New book tells terrifying true tale behind Moby Dick
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

Nantucket, Massachusetts, July 4: On November 20, 1820, thousands of miles (kilometers) off the coast of Chile, a giant sperm whale rammed twice into a whale-hunting ship called The Essex and sank it, according to a new book by Nathaniel Philbrick, called "In the Heart of the Sea." Three months after The Essex went down, the 20 crew members who had tried to survive on small life-boats in the middle of the Pacific had been reduced to only eight.

They had clung to life by eating their dead comrades, killing one by one, drawing lots to determine who would be next to be eaten. "Never before, in the entire history of the Nantucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship," writes Philbrick, who theorizes the whale was enraged by the noise of hammering, as a sailor aboard The Essex worked to repair a whaling boat on the deck of the ship.

"The clicking signals sperm whales use to communicate bore such a startling similarity to the tapping of a hammer that the whalemen dubbed the sperm whale the 'carpenter-fish,'" writes Philbrick, who directs a maritime history institute on this Massachusetts island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

The narrative of his book is drawn from a number of written accounts by survivors, including one by a 14-year-old ship's boy. According to Philbrick's account, two ramming assaults by the giant whale, striking below the water line, opened an irreparable waterway into The Essex, sinking it within minutes.

"My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?" Captain George Pollard asked of his first mate, Owen Chase. "We have been stove by a whale," was the reply from Chase, as he leapt into a lifeboat. Thus began one of the longest and most atrocious ordeals in maritime history.

Tahiti, which might have been reached in a week, was believed to be inhabited by cannibals, and this led the officers of The Essex to make a fateful -- and for many of them fatal -- decision. They began paddling their boats back toward the coast of South America, more than 3,000 kilometers (2,000 miles) away. "They soon became what psychologists ... have called feral communities," writes Philbrick, noting the tragic irony that, while they steered clear of Tahiti fearing cannibalism, the desperate sailors ultimately resorted to eating each other so that a few of them might survive.

The first to die and be eaten were blacks, a fact that has long troubled the collective memory of Nantucket residents, many of whom are Quaker and proud of their denomination's support for the rights of blacks even before the US Civil War. At the end of February 1821, sailors of the ship The Dolphin found and rescued the bedraggled survivors not far from Easter Island, still thousands of kilometers (miles) off the coast of Chile.

Witnesses said they looked like emaciated ghosts. The Dolphin's sailors would never forget the handful of hairy, haggard crew of The Essex, their beards stained with blood, sitting in lifeboats filled with human remains, sucking the bones of their late comrades.

"It's a story that was out there long before Melville heard about it. He was a whaleman in his twenties. A crew man told him about the story of the Essex. And one day, in the Pacific, he came across another whaleship that had the son of Owen Chase on board," writes Philbrick. "The boy went to his sea chest, took his own copy of his father's narrative and gave it to Melville for the night. He said that it had a profound influence on him.

A decade later, he writes `Moby Dick

,'" according to Philbrick.

"Melville used the disaster for the climax of Moby Dick. But the issue of man against nature, leadership, class, race are all in The Essex and in Moby Dick. I wanted to rescue the Essex from Moby Dick," writes Philbrick. It was only after Melville's novel was published -- initially a crushing failure, only later deemed a masterpiece -- that the author himself actually set foot on Nantucket.

Today a popular tourist destination, Nantucket has only a whale museum to remind visitors of the giant mammals prior dominance there. "For the sea is his; he owns it, as emperors own empires; other seamen having but the right of way through it," Melville wrote.

Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.