FA:: In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, 2000 HB

In the Heart of the Sea
The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
by Nathaniel Philbrick

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth
century as the Titanic disaster was in the twentieth century. Nathaniel
Philbrick now restores this epic – which inspired the climactic scene in
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick -- to its rightful place in American history. In
1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for
whales. Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the farthest
reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged
sperm whale. 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. They would eventually travel over 4,500 miles. 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.
Illustrated with B&W photos.

Viking Penguin, New York, 2000, 5th printing, 302 pages, 6 ½” x 9 ¼”, blue
boards with black spine and silver lettering, dust jacket, illustrated.

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Auction closes 6/9/05.