Essex
Books
- Struck by a Whale The Essex Disaster and the True Story Behind Moby-Dick · Liszt Think
On November 20, 1820, a sperm whale rammed and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex in the remote Pacific. Twenty men took to three open whaleboats, choosing a perilous eastward course over feared cannibal islands.
- The Endless Green MeadowThe deck tilted under Owen Chase’s boots as the Essex cleared the harbor bar, and he kept his eyes on the receding shore not from sentiment but from professional habit: a last check of wind, ti…
- A Vessel Fitted for the Sea…hot. Water stretched flat to the compass rim, and nothing moved against it—no hull, no cloud, no dark interruption of a whale’s breath. The Essex rode at anchor in Nantucket harbor, and men with measuring rods were determining what that emptiness was worth. August 1819. The gauging be…
- The Blank Page of the Ocean…head for what felt like the hundredth time: “There she blows!” Somewhere in the South Pacific, in the middle months of 1820, the men of the Essex knew this rhythm by heart. They had lived it for more than a year now—sighting, lowering, rowing, the exhausted pursuit, the whale sounding…