44 pages • 1 hour read
Nathaniel PhilbrickIn the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Endurance of the Human Spirit
Content Warning: This section references survival cannibalism as well as violence against animals.
Far more than anything else in the story of the Essex, Philbrick highlights the endurance of the human spirit and the will to survive. While the crew was relatively young and inexperienced—their captain was only 28, their first mate 22, and the youngest a mere 15 years of age—eight of them would ultimately survive the ordeal, struggling through starvation, illness, and death to do so. The survivors even managed to lead relatively similar lives after returning to Nantucket, and all would return to sea at least once more.
When the Essex first began to sink beneath the waves after being attacked by the great whale, the quick thinking of William Bond gave the company their greatest chance of survival by “[returning] several times to the rapidly filling aft cabins to retrieve Pollard’s and Chase’s trunks and—with great foresight—the navigational equipment” (84). If it were not for this courageous act, the crew would have been at a loss from the very start. As it was, the journey proved to be a test of physical and mental endurance. The men survived on starvation rations for three months, only supplemented once during their short stay on Henderson Island. On the open ocean, the survivors endured storms, multiple attacks on their small vessels by killer whales and sharks, and extremes of heat and cold. The men would ultimately resort to cannibalizing the dead to prolong their own lives.
Philbrick stresses the psychological cost of the decisions the men made to survive, even before they began to consume the dead. Each boat ultimately ended up separated from the others, and the officers decided relatively early in the journey that they would not try to find any boat that became lost: A search would waste time and resources, jeopardizing the lives of those conducting it. However, the choice was morally and emotionally complex. On the one hand, companionship was one of the few comforts the men still had, so the loss of any boat was a blow to morale. On the other hand, lacking the ability to take in survivors of a damaged whaleboat without overloading the others, the men knew that trying to keep the group together at any cost could jeopardize not only their survival but also their humanity: “The prospect of beating away the helpless crew of another boat with their oars was awful to contemplate, even if they all realized that each boat should go it alone” (120). While abandoning a lost boat might seem harsh, Philbrick suggests that it was actually the kinder option, as it would spare everyone this complete disintegration of fellow feeling.
Similar attempts at preserving their humanity underpinned the cannibalism the men eventually participated in. Though all the men found the experience traumatic, the way in which they about it speaks to a continued sense of compassion, fairness, and morality. Those in Chase’s boat made the decision after realizing that they would likely end up casting lots anyway: “Better to eat a dead shipmate […] than be forced to kill a man” (181). When Pollard’s boat did resort to casting lots, teenage Owen Coffin responded to drawing the short straw with calm acceptance, even trying to comfort the others by telling them that the process had been “fair.” Even in extreme circumstances, Philbrick suggests, the survivors of the Essex retained “great discipline and human compunction” (173).
The Dependence of Nantucket on the Whaling Industry
The European American experience on the island of Nantucket is a tale of three different stages. The first stage of industry on Nantucket was agricultural. The island’s earliest white settlers intended to farm, but this quickly became unsustainable: “The island’s soil had long since been exhausted by overfarming” and could no longer do much more than support small family farms and crops (8). The third stage of industry was tourism. From the late 19th century onwards, the island has been a destination for vacationers.
In between these eras, Nantucket was the whaling capital of the nation. In fact, by the start of the 19th century, Nantucket likely led the world in the industry, without competition in the business of hunting, processing, and capitalizing on the products drawn from the sperm whale population. So extensive was Nantucket’s monopoly that the Essex was simply “one of a fleet of more than seventy Nantucket whaleships in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans” (1). The economy of the island was inextricably designed to support the whaling expeditions, with other businesses in town revolving around the existence of the industry and the prolonged absences of the island’s men. Many Nantucket businesses were run and operated by women, and it was “largely the women who maintained the complex web of personal and commercial relationships that kept the community functioning” (15). In this way, Philbrick suggests that the island was not merely economically but also culturally dependent on whaling in a way that paralleled the “culture” of the whales themselves, which consists of matriarchal pods visited by “itinerant” males: “In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey” (71).
This was not a connection the islanders themselves recognized. Instead, they saw the whales as no more than living bags of money; in fact, “the whalemen preferred to think of it as what one commentator called ‘a self-propelled tub of high-income lard’” (65). Although experienced whalers could not ignore the dangers associated with whale hunting, there is some suggestion that Nantucket as a whole did not fully appreciate how precariously intertwined its existence was with that of the whales. The need to sail so far out to sea, which had disastrous consequences for the Essex, was partly the result of overfishing. This same overfishing would later play a role in Nantucket’s economic decline. Philbrick thus draws an implicit parallel between the Essex and Nantucket, both of which proved vulnerable to their purported prey.
Humans’ Relationship With, and Vulnerability to, Nature
The Nantucket whaling industry was entirely dependent on the natural world for its existence. While all human industry relies on nature in at least some small way, the whaling industry was dependent on nature in one of the most obvious ways. Hunting requires an intimacy with the natural world that few other endeavors do—knowledge not only of one’s prey but of its environment. Whalers needed to know how to navigate the vast open ocean, how to handle particular weather patterns and currents, and how to find and kill the animals themselves.
Nantucketers prided themselves on being able to handle these challenges, to the point that they developed what Philbrick paints as a detached and somewhat cavalier attitude toward their quarry. Despite the whales’ size and strength, Nantucketers viewed them simply as commodities; because of overfishing around Nantucket itself, the women on the island could go their entire lives without even seeing a whale, heightening the abstractness of the business. Over the course of the 19th century, roughly 225,000 whales died at the hands of whalers, illustrating the impact of this commercial attitude on the natural world. On a smaller scale, the inadvertent destruction of an island ecosystem by one of the sailors on the Essex suggests how vulnerable nature can be to human activities.
However, this vulnerability goes both ways. Philbrick’s description of even a “successful” whale hunt emphasizes the precarious position of the hunters relative to the animal they were hunting: “The boat rocked from side to side and bounced up and own as the whale dragged it along at speeds that would have left the fleetest naval frigate wallowing in its wake” (53). The sinking of the Essex is of course Philbrick’s prime example of whaling’s dangers, as a single whale was able to destroy the ship in a matter of moments. The ordeal that followed further stripped away the men’s illusion of their independence and power. Floating in the ocean and watching their ship sink beneath the waves, the crew could only hope for the best: “Nature had already betrayed them once—with the vicious attack on them by their rightful prey, the normally benign sperm whale” (96).
The story of the Essex is an object lesson in the reality that while humanity often considers itself Earth’s apex creature, it is nevertheless vulnerable to a variety of natural forces—animal attacks, the elements, food scarcity, etc. Human industry allows for domination over nature, but when that industry is destroyed or taken away, nature suddenly appears as it truly is: powerful, dangerous, and largely indifferent to human suffering.
Related Titles
By Nathaniel Philbrick
