THE BIGGEST MONSTER OF THEM ALL!

This one's literally a whale of a tale. Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was a sailor and a whaler before he turned his hand to writing. Considered to be one of the great American novels, he wrote Moby Dick (serialized as The Whale in the UK) which took him a year-and-a-half to complete and was published in 1891 as a single volume in the US.

What people may not know is that Melville based Captain Ahab and his crew's famous encounter with the huge sperm whale on a real-life event. In 1819, three whaling ships sailed out of Nantucket, Massachusetts bound for the Pacific Ocean. They traveled south around Cape Horn and then north. When they reached their destination they were thousands of miles from the nearest land. Encountering a pod of sperm whales they began their work of spearing them from smaller whaling boats and hauling them back to the ship where they would be processed for their oil. Sperm whale oil during this period was highly valued as it was used for lamps and many other uses.

One day, when the men were out in their boat, a large bull whale estimated to be over 80 feet long rammed their ship, the Essex not once but twice, and eventually sank it. It was the first known attack of a whale on a ship on the high seas. The ensuing story is an astounding tale of survival and hardship for the men who drifted for months -- eventually resorting to cannibalizing the crew members who had died -- before being rescued.

This article from VANITY FAIR (May, 200) describes the harrowing event in detail,