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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 .
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.
Essex departed from Nantucket on August 12, 1819, on what was expected to be a roughly two-and-a-half-year voyage to the whaling grounds off the west coast of South America. The route towards Cape Horn was an indirect one dictated by the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean .
Pollard and Chase lead the expedition west. They find the grounds, but when they launch the whaling boats, a massive bull sperm whale with white, scarred skin damages the boats and turns on the ship. Chase harpoons it from the Essex deck, but the whale rams the hull, killing two men.
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 ...
After finding that her Nantucket-based books became increasingly challenging to write, Hilderbrand found new inspiration by working on a two-part book series with her 17-year-old daughter, Shelby ...
Whaling in the early colonial era. Nantucket is an island located 14 miles (20 km) south of Cape Cod in the State of Massachusetts. When the British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold first sighted Nantucket in 1602 on his way to the New World, it was already home to some 3,000 indigenous Native Americans who were living there. [1]
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