Well, I finished Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, the true story of the Essex, the ship that inspired Moby Dick. It was... hard to read. It's hard to imagine what the whaling life was like -- captains and the crew would leave for two year voyages around Cape Horn to search for whales in the Pacific Ocean before returning to their Nantucket base. And reading about the process for killing and disassembling a whale is somewhat stomach churning, even if I've read about it in other books. I always end up feeling sorry for the whale.
Ultimately, what makes this so hard to read is the trial endured by the cast members after a whale rams the Essex and it sinks far from land. They are initially divided up into 3 whaleboats, and the captain makes the wrong decision to sail for South America rather than Tahiti. They were worried about rumors of cannibals in the Marquesas Islands, and Philbrick does a good job explaining how this incorrect information likely led to the death of several crewmembers who probably would have survived had they sailed west to the Islands rather than making the long journey east. The harrowing accounts of life in a whaleboat for months with few resources and increasingly desperate crewmembers is sad and tragic.
Here's hoping for some lighter material in the next few books!
No comments:
Post a Comment