In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (National Book Award Winner)

by Nathaniel Philbrick

With its huge scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed—at least six knots. Chase, hoping “to cross the line of his approach before he could get up to us, and thus avoid what I knew, if he should strike us again, would prove our inevitable destruction,” cried out to Nickerson, “Hard up!” But it was too late for a change of course. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, the whale struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cathead on the port bow. This time the men were prepared for the hit. Still, the force of the collision caused the whalemen’s heads to jounce on their muscled necks as the ship lurched to a halt on the slablike forehead of the whale. The creature’s tail continued to work up and down, pushing the 238-ton ship backward until—as had happened after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream—water surged up over the transom. One of the men who had been belowdecks ran up onto the deck shouting, “The ship is filling with water!” A quick glance down the hatchway revealed that the water was already above the lower deck, where the oil and provisions were stored. No longer going backward, the Essex was now going down. The whale, having humbled its strange adversary, disengaged itself from the shattered timbers of the copper-sheathed hull and swam off to leeward, never to be seen again.