To put the review in brief, Nathaniel Philbrick picks up the thread where Herman Melville left off. In the Heart of the Sea steals a march over Moby Dick in that it is not a work of fiction, it is a chilling real-life story brilliantly retold by Philbrick, a leading authority on the history of Nantucket, director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. The climatic encounter between the whale and the whalers proved inspiration for Melville. The ordeal that the whalers went through the morrow morn has been stitched together into a classic by Philbrick from two accounts of the incident interwoven with a wealth of whale lore.

In August 1819, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. On 23 February, 1821 another Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, sighted a small open boat off the coast of Chile. There were two men in it surrounding by human bones. Emaciated beyond recognition, they had managed to survive by sucking the marrow from them. George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell were the only survivors of the Essex, done in by an 85-feet-long whale on a cold, cold wintry day in November 1820. Their ship and the crew had met their ill-fated end more than 3,500 miles north-west of the point they were picked up from.

Having provisioned itself with tortoises from the Galapagos Islands, the Essex made for the Central Pacific, reckoned to be mine of sperm whales. On November 20, 1820, Three boats were lowered and Pollard's mate, Owen Chase harpooned a whale, which gave his boat a "severe blow with his tail", punching a hole in it. He stuffed some jackets into the hole and made his way to the whaleship. Back on board, he saw a gigantic whale lying quietly about a hundred yards away. "As well as I could judge about 85 feet in length" is what he recounted later. The whale spouted a few times and disappeared. The next time he saw the whale again, it was charging furiously towards the Essex.

The whale rammed into the ship, making a hole in the hull. The oak ribs, a foot square, and her four-inch oak planking, sheathed with half an inch of yellow pine, and plated with copper below the waterline could not withstand the bull's onslaught. Just as it was beginning to fill up with water, the whale returned and pounded the Essex again. The bows began caving in and when Pollard returned, he hailed, "My God, Mr Chase, what is the matter?" "We have been stove by a whale," answered Chase. They were, and quite fatally at that. The titanic was sinking. This was where the story of the Essex ended and that of its crew began. This was where Melville left off and Philbrick took over.

The 20-man crew managed to get hold of some bread and water and a few tools, and lowered three boats into the sea. They spent the first night with the boats lashed to the Essex before she went down. The next 90-odd days were horrific. They steered clear of the islands to the west, lest they were to run into the cannibals they thought inhabited them. Little were they to foresee what was to happen to them, themselves. Pollard, relying on the advice of first mate Chase, took a decision that was to be catastrophic. They chose not to use the south-easterly trade wind to sail west, to the Marquesas or Society Islands, a thousand and two thousand miles away respectively. Pollard and Chase decided to turn back towards South America.

The boats first kept together, but were then separated. As the little food and water they began vanishing, members of the crew started to die, one by one. The bodies were first dumped overboard. Hunger, thirst, disease and fear now took its toll. When they realised they were disposing off the only food they were likely to have for the next heaven-knows-how-many days, they retained the corpses for feeding. If this was not ghastly enough, it also dawned on them that each would starve if he waited for the other to die. They drew straws to see who would die so that the others would live.

That boat commanded by the second mate was never to see the end of day. In Pollard's case, two of the men survived, three were eaten. In Chase's boat, three survived, one was consumed. The short and plump Pollard, who had a lower metabolic rate than the others, coped well with starvation, but had to commit gastronomic incest: he devoured his own his cousin Owen Coffin. He was, nevertheless given charge of another whaler much later. He retired to become a nightwatchman. Chase too rose to the designation of a captain who led many successful voyages, but could never reconcile to what he had gone through. Headaches dogged him for the rest of his life. He died a mad man.

What Melville had access to was the first person account of the disaster by Chase. Published in 1821, the first mate's Wreck of the Whaleship Essex was primarily based his own log entries and was ghostwritten for him by a Harvard friend, William Coffin. For more than a century and a half, this remained the only known reconstruction of the survivors' grotesque tale of survival. It was in 1980 that another version of the tragedy written in the last years of his life by a 14-year-old cabin boy who too endured the unnverving adventure was discovered. Thomas Nickerson had long been forgotten. Philbrick works on the two narratives and recreates the incident all over again.

In gripping tale that is compellingly rewritten and meticulously researched by Philbrick, the author does not miss out on the nitty-gritties. The details of the importance and mechanics of blubber production and those of harpooning, the tough and pensive life aboard the whalers all abound in the depressing man vs nature saga, destined to become a classic in maritime history. What is also obviously interlaced is the history of Nantucket itself, which Philbrick describes as, a "barren sandbank, fertilised with whale-oil only". Its unique community of whalers was made of Quakers who were pacifists themselves but never flinched when it came to the slaughtering of whales. Wives spent counting days for years together waiting for the menfolk to return, only to set sail once again. Racial prejudices too emerge in the ambivalence towards Afro-American sailors.