The Leviathan's Wake
from HMSP — Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
An eighty-five-minute audiobook that teaches the vocabulary of Moby-Dick through the true story that inspired it. In 1820 the Nantucket whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the emptiest water on earth. Follow cabin boy Thomas Nickerson from the oil-soaked wharves of Nantucket, through the hunt and the fire of the try-works, to the wreck, the open boats, and the book the disaster became — learning the working language of the whale fishery along the way. Full transcript and chapter illustrations included. Produced with ElevenLabs (narration), Gemini (illustrations), and Claude (writing and orchestration).
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Chapters
- 0:00 Title
- 0:01 Cold Open — The Second Charge
- 0:36 Part I — The Oil Island
- 8:15 Part II — The Ship and the Green Hands
- 16:29 Part III — First Blood
- 25:24 Part IV — The Fire and the Oil
- 32:25 Part V — Around the Horn
- 39:48 Part VI — Omens
- 47:10 Part VII — The Whale
- 55:32 Part VIII — The Boats
- 1:04:16 Part IX — The Wake
- 1:12:46 Vocabulary Review
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