Book review: "In the Wake of Madness" by Joan Druett

It says a lot about the job options available to young American men in the first half of the 19th century that so many of them opted to work on a whaling ship. Sure, you would get to travel the world and visit idyllic South Seas islands, but, as Joan Druett illustrates in "In the Wake of Madness" it would have been a grim career path, and possibly a hellish one.

In this 2003 book, Druett tells the story of the whaleship Sharon, and its seemingly cursed voyage of 1841 to 1845. Two men were brutally murdered on the trip, while other men died in accidents. The captain harshly put down an attempted mutiny, and most of the crew eventually deserted the ship at various ports of call.

Sound like a downer? Far from it: It is a fascinating story of life on a whaleship and the varied men — some brave, some cowardly, some cruel — that inhabited it.

While "In the Wake of Madness" revolves around the two murders, that's not the key to its compelling story. After all, if you're interested in homicide, there are countless true crime books to choose from. What sets Druett's book apart is that she places you on the whaleboat, amid the salty air, the dank smells of the cramped cabins, the sweat and blood of the men who lived and worked together without break.

Druett does this even while acknowledging that her primary sources are flawed and fragmented.  She relied on the diaries of sailors as key sources of information, but at times they were are cryptic or mute. To fill in the spaces, she pulls from documents from other whaleships, news reports of the time, and accounts from authors like Herman Melville.

Druett makes it clear that while the trip of Sharon was particularly snakebitten, the work on any whaleship was often miserable and conflict-ridden. I suppose that's not too surprising when you have men living in close contact for years, never getting a full night's sleep (they swapped shifts every four hours around the clock), and pushed to the brink in extreme conditions.

No one asked me, but I've got to wonder how much trouble could have been avoided if the owners of the Sharon and the other whaleships would have put more time into selecting and training their men before the voyage even began. As Druett describes it, it was common at the time to take virtually any man with a pulse on board, regardless of whether he had any experience at sea or any skills at all.

So suddenly you're deep into a three- or four-year voyage and you realize that your crew is unqualified and possibly unwilling. It's also possible, as with the Sharon, that the captain himself was not up to the task.

One of the biggest problems on the Sharon was that the harpooners repeatedly missed the whale or threw so weakly the implement easily fell out of the target. Here's an idea: Hire better harpooners, or train them before you leave home. It might cost you a bit more upfront but it would have greatly increased the success of the journey and your ship would return more quickly with a full load of whale oil.

If you like this book, I would recommend,  "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick, another story of a whaleboat trip that went very wrong.