Click on any phrase to play the video at that point.Close One
day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the
most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors
watched their ship flood with seawater. They'd been struck by a
sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's
hull. As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men
huddled together in three small whaleboats. These men were
10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest
scrap of land. In their small boats, they carried only
rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food
and water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose
story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick." Even in today's
world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how
much worse it would have been then. No one on land had any idea
that anything had gone wrong. No search party was coming to look
for these men. So most of us have never experienced a situation
as frightening as the on