David Dowling

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.… (meer)

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.… (meer)

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 Later in life Nickerson wrote an unpublished manuscript that contradicted much of Chase’s version of events.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.… (meer)