![]() ![]() 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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May 2023
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