Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America's Most Storied Shipwreck

immeasurable.

PROLOGUE

Although she was an old ship, the Essex gleamed with opportunity in the July sun as she rested moored in the dock of Nantucket harbor. Her former captain, Daniel Russell, had commanded the vessel on four consecutive whaling voyages with great success, and now looked forward to manning the helm of the Aurora, a ship of more recent construction with a much larger hold. Russell’s former first mate, George Pollard Jr., would become the new captain of the Essex, and boatsteerer Owen Chase would assume the position of first mate for her next voyage, planned for summer of 1819. Chase knew this was a pivotal step in his career, an opportunity to prove his competence as an expert navigator and leader of the youthful whaling crew. Pollard had his sights on a propitious debut, stepping gingerly aboard the Essex with the spring of a man meeting his bright future. His great expectations for a long and successful career were buoyed by the ideal circumstances—a fortuitous privilege he would never forsake—of launching his career as a captain hailing from Nantucket, home of the world’s oldest and most lucrative whaling port.

With a full complement of men aboard, the Essex eased out of the harbor on August 5, 1819, beyond the shallow waters of the infamous Nantucket bar and dropped anchor. Here the crew and workers heaved the heaviest of the cargo onboard from light craft scurrying around the old ship’s periphery, displacing her bulk ever deeper beneath the water’s surface with each new load. The eagerly awaited departure for the South Pacific, home to the world’s richest whaling waters, was nearly upon them. The crew thirsted for the first hunt, with Pollard seeking to set the keynote for his career and Chase yearning to prove himself worthy of rising to the rank of captain for his next voyage. Young Thomas Nickerson, the ship’s cabin boy, would venture to sea for the first time. Amid the stowing down, the crisscrossing of decks, and the incessant comings and goings of boats delivering ever more provisions, the crew could hardly appreciate how precious their food stores would become. Instead, they could only recognize the growing tedium of a process heading into its sixth day. At last, their moment arrived and dawn liberated the Essex into the open ocean with the Nantucket shore receding behind her.

Captain Pollard’s speech to the crew on the first day at sea, like all such orations on whaling vessels, was met with great anticipation, for it would set the tone for the entire voyage. The crew was particularly attentive to the character expressed in the grain of his voice, from which they might measure the manner of his command. In inaugurating the voyage, Pollard’s bearing was not that of a spitfire or martinet; he would deliver no hortatory invective maligning the whale as a devilish species, nor would he condescend to the penniless common sailors as some captains with genteel pretentions could from above on the quarterdeck. Instead, Pollard was frank and direct, a seaman’s captain with no airs or ulterior motive, no revenge to exact from a former loss or injury. His message was clear: success depended on the cooperation of crew and officers, who in turn were expected to obey the word of their captain. If the address bore no note of originality—captains typically made such admonitions—its delivery distinguished Pollard as a democratic leader more interested in weaving a strong social bond among the crew than subduing them with fear, or worse, transfixing them with supernatural mortal terrors intrinsic to the perilous enterprise before them.

After just three days at sea, the Essex was on course for the Azores, cruising full sail for a gam, a meeting of captains and crew, with the whaleship Midas. Now Pollard brimmed with confidence, aggressively opening his studding sails, the canvas rectangles fitted to the far extremity of the fore-topsail yardarm. Pollard’s haste was not entirely unreasonable. The voyage had begun relatively late in the whaling season and there was no time to lose. After exchanging pleasantries with the Midas, the Essex now carried up to eight knots of careening momentum as the clouds darkened and thunder rolled. With the main topgallant and studding sails still flying into the approaching tempest, the Essex heaved as Pollard barked the command to come about and face the opposite direction of the incoming gale. During the maneuver, the uppermost sails violently yanked the ship over while the crew desperately clung to her decks. The old whaler keeled over in the gale, leaning almost forty-five degrees until her beam-ends were completely submerged. The storm soon abated, however, and like a phoenix from the ashes, the Essex rose again, her mainmast reaching heavenward in what to officers and crew was an unmistakable harbinger of good fortune for the duration of their journey.

Weeks later, darkness loomed over the Essex again as she emerged from the Gulf Stream to face the formidable obstacle of Cape Horn. The crew looked on in horror as yet another massive weather front spread across the horizon, making the already challenging passing appear nearly impossible. Sailing as close to shore as possible without running aground on the Horn’s jagged coastline, Pollard pressed on through the tempest for days. The days dragged on into weeks, draining the men’s endurance and morale until an entire month had passed under such profound strain. Ultimately, to the crew’s delight, the Essex emerged from the pounding passage without taking in so much as a gallon of water, incurring no damage on the treacherous shoals. But another force of nature awaited them, of which they were blissfully unaware during their cruise along the coast of Chile north to Peru. In these whale-rich seas they would reap the rewards of their herculean effort around the Horn, hauling in eleven whales for 450 barrels of precious oil, the gold of this watery Wild West.

Sailing westward into the Pacific after a brief stop on Charles Island for provisions on October 23, 1819, the Essex crew happily found itself surrounded by a shoal of whales. The men lowered their boats and waited with harpoons poised for what appeared to be an easy take of oil-rich sperm whales. First mate Owen Chase stood ready to hurl his lance when suddenly a whale swam directly under his boat, unleashing its formidable tail like a giant whip against the boat’s bottom with the force of a cannonball, catapulting its occupants skyward. The whalemen splashed about, scrambling to gain a handhold on the shattered wreckage and pull their heads above the rolling sea. Clinging to the sinking boat, they screamed to their mates in the other chase boat for aid. So another narrow escape and another fortuitous turn, this time with a rambunctious whale, left the whalemen once again unscathed.

One month after their violent introduction to the concussive force of the sperm whale’s tale, the Essex crew lowered its boats in pursuit of a pod of whales, this time swimming swiftly away from the ship. Captain Pollard was to lead the hunt with a team of harpooners, leaving first mate Chase in command of the crew left behind on the ship. Chase welcomed this relatively secure role away from the front lines. The trauma of his earlier clash that upended his boat was fresh in his mind, so the mother ship seemed a haven while Pollard marshaled his forces at a considerable distance. Any illusion of safety, however, was soon shattered when an eighty-five-foot bull seeking revenge for the attack on his predominantly female companions assumed the knightly role and bolted from the pod, whose members Pollard and company were butchering with their darts and lances. Flushed with fury, the leviathan rushed directly back at the ship, as the unsuspecting crew helplessly watched. Turning his full vengeance on the Essex, the bull accelerated to top speed, pumping its tail vigorously and ramming the hull with brute force as the men recoiled. But the creature was not through. Now circling back to gather momentum for the final blow while Chase stood frozen on deck, the whale blasted a fresh gaping hole in the ship’s hull. In minutes the old whaler keeled over, disappearing into the sea, with men scrambling onto open boats desperately salvaging provisions from her hold. His vengeance complete for the time being, the whale glided off into the vast Pacific in search of his next victims.¹

So reads the accepted story of events leading to the Essex wreck, primarily as handed down from first mate Owen Chase. Accounts of the crew’s struggle for survival in the aftermath also bear his stamp. After the Essex was lost on November 20, 1820, Captain Pollard suggested seeking the closest refuge available, on the Society Islands to the West. But Chase objected, along with Matthew Joy, who feared cannibals and instead insisted on rowing for South America—some three thousand miles away—despite the triple vulnerability of navigating tiny open boats in unfavorable winds with dangerously low provisions. After yielding to the headstrong first mate’s will, Pollard and the crew set off for the long journey, first landing on Henderson Island, where they stayed for a week before departing for the coast of Chile on December 27. The crew, desperate and now dying, launched themselves into the vast expanse of the sea, hopeful that the current and their strength would somehow bring them safely ashore. In the nearly two-month period after they left Henderson Island, they would experience horrors that forever changed their lives. In March of 1821, a month after their rescue, the press was still reporting on the harrowing ordeal, reprinting a letter Pollard had left in a tin box on the island. Not knowing if he would survive the journey to the mainland, Pollard accounted for the events on one page, and on another he poured out a wrenching farewell: I shall leave with this a letter for my wife, and whoever finds, and has the good will and has the goodness to forward it, will oblige an unfortunate man and receive his sincerest wishes.²

As the most storied and horrifying shipwreck in whaling history, the Essex disaster is astonishing for both the way the ship was sunk—rammed by a massive sperm whale—and the grisly scenes of starvation and cannibalism that thinned the original crew of twenty men down to eight. Three of the survivors stayed behind on Henderson Island and were later rescued by the Surry, an English vessel. Of the three boats carrying the seventeen crewmen who attempted to row to Chile—while subsisting on the meager supply of bread, water, and Galápagos tortoises they salvaged from the sinking Essex—only two boats arrived, with five survivors.³ But more shocking in many ways was the ensuing struggle to survive the stigma of cannibalism, and the more improbable challenge for crew members of salvaging their professional reputations and careers at sea. At stake was the story of the wreck itself, as seen in the inconsistent and highly contested survivors’ accounts, and the race to print it.

News coverage of the ordeal inspired a flurry of sensationalized shipwreck narratives in the popular press, soon followed by the 1821 publication of Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.⁴ Chase’s narrative, which Nathaniel and Thomas Philbrick call an excellent work of self-promotion, casts the writer as a hero who overturned the allegedly misguided and ill-conceived instincts of Captain Pollard, and calmed and encouraged his hysterical crew, particularly the young cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson.⁵ For Pollard’s part, rather than racing to print his account, the captain sought redemption in another whaling expedition, aboard the Two Brothers, buoyed by the confidence of his Nantucket community and the good faith of his cabin boy, Nickerson, who signed on for the venture. This time Nickerson elevated his practice of keeping a standard log by immortalizing in verse the propitious journey of the Two Brothers.⁶ Despite lofty expectations for Pollard’s return to whaling—one worthy of epic poetry—the journey proved disastrous, as the ship crashed on craggy shoals northwest of Hawaii. His spirit crushed, Pollard retreated into exile on Nantucket. Having saved his manuscript from the Essex voyage, Nickerson retrieved it from storage decades later to revise for publication with Leon Lewis, a staff writer for the New York Ledger, the widest circulating story paper of the nineteenth century.⁷ But, in a detail nearly lost to history, Lewis agreed to work on but eventually abandoned what was then the most coveted manuscript of America’s most notorious shipwreck.

This book unearths the stories behind the survivors’ accounts of the Essex voyage, the Nantucket whaler that captured Herman Melville’s imagination after colliding with a massive sperm whale in November 1820. The story lay with the few men who finally returned to Nantucket under the scrutiny of a clamoring public. Although Chase was the first to print his account, others would provide their own unique perspectives. Surviving the Essex seeks to give a richer, more contextualized portrait than what is already available, looking closely at the survivors’ lives, ambitions, and motives, their pivotal actions during the wreck itself, and their will to reconcile themselves to those actions in both the short and the long term. This book also seeks to identify as-yet-identified villains and unsung heroes.

Penned by a ghostwriter, Chase’s account reflects his objective to preempt questions about his competence as a seaman by heaping the blame on the whale, as well as to question Captain Pollard’s leadership. For him, and each survivor who offered his particular story, the retelling uniquely shaped his public and private life, cementing his place in maritime Nantucket history as well as showing his particular form of psychological reconciliation. For Chase, the traumatic event became an opportunity to enter the ranks of the most successful captains in whaling history. After the Essex, Pollard’s loss of the Two Brothers meant a kind of personal exile and highly modest work as a night watchman. Then there was Nickerson, who years later attempted to publish his account. The whale itself, especially its behavior and purported motives, also factors into profiles of the event. As for the thumbnail portraits ultimately associated with these men (and the beast), they go roughly as follows: Chase brimmed with ambition but ultimately went mad in old age; Pollard, in Nantucket, came to embody suffering with dignity; Nickerson was cast as the aging seaman who tried but ultimately failed to communicate his story to a wider audience; and the whale, speechless and maligned, was the scapegoat for a civilization determined to justify a ruthless industry.

Tracking down lost clues not only helps expose the exaggerations and inaccuracies of Chase’s account, but also pieces the story back together for a richer, more detailed view of the event’s impact. In profiling Chase, Pollard, and Nickerson, this book explores how these survivors shaped their own respective versions of the tale in order to preserve their dignity and names for posterity, and to conceal their liability for the lost lives of the other crew members.

The most mythologized elements in the Essex narratives are the death of crewman Owen Coffin and the whale’s strike. This book begins with the former and ends with the latter. Chapter 1 thus takes up the question of who shot Coffin as a means of exploring the ambiguities regarding this messianic figure at the heart of the crew’s deadly survival ritual. What Coffin means—whether he died in vain, or gave his life meaningfully based on the fairest and most reasonable intentions and procedure, as directed by Pollard—was a crucial consideration for all the narratives. His life was framed as the most sacred and telling of those lost at sea. Many facts are unclear. Did Pollard refuse, in a fit of cowardice, to execute the youth himself for the crew’s sustenance? How does the ritual consumption of Coffin’s body compare to that of the black sailors, who all died unusually soon in the scope of the event?

Chapter 2 concerns Chase’s ghostwritten Narrative as an attempt to not only live down the event but also defend himself from allegations of negligence and incompetence. It details Chase’s efforts to rid himself of associations with savage cannibalism and cast himself as an icon of civility and productive industry. Why were other options for survival not mentioned or considered in his Narrative, especially the prospect of seeking aid from one of the many ships near Henderson Island, or the use of the first deceased crewman, Matthew Joy, as shark and porpoise bait?

Chapter 3 considers Nickerson’s use of his personal experience aboard the Essex as a source of fame and profit, as well as an opportunity to place himself more admirably in the tale for posterity. He attempted to publish his story immediately after Chase’s decline into madness and death, precisely when a power vacuum opened in the competition for the Essex’s master narrative.

Moving from Owen Coffin’s iconic death (chapter 1) and assessments of the respective motives behind Chase’s and Nickerson’s narratives (chapters 2 and 3), chapter 4 explores the conditions of Pollard’s return to sea. There I suggest an alternative to the commonly held view that the disaster was a consequence of his Ahab-like obsessive pursuit of whales, and that its demise, like that of the Pequod, in Moby-Dick, provides a cautionary tale stressing the need for personal restraint and humility. Such readings run counter not only to Pollard’s humble, self-effacing temperament but also to his optimistic attempt at seafaring redemption so soon after the Essex debacle. He was seemingly compelled not by a drive for vengeance but instead by a sincere desire to support his community and