by Nathaniel Philbrick
Scott County Library paperback 238 pages plus notes, bibliography, etc.
Published: 2000
Genre: non-fiction, survival
I'm not intentionally reading books about cannibalism, but this one involved that topic again. (It also made mention of the soccer players of Alive who crashed in the Andes Mountains in 1972.) I don't remember why I wanted to read this, but I know that I have not yet been able to read Moby Dick. I've tried. It doesn't appeal to me. Yet it was inspired by this real life story of the whaleship Essex.
Philbrick is a very good author, but this book wasn't my cup of tea. It was informative and even interesting, but I'll just make note of my post-its.
Page 9: "Pacifist killers, plain-dressed millionaires, the whalemen of Nantucket were simply fulfilling the Lord's will."
It's interesting how he juxtaposed their Quaker faith with their capitalist mindset.
Page 16: "First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I'm free."
This is the last line of a poem Eliza Brock recorded in her journal. It's called the "Nantucket Girl's Song." This whole section talks about the women of the island. Left alone for so many months (and years) at a time, they raised the children and were strong, independent people. Lucretia Mott was from Nantucket! The "three-years-away, three-months-at-home rhythm of the whale fishery" sounds awful to me. But it definitely shaped a lot of lives in interesting ways.
Page 23: "If he bungled a job, it was a 'foopaw,' an apparent corruption of the French faux pas . . . If someone was cross-eyed, he was 'born in the middle of the week and looking both ways for Sunday.'"
I love language! This section on some of the peculiarities of 1800s Nantucket whalers' speech made me smile.
Page 46/47: There was a two-page map of the voyage of the Essex. What a route! From Nantucket Island to the Azores to just off the coast of Africa and on to Cape Horn. I marked this map so I could refer back to it periodically. It made me think of how incredible the Panama Canal was in altering shipping routes. (Later, I marked page 179 which showed the different whaleboats and their probable routes.) Too bad they didn't go to Tahiti! It would have been so much easier and they might all have survived.
Page 54: "And as any hunter knows, killing takes some getting used to."
The descriptions of hunting, killing, and dismembering the whales completely turned my stomach. I think if I were up close to a process like that, I might become a vegetarian.
Page 81: "As they pulled themselves up off the deck, Chase and his men had good reason to be amazed. Never before, in the entire history of the Nantucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship."
I love how Philbrick built the story from so many different references. First mate Chase left his account, young Thomas Nickerson told the same tale from a different perspective. It was very interesting to learn about this whale attack and what else might have gone on.
Page 132: "Until this point, it had been the African Americans, specifically the sixty-year-old Richard Peterson, who had led the men in prayer. This was not uncommon at sea. White sailors often looked to blacks and their evangelical style of worship as sources of religious strength, especially in times of peril."
Philbrick pointed out many times the racial issues and how the men were treated differently. Racism isn't over . . .
Page 195: "'I found religion not only useful,' he later wrote, 'but absolutely necessary to enable me to bear up under these severe trials.'"
This is from Thomas Chappel, who was the idiot who had started an island on fire earlier in the voyage. He definitely learned through his adversity.
Page 235: "It is not whaling, of course, that brings the tourists to the island, but the romantic glorification of whaling - the same kind of myths that historically important places all across America have learned to shine and polish to their economic advantage."
I've never been to Nantucket Island, but I can picture how it's pretty much just a tourist trap at this point. Why would you want to "romanticize" whaling? Yuk.
This book was interesting and well-written. Here are my notes from while I was reading:
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