Description

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was a meeting as mythic in the nineteenth-century whilst the sinking of the Titanic was in the last. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the centre of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for significantly more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately embracing drastic measures in the battle for success.