I love castaway stories!

Although I haven't been blogging for a few months, I have managed to get through a few books in the moments when I was not knitting.

One terrific book I read recently was In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. I grabbed this from Stimey's basement library because I cannot get enough of shipwreck and disaster stories. Morbid and creepy, I know. However, from all these books I have learned that I most certainly could become a cannibal. I shocked my poor friend today when I suggested that if my child were starving I would cheerfully slaughter my dog, stew him up and feed him to my children.

I am always planning for my own personal apocalypse, and so reading these survival books maybe helps me to mentally prepare for the starvation I seem to think is inevitable for me. I read them almost like textbooks, noting gruesome details so I can identify the signs of scurvy or maybe another horrible vitamin deficit in myself.

I absolutely love reading these stories of tongue swelling thirst and sucking on the bones of your first mate. Mr. Philbrick did a tremendous job of bringing this important American story to life. He described how is became Melville's inspiration for Moby Dick, and did a bang up job explaining nautical terms. Generally when reading books about ships, my eyes glaze over when they start talking about mainsails and knots and starboard but Mr. Philbrick gave one particularly useful diagram of a ship and used details from the life of a greenhorn to clearly portray how a ship leaves a harbor. I was not bored stiff when he recounted the voyage southerly around the tip of South America, or by the description of tides.

Now that I'm thinking back, this was really a great book. Not only did it have a gruesome and horrifying castaway story; it includes a colorful description of Nantucket and the unique culture that sprang up around the whaling industry as well as pertinent follow up stories about the survivors. Philbrick also touches on such thought provoking topics as the order in which people died while adrift at sea-- Blacks first. Hmm..prior nutrition patterns matter when your body is challenged. As do family and cultural ties.

Thanks Stimey for introducing me to the wonderful world of horrifying survival books. It hasn't made me morbid at all.