawl about the boat upon our hands and knees’” (Philbrook 177). Also, the tragedy was comparable to other devastating world occurrences, such as the Holocaust. For this reason, an Auschwitz survivor described the process he went through of “physic deadening” that is also present in the minds of Essex crew members as “a tendency to ‘kill my feelings’” (Philbrick 172). Although a survivor of the tragedy, accounts from Captain George Pollard were not included in the book other than a letter to his wife in December 20 informing her of the incident. While specific events occuring in Chase and Nickerson’s boat covered in the book are most likely accurate due to

More about In The Heart Of The Sea Book Summary

Open Document