bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with maritime

The second pirate book of the weekend was Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt.

Several years ago I read Johnson’s book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was about a cholera outbreak in London and the scientist who tracked down where it happened, thus proving that cholera was a waterborne disease. I recall it was very fun and informative, although given that I read it 15 years ago I don’t recall as much else as I wish I did.

In this one, we aren’t chasing a disease, we are chasing a man–pirate captain Henry Every (or Avery, in some books), plus his crew.

The short version of Every’s career as a pirate is this: First, he had some sort of regular maritime career, which we don’t know very much about. Then, he signed on as first mate for an ill-fated business proposition called Spanish Expedition Shipping. Spanish Expedition Shipping was an English venture but due to inter-empire trade shenanigans got stuck at port in Spain awaiting some sort of licensing issue to be solved for like, weeks, when it was supposed to have taken only a few days. A bunch of the guys trapped on this fleet of ships going nowhere fast decided to mutiny, and stole the fastest of the ships, sailing out of Spain the dead of night to go “on the account.” Every was the head of these mutineers. Their plan was to become “Red Sea Men,” a term for pirates who skulked around at the mouth of the Red Sea and enacted piracy upon ships of pilgrims going from the Mughal Empire in India to Mecca in Arabia. The ships that transported the pilgrims were also full of trade goods, and many of the pilgrims that could make this pilgrimage in style were quite wealthy. In addition, European pirates had basically no respect for people of any other religion, so they figured that robbing “infidels” didn’t really count as bad behavior.

The Mughals, of course, disagreed, which put groups like the East India Company in an awkward position. At this point in the 1690s, the British East India Company was more like a normal actual trade partner, doing business with the Mughal Empire at the discretion of the Mughal Emperor. It would not take over the subcontinent for another several decades. As such, having other Englishmen pissing off their incredibly wealthy client was bad for business, as the devout Emperor Aurangzeb was too busy being the richest man in the world to draw distinctions between different groups of Englishmen. Bad behavior by Englishmen who were, in their own estimation, following in the grand patriotic tradition of sea dogs like Sir Walter Raleigh, were bad for business. This is where all the fun political dimensions come in.

I had just gotten out of reading a shorter version of this sea change (pun intended) in England’s economic and political relationship to piracy two days earlier when reading Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. So it was fun to dig into the details, as well as to contrast the two authors’ reads on the political sophistication of pirates (Johnson is a little more bullish on the “radical democratic political theory” element; Dolin just chalks it up to a very basic and practical “not instantly recreating the exact same thing they were trying to escape” impulse). Johnson also ties in the story of the manhunt following Every’s capture and sack of the Ganj-i-sawai–a ship that, unfortunately for Every, belonged to the Grand Mughal personally–with the technological and political advancements of the day, including mass media, the speed of news (or the lack of it), the ambiguous delineations between state and corporate power, and the class splits within English views on pirates, “infidels,” and the importance of trade.

The last third or so of the book is also a frankly hilarious tale of misadventures in English jurisprudence. While Every was never captured, several of his crewmen were, and put on trial–twice, first for piracy, and second for mutiny. The second trial was necessary because the first trial did not go at all the way the English state had choreographed it to go. As a reader I found it very funny to see the East India Company and the English state get embarrassed in the first trial even though it was for such bad reasons that I think the prosecution was actually in the right. This is not really a story with a lot of good guys per se, just people that were victimized in specific instances. It’s especially interesting to see the way the working-class folk hero version of Every’s story glosses over most of what Every and co. actually did.

Anyway, the book packs a lot of food for thought into something that is both reasonably short and also definitely constitutes A Rollicking Adventures On The High Seas, so well done, even if I think the political intention Johnson credits the pirates with is a little overstated.

My June read for my Year of Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. I have my own copy of this one; I bought it at his Rebels at Sea talk at Hamilton Hall last November and was specifically keeping it til June so I could read it outside by the water, in the heat, which is the correct way to read most books about pirates. I got through this book in a record two days: Day 1 while at Crane Beach with my mother, being vigorously exfoliated by the blowing sand, and Day 2 by the lakeside in Maine with my Dad, testing out the brand-new porch. (Verdict: It’s a good reading porch.) I’m pleased I got in basically the perfect reading experience for this book.

If you’ve read a lot of other pirate books, which I have, some of Black Flags, Blue Waters treads fairly familiar ground. But Dolin does manage to sneak in a reasonably fresh angle, which–unsurprising if you’ve read much other Dolin–is piracy’s relationship to early American history specifically. The book explores not just the economic ties between the traditionally focused Caribbean piracy and early British America, but also how the changes in economic situation, balance of power among England and various other powers, and the targets preferred by the pirates themselves all shifted over time. England went from an enthusiastic sponsor of piracy in its “sea dogs era” through a period of benign neglect about it until, eventually, it became both an economic problem and politically embarrassing. As usual, the Crown decided that it needed to get law-n-order-y about this piracy business a bit before its American colonies did, as the colonies needed illegal trade to get around the onerous mercantile obligations placed upon them by the mother country. But eventually, they, too, turned on the pirates, as the “golden age” turned out scores of feral, unemployed sailors whose depredations sailed a little too close to home. In the interim, Dolan walks us through the sea dog era, the buccaneer era–together, the first big age of Caribbean piracy–the Red Sea Men era, and the final Golden Age (the second big Caribbean era). While the span of nautical hijinks is global, Dolan’s New England roots are visible in the focus on little-known stories out of Marblehead, Salem, Gloucester, and other East Coast seaports who loom far less large in general pirate history than Port Royal, Tortuga, Nassau, and Okracoke Island. I found this all very charming, and also was pleased with myself that I already knew the story of Philip Ashton, the Marblehead fisherman who was kidnapped by Edward Low and lived on an uninhabited island off the coast of South America until he was picked up by another ship from the North Shore. (This story is the subject of At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton, which I read in 2020.)

I also had some fun spotting names in the Pirate History Extended Universe–hey, there’s Dave Cordingly! And Colin Woodard! And the guy that wrote The Pirate Hunter!--but I found the book an enjoyable read for plenty of reasons other than personal smugness. The book gets deeper than I was familiar with into the stories of some of the big names in piracy, including the strange relationship between “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (the real history is very different than the playing-with-historical-Barbies romcom version portrayed in Our Flag Means Death, obviously, but Bonnet and Teach did in fact sail together for a while). I also didn’t know very much about the “Red Sea Men” era at all, which this rectified to some degree, which was quite useful stage-setting for the next pirate book I would read this weekend (Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind; review forthcoming).

Overall I thought this was a really good entry into the literature of Piratical Overviews for Grown-Ups, and I enjoyed it as both part of the Pirate History Extended Universe and the Eric Jay Dolin Extended Universe. I’d highly recommend it in either category.

My May entry in the Year of Erics was the only reread of the bunch: Eric Jay Dolan’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. I bought this on my senior year field trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum at the end of my Moby-Dick capstone seminar in fall 2009, and read it the first time around in 2011, after a little of the whale trauma had worn off. Now, nearly 15 years later, I a older/wiser/sadder/fatter/etc. and my love-hate relationship with Moby-Dick has turned into a whole-hearted and unironic love of it, and I would give anything to go to three-hour seminars about it at the quite reasonably late-starting hour of 9 am on Wednesdays. (Youth is wasted on the young, etc. etc.).

I decided to include this book in my Year of Erics reading because 15 years is a long time, certainly plenty of time to forget most of the stuff you read in a nonfiction book. This, I think, was a good decision! I had, indeed, forgotten quite a lot of stuff, and there were many fun anecdotes about American whaling, plus some information on Norwegian whaling that some steampunk author or other really ought to incorporate into something. Also, even though Salem was never a big whaling port, the additional 15 years in New England coastal cities makes reading New England maritime history more fun than it was when I had only lived a few years in landlocked Worcester.

The book covers not just the golden age but truly the entire timeline of American whaling, including what little we know about pre-Columbian native whaling practices, and then from the very earliest drift whaling/scavenging of the English in what they would turn into New England up until the very last wooden American whaleship, the Wanderer, left port from New Bedford in 1924, which promptly wrecked on Cuttyhunk Island in Buzzard’s Bay. Whoops.

In the middle we learn about drift whaling, shore whaling, open-sea whaling, wartime raiding upon whaleships, the discovery and exploitation of various fisheries, and some whale anatomy. There are silly political cartoons and tales of battles and mutinies where people say all sorts of insane things to each other, because people have always been people. There are not really heroes although there are occasionally villains. Fun anecdotes are enjoyably woven through a narrative that does trace the overall rises and falls in fortune of the industry and explain how it shaped American life and commerce.

I am glad to have brought this old friend off the shelf for a little bit, and now I am going to put it back on the shelf of Boat Books where it will soon be joined by some new friends as summer lakeside reading season gets started.

My March assigned nonfiction read was Eric Jay Dolin’s When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. This is, broadly, a history of US trade with China, which started approximately five minutes after the US was established, and continues to today, although the President is doing his damndest to stop it because he doesn’t know anything about economics. The book doesn’t get to that point both because it was published in 2012 and also because, as the subtitle suggests, it only goes through the end of the Age of Sail.

Much of early America’s trade with China involved triangulating with the English, and less often the French. China’s system of foreign trade at the time was something called the Canton System, where foreign traders basically were only allowed to go to Canton, where they each had to have a little embassy-type trading house called a factory, from which they engaged in complex trade negotiations with the hong merchants who interfaced between the foreigners and the Chinese consumer base. This was all very complicated but for a while it mostly did its job of keeping the foreigners relatively quarantined so they didn’t disrupt life in China and a minimal sector of the Chinese population was exposed to their bad behavior.

The British were really the big egos here that got everyone into trouble with the Chinese. China, an empire that had been going for about two thousand years, considered itself the most advanced civilization on Earth, and basically acted like it was doing everyone else a big favor by trading with them. Mostly everyone else agreed that China was pretty ancient and advanced and cultured, and in America particularly everyone was quite mad for Chinese fashions. However, this sort of cultural admiration could only go so far, and eventually the Chinese view of imperial China as self-evidently the greatest civilization on earth would end up butting heads with the English view of the British Empire as self-evidently the greatest civilization on Earth. The Americans, in their pre-Manifest Destiny fashion, just wanted to make a buck.

Probably the most important stuff here for your average miseducated American to learn about is the Opium Wars! There were two of them, and the extremely short version is that they cracked Imperial China open like an egg to allow British (and other foreign, but mainly British) merchants to flood China with opium because if it wasn’t illegal in England, then clearly it had no business being illegal anywhere else; who did these Chinese think they were? A sovereign country?

Overall I found this a fun read despite the occasionally dark subject matter; there’s lots of cool stuff about boats and murder trials and tea, and it’s an area of world history that I didn’t know very much about, so I feel all edified and stuff. I definitely need to learn more Asian history but this was a decent start.

The February entry in my Year of Reading Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. In November I had gone to a talk by the author about this same subject, and it was a lot of fun, even if I was the youngest person in the audience.

My thoughts on this book are a little scattered and I can’t tell if it’s because the content, while a lot of fun, actually is a little bit disjointed, or if it just seems that way to me because I read it in two- and three-page spurts at random times and kept getting interrupted, because I had the February from Hell, and somehow it took me upwards of ten days to read this even though it’s not very long and I’m sure if I had read it, like, by the lake in the summer, it’d have taken me one day, max. But anyway, it’s largely exactly what it says on the tin, which is a bunch of information about privateering in the American Revolution, and that is a very fun subject that is not usually talked about much, in my experience of people talking about the American Revolution, which does happen quite a bit when you spend your entire adult life in the immediate environs of Boston.

Some of the moral framing that is used in the marketing for this book annoys me, because it’ll be like “Some people think that privateers are basically pirates or war profiteers, but they were actually instrumental in winning the American Revolution,” even though the two parts of that sentence don’t contradict each other. The moral assumptions about piracy, war profiteering, and the American Revolution contradict each other, so the sentence only makes sense if you read it as “Some people think that privateers are [bad] but they are actually [good]” and this type of talk where people use words as if their only meaning is their moral connotation and their actual denotative meaning simply doesn’t exist drives me batty in the extreme. Fortunately, the moral assumptions made in this book only descend to this level of illiterate idiocy in the marketing; the rest of the book takes a pretty standard level of sympathy for the American Revolution and its ideals, as one would expect from an American author writing for an American audience, but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not to the point of forgetting what words mean. My own understanding of the morals of the American Revolution is a bit more complicated than your standard American propaganda but only when talking about the American side; the few things in this world that can make me feel patriotism include sentences like “This annoyed the English considerably.”

Anyway. Privateering! The first of the rebelling colonies to legalize privateering and start issuing letters of marque was my own dear Massachusetts, a state full of little coastal trading ports and inhabited by very intense people. Salem, being a much more economically important place then than it is now, features fairly heavily; we sent out a lot of privateers. Eventually the fledgling US started sending out privateers as a country in addition to the ones being sent out under state flags; this was largely to supplement the just-founded US Navy, which was having a bad time getting off the ground. The new American privateers were pretty successful, wreaking havoc on British shipping and bringing badly needed commodities into the colonies, and making a pretty profit at the same time. The practice has its naysayers but mostly people thought this was a fantastic way to stick it to the English and men signed up for them in droves.

Disposing of the ships after they were captured added a whole other level of politicking, with Americans conspiring with the French and other supposedly neutral nations to turn prizes into cash at foreign ports, in defiance of various treaties with England. The English were big mad about it, and eventually started trying to do a bit of privateering back, although they never caught up to the Americans.

There is also a chapter on what happened to privateersmen when they got captured, which is pretty sobering. Some of them got sent to regular jails on land in England, which wasn’t fun but seems to have been humane enough by the standards of the time. Others got stuck on prison ships, including the notorious Jersey, a pestilential, overcrowded hulk in the Long Island Sound where the only way to get off the packed ship for even a little bit was to go bury corpses on the nearby beach.

Overall, I liked this book! I think! I’m glad I read it but I wish I’d gotten to read it… better? I was not at the top of my reading game lately and I wish I had been able to read it in big relaxed chunks on Derby Wharf, but alas, sometimes February happens. We’ll see how March’s reading fares in comparison.

Sometimes when I am having a bad time I like to read about people having an even worse time, so it is fortunate for me that my hold on Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World came in right before I fell sick last week.

Dolin lets us know right off the bat that this is not a story of far-reaching historical importance; instead, it is merely a really wild tale that he wanted to rescue from oblivion because of how nuts it is.

There are a couple of main parties in this story, which takes place during the War of 1812. Party 1 is the crew of the Nanina, an American ship on a sealing voyage to the Falklands, which had sailed out of New York right before war officially broke out. They were hoping to spend a year or so sealing and then sail back when the war had blown over. This didn’t quite work out for them. It is important to note, however, that the Nanina was in the Falklands on purpose and was not shipwrecked. The Falklands were otherwise uninhabited at the time, the Spanish settlement having been abandoned a year or two earlier.

The second main party is the crew and passengers of the Isabella, a British ship inbound from Australia. The captain of the Isabella is not the greatest at his job and manages to wreck the ship on one of the outer islands in the Falklands. The resourceful Aussies are able to set up a little camp on their spit of land that keeps them all alive, although not quite in the style they are accustomed to. They send some guys out in a longboat on a hail Mary trip to South America to try to get help.

While the guys in the longboat are on their way to Rio, the American sealers discover the stranded British Australians. Though the two countries are at war, the Americans figure that’s not really the top priority here outside of what they would have considered civilization. The Americans agree to cut their sealing voyage short and give the stranded Brits a ride back to the mainland.

Unbeknownst to them, the hail Mary longboat trip works out! While the Nanina is preparing to house its own crew and the folks from the Isabella, the head of British naval operations in Buenos Aires sends out his subordinate, William D’Arada, out to rescue his fellow countrymen in a rickety tub called the Nancy. D’Arada, upon arriving in the Falklands, is delighted to find not only the folks he was sent to rescue, but also a bunch of Americans! He promptly, and somewhat illegally, takes the Nanina as a prize and its crew as prisoners. His fellow Brits find this pretty ungallant but don’t do much about it. D’Arada sends the Nanina off to England under his prize master and then sails the Nancy back to Buenos Aires with the rescues from the Isabella.

Unfortunately, while D’Arada was upsetting all their plans, a hunting party of five men–mixed American and British–had separated from the main group to get food. When they returned to the main camp, everyone else had departed. Again, some of the Isabella passengers thought this was pretty douchey of D’Arada, but nobody really had the standing to mess with him, nor did they try too hard.

Thus, in the second half of the book, our cast of characters is drastically reduced, from two or three ships’ worth of people to merely five, plus a dog. These five guys (and their dog) have an eventful but, fortunately, never fatal eighteen months of Robinson Crusoe-ing it up in the Falklands, having interpersonal falling-outs, at least one mutiny, numerous attempts at conflict resolution in different levels of success, trips to hunt seals, hogs, and penguin and albatross eggs, and other such shenanigans as they wonder if anyone will ever come to get them. Navigating around the Falklands in their little shallop is dangerous enough that sailing to Rio or wherever seems to be out of the question, although if I recall correctly they do try once and basically can’t get the little boat out of the Falklands in one piece. Meanwhile, back in Buenos Aires, and then New York, and then London, legal and press machinations are afoot, and eventually, the Americans who had made it back to America–after some time as British prisoners of war–are able to send a brig out to the Falklands to rescue the five men. It takes some of them a whole other relay race of shipping voyages to get their arses back home again, but at least in the meantime they got to see some other people. One of the stranded men, Captain Charles Barnard (the original captain of the Nanina), eventually writes a rather pompous memoir about his adventures, which sells moderately well for the time and then fades into obscurity, until apparently one day Eric Jay Dolin found it and was like “This is nuts; I gotta tell people about this” and wrote Left for Dead.

This was overall a very fun read. I’m not sure it quite reaches the “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction” level of something like The Wager but I’d still definitely recommend it for fans of The Wager because it tells a similar type of story, and is very fast-paced and readable. Dolin goes to great pains to avoid moralizing about things like the ethics of sealing or basically anything other than D’Aranda’s personal conduct, which pretty much everyone except D’Aranda agrees was shitty. The book has lots of pictures, which I thought was great, and lots of footnotes, which were informative but interrupted the flow a little. There is plenty of interesting historical context to flesh out what the world was like for the people involved, which I think is valuable even if there’s simply no case to be made that this event had any particular far-reaching impact on history writ large. It’s an excellent addition to the “putting dudes in Situations” canon of maritime literature. Those dudes were for sure in a Situation! In fact, the Situations kept compounding into new and worse Situations, for quite a while! None of these Situations devolved into cannibalism, which was frankly a lucky break for these guys, but there weren’t too many other people around to eat anyway, so instead we get interesting lessons in how to hunt all the weird fauna that was hanging out in the Falklands around 1813 or so, and several near-death experiences with elephant seals. Exciting!

For reasons related to my current maritime disasters kick I vowed that this December I would finally read the copy of The Great Halifax Explosion that has been sitting on my shelf since January 2019. I first learned about the event when I visited Nova Scotia in 2017 and everybody was doing centenary stuff about it, and I am reminded of it every year when Boston gets its Christmas tree, which the Haligonians send us in thanks for our relief efforts. So I know the short version of the story pretty well but I wanted to read the book-length version, which is why I bought this book when I saw it in an airport, a place I almost never buy books.

The short version of the story is that at 9 o’clock in the morning on December 6, 1917, two ships accidentally bonked into each other in Halifax Harbor. This was not a very fierce crash and it would not have been a huge deal except that, Halifax Harbor being a major port in the World War One supply line, one of the ships was carrying six million pounds of explosives. The resulting blowup was the largest man-made explosion in history at the time and would retain that record for another almost thirty years until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This short version is very exciting but doesn’t contain any important lessons, other than maybe that it was very heroic for Boston to send so many doctors and nurses and blankets and hits of cocaine afterward.

The long version is a whole different story! In addition to the added human interest element, of which there is quite a lot–eyewitness accounts by survivors, photographs, a lot of historical context of the different neighborhoods in Halifax and Dartmouth–John U. Bacon spends a good amount of time giving a play-by-play account of every single safety regulation, norm, and best practice that was disregarded over the course of both ships’ journeys, starting with the Mont-Blanc’s unsuitability for the job it was doing and going through the inadvertent packaging of the Mont-Blanc into a perfect floating bomb, Halifax Harbor’s decision to rescind safety protocols like requiring munitions boats to fly a red flag, and the Imo’s Captain From’s impatient decision to blow out of Halifax Harbor at top speed in the wrong lane and play chicken with anyone coming the other direction. This book has lots of things it wants us to learn about the importance of safety regulations, which I agree is very important. It’s also genuinely thrilling reading–well paced, and you can see the disaster inching nearer with every corner cut. I also learned a lot about Halifax and the people who lived here, which as an idiot American I am in sore need of education on.

The explosion itself occurs about halfway through the book, and the second half describes in horrifying detail the immediate aftermath–told largely through the eyes of the ordinary survivors we’ve been getting to know in the first half–the relief and cleanup efforts in the following few weeks, and the later legal wrangling to determine blame, a series of four trials that started with the local Wreck Commission and ended up being appealed all the way to London. The descriptions of the medical relief efforts, from both the local and semi-local Canadian doctors who could make their way in that day and the US contingent sent by Massachusetts’ first experimental iteration of a disaster relief commission, are thorough, vivid, and incredibly nasty. I found it absolutely riveting but some readers might get squicked, so caveat lector if you are squeamish about gross medical stuff, especially eyeballs.

While I read this in December specifically to be seasonal, I did not expect the Christmas season connection to affect me as much as it did, especially reading it warm and cozy in my bed on a bitingly cold morning, reading about these poor folks whose windows had all been blown out of their houses trying stay warm through a particularly ill-timed blizzard. It manages to get all heartwarming at the end, so I guess it really is a Christmas book. It’s not one that could ever be made into a family holiday movie, though; too many people get their eyeballs removed.

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.