The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic...

After more than a century of silence, the true story of one of history's most notorious mutinies is revealed in Joan Druett's riveting "nautical murder mystery" (USA Today). On May 25, 1841, the Massachusetts whaleship Sharon set out for the whaling ground of the northwestern Pacific. A year later, while most of the crew was out hunting, Captain Howes Norris was brutally murdered. When the men in the whaleboats returned, they found four crew members...

Fun, excitement and the whale that captured the world's imagination add up to big family entertainment. A lonely boy understands the plaintive cries of the orca confined to an aquatic park's too-small tank and does something about it in Free Willy. Watch and understand why audiences have loved Willie. The boy rejoins Willy in his new ocean home and together they confront a burning oil spill in Free Willy 2. In Free Willy 3, the best of the Free Willy...

In 1871, an entire fleet of whaling ships was caught in an Arctic ice storm and destroyed. Though few lives were lost, the damage would forever shape one of America's most distinctive commodities: oil.