Finding comfort and escape in a whale of a tale

In a pandemic, people turn to comfort items — a special piece of clothing, a favorite snack or meal, the musical album that served as the soundtrack to their senior year of high school.

Me? I turn to big, impenetrable books. And the sea.

That means, of course, “Moby Dick.”

Last summer, I went to see an exhibition called “Melville: Finding America at Sea,” chronicling Herman Melville’s life work and how it continues to inspire artists around the world.

Of all the gorgeous paintings, fun comic book covers and old newspaper clippings about Melville, I took photos of, the one thing that did not take up much of my time or attention was a thin volume, mildewed and yellow from time, whose extensive title page I snapped a picture of just to look at later. It reads:

“Narrative of the most distressing shipwreck of the whaleship Essex of Nantucket; Which was attacked and finally destroyed by a large spermacetiwhale in the Pacific Ocean; with an account of the unparalleled sufferings of the captain and crew during a space of ninetythree days at sea, in open boats, in the years 1819 and 1820. By Owen Chase, of Nantucket, first mate of said vessel.”

I only made the connection between Chase’s book and Melville’s “Moby Dick” this week after reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 tome, “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.” I hadn’t even realized that the incident was the impetus for Melville’s masterpiece.

“In the Heart of the Sea” details agony, yes, but also provides a lot of amazing insight into the world the sailors grew up in, and returned to, after their voyages to the ends of the earth searching for whales.

Nantucket was a real woman’s scene, it turns out. According to Philbrick, Quakerism was the dominant religious and social driver of the community, and it put an emphasis on spiritual and intellectual equality between men and women

“The nineteenth-century feminist Lucretia Coffin Mott, who was born and raised on Nantucket, remembered how a husband back from a voyage commonly followed in the wake of his wife, accompanying her to get-togethers with other wives. Mott, who eventually moved to Philadelphia, commented on how odd such a practice would have struck anyone from the mainland, where the sexes operated in entirely different social spheres,” Philbrick wrote.

Not only that, but the women felt very at ease with their men coming home — and then getting the heck out of their hair. Here’s a snippet of a well-known poem at the time:

“Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea,

For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me . . .

Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh.

But when he says ‘Goodbye my love, I’m off across the sea,’

First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I’m free.”

The ladies found, let’s say a variety of ways, to keep themselves entertained while home alone, including getting high on opium.

There were so many bits of fantastic sociological trivia in Philbrick’s book, I can hardly start to list them here. It’s escapism at its very best.

But while Melville’s book is about the tireless desire to attain something in life big enough to leave a lasting legacy (kind of like how, before the quarantine, many of us spent all of our time striving for some big job, house, or perfect family), Philbrick’s is all about survival.

Twenty men went out to sea on the Essex, and only eight endured. They faced isolation, loss, physical suffering and deprivation. But they made it.

And with a little luck, our favorite comfort items, and some art to buoy our spirits, we’ll make it, too.