Around 7 this morning the sun shown beautifully on snow-covered Greyock. I could see how the mountain could remind Herman Melville of a big white whale as he looked from a north window of his brother’s farmhouse on what is now Holmes Road. He had been part of a whaling crew himself and of course knew of the sinking of the Essex by an enraged sperm whale the year after he was born. He fictionalized a version of the ill-fated Essex voyage in Moby-Dick based in part on the only available first-person written account, by first mate Owen Chase, published nine months after he and four others were rescued, barely alive, off the coast of Chile.
Thanks to historian Nathaniel Philbrick, we know a lot more. For his 2000 book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, he drew from other sources, including notes written in 1871 by the cabin boy, who at 14 and 15 was the lowest-ranking member of its crew. These were discovered in an attic in an Upstate New York village in 1960 and reached Nantucket two decades later.
Philbrick’s research and reporting yields a fuller, much more accurate explanation of events than Chase’s alone, including why a whale would repeatedly attack a ship resulting in its sinking. The whole thing may also provide clues not only to what happened to a crew of 21 sailors (and hunters) two centuries ago in the Pacific — it could presage what’s in store for billions of the planet’s humans much less than two centuries from today.
What’s this rumination doing in a blog that got started shortly before a 2018 walk across Massachusetts by two Pittsfielders wearing four “9/11 TRUTH” signs between Provincetown and the New York State line? This: Succeeding accounts have depended on more and more information becoming available about that voyage, focused research into that information, and enthusiastic reception of the findings by a publisher and ultimately readers.
In the case of the world-changing attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more and more information has been turned up since that Tuesday morning, from plenty of determined research. A big difference is that findings and reasonable conclusions at odds with official government accounts (some coming from those accounts) of “9/11” have met with hostility from mainstream media. Much of it, no matter how painstakingly nailed down and factual, is called misinformation or disinformation, and so-called “truthers” are routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
Similar hostility greets those not in agreement with the government’s approach to Covid-19. A report, HERE, from today’s NPR’s “Morning Edition” news program is typical in its avoidance of relevant context. Simplistic, politicized and scaremongering, it concerns “what a bottle of ivermectin reveals about the shadowy world of telemedicine.”
Or consider THIS Associated Press report from last December headlined “How RFK Jr. built anti-vaccine juggernaut amid Covid-19.” By Michelle R. Smith with help from five other AP contributors, it shows no sign that any of them read much of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War of Democracy and Public Health.
The good news is, AP’s “global investigative team” now can do a followup showing what in that best-seller is helpful for a better understanding of how public health works in this country and the world, and what in it is dangerous garbage.
Presumably Dr. Michael Specter is at work on a review of it for The New Yorker and someone at The New York Times or The Washington Post is as well. So far, I’m eight and a half chapters into it and find practically every page revealing.
Meanwhile, the sun still shines on Mount Greylock.
— Mark Channing Miller