The custom of the sea

For a brief moment I was trying to plan a trip to Nantucket this month, before I had to concede defeat and realize that I had too much other stuff on my plate, including too much traveling, to squeeze it into this particular damp drizzly November of my soul and also the freakishly warm and drought-y November of the actual calendar. But before deciding to defer this trip I had already put a hold on Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which I had intended to be my ferry reading. Despite being tragically unable to read it on or while traveling to Nantucket, I had an absolutely great time reading this book, partly because I read much of it while taking time off work, and partly because it’s just that good.

The sinking of the Essex, a whaleship that sailed out of Nantucket in 1819, is now best known as being the real-life tragedy that inspired Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick, a book that I am, with the help of an enabling crew of terminally online boat gays, increasingly not normal about. In Moby-Dick the attack by the titular whale happens right at the end, and then Ishmael as the sole survivor is quickly picked up by another ship. So I was a bit surprised to find that that was not at all what happened with the Essex–most of the crew (or possibly the entire crew?) survived the initial sinking, and then most of them died over the next two months as the three whaleboats full of men wandered around the Pacific making bad decisions and eventually resorting to cannibalism, before they got close enough to the South American coast to be intercepted and rescued. (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised about a book about a shipwreck involving cannibalism, but I was, in part because my mother recommended the book to me and she does not usually go in for books full of fucked-up gross shit the way I do.)

Another difference between this book and Moby-Dick is that Moby-Dick is an extremely long book that takes me a long time to read (so far, four months for my first read and two years for my second), whereas In the Heart of the Sea clocks in at a tidy 250 pages or so and I ripped through it in like three days. If I didn’t have things to do in my life I could probably have read this in one sitting. It’s definitely a triumph of narrative nonfiction if speed of reading is any metric. It’s also really fun in how it engages with its source materials–the ship’s first mate, Owen Chase, wrote an account of his travails, which became a reasonably popular publication and which Melville read while out whaling in the Pacific. It turns out that the ship’s cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, also wrote a memoir about it, which nobody read or published for over a century, and which definitely challenges some of the things Chase wrote. Other accounts derived from interviews with the few other survivors, including the unlucky Captain Pollard, also exist, and I found it very interesting how each of these takes allocated responsibility for the various disasters and successes of the voyage.

Philbrick doesn’t shy away from discussing the more uncomfortable aspects of this trial, stressing that while it is a ripping good story and an impressive feat of not-capsizing-the-tiny-boats, it is not exactly a feel-good story of the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of adversity, either. A bunch of this adversity was self-inflicted due to plain old racist fearmongering about cannibals, and the pattern of deaths raise some uncomfortable questions about Nantucket clannishness vs. its self-congratulatory history as a bastion of Quaker abolitionism and therefore Definitely Not Racist. It’s not a story about heroes; it is for sure however a story about taking some guys and putting them in extreme situations, which is pretty much what I read boat books for. A+ boat book, a modern classic for a reason.