American Experience: Into the Deep - America, Whaling & the World

For nearly 400 years, few aspects of the American experience have struck more deeply into the imagination of the American people than the savagely primal, unfathomably limit-testing experience of whaling. From the dawn of the 17th century to the eve of the the Civil War, the epic story of the commercial pursuit of the largest creature on earth would be intimately bound up with the story of America: as a dark and shining parable of American capitalism on the rise; as a riveting case study in maritime culture at its most extreme; and as an allegory for the American - and the human experience.

At once a fantastic sea-adventure, a cautionary economic and environmental tale, and a mythic saga of a man and nature, this thrilling films tells the story of three centuries of American whaling, interweaving the riveting tale of the doomed whaleship Essex and the deeply moving story of a young whaleman named Herman Melville, whose own real life and imaginative voyage into the deep would give rise to one of the greatest works of literature ever created by an American