![]() ![]() ![]() The next three months tested just how far humans could go in their battle against the sea as, one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. They would eventually travel over 4,500 miles. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, decided instead to sail their three tiny boats for the distant South American coast. ![]() Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the furthest reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Nathaniel Philbrick now restores this epic story-which inspired the climactic scene in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick-to its rightful place in American history. The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the Titanic disaster was in the twentieth. ![]()
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