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In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is a book by American writer Nathaniel Philbrick about the loss of the whaler Essex in the Pacific Ocean in 1820. The book was published by Viking Press on May 8, 2000, and won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction .
Essex was an American whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799.On November 20, 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., the ship was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale.
As first mate of Essex, 21-year-old Owen Chase left Nantucket on August 12, 1819, on a two-and-a-half-year whaling voyage. On the morning of November 20, 1820, a sperm whale (said to be around 85 feet; 26 m) twice rammed Essex, sinking her 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 km) west of South America.
A number of New England towns were heavily involved in whaling, particularly Nantucket and New Bedford. Nantucket began whaling in 1690 after recruiting a whaling instructor, Ichabod Paddock. [20] The south side of the island was divided into three and a half mile sections, each with a mast erected to look for the spouts of right whales.
Finch's wife Ann, recognizing the manuscript's importance, contacted the Nantucket Historical Association. It took another twenty years before it was authenticated by Edouard A. Stackpole, a Nantucket whaling historian. The Finches donated the manuscript to the Association, who published an abridged version in 1984, a century after Nickerson's ...
George Pollard Jr. was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the son of Tamar Pollard (née Bunker) and George Pollard, a ship's captain, [2] at a time when the principal industry there was hunting sperm whales to harvest the oil contained in their blubber and spermaceti. [3]
NANTUCKET, Mass. – Two endangered North Atlantic right whales have been spotted off Massachusetts with entanglements that could potentially be life-threatening to the massive mammals.
Pequod is a fictional 19th-century Nantucket whaling ship that appears in the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by American author Herman Melville. Pequod and her crew, commanded by Captain Ahab, are central to the story, which, after the initial chapters, takes place almost entirely aboard the ship during a three-year whaling expedition in the Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific oceans.