The Whaleship Essex — Rammed by a whale, doomed by fear of the wrong shore

Summary

On 20 November 1820 the Nantucket whaleship Essex, under first-time captain George Pollard Jr., was rammed twice and sunk by a large sperm whale in the remote equatorial Pacific, roughly 2,000 nautical miles west of South America. The crew of twenty escaped into three small whaleboats with a meager salvage of bread and fresh water. Twelve of them would not survive. After about three months adrift, only eight men lived to be rescued; some endured by eating the bodies of shipmates who had died, and in one boat by killing a chosen man after the survivors drew lots.

The disaster turned on a single navigational decision. The Marquesas and Society Islands lay downwind, within reach. Pollard wished to run for them, but his officers, Owen Chase chief among them, feared the islanders were cannibals and argued instead for the far longer beat toward the coast of Chile and Peru, against wind and current. Pollard yielded. The choice condemned the men to a voyage of more than 2,500 nautical miles in open boats, and to the very starvation and cannibalism they had sailed to avoid. The islands they feared were, in fact, safe; traders had been calling at them without harm.

The Essex is remembered less for the whale than for what followed it: a clinical demonstration of how fear of the unknown can be deadlier than the unknown itself, and how command under starvation collapses into the drawing of lots. First mate Owen Chase published his Narrative in 1821; cabin boy Thomas Nickerson wrote his own account decades later. Together they reached a young Herman Melville, who built the ending of Moby-Dick upon a whale that turns on the ship that hunts it.

Timeline

The grounds and the great whale

The Essex was a small, aging vessel by 1819, but Nantucket was the capital of the American whale fishery and her two-and-a-half-year voyage was routine in its ambition: round Cape Horn, fill the hold with sperm oil, return. Command had passed to George Pollard Jr., promoted from first mate; his own first mate was the 22-year-old Owen Chase, and among the green hands was the teenaged cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, later a chronicler of what he saw. By November 1820 the ship was working the newly opened offshore grounds near the equator, far from any coast.

On the morning of 20 November the boats were down and chasing whales when a large bull sperm whale surfaced near the Essex herself. Chase, back aboard repairing a stove boat, watched it turn toward the ship and gather speed. It struck the hull squarely, swam off, then turned and struck a second time at the bow. The blows stove in the timbers; the ship took on water and rolled onto her side. The crew had minutes to cut free the boats and snatch what they could. A directed assault by a whale upon the ship that hunted it was, to the men of Nantucket, almost beyond belief, and it left them adrift in three twenty-five-foot boats in one of the emptiest stretches of ocean on earth.

The decision that doubled the sea

With the wreck behind them, the officers weighed their options. To the west, downwind and within perhaps a few weeks' sail, lay the Marquesas and the Society Islands. To the east and far to the south lay the coast of South America, more than 2,000 nautical miles distant, to be reached only by beating against the prevailing trade winds and the equatorial current. Pollard favored the nearer islands. Chase and second mate Matthew Joy argued that those islands were peopled by cannibals who would kill them, and pressed for the long passage to the known ports of Chile and Peru. Pollard, a new captain overruled by his officers, gave way.

The fear was a phantom. Traders had been visiting the Marquesas and Society Islands without incident; the rumored cannibals were a horror of the imagination, not the charts. By choosing the longer route the men committed themselves to weeks of additional sailing, on rations already too thin, into a region of light and contrary winds. They stopped on 20 December at uninhabited Henderson Island and nearly exhausted its scant birds, fish and fresh water within a week. Three men, William Wright, Seth Weeks and Thomas Chappel, judged their chances better ashore and stayed; Pollard promised to send help. Then the three boats put back to sea, still hundreds of miles from any port, and the long dying began.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Of the twenty men in the boats, eight survived: Pollard, Chase, Nickerson, Benjamin Lawrence, Charles Ramsdell, and the three from Henderson Island, Wright, Weeks and Chappel. Twelve died, several of them consumed so that others might live, and one, Owen Coffin, killed by the lot. Pollard kept his promise and the three islanders were taken off by the Surry in April 1821. The survivors carried the weight of it for the rest of their lives; Pollard, who lost a second ship soon after and never commanded again, became a Nantucket night watchman, and reportedly fasted each November in memory of the men who had died.

Nantucket, a tight whaling community, absorbed the catastrophe without sensational scandal, and the practice of cannibalism of necessity at sea was, in that era, grimly understood by seafarers rather than prosecuted. The lasting consequence was literary and documentary rather than legal. Owen Chase's Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex appeared in 1821; Thomas Nickerson wrote his fuller account in old age, a manuscript lost until 1960 and published by the Nantucket Historical Association in 1984. A young Herman Melville read Chase's Narrative, later met the aged Pollard, and drew on the Essex for the climax of Moby-Dick, fixing the disaster permanently in memory through fiction.

Lessons

References

• Essex (whaleship) WIKIPEDIA
• Essex | Whaling Ship, Cannibalism, Wreck, & Survivors ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
• The True-Life Horror That Inspired 'Moby-Dick' SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
• Moby-Dick and Nantucket's Moby-Dick: The Attack on the Essex NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
• This Real-Life Whaling Disaster Inspired 'Moby-Dick' NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC