"Their vessels, after all, were not cumbersome, run-of-the-mill lifeboats; these were whaleboats, high-performance craft that had been designed for the open ocean. Made of light, half-inch-thick cedar planks, a whaleboat possessed the buoyancy required to ride over rather than through the waves. 'I would not have exchanged {my boat}, old and crazy as she was,' Chase claimed, 'for even a ship's launch,' the sturdy type of craft in which, three decades earlier, Captain Bligh had sailed more than four thousand miles after the Bounty mutiny." --Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, 99
"Their vessels, after all, were not cumbersome, run-of-the-mill lifeboats; these were whaleboats, high-performance craft that had been designed for the open ocean. Made of light, half-inch-thick cedar planks, a whaleboat possessed the buoyancy required to ride over rather than through the waves. 'I would not have exchanged {my boat}, old and crazy as she was,' Chase claimed, 'for even a ship's launch,' the sturdy type of craft in which, three decades earlier, Captain Bligh had sailed more than four thousand miles after the Bounty mutiny."
--Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, 99