All that comes with it

This week I’ve been reading In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is the true story of the last voyage of the whaling ship Essex in 1819. To cut a long story short, the boat got rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale and its twenty crewmen were forced to take to the sea in three small rowing boats. The events inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, and it is certainly a fascinating tale.

What was really interesting to me however wasn’t the details of the whaling culture or the sinking of the ship, but the desperate attempt to stay alive once it had gone down. Out of the twenty men that set off in the three boats only nine survived. Of the dead: two were buried at sea, three were on a boat that went missing, and seven were, err, eaten by the others.

Ironically immediately after the Essex had gone down the sailors had decided against heading for some relatively nearby islands in case they were inhabited by cannibals.

Of course the crew of the Essex weren’t the only seafarers to have resorted to eating their crew-mates in times of trouble. In fact cannibalism at sea was so common that when survivors of wrecks were found they often felt compelled to tell their rescuers if they hadn’t resorted to eating their dead shipmates, as it would be automatically assumed they had done.

Perhaps more socially acceptable, although still pretty gruesome, were the crew of The Polly a 139-ton brig which in 1811 had it’s mast broken in a storm. When people began to die of hunger and exposure their shipmates used them as bait in order to catch sharks.

The heart of the sea isn’t exactly and unknown book, and I wouldn’t want to claim that I discovered it. It came in the same bargain pack as The Naked Civil Servant and Longitude, so I know I’m not exactly breaking new ground here.

But if you haven’t read the book I advise you to do so. It was fascinating, compelling, and flowed off the page nicely. But most impressive of all it managed to tackle a very gruesome topic without a hint of sensationalism.

(I must point out that this isn’t a pay per post, and I haven’t received a free review copy of the book or anything like that. I just enjoyed it, and thought you might too)