The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex by Betty Shepard, Iola Haverstick, Owen Chase (1999, Paperback, Illustrated)

"The Wreck Of The Whaleship Essex" is the First Mate, Owen Chase's, acount with a short foreword and epilogue added. However, Chase's full account plus the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson's, full account plus several letters from captains and others are all in "The Loss Of The Ship Essex, Sunk By A Whale." So that book, while about the same size as this one, contains more. Another book, "In The Heart Of The Sea," by Nat Philbrick, uses all the different accounts plus other relevant data to seamlessly weave a single account that reads like a novel. The most interesting part of "The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex" was, for me, the epilogue, because it contained some things I had not read in the other two books, and the 7 or 8 pages of old woodcut reproductions in the middle of the book. Make no mistake, if you have the chance to get this book for a good price grab it! You won't regret it. But I recommend reading "In The Heart Of The Sea," which tells the story like a novel, first, then reading the first-hand accounts. "The Loss Of The Ship Essex, Sunk By A Whale" has more first-hand accounts than "The Wreck Of The Whaleship Essex" does, but both are great resources and well worth having! The cover of "The Wreck Of The Whaleship Essex" was intentionally printed with a dirty look, to make it look antique, I guess. It doesn't need to be cleaned. I tried before I found out it was printed that way.

The synopsis and publisher's note above contain several mistakes. There were 20 men, not 30, on the Essex, and they were not entirely without charts or compasses. One of the men rescued 2 quadrants and 2 copies of Bowditch's Navigation Guide (which has charts showing the islands known at the time), as well as the Captain's and First Mate's trunks, which had a tinderbox and other items in them, and Chase himself grabbed two compasses from the ship's binnacle. Unfortunately, that left one boat with no chart or compass or anything. The three boats tried to stay together, and did for about two months, but eventually got separated in a gale. The boat without navigation equipment disappeared. Also, it was the Whaleship Essex out of Nantucket, not the Nantucket Essex.