Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is centered on the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
Nantucket is an island about 30 miles (48 km) south from Cape Cod. Together with the small islands of Tuckernuck and Muskeget, it constitutes the Town and County of Nantucket, a combined county/town government in the state of Massachusetts, USA. Nantucket is the southeasternmost town in both Massachusetts and the New England region. The name "Nantucket" is adapted from similar Algonquian names for the island.
Thomas Gibson Nickerson was an American sailor and author. In 1819, when he was fourteen years old, Nickerson served as cabin boy on the whaleship Essex. On this voyage, the ship was sunk by a whale, and the crew spent three months at sea before the survivors were rescued. In 1876 he wrote The Loss of the Ship "Essex", an account of the ordeal and of his subsequent experiences at sea. The manuscript was lost until 1960, and was first published in 1984.
Essex was an American whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799. On November 20, 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., the ship was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. About 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 km) from the coast of South America, the 20-man crew was forced to make for land in three whaleboats with what food and water they could salvage from the wreck.
The Ann Alexander was a three-masted ship from New Bedford, Massachusetts. She is notable for having been rammed and sunk by a wounded sperm whale in the South Pacific on August 20, 1851, some 30 years after the famous incident in which the Essex was stove in and sunk by a whale in the same area.
Owen Chase was first mate of the whaler Essex, which sank in the Pacific Ocean on November 20, 1820, after being rammed by a sperm whale. Soon after his return to Nantucket, Chase wrote an account of the shipwreck and the attempts of the crew to reach land in small boats. The book, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, was published in 1821 and would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.
Nathaniel Philbrick is an American author of history, winner of the National Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His maritime history, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, is based on what inspired Herman Melville to author Moby-Dick, won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was adapted as a film in 2015.
Pablo Valencia, a prospector, is remembered primarily for his extraordinarily close brush with death in August 1905. Valencia, on the route with one Jesús Rios to an Arizona claim, realized belatedly that they had not brought enough water to sustain themselves, and sent his companion to secure more. Rios did so, but afterwards could not find his partner for want of an agreed-upon meeting place; Valencia, consequently, found himself alone and waterless in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. In this state, he wandered for more than six days with nothing but his own urine and what moisture he could coax from a single scorpion to drink, growing ever weaker. More dead than alive, he eventually reached the only source of water for miles in any direction, Tinajas Altas. There he was nursed back to health by W. J. McGee, who wrote of his ordeal in a paper, "Desert Thirst as Disease."
Sperm whaling is the human practice of hunting sperm whales, the largest toothed whale and the deepest-diving marine mammal species, for the oil, meat and bone that can be extracted from the cetaceans' bodies.
Owen Coffin was a sailor aboard the Nantucket whaler Essex when it set sail for the Pacific Ocean on a sperm whale-hunting expedition in August 1819, under the command of his cousin, George Pollard, Jr. In November 1820, a whale rammed and breached the hull of Essex in mid-Pacific, causing Essex to sink. The crew escaped in small whaleboats, with sufficient supplies for two months, but were not rescued within that time. During January 1821, the near-starved survivors began to eat the bodies of those who had died. When even this resource ran out, the four men remaining in Pollard's boat agreed to draw straws to decide which of them should be killed, lest all four die of starvation. Coffin lost in the lottery, and was shot and eaten. The captain volunteered to take Coffin's place but Coffin refused, saying it was his "right" to do so that the others might live.
Two Brothers was a Nantucket whaleship that sank on the night of February 11, 1823, off the French Frigate Shoals. The ship's captain was George Pollard, Jr., former captain of the famous whaleship Essex. The wreck was discovered in 2008 by a team of marine archaeologists working on an expedition for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. She is thought to have been built in 1804 by Joseph Glidden in Hallowell, Maine.
Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World is a two-hour documentary by Ric Burns about the history of the whaling industry in the United States. The film was initially released on May 10, 2010.
Heart of the Sea may refer to:
"Carpenter fish" is a term that was used by US Navy sonar operators in the late 20th century to describe sperm whales, referring to the evocative, hammer-like patterns of "clicks" used to communicate and echolocate. As early as 1965, marine biologist and bioacoustics researcher William N. Tavolga referred to the fact that sperm whales clicks had been often called "'carpenter' sounds." A later naval technical report in 1980 notes that "sperm whale click trains are called "'carpenter fish' sounds by Navy sonar-men." A 2008 marine bio-acoustics textbook likewise notes this term as slang among Navy sonar operators for many years. According to some authors, 19th-century whalers used this term as well, although there is little evidence that this was the case. Some authors state that whalers used the term to refer to sperm whales, while others write that it was used to refer to an anonymous, unknown species that produced such clicking sounds as heard through the hulls of wooden ships. It was common knowledge among American whalers and naturalists in the 19th century that sperm whales had ways of communicating danger across long distances. In his narrative of a whaling voyage from 1841, Francis Allyn Olmsted hypothesized that this alarm is sounded via a "flourish of [the whale's] flukes." The naturalist Thomas Beale infamously and erroneously wrote in 1839 that sperm whales were remarkably silent animals. In his comprehensive account of the state of cetology in the 19th century, Richard J. King finds no evidence of the term's use. He writes, "although the term 'carpenter fish' is often written, I've yet to find any nineteenth-century evidence by or about whalemen that actually uses this phrase of even mentions sounds through the hull."
In the Heart of the Sea is a 2015 historical adventure drama film directed and co-produced by Ron Howard from a screenplay by Charles Leavitt and a story by Leavitt, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver. An international co-production between the United States and Spain, the film stars Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, and Brendan Gleeson. It is based on Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, about the sinking of the American whaling ship Essex in 1820, an event that in part inspired Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick.
The Whale is a British television film that was first broadcast on BBC One on 22 December 2013. Terry Cafolla wrote the film about the Essex incident in 1820, which also formed the basis of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. The Whale was also broadcast on Animal Planet in the United States during the summer of 2014.
Julius Warren Lewis was an American writer of popular fiction. He used the name Leon Lewis and wrote under that name among others. A prolific Dime novel author in the 1860's and 1870's, his works include "The Silver Ship", "The Web Of Fate", "The Reef Spider" and many others, serialized in publications as The New York Weekly Journal and the New York Ledger.
Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex was written by Nathaniel Philbrick. The 2002 historical book recounts the 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex by an enraged sperm whale and how the crew of young men survived against impossible odds. Revenge of the Whale is based on the author's adult book In the Heart of the Sea.
George Pollard Jr. was the captain of the whalers Essex and Two Brothers, both of which sank. Pollard's life, including his encounter with the sperm whale that sank Essex, served as inspiration for Captain Ahab, the whale-obsessed character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
Gam is a nautical term to describe one whaling ship paying a social visit to another at sea. The term was first used to describe a school of whales, and whalemen may have taken its meaning from that source.
