In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Encyclopedia
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
winning work of maritime history by Nathaniel Philbrick
Nathaniel Philbrick
Nathaniel Philbrick is an American author and a winner of the National Book Award for his 2000 work of maritime history In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. He is member of the Philbrick literary family.-Life:...
. It tells the story of the Whaleship Essex from the point of view of Thomas Nickerson
Thomas Nickerson
Thomas Nickerson was a fourteen-year-old cabin boy on the Essex, who wrote an account of the ship's sinking and the three months that the crew survived at sea.-Overview:...
who was a fourteen-year-old cabin boy on the Essex. The book is based on a notebook written by Nickerson when in his seventies. The notebook was lost until 1960, and only in 1980 was it recognized that Nickerson had been the Essex cabin boy.
See also
- Moby-DickMoby-DickMoby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...
- The Raft of the Medusa
- The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open BoatsThe Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open BoatsThe Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats is an unedited manuscript by Thomas Nickerson that was posthumously published in 1984 by the Nantucket Historical Society, over one hundred years after Nickerson had died....