Owen Chase. The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex. Ed. Iola Haverstick and Betty Shepard. New York: Harcourt, 1999. Print.

This straightforward, unembellished tale of survival intensely records a tale not unlike that of the popular Unbroken or Skeletons on the Zahara.

The account was first published in 1822, less than a year after its author, the first mate of the Essex had returned to his home on Nantucket Island. The details are clearly fresh. While the actual sinking of the Essex only takes up a few pages, it is most unusual. A large sperm whale appears to deliberately attack the whaleship like a modern torpedo. The ship is beginning to break up when the whale, recovering from a brief stun after striking the ship, goes at it a second time for the final blow. In ten minutes the crew of twenty abandon ship and set out in the vessel’s three whaleboats.

Rationing hardtack and fresh water, eight of the men ultimately survive. They experience many of the mental and physical privations were read of in those other stories. The author gives credit to “a beneficent Creator, who had guided me through darkness, trouble, and death, once more to the bosom of my country and friends.” (88)

It did not take much more than an hour to read this book, and it was worth it. The afterword by the editors is an epilogue telling what happened to each of the survivors, but, perhaps more significantly, telling how Herman Melville while on the whaler Acushnet in the Pacific Ocean in 1841 met with Captain Chase’s son William who told him his father’s story and lent him a copy of this book. “‘The reading of this wondrous story,’ Melville noted, ‘upon the landless sea and close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me.'” (100)

And so we find the facts that helped inspire what it arguably the greatest American novel. And even if you felt like you had to slog through Moby Dick, The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex is a quick voyage with following seas all the way.