David DowlingReseñas

This book starts out with a general overview of the story of the Essex shipwreck (10 pages). I was expecting much more detail about the actual story behind the Essex shipwreck. As a result, I found this read to be rather uninteresting at the start. I decided to read Nathaniel Philbrick's book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (an excellent book!) to get the full story and added details. This helped immensely. While clearly being an analysis, and not the easy read of a novel, it was interesting to read about the stories of the men aboard the Essex and how they differed from each other. Also very interesting was how each dealt with the experience and memories of the hardship endured during their return to safety.

I became interested in reading this book after watching the movie based on Nathan Philabrick's The Heart of the Sea. Dowling's book discusses the awful fate of the Essex, but its' primary purpose is to bring to life the fact behind the fictions. I found this book very interesting as it discussed many aspects of the survivor's tales (and the many different versions of them!) and tried to piece together the facts from the embellishments. I liked discovering what really happened to all of the crew and people surrounding the ill-fated Essex and would love to see a documentary based upon Philabeck's book and Dowling's book...they compliment each other well.

So, one doesn't have to pay for an advanced reading copy, and with this book I came out ahead, but not that far. While it was on a topic that I've read several other booksabout, it didn't add much to my enjoyment or knowledge. There are parts that I felt were quite interesting, but overall the book wasn't written that well and the book's organization really started to annoy me by its conclusion.

Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America’s Most Storied Shipwreck by David O. Dowling.

This book deals mostly with things that happened after the Essex was infamously destroyed in an encounter with a whale. (The blurb on the back states that it “acts as a sequel to Nathaniel Philbrick’s In The Heart of the Sea...”) It touches briefly on events prior to the wreck - mostly in overall history of the whaling industry at the time - but mainly concerns itself with the three most famous survivors of the shipwreck: Captain George Pollard Jr., first mate Owen Chase, and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson. As the subtitle suggests, this book deals mainly with the lives these men led after their ship was destroyed. It attempts to assemble the “true story” from the often conflicting accounts told by each of them.

Chase (with the help of a ghostwriter) almost immediately had a book published which more or less portrayed himself as the hero of the saga. Later in life Nickerson wrote an unpublished manuscript that contradicted much of Chase’s version of events. Pollard - who, rightly or wrongly, took the majority of the blame for what happened - simply went on with his life, most always answering questions asked by the curious with little embellishment.

This is not an easy book to read. It is written in a very dry (dull) style, almost like a dissertation - lots of facts and suppositions presented in a no-frills package. I found the narrative to be repetitive, muddled and confusing. There are many references to books and poems that were inspired by these events (as well as some nonfiction materials). Some of them I was familiar with, some of them I was not, making for a confusing reading experience. Author David O. Dowling often uses the fictional narratives to support his arguments and further his own assumptions as to what happened.

I had a hard time finishing this book My copy was 169-pages plus 19-pages of author’s notes (I skimmed those)… a relatively short book. Yet it took me a long time - about a month - to read it as I kept getting frustrated and putting it down before picking it back up and trying to finish.

Bluntly stated: This is the kind of book that makes people hesitant to read nonfiction. Surviving the Essex might be suitable for research or reference purposes, but I do not recommend this book for recreational reading.

**I got this book as a result of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway.

This is an odd book. I expected one of two things, either a detailed review of the historical record, or a smart and light pop history retelling. Instead, this book reads like a literary analysis. The author compare the contemporary narratives written by survivors to various other literature starting with Moby Dick and moving on to other less obvious ones (Frankenstein, etc.)

The style is very dry and academic with copious annotations and quotations. It's also quite slow and repetitive with many points belabored and others made over and over again so that I wondered if I was going crazy. The author seemed equally interested in the historical event and contemporary fiction so that I would sometimes get lost in the midst of a dense paragraph and be unsure whether we were discussing actual happenings or one of numerous fictional narratives.

I was excited to learn more about the wreck of the Essex which I had touched on briefly in college. But this book really isn't about that event but how it was perceived in the culture of the day. The author doesn't go into detail on the history and assumes the reader is already very familiar with the events in question. This left me sorely disappointed.

I've read and enjoyed both "In the Heart of the Sea" and "Moby Dick," so I was anticipating this book eagerly. This was not quite the book I was expecting. Given the description, I anticipated a work of history focusing on the impact that the sinking of Essex had on the sailors who survived and on the whaling industry in general, perhaps with a bit of how it became the root of one of the great American novels. This...wasn't that. Instead, I found it read more like literary criticism then anything else, as if the human beings who were involved in the Essex tragedy were characters under the control of an all knowing author whose actions could be analysed to find a deeper meaning. An early example, which left me scratching my head, was that Pollard's later work as a night watchman "suggests that his former actions were unassailable." The idea that a guilty party wouldn't have the "will to survive literally in darkness" is entirely something from a fictional narrative, not a real word idea. Since I don't buy into this concept, I found the book almost unreadable. It doesn't help that it's dense writing. I also wouldn't recommend reading this unless you have a basic understanding of the events of the Essex, since most of the analysis is presented without much background, assuming that you already know the story and the people involved. I'm not actually sure who this book is written for. It's certainly too dry and dense to interest a casual reader, and I admit it lost me as well, even with my interest in maritime history.

Having read and enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick’s non-fiction work, In the Heart of the Sea, I applied for a complimentary copy of this book, ostensibly a follow up to Philbrick’s in exchange for an honest review.

In 1819, the Nantucket based whale ship Essex set off on a two year journey, around Cape Horn and into the whale rich waters of the South Pacific. With a new captain, first mate and many green sailors, the trip suffered from several minor setbacks (not unusual in the trade), before the Essex was sunk in the first documented case of a ship being attacked by a sperm whale, estimated to be an 85 foot monster.

Relegated to whale boats, not suited for long trips on the open ocean, and hampered by trade winds which prevented steering a direct course for South America, the survivors spent three months in their whale boats, suffering through unimaginable bouts with starvation, dehydration, weather and ultimately cannibalism.

In the Heart of the Sea was a gripping account of this event and highly educational with respect to the culture of whaling in general and of the Nantucket trade in particular. Surviving the Essex not only follows the major actors in the drama as they continue with their lives and careers, but indulges in copious amounts of pop psychology and assumption with respect to the two major players, Captain George Pollard, Jr. and First Mate Owen Chase. Herman Melville also makes an appearance, as the Essex tragedy purportedly served as a template for Moby Dick.

The author clearly has decided that Captain Pollard has been badly represented in relation to the tragedy and takes every opportunity to put him in a good light. In order to do so, he must necessarily assign blame elsewhere and Owen Chase is his scapegoat. Certainly, it may be true that Chase played a large role in the tragedy, but in my opinion, the author overplays his hand in this regard, resorting to an enormous amount of undocumented assumption and hindsight to not only place the blame on Chase for selecting the disastrous post-accident decision to steer for South America instead of the possibly cannibal infested islands of French Polynesia (didn’t the final decision rest with the Captain?), but also to blame him for the sinking itself. In doing so, the author resorts to all sorts of pop psychology mumbo jumbo.

Putting aside the actual material content of the work, however, the biggest problem with the book is that it is simply not very interesting and reading it is something of a chore. It is written more in the style of a psychology textbook than the entertaining and educational experience that Philbrick’s book was.

SPOILERS. To summarize, Captain Pollard turned out to be very comfortable in his own skin, despite the Essex disaster and another sinking that immediately followed, becoming a well-respected and productive member of the Nantucket community (though a night watchman and not a whaler). Chase, on the other hand, though becoming enormously successful and wealthy in his whaling career, led a tortured existence and ultimately went insane. Chase, the author argues, is the model for Melville’s Captain Ahab, and not Captain Pollard.

This happens to me often. I am about to go somewhere and a book lands in my lap for review, and it happens to be related to the trip. When I went to Turks and Caicos, I was reviewing Wolitzer's Farewell Fred Voodoo and Hoare's The Whale, and now, in Cape Cod, I read Surviving the Essex. What's more, right before this trip, the Essex film, based on Philbrick's The Heart of the Sea just came out. In Sandwich, Titcomb's was displaying Philbrick's book. In Nantucket, the Whaling Museum had a whole Essex exhibit, not only of the disaster, but even down to the movie props used in the film. Somewhere in the vicinity, Hoare was to give a talk and show his documentary about whales. And we were convinced the whale watching boat we were on off of Provincetown had Hoare on board (though we could not make out the name of the person that was announced, not did we try to confirm our belief that it was Hoare, and not someone else we had never heard of).

So, among all that, I read Surviving the Essex in just a few sittings. Dowling's main argument is that Owen Chase is not the hero he publicized himself to be, and Captain Pollard was not a coward. Dowling arrives to these conclusions by close readings of Chase and Nickerson's accounts, a bolsters them with the opinion Melville and pretty much every other Nantucket person seems to have had of the captain. I have not read Philbrick's book yet, but someone told me that Owen Chase is the "hero" of the film based on the book, so I am not sure how much Dowling and Philbrick agree on these points.

My two complaints about Surviving the Essex is that Dowling sounds more like a whining child, desperately trying to defend someone, so much so that one wonders what his ulterior motives are. It almost sounds like Dowling himself is guilty of some Essex-related crime. As a result, the book lacks humor and is dry in telling the story.

For a short book, Dowling repeats some facts several times too many. Instead, perhaps he could have given a bigger picture of the cultural and historical changes that shaped the whaling industry in the wake of the Essex disaster. There are curious omissions in the book, too. For example, in the Whaling Museum, Pollard's sisters are discussed as community leaders, which one assumes had something to do with his eventual re-assimilation to the Nantucket society despite the Essex disaster, but Dowling does not mention the sisters in his book at all. Similarly, Pollard's wife is absent from the book, aside from a few mentions. The only woman that is discussed at length is the unforgiving mother of the cousin Pollard allows to be shot and eaten. There is, then, a lot of emphasis on how things would have been difficult for Pollard, and no mention of things that might have helped him survive the shame and stigma of the Essex incident. As a result, I felt like Dowling was doing exactly what he showed Chase and Nickerson to be doing in their narratives of the sinking of the Essex and its aftermath: he was omitting things to make the story tell his point of view. Granted, it is entirely possible that there are legitimate reasons for these omissions. Nantucketers are tight lipped about what went on in their society back in the whaling days, so perhaps there isn't much in the way of historical record of the relationship (good or bad) between Pollard and his sisters or Pollard and his wife, or how any of that helped or harmed his existence on the island after the Essex. Interestingly, Dowling spends a lot of time explaining what happened to Nickerson after the Essex and how he managed to trust his story to a scoundrel editor who never published it and how he spent his days in Nantucket telling his story in his guest house, but I do not remember him mentioning that Nickerson spent a good amount of years in Brooklyn, NY and much later returned to Nantucket... Even if this was mentioned, it seems like an important missing piece of the Nickerson side of events that needs more exploration, adding to the mystery of why so many years later and only after Pollard's death did Nickerson decide to publish his story (his manuscript was found in an attic in upstate NY and eventually published).

Overall, Surviving the Essex is a detailed incision into the events and the aftermath of the Essex disaster from a fresh perspective. It could be expanded to include more in-depth research about Nickerson's Brooklyn years, which may shed some light into his return to Nantucket, and the role Pollard's family played in his survival of the notoriety of the Essex disaster.

Many thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher for a free copy of the book in exchange of my honest review.

Having not previously read either Herman Melville's Moby Dick or Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, I felt very much at sea while trying to read Surviving the Essex. I found the narrative dense and complex and confusing, far more in the nature of literary criticism than I was expecting. I also wondered at the absence of a photo of George Pollard, but was able to find one online. This is not a book I would recommend to the casual reader.

This is a fascinating culmination of the author's research into why and how Moby Dick is relevant in our modern world. In particular, he looks at the annual Moby Dick Marathon in New Bedford, MA...a 25-hour non-stop reading of Herman Melville's most famous work. In 2009, the author himself participated in the Marathon, and interviewed some of the participants and the volunteers/staff that make the event possible.

This non-fiction work is not written as a novel, but more as a dissertation. It is very academic in tone, but thoroughly entertaining and enlightening.