In the Heart of the Sea is the story about the whaleship Essex - the story that was Melville's inspiration behind Moby Dick. The Essex left Nantucket in 1819 to hunt whales in the Pacific. Back then, whale oil was expensive and used a lot for lamps and candle wax. Here's a passage that describes very vividly the process of "whaling":"...finding 'the life' of a giant swimming mammal encased in a thick layer of blubber was not easy. Sometimes the mate would be forced to stab it as many as fifteen times, probing for a group of coiled arteries in the vicinity of the lungs with a violent churning motion that soon surrounded the whaleboat in a rushing river of bright red blood."
While in the Pacific Ocean, a huge whale rammed the ship twice and sank it. The sailors managed to escape in three small boats before the Essex sank, but the boats had no where near enough food or water. Much of the book tells the sad stories of the sickness that the sailors endured, and the death of some of the sailors and the cannibalism that ensued. Interestingly, none of the black sailors survived - because they started the voyage in poorer health than the white sailors and also got poorer quality food during the trip, they died first and thus were eaten first.
This part, describing how an 18th century British ship resorted to cannibalism, really messed me up: "... they began by removing the most obvious signs of the corpse's humanity - the head, hands, feet, and skin - and consigned them to the sea."
This is an extremely well-written book. The first two or three chapters moved a bit slowly for me, but it picked up. I also liked this book because it's non-fiction (and very well-researched - check out the endnotes!) but is written like a very readable fiction novel.
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