Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me. “Everything all right in here?” one said, stepping into the room. I held out my pa…

  I lost my fingertip in January while carrying a wooden boat across icy ground. When I slipped, the gunwale came down on my hands. About a half inch of my middle finger lay in the dead grass, which might not sound like a lot until you look at…

Retracing Moby-Dick on a nineteenth-century whaler.­­­When Herman Melville was twenty-one, he embarked on the whaleship Acushnet, out of New Bedford. We all know what that led to. This past summer, Mystic Seaport finished their five-year, 7.5-million…

Nathaniel Philbrick has written six books on United States history, most of which take place on or by the sea. In 2000, his In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex—about the sunken whaleship that inspired a young Herman Melvil…