Nantucket
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 Meadow…he island lay low against the water, a scraped knuckle of sand and salt grass barely rising above its own reflection. From three miles out, Nantucket presented no profile to speak of—no hills, no forests, no church spires catching the light. Only masts. Masts by the hundreds, a bristling…
- A Vessel Fitted for the Sea…t 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 began at the wharf. Surveyors…
- The Blank Page of the Ocean…pty. This was the grammar of their voyage: not catastrophe but repetition, not drama but the slow attrition of hope. The Essex had departed Nantucket on August 12, 1819, on what was expected to be a roughly two-and-a-half-year voyage to the whaling grounds off the west coast of South Amer…