31/10/2025
It is one of Kuya Ian's bed time stories. Sa ako madum2an.
The sea has always held dangers, but in 1820, one danger fought back. The American whaling ship Essex set out from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. But deep in the Pacific, the hunters became prey.
A massive s***m whale — said to be 85 feet long — rammed the ship with terrifying force, striking it twice. The Essex broke apart and quickly sank, leaving 20 men stranded in small whaleboats thousands of miles from land.
What followed was a slow-motion horror. The men drifted for more than 90 days under blistering sun and raging storms, with little food or water. As starvation took hold, they resorted to the unthinkable: drawing lots to decide who would die so the others could survive. In the end, only 8 of the original crew lived to tell the tale.
The story shocked the world, and decades later, Herman Melville used it as inspiration for Moby-Dick. But for the men of the Essex, it wasn’t literature. It was the nightmare of facing nature’s fury — and losing.
