the nickerson -- the house thomas nickerson was in, which was then a guest house.nantucketers no longer hunted whales. they fished for tourists. and thomas nickerson had this guest house. it's on north water street and has -- is part of the harbor house complex. there's the pollard house there on center street. and, you know, it's just amazing. you can go to, you know, the cemetery and, you know, there's all these -- the owen chase's grave is there. and i had a remarkable opportunity to take two of owen chase's descendents, a sister and brother, to owen chase's grave, even before the book came out. and they have his portrait that is now here. >> it's on loan here. >> on loan here. and so, you know, it -- it sort of brought home to me, you know, this is a local story. you know, this is local history, in one sense for me, but one of the aims i had one "the heart of the sea" was to take what i had learned as local history in my book about nantucket "a way of shore" and try to make it more universal, to really focus on this as an endurance situation as, you know, what

nickerson's is suspect. on the other side, he had the chance to talk to other survivors, get information that chase may not have had and he's coming from a different perspective. he was 15 a cabin boy. he had no great professional state in what happened. and what he reveals are details about what happened in the initial collision that chase chose not to. and decided the ship ended up on the side, floating, knocked out on the side of ship with its tail close to the rutter and chase had the opportunity to pick opkilling lance and motion to try to kill this whale, that dared to attack the ship. and he realized that tail was so close to the rutter, that if provoked he could take out the steering device and as nickerson says, he would have risked losing the rutter but chase makes no mention of this. in that instance, i tend to believe nickerson on this. i don't think he's making that up and he had great respect for chase. on the other side, nickerson claims they never had to eat anybody else. that it was the brea

nickerson with an old man who did not want to be remembered as a cannibal.and so what you need to do is look at the various sources. think about how they are going, how their point of view would've bent. bent wet they said. ultimately you need to do it you can do to make it on your own judgment. that's why people need to return to these stories over, and over again there's no such thing as a definitive account of any historical event particularly as we move through time. people are interested in different kinds of things you look back, if you're interested in telling a story different way. >> one of the other questions here is asking about other differences between chased and nickerson's perspectives i will sort of address if you don't mind it's so fascinating to read nickerson's account handwritten later in life. he clearly has chases account with him. he's reading that, it's a prompt to memory. and he fills an other details. or he chooses not to engage. with certain things that chase says. again, the bread versus cannibalism. but really wet chase does, wet