The gripping first-hand narrative of the whaling ship disaster that inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick and informed Nathaniel Philbrick’s monumental history, In the Heart of the Sea In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was rammed by an angry sperm whale thousands of miles from home in the South Pacific. The Essex sank, leaving twenty crew members drifting in three small open boats for ninety days. Through drastic measures, eight men survived to reveal this astonishing tale. The Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, by Owen Chase, has long been the essential account of the Essex’s doomed voyage. But in 1980, a new account of the disaster was discovered, penned late in life by Thomas Nickerson, who had been the fifteen-year-old cabin boy of the ship. This discovery has vastly expanded and clarified the history of an event as grandiose in its time as the Titanic. This edition presents Nickerson’s never-before-published chronicle alongside Chase’s version. Also included are the most important other contemporary accounts of the incident, Melville’s notes in his copy of the Chase narrative, and journal entries by Emerson and Thoreau. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A thrilling documentation of the first sinking of a ship by a whale.

The Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex was the inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick.

The morning of 20 November 1820 was a doomed one for the Essex. Over 1000 miles from land, she was sunk, rammed by a sperm whale. Only eight sailors survived the following three months of despair and debilitating exhaustion at sea - Owen Chase was one of these, and this is his journal of shipwreck, camaraderie and cannibalism.

Surviving the "Essex" tells the captivating story of a ship's crew battered by whale attack, broken by four months at sea, and forced - out of necessity - to make meals of their fellow survivors. Exploring the Rashomon-like Essex accounts that complicate and even contradict first mate Owen Chase's narrative, David O. Dowling examines the vital role of viewpoint in shaping how an event is remembered and delves into the ordeal's submerged history - the survivors' lives, ambitions, and motives, their pivotal actions during the desperate moments of the wreck itself, and their will to reconcile those actions in the short- and long-term aftermath of this storied event. Mother of all whale tales, Surviving the "Essex" acts as a sequel to Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, while probing deeper into the nature of trauma and survival accounts, an extreme form of notoriety, and the impact that the story had on Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick.

This fascinating anthology introduces readers to the literary side of Herman Melville's whaling world with an unprecedented collection of the original whaling texts from which Melville drew to create his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. The notorious 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, as recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick's bestselling book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex—now a major motion picture. But how exactly did Melville transmute the historic tragedy of the Essex into what is arguably the "Great American Novel"? Here, for the first time, R.D. Madison collects together Melville's personal "library" of whaling and whale-lore into a single volume and presents these primary sources in a way that readers can readily see how a horrific whaling tragedy became a literary masterpiece. But where did Moby-Dick begin? Prompted by sailor-author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Melville supplemented his own firsthand experience as a whaleman in the South Pacific with "libraries" of books that he "swum through" to create his whaling masterpiece. Scholars and lay readers alike have long wondered how he did it, and over the past 60 years, a very tight theory of inspiration and creation has emerged. It is very likely wrong. This volume gathers together for the first time all of the main texts that Melville encountered, including the accounts of the unique sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale that provided the climax for Moby-Dick. Melville scholar R. D. Madison examines what critics have said about Melville's response to the sinking and offers the challenging thesis that Melville did not even begin the book at all until spurred on by Dana in the spring of 1850.

This carefully crafted ebook: "MOBY DICK (Modern Classics Series)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: first published in 1851, considered to be one of the Great American Novels and a treasure of world literature, one of the great epics in all of literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab has one purpose on this voyage: to seek out Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg, which now drives Ahab to take revenge...

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whaling industry in New England sent hundreds of ships and thousands of men to distant seas on voyages lasting up to five years. In Captain Ahab Had a Wife, Lisa Norling taps a rich vein of sources--including women's and men's letters and diaries, shipowners' records, Quaker meeting minutes and other church records, newspapers and magazines, censuses, and city directories--to reconstruct the lives of the "Cape Horn widows" left behind onshore. Norling begins with the emergence of colonial whalefishery on the island of Nantucket and then follows the industry to mainland New Bedford in the nineteenth century, tracking the parallel shift from a patriarchal world to a more ambiguous Victorian culture of domesticity. Through the sea-wives' compelling and often poignant stories, Norling exposes the painful discrepancies between gender ideals and the reality of maritime life and documents the power of gender to shape both economic development and individual experience.

A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review

The Number One best-selling, epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the 19th century, beautifully reissued.