By Dave Shiflett Ric Burns’s “Into the Deep: America, Whaling and The World,” airing on PBS May 10 at 9 p.m., is a stunning rebuke to all of us who chose to read “Moby Dick” in the Cliff Notes edition. Burns, best known for his work on “The Civil War” and “New York: A Documentary Film,” tells the amazing and horrifying story of the Essex, an American ship that was rammed and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale some 3000 miles off the coast of South America in 1820. That incident would inform Herman Melville’s masterwork, which many an undergraduate has found to be rough sailing. The two-hour film is also a deeply interesting look at the American whaling industry, which became the engine of American economic expansion in the mid-1800s, according to the film. While early colonial “drift” whalers settled for stranded or beached whales the big breakthrough came around 1712 when a Nantucket-based crew was blown out to sea in a storm and encountered a sperm whale, which being whalers they killed and butchered. To the crew’s amazement, and many a sperm whale’s eventual demise, the mammal’s head contained hundreds of gallons of oil that was “clear as vodka,” according to the show, until it oxidized and clouded. That oil became the “heart-blood of American commerce” according to author Nathaniel Philbrick. In its heyday in the 1840s, 70,000 people made their living from whaling, including 20,000 seamen who departed American ports on voyages that could last three to four years. Burns never wanders far from the raw danger, violence and exhilaration of whaling. It was not an occupation for the faint of heart, or stomach. The action began when a sailor in the crow’s nest saw a whale exhale and shouted “thar she blows,” which sent the crew in pursuit in oar-powered boats. The whales produced an “awful stench” when they breathed which was nothing compared to what they emitted when harpooned and their lungs were lanced. Whalers were often drenched in blood and grime as the whales vomited squid in their death throes, after which the carcass, which could weigh up to 85 tons, had to be towed back to the ship where its blubber was stripped away and cooked down to oil. That’s when all went smoothly. The tale of the Essex, woven through the film, is recreated in stunning and sometimes nauseating detail. The doomed ship left Nantucket on August 12, 1819. After rounding Cape Horn in Jan. 1820 the crew learned the whaling was slow in the close-in waters and so headed into the vast Pacific, where a gruesome fate awaited. On Nov. 20, 3000 miles off the South American coast, the ship was rammed by a whale roughly its own size. It soon capsized, sending 20 survivors into three small boats. Three got off on a nearby deserted island but the rest decided to head for South America, fearing other islands would be inhabited by hungry cannibals. In an ordeal that makes Captain Bligh’s post-mutiny excursion seem like a pond cruise, the seamen traveled 4,000 miles over the course of three months in a moveable feast of horrific proportions; rescuers eventually found only five men adrift, some of whom were sucking the bones of their deceased mates. Melville came across the story in 1841 when fellow seaman William Henry Chase gave him a copy of his father’s narrative of the catastrophe. “Moby Dick” was published in 1851. In an interesting twist, the film says, the book sank Melville’s literary career, largely because the public’s imagination had shifted to the westward expansion and Gold Rush. Melville fell into obscurity and died in 1891 after a career as a customs inspector in lower Manhattan. Whaling was a shadow of its former self by then, its death blow delivered in 1859 when oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, which the film says created a “flood of cheap kerosene.” The search for oil thus shifted from the heads of whales to the bowels of the earth, where it remains a messy enterprise.
