![]() ![]() The trust of the US government, a budding but not yet imperial power, was vested in a clearly unqualified officer corps. The rest lived to spend years contradicting each other’s accounts of their voyage. They froze in terror at the bottom of the world, tasted the excess of tropical paradise, slaughtered and were slaughtered by fierce savages in an uncharted archipelago, camped out on the rim of the world’s most massive volcano, braved one of the world’s most treacherous coastal inlets. Six sailing vessels and 346 men set out in 1838 for a remote region few had ventured. In revisiting the long-forgotten South Seas Exploring Expedition, the author has taken on perhaps the ultimate in fact-based sea stories. The harrowing survival tale that garnered Philbrick a National Book Award ( In the Heart of the Sea, 2000) seems almost a tune-up for this saga of wind and wave. ![]()
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