The film recounts the 1820 sinking of the American whaling ship by a sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The crew, stranded in small whaleboats, resorted to starvation, dehydration, and ultimately cannibalism. This real-life catastrophe inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick .

For those studying the text or film, these are the core components often found in a study guide "index":

Unprotected index of directories have become infamous as a vector for . This is why searching for "index of" in the heart of the sea is often associated with unauthorized copies of the movie.

is a linguistic artifact of the underground web: part movie title, part server misconfiguration, part forum obfuscation code. It represents the eternal cat-and-mouse game between content seekers and copyright enforcers.