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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Psychologists studying the phenomenon of battle fatigue during World War II discovered that no soldiers—regardless of how strong their emotional makeup might be—were able to function if their unit experienced losses of 75 percent or more. Pollard and Ramsdell were suffering from a double burden; not only had they seen seven of nine men die (and even killed one of them), but they had been forced to eat their bodies. Like Pip, the black sailor in Moby-Dick who loses his mind after several hours of treading water on a boundless sea, Pollard and Ramsdell had been “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro.” Now they were alone, with only the corpse of Barzillai Ray and the bones of Coffin and Reed to sustain them.