Whale’s revenge tale gripping

SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALESHIP ESSEX, by Owen Chase, The Lyons Press, New York, 1999, 144 pages, paperback, $12.95.

MEN & WHALES, by Richard Ellis, The Lyons Press, New York, 1999, 542 pages, paperback, $30.

Call me oddball. But I liked “Moby Dick.”

OK, so, you didn’t read “Moby Dick.” Didn’t want to deal with 400 pages of nautical fiction filled with allegory, metaphor and imagery. Didn’t want to deal with a self-destructive, obsessive captain, who, if he lived today, would be heavily medicated by his psychiatrist.

Then here’s a 144-page true story of a vengeful whale and survival at sea for three months and 3,000 miles in a small open boat, a feat of seamanship to rank with the best. And it has an aspect that “Moby Dick” hasn’t — cannibalism.

It is the “Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex,” written by the vessel’s first mate, Owen Chase. It is the story of cetaceous vengeance that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby Dick.”

It is a wondrous strange tale because it is the only known incident wherein a whale sinks a whale ship. It proves that fact is stranger than fiction, maybe not as poetic but more unsettling in its reality.

If you read “Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex,” you can brag that you read the story “Moby Dick” is based on, just like people boast they’ve read the book that a movie is based on.

The Essex set sail from Nantucket in August 1819 for the Pacific.

On Nov. 20, 1820, a thousand miles west of the Galapagos Islands, the ship came upon a shoal of sperm whales. The Essex dropped three whaleboats and the hunt was on.

But one of the whales did the inconceivable: “He came down upon us with full speed, and struck the ship with his head,” Chase recounts. “He gave us such an appalling and tremendous jar. … We looked at each other with the most perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech.”

The whale returned “with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect … and completely stove in [the Essex’s] bows,” according to Chase.

To modern sensibilities, there is divine justice in the whale’s counterattack. Not so to sailors of Chase’s day: “The shock to our feelings was such, as I am sure none can have an adequate conception. … We were dejected by a sudden, most mysterious, and overwhelming calamity.

“We were more than a thousand miles to the nearest land, and with nothing but a light open boat,” Chase recalls.

The 20 crew members divided themselves among the three whaleboats. They gathered from the wreck whatever navigation instruments, food and water could be recovered. The Essex listed and lingered for two days before sliding into the water.

On Nov. 22, the three small boats set sail. They did not head west toward the nearest land, the Marquesas Islands, because the crew feared they were inhabited by “savages, from whom we had as much to fear as from the elements or even death itself.”

Instead they headed south toward Easter Island.

Now, do not read this book without a glass of water close at hand. Because by Dec. 10, Chase wrote, “Our thirst had become now incessantly more intolerable than hunger.”

The whalers caught turtles and fish. “We waited with impatience to suck the warm flowing blood of the [turtle],” Chase recalls.

The boats reached an island on Dec. 20 that supplied them with water, grass and birds to eat. The sailors set sail again a week later for Easter Island.

The sun beat down. Sharks circled. Storms swept over them. Hunger gnawed. Thirst wracked. Chase’s despair grew. The experienced whaler wrote, “The terrible sound of whale spouts near us sounded in our ears. … Our weak minds pictured out their appalling and hideous aspect.”

To survive they resorted to cannibalism, a great irony, as they had turned their backs on the Marquesas because they feared cannibals. Chase and those in his boat ate the body of a crew member who died. In the boat led by the Essex’s captain, they drew lots and one sailor was shot to feed the others.

In the end two of the three whaleboats — Chase’s and the captain’s — were rescued in late February 1821, nearly 3,000 miles from the site of the wreck, off the coast of Chile. The other was lost at sea.

In contrast to the thin volume about the Essex, “Men & Whales” by Richard Ellis is a feast about the relationship through the millennia between man and leviathan.

But it is set in short, digestible portions, laden with 400 pictures, charts and scrimshaw images. Despite being black-and-white, the pictures are still a delightful accompaniment to the text.

And throughout, Ellis makes reminder and pays homage to Moby Dick, the closest many of us will ever get to a live whale upon the seas.