Review: The perfect whale

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By Porter Anderson
CNN.com Features Writer

(CNN) -- Near the end of "In the Heart of the Sea," author Nathaniel Philbrick recounts a story that says the former captain of the doomed whaling ship Essex was once asked if he knew a man named Owen Coffin.

"Know him?" George Pollard reportedly said. "Why, I et him!"

And, of course, this is the heart of the appeal. Our unseemly but abiding interest in cannibalism has kept the awful tale of the Essex afloat for 180 years. Having your 87-foot, 238-ton whaling ship rammed twice and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale in the Pacific is extraordinary. Eating your cohorts in order to survive the trip home -- in Pollard's case, eating a cousin -- is something more.

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It was the business with the whale that seems to have caught Herman Melville's fancy. He credited accounts of the incident with some of the inspiration for his "Moby-Dick." For all the popularity of that work today, Melville had to work as a customs inspector. "Moby-Dick" didn't sell.

And of the several ironies in the Essex ordeal, none leaves a darker aftertaste than this: When the ship had gone down, the 20 steered their three little whaleboats away from the closest land - the Marquesas Islands and Tahiti -for fear they'd be eaten by cannibals.

Instead, the crew members chose the much harder easterly route, heading for South America. Yet only through cannibalism did a few of them manage to travel, as Philbrick writes, "almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific -- farther by at least 500 miles than Capt. William Bligh's epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackleton's equally famous passage to South Georgia Island" from Antarctica.

Philbrick's account -- built on many records from the era -- is compelling for its painstaking thoroughness. The men's agonies in open boats for more than 90 days are documented in a nearly seamless continuum of survivors' logs, memoirs and scientific data on what happens to the body and psyche in radical dehydration, starvation, exposure to sun, salt and a horizon devoid of hope.

It's all laid out with so rigorous a lack of sentiment that each reminder of some of these people's ages comes as a shock. Seaman Thomas Nickerson was 14. Capt. Pollard was 28. The cousin he "et," Owen Coffin, was 17 and was selected to die and feed his cohorts in a drawing of lots. By almost any age's standards, these were boys in an experience that could drive the most resourceful and experienced adults into madness and despair.

As Philbrick points out, the fate of the Essex was big news even in its pre-mass-media day. The quick turnaround of the now-inevitable book by a disaster victim is not a purely contemporary phenomenon. The first mate of the Essex, Owen Chase, got his writings about the incident onto market shelves almost precisely one year after the sinking.

Indeed, of all the event's personalities, Philbrick is able to make 22-year-old Chase seem the most complete -- admirable if impetuous, brave beyond his years. At the end of his life, he'd be judged "insane." But in his youth, Nantucketers would have approved of Chase as "fishy." The term meant to them that a young officer had seaworthy instincts.

If applied to navigating today's treacherous publishing and marketing waters, a man named Stuart Krichevsky might be worth calling "fishy." Krichevsky is Philbrick's agent - and also that of author Sebastian Junger, who churned up the bestselling "The Perfect Storm," now a big-budget movie.

The "bad boating" genre is clearly having its watery day. And agent Krichevsky - by now probably wearing a life preserver to work daily - has made sure that Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea" was released in the heart of Junger's "Storm."

Not surprisingly, Philbrick's book reads like Junger's. One wonders if they've ever been seen together. Both accounts are highly informed narrative estimates of what happens when Nature steps in and makes things go dreadfully wrong for real-life seamen. Both open with detailed explorations of the land-side cultures from which these men put to sea. Both tell you a lot about the dangers of their respective sub-industries of commercial fishing -- Junger wrote about swordfishing, or "longlining," in 1991; Philbrick writes about whaling in 1820.

Philbrick writes a lot about it, in fact. For those who can't get enough of this story, Penguin classics has released "The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale: First Person Accounts," edited by Philbrick and his brother Thomas. Philbrick, a research fellow with the Nantucket Historical Association, has also published "Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890" and "Abram's Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island."

The expertise shows. Philbrick forcefully lays out the peculiar confluence of circumstance and faith that rendered a Quaker community on a barrier island off Massachusetts one of the richest enclaves in the United States some 200 years ago. And he doesn't flinch from pointing out that the Society of Friends condemned violence against humans but were apparently quite comfortable killing, ripping to shreds and selling the oil of the largest mammals on Earth.

Philbrick also goes to admirable lengths to point out that "the first four men [of the Essex crew] to be eaten had been African-American. What made this a particularly sensitive topic on Nantucket was the island's reputation as an abolitionist stronghold -- what the poet John Greenleaf Whittier called 'a refuge of the free.'"

Exhaustively annotated and illustrated with maps, diagrams and some photos, "In the Heart of the Sea" makes a haunting summer read and an oddly soothing one after "The Perfect Storm."

It's the time passage that makes the difference. "Storm," particularly when cast with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg on film, is a modern fright. What Philbrick gives us is a comparatively cozy horror, one two centuries behind us.

Still fascinating, Philbrick's work is also safe, its nightmare being today -- as he quotes from the Book of Exodus, 15:8 -- "congealed in the heart of the sea."