Can I Solo Fathomless Gears?
Fathomless Gears, by Ralf Ziegler (publishing as Interpoint Station), is, allegedly, an "eldritch mech fishing TTRPG". In Fathomless Gears, you play as a Fisher; you get in your mech, you go into the ocean, and you fight some horrible eldritch Fish, ideally to catch them.
There are two things I think you need to know about Fathomless Gears:
1) It is not a fishing game. It is a
WHALING
game.
2) It is not intended to be a whaling game.
Both of these things surprised me so much I had to put them right at the top of the review. I promise I'll explain both in great detail in a minute, but let's get the basic facts down first.
The core gameplay loop of Fathomless Gears is: tinker with your Fisher's mech, go into the ocean on a Fishing Trip, fight Fish in three encounters of very tactical grid-based combat, come back out of the ocean for Shore Leave where you sell your fish/get new powers/tinker with your mech some more, slowly lose your humanity and stability, repeat. It's designed for 4-6 players, including a GM. The dice system is all d6s; narrative rolls are a dice pool system, whereas combat rolls are (mostly) 2d6+stat to hit with fixed damage.
You all already know that I love tactics and crunch, so much that it's one of my review criteria. What you maybe don't know is that I also love the ocean. I find the ocean and everything in it beautiful and fascinating and wondrous; I've got the opposite of thalassophobia, really. Thalassophilia? If I'd been born three to four centuries earlier, well, I'd be dead for disability reasons, but if not I would absolutely, absolutely have taken to sea. Now I content myself with following as many aquariums as possible across as many social media as possible and regularly rereading Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane. Ominous foreshadowing: I especially love whales.
So imagine my delight when I stumbled across this game, which promised me TACTICAL COMBAT IN THE OCEAN. A pitch perfectly tailored to my personal interests! As soon as I possibly could, I reached out to Ziegler, got a review copy, and set off to sea.
I played through the entirety of the starter adventure "Dead in the Water", which includes one 3-encounter fishing trip and a bit of narrative framing. This took me about 4 sessions total: one to read the rules and build my three Fishers, and about one session per combat encounter. Each play session was shorter than my usual—maybe 2 hours, instead of my usual 3-4.
Structure
Is this a journaling game? Ha! Imagine. No, it's primarily a tactical combat game.
Is this a bunch of random tables? No. Except when you're on Shore Leave between fishing trips, and then it is a bunch of random tables with vague improv prompts.
Does this have published modules or adventures?
The game comes with a single-trip starter adventure, but as far as I know, there aren't any other published adventures yet, first- or third-party. The game was only released about three months ago, and it's the work of a single designer, so this is fine. Ziegler is playtesting scenarios and supplements right now, so it seems likely more adventures are coming.
In the meantime, the book has a variety of things that could be chained together into an adventure, such as:
quests, which are little objectives that can be added to fishing trips (think "retrieve an object" or "destroy some toxic seaweed")
special "curio" equipment, which is more powerful than normal PC equipment and comes with a little snippet of lore (macguffin vibes)
the aforementioned random table of situations for shore leave
secret "deep words" and forbidden knowledge
20 pages or so of lore and setting information
So that's nice. But, uh. Listen, I have to tell you, if there was another published adventure, I'm not sure I could play it as intended or as written, because, well, let's talk about how this game actually played for me.
Gameplay
Let's fortify ourselves with the things I liked first.
Is there crunch and tactical gameplay?
Yes, absolutely. Outside of Fathomless Gears, Ziegler is known for his work on first- and third-party Lancer supplements, and he also runs Lancer games professionally, to give you an idea of the tactical combat expertise he's bringing to the table. And that expertise shows! There is so much crunch and tactical gameplay in Fathomless Gears. This is a good thing; I love crunch, and I liked the crunch here.
The crunch and tactics actually start before you even get into your first fight, or start playing at all. In Fathomless Gears, you create your own mech! And this process is very detailed. You choose what role you want to play in your fishing crew, which isn't a formal "class" but does inform how you build your character. You choose your mech's frame, your background, and your equipment, which slots in, Tetris-style, into the unlocked spaces in your mech. It's a bit like building your ship in the video game Dredge, if you've played that. Fish have a similar customizable building process, though with big teeth and weird ocean visions instead of net launchers etc; it's similarly fun.
All this is made relatively easy, because Fathomless Gears has its own companion app for building Fishers and Fish. It's called Gearwright, and it's tremendously useful and easy to use. As Lancer (I'm told) shouldn't be played without COMP/CON, Fathomless Gears shouldn't be played without Gearwright. I found tinkering with my mechs in Gearwright very fun. Really hits that satisfying puzzle-solving feeling that I get from minmaxing in TTRPGs.
I will say: I liked building my mechs, but I wasn't very good at it. There are some guidelines for how to build each role in a fishing crew, but they are pretty general, and the list of building options is, at every step, quite long and overwhelming. I ended up with mechs that were, let's say, suboptimal, because I didn't know how combat would actually go in practice. And then, of course, I was stuck with those bad choices for three full combat encounters, and couldn't really do anything to mitigate that, which didn't feel great. I think a couple sample characters, maybe one per role in a fishing crew, would be extremely helpful. Building your own mech is a big part of Fathomless Gears, but I think it would be much easier for new players to look at an existing build and swap some things out, instead of doing it all from scratch. Even just knowing what kinds of internals should be in each mech, or which frames and backgrounds are most naturally suited to each role, would've been really helpful for me.
Then the actual combat. It's very grid-based, there's a long list of conditions with which to buff and debuff, and positioning and terrain and cover all matter a lot. Plus, Fish aren't just big bags of hit points; it matters how and where you hit them. And there's the dynamic initiative system, which is determined partially by how you built your mech and partially by conditions you get during combat.
So lots of crunch and tactics, all round! I like combat that feels like a puzzle, and this certainly did. I had fun…as long as I wasn't thinking about what my characters were actually doing: namely, whaling.
Solo-Specific Thoughts
Fun fact: when I asked for a review copy of Fathomless Gears, Ziegler said he didn't think it could be soloed. Not so! From a mechanical perspective, it's very soloable, as are many tactical combat games. Fathomless Gears is especially soloable, I think, because there's not a lot of hidden information. Every player character can scan Fish and reveal their stats to everyone. Plus, both Fishers and Fish are assumed to be making tactically optimal choices, so no need to give yourself a headache going "but would that goblin really know to target the fighter's weakest save?"
In a high-crunch tactical game like this, managing everyone on the battlefield can be a lot. But with a linear turn order and not a lot of off-turn reaction-type actions, you only have to think about one character at a time. Plus, Fathomless Gears has a good Foundry integration, with easy importing from Gearwright, so you can automate most things. And you should use it, if you've got a Foundry license; it really sped up combat for me. Conditions were a little tough to track correctly, but that's not a solo-specific problem, that's a lots-of-conditions-and-my-bad-memory problem.
Overall, the mechanics were perfectly manageable, for me. My sessions were so much shorter than normal purely because I could only avoid thinking about the whaling—enough to focus on tactical combat—for maybe two hours at a time.
Are there defined and achievable goals?
Yes. This is quite straightforward, actually. The goal on a Fishing Trip is to catch as many Fish as possible without getting your mech destroyed; the goal of catching all these Fish is to sell them for profit to keep your mech running and save for retirement.
A larger goal, though, or a personal goal—no, the game won't support you in that. It's Catch Fish, Get Money all the way down. Which is fine as a purely structural choice, in the same way as Crawl Dungeons Get Loot is also, you know, fine. But, much like many dungeon-crawling loot-gathering games, if you crack open this structure and look at what's inside, if you think critically about the nature of Fishing for even a few seconds, suddenly the simple goal of catch-Fish-get-money becomes quite complicated.
Can you play a paladin?
Not in a way supported by the game, that's for sure. There are a couple different dimensions to this, and I think the most important ones are narrative labels and, well, the whaling.
Labels
When you create a character, you choose two labels for your fisher and two labels for their equipment; you get an additional label every two levels. A label is a 1-2-word descriptor—think "menacing" or "charlatan" for a fisher, or "pocket watch" for their equipment. If you want to do something between fishing trips, you build a dice pool: 2d6 by default, and then more if your fisher or someone assisting them has labels relevant to the situation. This is, basically, the only mechanic the game has for resolving situations that come up in roleplay.
Labels are mostly, I think, intended to describe what your character is good at, rather than describing their personality. Sure, "charismatic butcher with a deck of cards" definitely tells you something about a person, but…not a lot, you know? What does your fisher care about? What makes them angry? What drove them to become a fisher and go into the ocean in the first place? The game simply will not support you in figuring that out, or in making that relevant during play.
The book does vaguely say that players can create their own labels and GMs can give the PCs temporary labels, which I suppose could be anything. Nobody's stopping you from giving your fisher the label "loves cats" or "mourning dead husband", I guess. But given that these labels are the only way to be better at narrative checks, and new labels come very rarely, it did feel like the game was implicitly pushing me to choose labels that would be obviously "useful"—even playing solo, it's tough to spin "loves cats" as something that'll help you sell your fish, you know? So I found it very difficult to make my fishers interesting people, without just making it all up freeform myself.
And then how to build my fishers into interesting relationships with each other, or with the various factions in the setting, or with fish or the ocean or the eldritch Deep—again, no support from the game there. Which is a bummer! When the premise of your game is that your characters have this brutal, grueling job, where they're individually disposable but essential to their society's function—I think that's really rich ground for complicated, fucked up relationships to grow, if Fathomless Gears just gave us some seeds.
Of course, I don't want to criticize the game too much for not being what it's not meant to be. "Meeting games where they are", as Thomas Manuel and Quinns (of the Quest) talked about on an episode of the Yes Indie'd Pod last year, is important to me! I'm not saying the extremely bare-bones narrative rules are a design flaw in themselves, necessarily. Fathomless Gears is, after all, mostly a combat game.
Still, I always find a roleplaying game less interesting if it doesn't support me in, well, playing the role of my characters. And I found this particularly difficult and friction-producing in my Fathomless Gears play because of, well, the whaling.
The Whaling
Here we are at last.
I'll start this whaling section by saying: I did not know this was a whaling game when I picked it up. It calls itself a fishing game; PCs are Fishers, adversaries are Fish, encounters happen during Fishing Trips, and so on. I expected fishing. But it is indisputably about whaling.
What you don't learn from the itch page but you do learn from the very first page of the book is: Fishers hunt Fish to extract their oil, which powers the industrial revolution of the game's setting.
This is whaling. It's not even subtext; it's just text. This is literally and exactly the relationship between the Euro-American whaling industry of the 18th and 19th centuries and the Industrial Revolution in our real world: whale oil was used for lighting and industrial lubricant, and baleen was used for corset boning and similar. This was pre-petroleum, so the Industrial Revolution (and all its horrors) really could not have happened without the whaling industry (and all its horrors).
So, there I am, cracking into what I expect to be a fun fishing game, and bam, whaling. Whaling which fuels not only the industrial revolution but also your player characters' mechs.
For what I think are obvious reasons, I read this and thought: oh, okay, this is not the game I thought it was. This is a horror game, but it's not mostly eldritch monster horror. The real horror, surely, is this profoundly evil industry and the fact that my player characters are active (willing?) (enthusiastic?) participants in it. This isn't Call of Cthulhu, it's something like a Triangle Agency or Trophy Dark. What I'm reading in this rulebook—which tells you that whales Fish are "twisted" and "malformed" "[c]reatures that should not be", and every whale Fish "hates you as it hates all of humanity"—is an in-world justification for the horrors the player characters are perpetrating. That's really interesting, actually, I thought.
I was pretty sure about this, I'd say. On that same first page, we've got: "It is their blood that sustains us, so it is their blood that must flow." In the setting lore, there's a church that violently persecutes "any who worship the Deep". And let's not forget the factories—the industrial revolution "chokes the air with factory smoke". Transparently evil. Right?
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how horrifying this setting's whaling industry is, by the way. The whales Fish are sort of people, in a way I cannot possibly explain here. We just don't have the time or space. We must press on.
So I kept playing, getting more and more unsettled as my characters kept diving into the ocean to extract oil to power their broken ship. I got to the end of the starter adventure, my characters just barely escaping the ocean with their mechs intact, and I found myself with a problem. I was really excited about my characters maybe confronting some of the oppressive forces they'd been complicit with so far, maybe befriending some fish, and I wanted to keep playing! But then…looking back through the book for inspiration for what my next sessions might look like…a few things stood out to me:
I didn't know why my characters were whalers in the first place, because of the lack of concrete roleplay support in character creation, so I had no idea what internal or external obstacles they might face in quitting whaling, or what a satisfying narrative arc for them might look like.
The only combat rules in this game are for PCs fighting fish. If I want my characters to go punch a capitalist or blow up a whale oil refinery, that should be more complicated and difficult than a single narrative check, right? But that's all the structure the game gives for anything outside Fish-fighting encounters.
Per the combat rules: "Fishers consider other Fishers allies and all Fish hostiles. Fish consider other Fish allies and all Fishers hostiles."
Hm.
So: if I kept playing in the direction that seemed natural based on the lore, the setting, the premise, the vibe, the whaling of it all…I would have to do some serious hacking and, in fact, outright break the rules. The mechanics of the game support a straightforward combat-as-sport play experience, and not much else. How does one square this circle?
Losing confidence in my whaling-existential-horror interpretation of the game, I decided at this point that I had to interview the designer before I could write a review, or even keep playing. Ziegler agreed, we sat down (virtually) for a chat about the game, and I got the second shock of my Fathomless Gears experience. Here's that part of our conversation—me in bold, Ziegler unbolded:
Could you talk a little about the choice to call [Fathomless Gears] a fishing game and not call it a whaling game? What made you choose that term?
I think "fishing game" is more common. I'm going to be completely honest with you: the term "whaling" hadn't even occurred to me until you just mentioned that. …No, you're absolutely right, too; it absolutely is whaling. …I don't know if a "whaling game" sounds as good as a "fishing game." …I think there's a lot of horrible, terrible connotations.
Yeah, that's why I asked, because I was wondering: did you intend to avoid those connotations, or—
Hell, I do now! [laughter] But no, I hadn't even considered that it could be a whaling game.
Imagine my surprise.
This game where you go to sea on an industrial ship and catch enormous sea creatures to extract their oil to power the industrial revolution poisoning the world wasn't meant to be a whaling game?
Obviously, I asked follow-up questions. All that stuff about Fish being twisted malicious monsters that shouldn't exist? Per Ziegler, that really is meant to be taken at face value: players are meant to think that Fish are evil and it's fine to fight them. The book's description of "brave Fishers fighting for their lives and communities"? Per Ziegler, that's not ironic, just an accurate description of Fishers' role in the setting—they're not particularly heroic, and Fishing is miserable, but they're protecting people from the dangerous beasts in the sea and providing an essential resource. So it's not meant to be an existential horror, the-real-villains-were-us-all-along kind of game? Per Ziegler, no. GMs can grapple with the moral implications of Fishing (whaling) if they want to, but the game really is designed for straightforward combat as sport, and is not meant to provoke complicated emotional experiences at the table or support campaigns with an anti-whaling-industry arc.
So I was quite dramatically wrong in my initial interpretation of the game, it turns out.
According to him, Ziegler hadn't thought about whaling at all.
I will throw in an additional complication here: earlier in our interview, Ziegler named the 2012 video game Dishonored as a design inspiration, specifically for the use of Fish oil as industrial-revolution-powering resource. The parallel in Dishonored, as it turns out, is actual whale oil (explicitly named), and (according to Wikipedia) whale bone is a key game resource. It's full of literal, textual, unmistakable whaling.
Also, whaling, named as such, isn't actually totally absent from Fathomless Gears. I went back and checked, and as it turns out, though Fishers aren't named as whalemen (whalepeople?), Fish aren't named as whales, and the industry isn't named as whaling, the ships that transport Fishers are called, explicitly, "whalers". That's not a casual throwaway line in the book; there are specific mechanics associated with your ship being or not being a Whaler.
What to make of this?
The most generous read I can muster: in fairness, Dishonored is thirteen years old, which is maybe long enough to forget that it's whaling even if drawing inspiration directly from the whaling. Maybe the term "whaling" really only came to mind for long enough during the Fathomless Gears design process to name the ships and set up those mechanics, and Ziegler thought about it no further. With eight instances of "whaler" in a 205-page book, perhaps that terminology choice just didn't stick in the mind. (Ziegler did not mention the choice to call the ships whalers during our conversation.)
Obviously, there are less generous reads one could make.
In any case, as he said himself, it seems Ziegler would prefer the game not be publicly associated with whaling and all its horrors.
Okay, It's Whaling. Now What?
This whaling section started out as a response to "can you play a paladin?", and I want to return to that. No, you cannot play a paladin. As designed, as intended, your Fathomless Gears experience is meant to be cheerfully whaling your way through the ten trips that make up your character's career. According to Ziegler toward the end of our interview, your character might be miserable and suffering, but you, the player, are meant to have an uncomplicated fun time.
I've said before that, to me, a paladin is a person so passionate about or devoted to something that their passion changes the world around them. In Fathomless Gears, no, you're not meant to have a passion, and if you invent a passion, you're not meant to change the world with it. Especially not if changing the world means abolishing the whaling industry.
I, personally, cannot play Fathomless Gears as intended.
This isn't just because industrial whaling is utterly abhorrent to me. This is also very practical! The game is whaling. Whaling is the game. Reading generously, taking Ziegler at his word, sure, you could run a Fathomless Gears campaign where you try to abolish whaling, in theory. As always, in analog roleplaying games, you can do anything you want if you just make it up yourself. But that's my problem: I'd have to abandon so many of the core mechanics of the game—the core mechanic of the game, really—and introduce so many new mechanics to support that kind of play that I wouldn't be playing Fathomless Gears anymore.
As I played Fathomless Gears, and then as I contemplated my conversation with Ziegler, I was reminded of Jay Dragon's (excellent) recent manifesto on expressionist games, which she describes as games "shaped by the unresolvable tension between mechanically-imposed external worlds and passionate inarticulate internal worlds" (emphasis hers); specifically, she notes that expressionist games can have "[a]n inability to resolve the tension within the rules of the game, requiring players to break the rules to have any chance to achieve their player goals". After my interview with Ziegler, I don't think Fathomless Gears is an example of expressionist design, but I certainly did have an expressionist play experience. By the end of my adventure, I felt like I was trying to climb the walls of the proverbial box that Fathomless Gears had put me in. Rattling the bars of my cage, to borrow another phrase from Jay Dragon. When I thought this was the result of an intentional design decision, I found this feeling of friction interesting, even fun, and was excited to pursue it further. I don't usually enjoy expressionist play, but I was ready to break the rules and go wild. Now…well, it feels different knowing I am not in conversation with the text in the way I thought I was.
You might be thinking: hold on, reviewer, don't you play and like a lot of combat-as-sport games? Indeed I do. Perhaps I am a hypocrite. But none of those games expect me to cheerfully play with horrific, entirely one-sided, industrial-scale violence without even acknowledging it. None of those games expect me to feel fine about my characters driving whole species closer to extinction (remember "creatures that should not be"?) for their own profit.
Ultimately, I can't engage with whaling as if it's cool and fun and uncomplicated. Fathomless Gears, as is, is emphatically not for me.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
These all feel pretty anticlimactic and unimportant in comparison to the whaling of it all, but in the interest of giving a full and complete review…
Gripes
When you invoke labels to add dice to your pool for a narrative check, the labels-to-dice conversion is not one-to-one. It's not even linear. There is a conversion table. I found this, frankly, annoying and disruptive to the flow of play.
There's a "cheat sheet" available for free on itch. It is ten (10) pages long, and I did not find it helpful as a reference during play. Important things, like what happens when a fish wins a reel check, are missing. Conditions are confusingly organized; I often had to go find the section heading (sometimes on a different page!) to figure out when a condition changes or ends. Nonessential things, like descriptions of every single stat, take up a lot of space. It's neither concise enough to be a useful cheat sheet for me, nor comprehensive enough to be a quickstart for someone trying out the game for the first time. Unfortunate!
Wishes
I wish there was a print-friendly character sheet. There isn't! Not even a bare-bones black and white empty mech grid with space to describe your internals. Ziegler did tell me that he intends for Fathomless Gears to be played in person, not just online, so this feels like a weird oversight. Gearwright (the aforementioned mech-building software) is great, but not everyone has a compatible device, even if you wanted to print out a very ink-heavy screenshot, you know? Sure, you could draw your own mech grid on graph paper with your bare hands, but that's not cool or fun.
Likes
When you lose your Marbles (usually from Fish psychically attacking you), you have a Meltdown, and you accumulate Backlash. Enough backlash and you start getting fucked up and fishy and also more powerful. This seems fun to me in the same way that it's fun to hit beats by taking fallout in Heart, and I, as a fish-lover, absolutely want my characters to get more fishy and closer to the creatures they hunt. (If only the game was willing to grapple with the implications.) It's kind of a bummer that you only start getting interesting stuff at 6 Backlash, though; that's at least two Fishing Trips' worth even if you really try to have meltdowns.
The art is really unique and beautiful. Much like the cover, the book is full of cool mechs and even cooler sea creatures.
Final Thoughts
Does this game deliver on its premise?
Eldritch? Check. Mech? Check. Fishing? Absolutely not. The play experience I expected and the play experience I got were worlds apart.
Did I have fun?
Yyyyyes? But only because I fundamentally misunderstood what the game was trying to do.
Would I play it again?
No. Not without so much hacking and homebrew as to be an entirely different and unrecognizable game.
Would I recommend it?
This is the part of the review where I normally say: if you're this kind of player or have this kind of taste, I'd recommend it for you, and if you're that kind of player or have that kind of taste, I wouldn't recommend it for you. This time, I'm really not sure I can do that.
As I said earlier in this review, the mech-building and combat mechanics of Fathomless Gears are genuinely interesting and fun. I suppose you could try to take those, strip away the whaling, and put your game in some other setting. But that's a lot of work—the asymmetrical nature of combat is baked into the mechanics, the industrial revolution provides the only motivation for your PCs to be doing what they're doing, and then what do you do with the eldritch ocean backlash system (IMO the most interesting mechanic) without whaling? Your nautical mileage may vary, but when I buy a new TTRPG these days, I don't want to do a ton of work to make it fun for me.
If you, like me, only want to play a whaling game if it's self-aware and engages with the catastrophic violence of whaling seriously, Fathomless Gears is not for you. If you think the mech-whaling premise sounds interesting and you're willing to hack your own structure to meaningfully explore that, I think you'd be better off finding a game that supports you in building interesting characters and moral conflicts and homebrewing mech-whaling into that game. I'd go for something like Heart (which does have a watery third-party supplement); there are interesting resonances between the fallout system in Heart and the backlash system in Fathomless Gears.
If you, like me, are excited by the idea of crunchy tactical combat in the ocean, but unlike me you could read a whaling game and not realize that it's about whaling, or you can treat whaling as fun uncomplicated sport—I don't know how to finish this sentence. Is that who's reading my reviews? Is that my audience, or my creative community? Is this the kind of recommendation I want to give on this platform?
I feel I should say I don't think it's impossible to make a whaling game and do it well, or at least engage with the whaling in an interesting way. Descent, which I have read but have not played yet, is a sci-fi game about whaling on Jupiter which really focuses on the grim and fundamentally unnecessary violence of whaling; the game starts by calling space-whaling "less and less relevant" and telling you that "You did not come here for an adventure. …You came here to die", to give you an idea of tone. Hellwhalers, on the other hand, which I've neither read nor played but which was recommended to me by three separate people, is a Christian-religious horror game so far from whaling-as-fun-sport that the player characters are in literal hell trying to escape their sins. Both of these are very interesting to me! And crucially, both of these games know and acknowledge that they're whaling games, and thus grapple with the horrors both inflicted on and perpetrated by whalers openly, thoughtfully, and with care.
Fathomless Gears does not.
This is, by far, the most difficult review I've ever written. It's taken more than a month to write, and there were several points where I wondered if I should publish it at all. As I finish writing, I'm still not fully sure; it's critical in a way my past reviews mostly have not been, though I hope I've engaged with the game and its designer fairly and generously. Hopefully this was interesting, useful, or thought-provoking for you, readers. If it was, or if you have recommendations for thoughtful whaling games, please tell me—the ask box is always open.
Disclaimers:
I got a free review copy of Fathomless Gears from the designer, but there's no quid pro quo here.
Every time I refer to "whaling" in this review, I mean very specifically industrial and commercial whaling. Indigenous whale hunting practices are none of my business, critique-wise.
If you're curious about the history of the real-world whaling industry, Moby-Dick, or that one time a whale fought a whaler and decisively won, there's a good PBS doc, which your library may have via Hoopla, based on In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. Proceed with caution; the doc accurately describes the gruesome realities of whaling and the aftermath of the destruction of the whaleship Essex (warning: cannibalism). Many thanks to the whaling history expert who recommended these to me.
