The first mate's account of the whaleship Essex, stove and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820, and the three months in open boats that followed, in which the survivors ate their dead and drew lots to shoot one of the living. Melville read this and wrote Moby-Dick. This edition includes a gallery of 60 plates of painting from 1600 to 1899, among them works by Winslow Homer, Ivan Aivazovsky and J. M. W. Turner.