Other editions of book In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired " Moby Dick "

This is the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship ESSEX, the inspiration for Melville's great classic, MOBY DICK. In 1820, the ESSEX set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, they clung to life and, one by one, succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. When eight survivors were retrieved off the coast of Chile, they had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific. "A gripping chronicle of an epic voyage of hardship and survival that deserves to be as well known now as it once was." (Kirkus Reviews)