CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ON FEBRUARY 25, 1821, Chase, Lawrence, andNickerson arrived in Valparaiso, Chile's largest port, set on a steep hill facing north across a wide bay. At any other time the story of the Essex would have captivated the city. But in February and March of that year, the citizens of Valparaiso were tensely awaiting news from the north. Revolutionary forces, having already secured Chile's independence from Spain, were bearing down on Royalists in Lima. It was Peru, not a few American castaways, that demanded Valparaiso's attention, allowing the Essex survivors to recuperate in relative privacy.
From the beginning Chase and his men spoke openly about having resorted to cannibalism. On the day of the Nantucketers' arrival, the keeper of the port's official log of incoming and outgoing vessels matter-of-factly reported that the captain of the Indian had picked up three men who “survived with a little water and crackers... and with a shipmate that died and that they ate in the term of eight days.”
The U.S. frigate Constellation was anchored at Valparaiso, and the acting American consul, Henry Hill, arranged to have Chase. Lawrence, and Nickerson taken to it. Even though it had been a week since their rescue, the survivors still presented an affecting sight. “[T]heir appearance...was truly distressing,” wrote Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, “bones working through their skins, their legs and feet much smaller and the whole surface of their bodies one entire ulcer.” Ridgely placed the three men under the care of his surgeon, Dr. Leonard Osborn, who supervised their recovery in the frigate's sickbay deep in the forward part of the third deck. It may have been hot and airless, but for three men who had spent eighty-nine consecutive days beneath the open sky, it was a wonderful comfort.
The crew of the Constellation was so profoundly moved by the sufferings of Chase and his men that each sailor donated a dollar toward their assistance. When this was combined with money collected from the American and British residents of Valparaiso, the Essex survivors had more than $500 to help defray the costs of their convalescence.
But the men's sufferings were not yet over. As the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment discovered in 1945, the recovery period was a torturous part of the ordeal. After three months, the Minnesota volunteers still had not returned to their normal weights, even though some were consuming more than five thousand calories a day. They would eat until their stomachs could not take any more, yet they still felt hungry. Many would continue to eat between meals. It wasn't until after six months of “supernormal eating” that they had regained the bodies they had once possessed.
The Essex survivors were in much worse shape than the volunteers in the Minnesota experiment. After three months of abuse, their digestive systems had a difficult time handling the intake of increased quantities of food-a problem shared by Captain David Harrison of the Peggy in 1765. Upon his rescue, Harrison was given some chicken broth. It had been thirty-seven days since he'd last had a bowel movement, and soon after drinking some of the broth, he was wracked by excruciating abdominal pain. “I was ... at last relieved,” Harrison wrote, “by the discharge of acallous lump about the size of a hen's egg, and enjoyed a tranquillity of body, notwithstanding all my disorders, with which I was utterly unacquainted for some preceding weeks.”
The day after their arrival in Valparaiso, Chase and his men received a visit from the governor, who had heard rumors that, instead of being the survivors of a wreck, the first mate and his men had killed the Essex's captain in a bloody mutiny. “For there was a whispering abroad,” Nickerson wrote, “that foul play had been used by us.” The governor was reassured enough by Chase's story that he allowed the Nantucketers to go freely about the city as soon as they were able.
A week and a half later, on March 9, the Nantucket whaleship Hero arrived in Valparaiso. While cutting in a whale off St. Mary's Island, she'd been attacked by Spanish pirates. The Spaniards imprisoned the captain and the cabin boy on shore, then locked the rest of the crewbe-lowdecks and began to ransack the ship. When an unknown vessel appeared in the harbor, the pirates returned briefly to shore, allowing first mate Obed Starbuck to burst open the cabin door and retake the ship. Starbuck ordered his men to set sail, and although the pirates came to within yards of catching up to the fleeing whaleship, the Nantucketers were able to reach safety.
As dramatic as that report was, the Hero bore even more sensational news. With mate Starbuck acting as skipper, the Hero had encountered three whaleships sailing together as an informal group-the Dauphin, the Diana, and the Two Brothers. Captain Zimri Coffin of the Dauphin told Starbuck that he had the captain of the Essex and another crew member aboard. Shortly afterward, Pollard and Ramsdell were transferred to the Two Brothers, which was headed for Valparaiso.
It arrived on March 17. The five survivors had last seen one another on the night of January 12, when their boats had become separated in a howling gale more than two thousand miles out to sea. Since then, two of Chase's crew had died, four of Pollard's, and three of Joy's (then under Hendricks's leadership) before the second mate's boat and the three remaining men disappeared. Only Nantucketers had emerged from Pollard's and Chase's whaleboats alive.
They had all suffered terribly, but it was Pollard and Ramsdell- found clutching the bones of their dead companions-who had come the closest to complete psychic disintegration. Of the anguish each of these two experienced, Pollard's was perhaps the greater. Ayear and a half earlier, his aunt had entrusted him with the care and protection of her oldest son, Owen. Pollard had not only presided over his cousin's execution but had eaten his flesh, thus participating in what one historian of cannibalism at seahas called the taboo of “gastronomic incest.”
Pollard had demonstrated remarkable stamina immediately after his rescue, but his urgent need to tell his tale had almost killed him. Soon after that first night, he suffered a relapse. When Captain William Coffin of the Nan tucket whaleship Eagle offered the Essex survivors passage home, Pollard was judged to be too weak for a voyage around Cape Horn. On March 23, Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell bid farewell to their captain and left for Nantucket. In May, after two months of recuperation and solitary reflection, Pollard followed them in the whaleship Two Brothers.
In the meantime, Commodore Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, had made arrangements for the rescue of Chappel, Weeks, and Wright from (as he was told) Ducie Island. Recently arrived in Valparaiso was the Surry, a trading vessel from Australia being loaded with fifteen thousand bushels of wheat. Her captain, Thomas Raine, agreed to stop at Ducie on his way back to Sydney and pick up the three Essex crew members, assuming, of course, they were still alive.
The Surry left South America on March 10. Captain Raine and his crew arrived at Ducie Island less than a month later, only to find the tiny coral atoll uninhabited. The shore was so thick with nesting birds it was impossible to walk without stepping on eggs. Raine decided that no one had visited this necklace of coral in a very long time.
He studied his navigational guide and wondered if the Essex officers might have mistaken an island seventy miles to the west for Ducie. A few days later, on April 9, Henderson Island came within view. They approached it from the east, then began to follow the coastline to the north. Upon rounding a rocky headland they found a “ spacious bay” to the west. Raine ordered one of his men to fire a gun.
At that moment, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright had just sat down to eat a tropic bird. Except for some berries and shellfish, birds and eggs were the only food left on Henderson. The landcrabs had disappeared. A few months before, the men had succeeded in catching five green turtles, but by the time they had eaten just one of the turtles, the meat on the other four had spoiled. Over the last four months, the tropic birds had proved exceptionally difficult to find, so the bird they had now was, for them, a bountiful feast. But food was not their gravest concern. What they still needed most was water.
From the day after their seventeen shipmates left for Easter Island, the spring of freshwater never again emerged above the tide line. At low tide they could see freshwater bubbling up to the ocean's surface from the rock, but for the rest of their time on Henderson the spring always remained covered by saltwater.
In desperation, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright dug a series of wells but were unable to reach groundwater. When it rained they would greedily collect the water that accumulated in the hollows of nearby rocks. Dehydration caused their tongues to swell and their lips to crack. After a five-day stretch without water, they reluctantly sucked the blood of a tropic bird but found themselves “much disordered” by it. While searching the crevices and caves for water, they discovered the remains, of the eight unidentified castaways, whose fate they feared would soon be their own. The skeletons lay side by side as if the people had decided to lie down and quietly die together. For Chappel, who had once been the wildest and least responsible of the Essex's crew, it was a sight that helped change his life. From that day forward, he would look to God. “I found religion not only useful,” he later wrote, “but absolutely necessary to enable me to bear up under these severe trials.”
When Chappel, Weeks, and Wright, crouched around their tropic-bird feast, heard a distant booming, they assumed it was thunder, but one of the men decided to walk down to the beach and have a look. Later he would tell what had happened as soon as he saw the ship: “The poor fellow,” one of the Surry's crew members reported, “was so overpowered with the emotions such a sight excited in his breast, he could not go to tell his companions the joyful news.” Finally, however, they, too, grew curious and joined him at the beach.
A high surf was breaking on the ledge of coral surrounding the island. Several times the crew of the Surry attempted to land a boat, but the conditions proved too dangerous. The three desperate men stood on the beach, increasingly fearful that their rescuers would decide to abandon them. Finally Chappel, the strongest of the three and the only one who knew how to swim, dove into the sea. His arms were skin and bone but with the adrenaline coursing through him, he reached the launch and was pulled aboard.
The Surry's crew discussed what to do next. They might have to return the following day for the other two men. But Chappel refused to abandon his two shipmates even temporarily. With a rope tied around his waist, he dove into the water and swam back over the coral to the beach. One at a time, the three of them were pulled out to the boat. They suffered many cuts and bruises from the reef, but all made it to the Surry alive.
Captain Raine judged that the three of them would have been dead after another month on the island. Their clothes were mere rags; between them they had only a single pair of pants. Somehow one of them had been able to save his seaman's certificate, on which he had kept a record of their days spent on Henderson. They told Raine that Captain Pollard had left several letters in a box nailed to a tree, and the next day Raine was able to land on the island and retrieve the letters.
the only Essex crew members not accounted for were the three men-Obed Hendricks, Joseph West, and William Bond-in the second mate's boat, which separated from Pollard's on the night of January 29. Months later, long after Captain Raine had searched Ducie Island, the atoll to the east of Henderson, another ship touched down there. The crew discovered a whaleboat washed up on the brittle shore, with four skeletons inside. In 1825 the British navy captain Frederick William Beechey, who visited both Ducie and Henderson Islands, made the connection between this ghostly vessel of bones and the lost Essex boat. If this was indeed the second mate's whaleboat and the skeletons belonged to Hendricks, West, Bond, and perhaps Isaiah Sheppard, the last of the crew to die before the separation from Pollard, then it had drifted for more than a thousand miles, finally coming to restwithin a day's sail of where it had started on December 27,1820.
In 1820-21, as the Essex boat-crews struggled east under a blistering sun, their kin on Nantucket were suffering through one of the coldest winters in the island's history. On the day that the three whaleboats left Henderson Island, Obed Macy, Nantucket's historian, recorded in his journal that the harbor was covered with “porridge ice.” By January 7, the harbor was frozen solid. Ice extended north toward the mainland as far as the eye could see. Supplies of food and especially firewood were already dangerously low. Six feet of snow smothered the outlying areas of the island, making it impossible for the sheep to feed on grass. Macy estimated that as many as half of Nantucket's total herd of about nine thousand sheep would be dead by spring.
On January 13, six men from Martha's Vineyard, who were trapped on Nantucket and desperate to return to their families, launched a whaleboat from the south shore, where the ocean surf had maintained a corridor of open water. The wind remained moderate that day, and people were optimistic that the Vineyarders had reached home safely.
There is no record of whether or not they did. On January 25 the temperature dropped to 12 degrees below zero, the lowest ever recorded on the island. “Many people, especially the old,” Macy wrote, “could hardly be kept comfortable in bed.”
Four men were added to the town's nightwatch. With almost all of the island's population crowded into a congestion of old wooden buildings, their fireplaces roaring night and day, there was a high risk of what Macy called a “disastrous fire.” Adding to the danger was the unusually large amount of sperm oil stored in the town's warehouses that winter. Macy noted that the merchants had taken “every necessary care to preserve [the oil] from fire.”
Finally, in the beginning of February, the temperature rose above freezing, and it began to rain. “The ice and snow melts away rapidly,” Macy wrote, “which seems to animate and give life to business of most kinds. The vessels and men who have been confined here for some weeks begin to move, with some prospects of being released from prison. The people who are so anxious to get off are cutting out the mail packet [from the ice].” On the morning of February 4, the packet sailed from Nantucket with “the largest mail packages that ever went from here at one time.” On February 17, the day before Chase's rescue, several trading vessels arrived with cargoes of corn, cranberries, hay, fresh pork, beef, turkey, cider, dry fish, and apples. The crisis was over.
The families of the Essex crew members had no reason for concern throughout the winter and spring. Letters mailed from the Galapagos post office on Charles Island in late October would not have reached Nantucket until February or March at the earliest. They would have told of a typical whaling voyage reaching its midpoint, with hopes high that a productive season in the Offshore Ground would allow them to return home in the summer of 1822.
What the people of Nantucket did not know was that since late February, a kind of tidal wave of horror had been building in the whale fishery as the story of the Essex was passed from ship to ship, gradually making its way around the Horn and up the Atlantic toward Nantucket. Riding the crest of this wave was the Eagle, with Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell aboard. Before the Eagle's, arrival, however, a letter reached Nantucket that told of the disaster.
The town's post office was on Main Street, and as soon as the letter arrived, it was read there before an overflowing crowd. The islander Frederick Sanford was a contemporary of the Nantucket teenagers aboard the Essex, and he would never forget what he saw and heard that day. The letter, Sanford recalled, told of “their sufferings in the boats, eating each other, and some of them my old playmates at school!” Despite Nantucket's reputation for Quaker stoicism, the people assembled outside the post office could not conceal their emotions. “[E]veryone was overcome by [the letter's] recital,” Sanford wrote, “and [wept] in the streets.”
As it turned out, the letter contained an incomplete account of the disaster. Pollard and Ramsdell had been rescued almost a week after Chase's boat-crew, but their account-passed from whaleship to whaleship-was the first to make it home. The letter mentioned the three men left on the island but gave little hope for any other survivors. Pollard and Ramsdell were assumed to be the only Nantucketers left alive.
On June 11, the Eagle arrived at the Nantucket Bar. “My family had received the most distressing account of our shipwreck,” Chase wrote, “and had given me up for lost.” But standing alongside Ramsdell was not George Pollard; instead, there were three ghosts-Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson. Tears of sorrow were soon succeeded by amazement and then tears of joy. “My unexpected appearance,” Chase remembered, “was welcomed with the most grateful obligations and acknowledgments to a beneficent Creator, who had guided me through darkness, trouble, and death, once more to the bosom of my country and friends.”
Chase discovered that he was the father of a fourteen-month-old daughter, Phebe Ann. For Chase's wife, Peggy, itwas an overwhelming sight: the husband whom she had once thought dead holding their chubby-cheeked daughter in his still bony, scab-covered arms.
The community of Nantucket was overwhelmed as well. Obed Macy, the meticulous keeper of Nantucket's historical record, chose not to mention the disaster in his journal. Although articles quickly appeared about the Essex in the New Bedford Mercury, Nantucket's own fledgling newspaper, the Inquirer, did not write about the disaster that summer. It was as if Nantucketers were refusing to commit to an opinion about the matter until they had first had a chance to hear from foe Essex's captain, George Pollard, Jr.
They would have to wait almost two months, until August 5, when Pollard returned to the island aboard the Two Brothers. The whaleship was first sighted by the lookout posted at the tower of the Congregational church. As word spread down the lanes and into the grog shops and warehouses and ropewalks and out into the wharves, a crowd formed and began to make its way to the cliff along the north shore. From there they could see the black, sea-worn ship, heavy with oil, her sails furled, anchored at the Nantucket Bar. At 222 tons, the Two Brothers was even smaller than the Essex had been, and once she'd been relieved of some of her oil, she crossed the Bar at high tide and made her way toward the harbor entrance. The crowd surged back to the waterfront. Soon more than 1,500 people were waiting expectantly at the wharves.
The arrival of a whaleship-any whaleship-was what one Nantucketer called “an era in most of our lives.” It was the way people learned about the ones they loved-the sons, husbands, fathers, uncles, and friends whose workplace was on the other side of the world. Since no one knew what news the whaleship might bring, islanders greeting a ship tended to hide their eagerness and anxiety behind a veneer of solemnity. “We feel a singular blending of joy and grief on such occasions,” this same Nantucketer confessed. “We know not whether to smile or weep. Our emotion at all events is much subdued. We dare not express it aloudlest it grate upon the ear of some to whom this ship has been a harbinger of evil. We are disposed to be quiet. And yet at this time we have an irresistible impulse to utter our feelings.”
And so, when Pollard first stepped upon the wharf, surrounded by more than a thousand familiar faces, there was an absolute, nerve-shattering quiet. Frederick Sanford, Nickerson's and Ramsdell's old school chum, would later describe the assembly as “an awe-struck, silent crowd.” As Pollard began to make his way toward home, people moved aside to let him pass. No one said a word.
It was generally acknowledged that a whaling captain bore a much heavier weight of responsibility than a captain in the merchant service. In addition to navigating his vessel around the Horn and back, he was required to train a crew of inexperienced men in the dangerous art of killing and processing whales. And when it was all done, he had to answer to his ship's owners, who expected nothing less than a full hold of oil. Itwas little wonder, then, that awhaling captain was paid, on average, three times what the commander of a merchant vessel received.
As a mate aboard the Essex, George Pollard had known only success; as captain, he had known only disaster. Since a whaleman was paid a portion of the proceeds at the end of the voyage, Pollard, like all the other survivors, had nothing to show for two years of misery and hardship.
Captain Amasa Delano knew what it was like to return home after an unsuccessful voyage. “[I]t must be acknowledged, that I never saw my native country with so little pleasure as on my return to it after a disastrous termination of my enterprises and my hopes,” Delano wrote in an 1817 account of his many voyages to the Pacific. “The shore, on which I would have leaped with delight, was covered with gloom and sadness to my downcast eye and wounded mind... [M]y observation was alive to every symptom of neglect or affected pity which might appear in the conduct or salutations of my acquaintance onshore.”
Pollard was inevitably subjected to a lengthy interview by the Essex's owners, Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, a harrowing process during which it would have been difficult for a first-time captain not to sound defensive. “It is unquestionably true, that the poor and disappointed man is often too jealous on this subject,” Delano wrote, “and puts an erroneous and unjust construction upon conduct which is neither mercenary nor heartless.” But it wasn't just the Essex's owners to whom Pollard had to answer. There was a member of his own family- Owen Coffin's mother.
Nancy Bunker Coffin, forty-three, was Pollard's aunt, the sister of his mother, Tamar, fifty-seven. Nancy had married into one of Nantucket's oldest and proudest families, one that traced its roots to Tristram Coffin, the patriarch of the island's first English settlement in the seventeenth century. Nancy's father-in-law, Hezekiah Coffin, Sr., had been the captain of one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Hezekiah had distinguished himself, according to family legend, as “the first to throw tea into Boston Harbor.” The family possessed a miniature portrait of Hezekiah. He had wide-set eyes, a sharp nose, and a gentle, slightly embarrassed smile.
Although his son, Hezekiah Jr., had been a birthright Friend, he'd been disowned when he married Nancy Bunker, a non-Quaker, in 1799. Then, in 1812, when Owen Coffin was ten, Hezekiah Jr. officially “apologized,” and both he and Nancy became members of the North Meeting on Broad Street.
On that August day in 1821, when George Pollard arrived on her doorstep, Nancy's commitment to her adopted faith met the severest possible test. “He bore the awful message to the mother as her son desired,” Nickerson wrote. Nancy Coffin did not take it well. The idea that the man to whom she had entrusted the care of her seventeen-year-old son was living as a consequence of her boy's death was too much for her to bear. “ [S]he became almost frantic with the thought,” Nickerson wrote, “and I have heard that she never could become reconciled to the captain's presence.”
The verdict of the community was less harsh. The drawing of lots was accepted by the unwritten law of the sea as permissible in a survival situation. “Captain Pollard was not thought to have dealt unfairly with this trying matter,” Nickerson wrote. Although it did not involve the drawing of lots, a comparable case of survival cannibalism rocked the community of Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1972. The ordeal began when a plane transporting a local soccer team to Santiago, Chile, crashed in the snowy Andes Mountains. Until their rescue ten weeks later, the sixteen survivors sustained themselves on the frozen corpses of the passengers who had died in the crash. Just as had occurred in Nantucket more than 150 years earlier, the residents of Montevideo did not fault the young men's behavior. Soon after their return, Montevideo's Catholic Archbishop declared that since it had been a question of survival, the men were blameless, adding, “It is always necessary to eat whatever is at hand, in spite of the repugnance it may evoke.”
There is no evidence that Nantucket's religious leaders felt compelled to speak in defense of the Essex survivors. The fact remains, however, that no matter how justified it may have been, cannibalism was, and continues to be, what one scholar has termed a “cultural embarrassment”-an act so unsettling that it is inevitably more difficult for the general public to accept than for the survivors who resorted toil.
For his own part, Pollard did not allow the horror he had experienced in the whaleboat to defeat him, displaying an honesty and directness concerning the disaster that would sustain him all his life. Captain George “Worth of the Two Brothers was so impressed with the integrity of the former captain of the Essex during the two-and-a-half-month voyage back from Valparaiso that he recommended Pollard as his replacement. Soon after his return, Pollard was formally offered command of the Two Brothers.
By the time Pollard returned to Nantucket, Owen Chase had begun working on a book about the disaster. Chase had kept a daily log of his ordeal in the boats. He also appears to have obtained a copy of the letter written by the Dianas captain, Aaron Paddack, the night after hearing Pollard's story, which provided him with an account of what had happened on the other two boats after the separation on January 12. But Owen Chase was a whaleman, not a writer. “There seems no reason to suppose that Owen himself wrote the Narrative,” Herman Melville would write in his own copy of Chase's book. “It bears obvious tokens of having been written for him; but at the same time, its whole air plainly evinces that it was carefully and conscientiously written to Owen's dictation of the facts.”
Chase had grown up with a boy who, instead of shipping out for the Pacific, had attended Harvard College. William Coffin, Jr., was the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful whale-oil merchant who had also served as Nantucket's first postmaster. After graduating from Harvard, William Jr. had briefly studied medicine, and then, in the words of a friend, followed “other pursuits more congenial with his enthusiastic love of literature.” Years later, he would ghostwrite Obed Macy's much-praised history of Nantucket; there is also evidence that he helped write an account of the notorious Globe mutiny. His published literary career appears to have begun, however, with the narrative of the Essex disaster.
Coffin was the ideal person to work with Chase. Well educated and an accomplished writer, Coffin also had a thorough knowledge of both Nantucket and whaling. Being Chase's own age, he could empathize with the young first mate in a way that makes the narrative read, Melville noted, “as tho' Owen wrote it himself.” The two men worked quickly and well together. By early fall the manuscript was finished. By November 22, almost precisely a year after the sinking, the published book had reached shops on Nantucket.
In a note to the reader, Chase claims that, having lost everything in the wreck, he was desperate to make some money to support his young family. “The hope of obtaining something of remuneration,” Chase wrote, “by giving a short history of my sufferings to the world, must therefore constitute my claim to public attention.” But he had other motives as well. Writing the narrative offered him an opportunity to represent himself-a young officer in need of another ship-as positively as possible.
Chase's account is necessarily focused on what happened on his own boat. However, the majority of the deaths-nine out of eleven- occurred on the other two boats, and Chase's description of these deaths is limited to a brief summation at the end of his narrative. It would be difficult for any reader of Chase's book alone to appreciate the true scope of the disaster. In particular, the fact that five out of the first six men to die were black is never commented on by Chase. By keeping many of the most disturbing and problematic aspects of the disaster offstage, Chase transforms the story of the Essex into a personal tale of trial and triumph.
It is in his account of the decisions made prior to the ordeal in the whaleboats that the first mate is the most self-serving. He chooses not to mention that he was the one, along with Matthew Joy, who urged Captain Pollard to continue on after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream even though several whaleboats had been lost. He also makes the officers' decision to sail for South America sound as if it were mutually agreed upon from the start when, according to Nickerson, Pollard had initially proposed to sail for the Society Islands. More important, Chase is careful to conceal that he had the opportunity to lance the whale after the first attack-a fact that would not be revealed until the publication of Nickerson's account 163 years later.
Chase's fellow Nantucket survivors, particularly Captain Pollard, undoubtedly felt that their side of the story had not been adequately told in the first mate's account of the disaster. (Herman Melville would later report that Pollard had been moved to write, “or caused to be [written] under his own name, his own version of the story”-a narrative that has not come to light.) But it wasn't just Chase's fellow crew members who felt slighted by the publication of the Essex narrative. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would observe during a visit to the island in 1847, Nantucketers are “[v]ery sensitive to everything that dishonors the island because it hurts the value of stock till the company are poorer.” The last thing they wanted placed before the nation and the world was a detailed account of how some of their own men and boys had been reduced to cannibalism. Chase's account pulled no punches on this issue, employing two exclamation marks when it came to the initial proposal to eat Isaac Cole. No matter how straitened a man's circumstances, many believed, he did not attempt to enrich himself by sensationalizing the sufferings of his own people. Significantly, Chase's next voyage would not be on a Nantucket whaleship. That December he traveled to New Bedford, where he sailed as first mate on the Florida, a whaleship-without a single Nantucketer in the crew. Even though his family remained on the island, Chase would not sail on a ship from his home port for another eleven years.
George Pollard, however, was given the ultimate vote of confidence. On November 26, 1821, a little more than three months after returning to Nantucket and just a few days after the appearance of Chase's narrative, he set sail for the Pacific as captain of the Two Brothers. But perhaps the most extraordinary endorsement Pollard received came from two of his crewmembers. For Pollard wasn't the only Essex man aboard the Two Brothers; two others had chosen to serve under him again. One was Thomas Nickerson. The other was Charles Ramsdell, the boy who had spent ninety-four days in a whaleboat with him. If there was someone who had come to know Captain Pollard, it was Charles Ramsdell.