CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GEORGE POLLARD TOOK to his second command with optimism that was remarkable, considering what had happened o his first. In the winter of 1822 he successfully brought the Two brothers around the Horn, headed her up the west coast of South America, and provisioned her at the Peruvian port of Payta. In mid-August the Two Brothers spoke the U.S. Navy schooner Waterwitch. Aboard the Waterwitch was a twenty-four-year-old midshipman named Charles Wilkes. As it so happened, Wilkes had finished reading Chase's narrative of the Essex disaster only the day before. He asked the captain of the Two Brothers if he was any relation to the famous George Pollard of Nantucket. Pollard said that, yes, he was the same man. “ [T]his made a great impression on me,” Wilkes said many years later.
Even though Wilkes had already read the published account, Pollard insisted on telling the young midshipman his own version of the story. “It was to be expected that some effect of his former cruise would have been visible in his manner or conversation,” Wilkes wrote, “but not so, he was cheerful and very modest in his account.” The midshipman judged Pollard to be “a hero, who did not even consider that he had overcome obstacles which would have crushed 99 out of a hundred.”
But there was at least one indication that Pollard had not emerged from the ordeal entirely unscathed. Wilkes noted an unusual feature in the captain's cabin. Attached to the ceiling was a large amount of netting, and it was filled with provisions-primarily potatoes and other fresh vegetables. Captain Pollard, the man who had almost starved to death only the year before, could now simply reach over his head and pull down something to eat. Wilkes asked Pollard how, after all that he had suffered, he could dare go to sea again. “He simply remarked,'7 Wilkes wrote, “that it was an old adage that the lightning never struck in the same place twice.” But in the case of Captain Pollard, it did.
In February of 1823 the Two Brothers and another Nantucket whaleship, the Martha, were sailing west together toward a new whaling ground. In the few years since the start of Pollard's previous voyage, much had changed in the Pacific whale fishery. Soon after the opening up of the Offshore Ground in 1819, Nantucket whaleships had stopped at the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time. That same year, Frederick Coffin, captain of the Syren, laid claim to discovering the rich Japan Ground. All of the Pacific, not just its eastern and western edges, had become the domain of the Nantucket whalemen.
The Two Brothers and the Martha were several hundred miles west of the Hawaiian Islands, headed toward the Japan Ground, when it began to blow. Pollard ordered his men to shorten sail. It was raining hard, and in the high seas, the Two Brothers was proving difficult to steer. The Martha was the faster of the two whaleships, and as night came on the lookout of the Two Brothers could barely see her from the masthead.
They were sailing at about the same latitude as French Frigate Shoals-a deadly maze of rocks and coral reefs to the northwest of the Hawaiian Islands-but both Pollard and Captain John Pease of the Martha judged themselves to be well to the west of danger. Since his previous voyage, Pollard had learned how to determine his ship's longitude by lunar observation. However, owing to overcast skies, it had been more than ten days since he had been able to take a lunar, so he had to rely on dead reckoning to determine his ship's position.
It was blowing so hard that the whaleboats had been taken off the davits and lashed to the deck. That night one of the officers remarked that “the water alongside looked whiter than usual.” Thomas Nickerson was about to retrieve a jacket from down below when he noticed Pollard standing on the ship's railing, staring down worriedly into the sea.
While Nickerson was belowdecks, the ship struck something “with a fearful crash,” and he was thrown to the floor. Nickerson assumed they had collided with another ship. “Judge of my astonishment,” he wrote, “to find ourselves surrounded with breakers apparently mountains high, and our ship careening over upon her broadside and thumping so heavily that one could scarcely stand upon his feet.” The ship was being pounded to pieces on a coral reef. “Captain Pollard seemed to stand amazed at the scene before him,” Nickerson remembered.
First mate Eben Gardner leaped into the breach. He ordered the men to begin cutting down the masts in hopes of saving the ship. Realizing that the spars would likely fall across and crush the whaleboats tied to the deck, Pollard finally came to life. He commanded the crew to put away their axes and begin readying the boats. “Had the masts of the ship been cut away at that time,” Nickerson wrote, “[I] would probably have adorned this tale instead of [told] it.”
But by the time the men begun crowding into the two boats, Pollard had lapsed into his former state of mesmerized despair. “[H]is reasoning powers had flown,” Nickerson remembered, and the captain appeared unwilling to leave the ship. The waves threatened to bash the boats against the hull as the men pleaded with their commander to save himself. “Captain Pollard reluctantly got into the boat,” Nickerson wrote, “just as they were about to shove off from the ship.”
Nickerson, who at seventeen years old had been promoted to boat-steerer, was standing at the steering oar when a huge wave slammed into the boat and threw him into the sea. One of the mates reached out to him with the blade of the after oar. Nickerson grabbed it and was pulled back into the boat.
The two whaleboats were quickly separated in the darkness. “Our boat seemed to be surrounded with breakers,” Nickerson remembered, “and we were compelled to row between them all night for we could see no outlet.” The next morning they saw a ship anchored in the lee of a fifty-foot-high rock. It proved to be the Martha, which had narrowly escaped crashing into the rock the night before. Soon both boat-crews had been rescued, and the Martha was on her way to Oahu.
Two months later, in the harbor of Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, a missionary named George Bennet boarded the U.S. brig Pearl bound for Boston. Among the passengers was George Pollard. The thirty-one-year-old captain had greatly changed since he'd talked to Charles Wilkes less than a year before. His former cheerfulness had disappeared. Yet, anchored in the harbor of an island that he and his men had once spurned in the mistaken fear of cannibals, he insisted on telling Bennet the story of the Essex in painful detail. This time, when it came to describing the execution of Owen Coffin, he broke off. “But I can tell you no more,” he cried out to Bennet, “my head is on fire at the recollection; I hardly know what I say.”
Pollard finished the conversation by relating how he had recently lost his second whaleship on a shoal off the Hawaiian Islands. Then, in what Bennet called “a tone of despondency never to be forgotten by him who heard it,” Pollard confessed, “[N]ow I am utterly ruined. No owner will ever trust me with a whaler again, for all will say I am an unlucky man.”
As Pollard predicted, his whaling career was over. The island that had rallied so quickly behind him after the sinking of the Essex now turned its back. He had become a Jonah-a twice-doomed captain whom no one dared give a third chance. After returning to his wife, Mary, Pollard made a single voyage in a merchant vessel out of New York. “[B]ut not liking that business,”Nickerson wrote, “he returned to his home on Nantucket.” He became a night watchman-a position on the lowest rung of the island's social ladder.
A disturbing rumor began to be whispered about the streets of town, a rumor that was still being told on Nantucket almost a hundred years later. It had not been Owen Coffin who had drawn the short piece of paper, the gossipmongers claimed, it had been George Pollard. It was only then that his young cousin, already near death and convinced he would not last the night, offered and even insisted on taking the captain's place. If the rumor had it right, Pollard was not only unlucky, he was a coward, and fate had found him out.
The word “pollard” has two meanings. Apollard is an animal, such as an ox, goat, or sheep, that has lost its horns. But pollard is also a gardening term. To pollard a tree is to prune back its branches severely so that it may produce a dense growth of new shoots. Misfortune had pollarded George Pollard, cutting back his possibilities, but, as if strengthened by the surgery, he created a happy, meaningful life for himself in his native town.
George and Mary Pollard would never have any children of their own, but it might be said that they presided over the largest family on Nantucket. As the town's night watchman, Pollard was responsible for enforcing the nine o'clock curfew, a duty that brought him into contact with nearly every young-person on the island. Instead of becoming the dour, embittered man one might expect, he was known for his buoyant; even cheerful, manner. Joseph Warren Phinney was part of the Pollards' extended family. When Phinney's mother and father died, he came to Nantucket to live with his grandparents. His father's first wife had been Mary Pollard's sister, and late in life Phinney left an account of George Pollard.
“He was a short fat man,” Phinney recalled, “jolly, loving the good things in life.” Phinney fondly remembered how Mary Pollard would lay her husband down on the kitchen table and measure him for a new-pair of pants. Instead of a harpoon, this former whaleman wandered the streets “with a long hickory pole with an iron hook at the end, under his arm.” The pole not only enabled him to adjust the town's whale-oil street lamps but proved useful in persuading the children to be in their homes by the curfew. Pollard took his duties so seriouslv that he was known, according to Phinney, as the town “gumshoe”-a streetwise detective familiar with the intimate details of an island whose population would grow from seven thousand to ten thousand over the next two decades.
Phinney, like every other Nantucketer, knew the story of the Essex and had even heard the rumor about how “the man who drew the lot had his place taken by ayoung boy.” To Phinney and everyone else who actually knew Pollard, it was impossible that “this man” could have been George Pollard. (According to the version of the rumor Phinney heard, the man whose place was taken by Owen Coffin “had a wife and babies,” and as everyone knew, the Pollards were childless.)
There was another rumor about Captain Pollard. It claimed that a newly arrived off-islander innocently asked him if he had ever known a man named Owen Coffin. “Know him?” Pollard was reputed to have replied. “Why, I erhim!”
Pollard's friends didn't credit that story either. They knew that he was incapable of mocking the memory of the men who had died in the Essex whaleboats. Even though he had been able to put the tragedy behind him, he never ceased to honor those who had been lost. “Once a year,” Phinney remembered, “on the anniversary of the loss of the Essex, he locked himself in his room and fasted.”
As A whaleman, Owen Chase would enjoy the success that had eluded George Pollard. His personal life, however, proved less fortunate. Chase's first voyage after the sinking of the Essex, as first mate aboard the New Bedford whaleship Florida, lasted less than two years and reaped two thousand barrels of oil. When he returned to Nantucket in 1823, he found a second child, Lydia, toddling in the wake of her older sister, Phebe Ann, now approaching four. Chase chose to remain on-island for the birth of Ms next child, a son, who was named William Henry. Owen's wife, Peggy did not recover from the delivery. She died less than two weeks later. Owen was now a twenty-seven-year-old widower with three children to care for.
In the fall and winter of 1824-25 he came to know a woman with whom he already shared a special bond. Nancy Slade Joy was the widow of Matthew Joy, second mate of the Essex. She and Matthew had been married for two years before her husband had shipped out for the last time. In June of 1825, nine months after the death of Peggy Chase, the widow and widower were married, and Nancy became the stepmother of Owen's three children. Two weeks later, Chase purchased a house from his father on the outskirts of Orange Street's “Captain's Row.” In early August, Chase sailed for New Bedford, where he took command of his first vessel, the Winslow. He was twenty-eight years old, the same age Pollard had been when he had become captain of the Essex.
The Winslow was a small whaleship and carried only fifteen men. On July 20, 1827, after a voyage of almost two years, she returned to New Bedford with 1,440 barrels of oil. Chase returned to Nantucket, paid off the $500 mortgage on his house, and was back in New Bedford by the second week in August. The emotions of Nancy Chase, who had lived with her husband for less than two months back in the summer of 1825, can only be imagined when she learned that Owen was departing almost immediately on another voyage aboard the Winslow.
Soon after her departure, the Winslow was damaged in a tremendous gale and limped back to New Bedford in October for repairs. The owners decided to take the opportunity to enlarge the ship to 263 tons, allowing Chase to spend nine months with his wife and three children back on Nantucket. Leaving again in July 1828, he filled his newly modified ship in two years and was back on Nantucket in the summer of 1830.
It is naturally tempting to read into Chase's post-Essex career an Ahab-like quest for revenge. There is, in fact, a tiny shred of evidence to indicate that even if Chase was not motivated by a desire to find and kill the whale that had sunk the Essex, other whalemen said he was.
In 1834, seventeen years before the publication of Moby-Dick, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson shared a coach with a sailor who told of a whale (and a white whale at that) known for bashing up whaleboats with its jaw. The seaman claimed that a whaleship had been fitted out of New Bedford called the Winslow or the Essex, he wasn't sure which, to kill this whale and that the creature had been finally dispatched off the cost of South America. One can only wonder if Emerson recorded a garbled account of how Owen Chase, the new captain of the Winslow and the former first mate of the Essex, succeeded in avenging himself on the whale that had caused him so much hardship and pain.
Whatever the case may be, Chase's almost decade-long professional banishment from Nantucket ended soon after his return from his second full voyage as captain of the Winslow. At the age of thirty-three he was offered command of what was to be one of the largest ships in the Nantucket whale fishery. Until then, almost all the island's ships were built on the mainland in places such as Rochester and Hanover, Massachusetts. But whaling had brought a tremendous surge of wealth to the island. The profit margins were now high enough that it was deemed economically feasible to build a whaleship at the island's Brant Point Shipyard, even though all the materials had to be transported across Nantucket Sound. Over the next two years, the 376-ton, copper-fastened whaleship Charles Carroll took shape under Chase's experienced eye, and with an investment of $625 he was given a 1/32 owners' share in the vessel.
Chase's first voyage as captain of the Charles Carroll was a financial success. After three and a half years, he returned in March 1836 with 2,610 barrels of oil, almost twice the return of his first voyage as captain aboard the Winslow. But the voyage came at a great personal cost. Nine months after her husband left the island, Nancy Chase gave birth to a daughter, Adeline. Afew weeks later, Nancy was dead. Greeting their father at the wharf in the spring of 1836 were Phebe Ann, almost sixteen; Lydia, thirteen; William Henry, eleven; and Adeline, two and a half-a girl who had no memory of her mother and had never known her father.
Chase wasn't home a month before he had remarried. Eunice Chadwick was just twenty-seven years old, and she now had four stepchildren to care for. By the end of August, after less than five months of marriage, she was waving good-bye to her new husband. This was to be Chase's last voyage as a whaling captain. He was forty years old and, if all went well, would be able to retire to his house on Orange Street.
Also in the Pacific during this period was ayoung man whose whaling career was just beginning. Herman Melville first signed on in 1840 as a hand aboard the New Bedford whaleship Acushnet. During a gam in the Pacific, he met a Nantucketer by the name of William Henry Chase-Owen Chase's teenage son. Melville had already heard stories about the Essex from the sailors aboard the Acushnet and closely questioned the boy about his father's experiences. The next morning William pulled out a copy of Owen's Essex narrative from his sea chest and loaned it to Melville. “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea,” Melville remembered, “and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.”
Later in the voyage, during a gam with another whale ship, Melville caught a glimpse of a Nantucket whaling captain whom he was told was none other than Owen Chase. “He was a large, powerful well-made man,” Melville would later write in the back pages of his own copy of Chase's narrative, “rather tall; to all appearances something past forty-five or so; with a. handsome face for a Yankee, and expressive of great uprightness and calm unostentatious courage. His whole appearance impressed me pleasantly. He was the most prepossessing-looking whalehunter I think I ever saw.” Although Melville appears to have mistaken another whaling captain for Chase, his description is remarkably similar to a surviving portrait of Owen Chase. It depicts a confident, almost arrogant face-a man completely at ease with the responsibility of command. But Chase's professional assurance would not prepare him for the news he heard midway through his final voyage, sixteen months after her husband sailed aboard the Charles Carroll. Eunice Chase, Owen Chase's third wife, gave birth to a son, Charles Fredrick. Herman Melville would be told of how Chase received the news, and inevitably the future author of Moby-Dick would compare the plight of the former first mate of the Essex to that of George Pollard. “The miserable pertinaciousness of misfortune which pursued Pollard the captain, in his second disastrous and entire shipwreck did likewise hunt poor Owen,” Melville wrote, “tho' somewhat more dilatory in overtaking him the second time.” Melville was told that Chase had received letters “informing him of the certain infidelity of his wife... We also heard that his receipt of this news had told most heavily upon Chase, and that he was a prey to the deepest gloom.”
A matter of days after his return to Nantucket in the winter of 1840, Chase filed for divorce. On July 7, the divorce was granted, with Chase taking over legal guardianship of Charles Frederick. Two months later, Chase was married for the fourth time, to Susan Coffin Gwinn. In the previous twenty-one years, he had spent only five at home. He would now remain on Nantucket for the rest of his life.
The other Essex survivors also returned to the sea. Once they'd been delivered to Oahu after the wreck of the Two Brothers, Thomas Nickerson and Charles Ramsdell soon found berths on other whaleships. In the 1840s Ramsdell served as captain of the Generaljackson out of Bristol, Rhode Island; he would marry twice and have a total of six children. Nickerson eventually tired of the whaling life and became a captain in the merchant service, relocating to Brooklyn, New York, where he and his wife, Margaret, lived for a number of years. They had no children.
Benjamin Lawrence served as captain of the whaleships Dromo and Huron, the latter out of Hudson, New York, home of the Essex's second mate, Matthew Joy. Lawrence had seven children, one of whom would die at sea. In the early 1840s, Lawrence, like Chase, retired from the whaling business and purchased a small farm at Siasconset, on the east end of the island of Nantucket.
Less is known about the three off-islanders rescued from Henderson Island. The two Cape Codders, Seth Weeks and William Wright, continued as crew members on the Surry, voyaging throughout the Pacific until they made their way to England and back to the United States. Wright was lost at sea in a hurricane off the West Indies. Weeks eventually retired to Cape Cod, where he would outlive all the other Essex survivors.
The Englishman Thomas Chappel returned to London in June 1823. There he contributed to a religious tract that wrung every possible spiritual lesson from the story of the Essex disaster. Nickerson later heard of the Englishman's death on the fever-plagued island of Timor.
Although townspeople continued to whisper about the Essex well into the twentieth century, it was not a topic a Nantucketer openly discussed. When the daughter of Benjamin Lawrence was asked about the disaster, she replied, “We do not mention this in Nantucket.”
It wasn't just the fact that the men had resorted to cannibalism. It was also difficult for Nantucketers to explain why the first four men to be eaten had been African American. What made this a particularly sensitive topic on Nantucket was the island's reputation as an abolitionist stronghold-what the poet John Greenleaf Whittier called “a refuge of the free.” Instead of the Essex, Nantucket's Quakers preferred to talk about how the island's growing black community to the south of town, known as New Guinea, participated in the booming whaling economy.
In 1830 Captain Obed Starbuck and his almost all-black crew returned after a voyage of only fourteen and a half months with 2,280 barrels of oil. A headline in the Nantucket Inquirer announced, “greatest voyage ever made.” Spirits ran so high that the black sailors in the crew paraded up Main Street proudly shouldering their harpoons and lances. Less than ten years later, an escaped slave living in New Bedford was invited to speak at an abolitionist meeting at the island's Atheneum library. The African American's name was Frederick Douglass, and his appearance on Nantucket marked the first time he had ever spoken before a white audience. This was the legacy Nantucket's Quaker hierarchy wanted the world to remember, not the disturbing events associated with the Essex.
For a time, at least, off-islanders seemed to have forgotten about the tragedy. In 1824 Samuel Comstock led the crew of the Nantucket whaleship Globe in a bloody mutiny and public attention was directed away from the Essex. Ten years later, however, with the publication of an article about the wreck in the North American Review, interest returned. Over the next two decades, numerous accounts of the Essex disaster appeared. One of the most influential versions of the story was included in a popular children's schoolbook, William H. McGuffey's The Eclectic Fourth Reader. It would become difficult to grow up in America without learning some form of the Essex story.
In 1834 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal of his conversation with the seaman about the white whale and the Essex. When Emerson visited Nantucket in 1847, he met Captain Pollard and, in a letter to his young daughter back home in Concord, Massachusetts, described the sinking of the Essex: “ [A] great sperm whale was seen coming with full speed toward the vessel: in a moment he struck the ship with terrible force, staving in some planks and causing a leak: then he went off a little way, and came back swiftly, the water all white with his violent motion, and struck the ship a second frightful blow.”
In 1837 Edgar Allan Poe made use of the more ghoulish aspects of Chase's account in his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Lots are drawn, men are eaten, and one sailor dies in horrible convulsions. Decades before the Donner Party became snowbound in the foothills of the Sierras, the Essex brought a scandalous tale of cannibalism to the American public.
But it would be left to Herman Melville to make the most enduring use of the whaleship's story. Moby-Dick contains several detailed references to the attack of the whale on the Essex, but it is the climax of the novel that draws most heavily on Chase's narrative. “Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect,” Melville writes of the white whale's assault on the Pequod. Upon impact, the whale, just as Chase describes in his account, dives beneath the ship and runs “quivering along its keel.” But instead of attacking the already sinking ship for a second time, Moby Dick turns his attention to the whaleboat of Captain Ahab.
Moby-Dick proved to be both a critical and financial disappointment, and in 1852, a year after its publication, Melville finally visited Nantucket. He traveled to the island in July with his father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw, the same judge who had granted Owen Chase's divorce twelve years earlier. Like Emerson before him, it wasn't Chase, now a retired whaling captain living off the income from his investments, whom Melville sought out, but rather George Pollard, the lowly night watchman.
Melville appears to have stayed at the Ocean House, on the corner of Centre and Broad Streets, diagonally across from the home in which
George and Mary Pollard had been living for decades. Late in life Melville wrote of the Essex's captain: “To the islanders he was a nobody-to me, the most impressive man, tho' wholly unassuming even humble-that I ever encountered.”
In the years to come, Melville's professional life as a novelist would go the way of Pollard's whaling career. Without a readership for his books, the author of Moby-Dick was forced to take a job as a customs inspector on the wharves of New York City. Although he ceased writing novels, he continued to write poetry, in particular a long, dark poem called Clarel, in which there is a character based on Pollard. After two disastrous voyages, the former captain becomes “A night patrolman on the quay / Watching the bales till morning hour / Through fair and foul.” Melville felt a powerful kinship with the captain of the Essex, and his description of the old seaman is based as much upon himself as it is on the man he met on the streets of Nantucket:
Never he smiled;
Call him, and he would come; not sour In spirit, but meek and reconciled: Patient he was, he none withstood; Oft on some secret thing would brood.
By 1835, when Obed Macy published, with the assistance of William Coffin, Jr., his History of Nantucket, New Bedford had eclipsed the island as America's leading whaling port. The Nantucket Bar-a mere nuisance in the early days of the Pacific whale fishery-had developed into a major obstacle to prosperity. The whaleships had become so large that they could no longer cross the Bar without being almost completely unloaded by lighters-a time-consuming and expensive process. In 1842, Peter Folger Ewer designed and built two 135-foot “camels”-giant wooden water wings that formed a floating dry dock capable of carrying a fully loaded whaleship across the Bar. The fact remained, however, that New Bedford's deep-water harbor gave the port an unassailable advantage, as did its nearness to the newly emerging railroad system, on which increasing numbers of merchants shipped their oil to market.
But Nantucketers also had themselves to blame for the dramatic downturn the whaling business would take on the island in the 1840s. As whalemen from New Bedford, New London, and Sag Harbor opened up new whaling grounds in the North Pacific, Nantucketers stuck stubbornly to the long-since depleted grounds that had served them so well in past decades.
There were also problems at home. Quakerism, once the driving cultural and spiritual force of the community, fractured into several squabbling sects. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, there were more meetinghouses than ever on the island, yet the total number of Quakers on Nantucket dwindled with each passing year. As the strictures of Quakerism relaxed, Nantucketers were free to display the wealth they had once felt obliged to conceal. Main Street became lined with elegant brick estates and giant clapboard Greek Revival mansions- monuments to the riches islanders had, in the words of Herman Melville, “harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” Even though the annual return of oil had been steadily diminishing for a number of years, there was little visible reason for concern on the streets of Nantucket in the early summer of 1846. Then, at eleven o'clock on a hot July night, someone shouted the dreaded word “Fire!”
It had been one of the driest summers on record. The wooden buildings were as parched as tinder. In a few short minutes, the flames had spread from a hat factory on Main Street to an adjoining structure. At this time Nantucket was without a municipal fire department, relying instead on privately organized fire companies. As the fire made its way up Main Street with alarming rapidity, individual homeowners started bidding for the fire companies' services so as to protect their own houses. Instead of working together as a coordinated unit, the companies split off in different directions, allowing the blaze to build into an uncontrollable conflagration.
The immense upward flow of heat created wind currents that rushed through the narrow streets, spreading the fire in all directions. Chunks of burning debris flew into the air and landed on houses that had been assumed safe. In an attempt to contain the blaze, the town's fire wardens dynamited houses, the explosions adding to the terrifying confusion of the night. Owen Chase's Orange Street home was far enough south to escape the fire, but Pollard's house on Centre Street was directly in its path. Miraculously, the tornado-like convection currents turned the fire east, toward the harbor, before it reached the night watchman's house. Pollard's residence survived, even though all the houses on the east side of the street were destroyed.
Soon the fire reached the waterfront. Oil warehouses billowed with black smoke, then erupted into flame. As the casks burst, a river of liquid fire poured across the wharves and into the harbor. One fire company had run its engine into the shallows of the anchorage and was pumping seawater onto the wharves. The men belatedly realized that a creeping slick of oil had surrounded them in fire. Their only option was to dive underwater and swim for their lives. Their wooden fire engine was destroyed, but all the men made it to safety.
By the next morning, more than a third of the town-and almost all the commercial district-was a charred wasteland. But it was the waterfront that had suffered the most. The sperm oil had burned so fiercely that not even cinders remained. The leviathan, it was said, had finally achieved his revenge.
The town was quickly rebuilt, this time largely in brick. Nantucketers attempted to reassure themselves that the disturbing dip in the whaling business was only temporary. Then, just two years later, in 1848, came the discovery of gold in California. Hundreds of Nantucketers surrendered to the lure of easy wealth in the West. Abandoning careers as whalemen, they shipped out as passengers bound for San Francisco, packed into the same ships in which they had once pursued the mighty sperm whale. The Golden Gate became the burial ground of countless Nantucketwhaleships, abandoned by their crews and left to rot on the mudflats.
Long before Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, Nantucket's economic fate had been determined. Over the next twenty years, the island's population would shrink from ten thousand to three thousand. “Nantucket now has a 'body-o'-death' appearance such as few New England towns possess,” one visitor wrote. “The houses stand around in faded gentility style-the inhabitants have a dreamy look, as though they live in the memories of the past.” Even though whaling would continue out of New Bedford into the 1920s, the island whose name had once been synonymous with the fishery had ceased to be an active whaling port only forty years after the departure of tlie Essex. On November 16,1869, Nantucket's last whaling vessel, the Oak, left the harbor, never to return.
The world's sperm-whale population proved remarkably resilient in the face of what Melville called “so remorseless a havoc.” It is estimated that the Nantucketers and their Yankee whale-killing brethren harvested more than 225,000 sperm whales between 1804 and 1876. In 1837, the best year in the century for killing whales, 6,767 sperm whales were taken by American whalemen. (As a disturbing point of comparison, in 1964,”the peak year of modern whaling, 29,255 sperm whales were killed.) Some researchers believe that by the 1860s whalemen may have reduced the world's sperm-whale population by as much as 75 percent; others claim that it was diminished by only 8 to 18 percent. Whatever figure is closer to the truth, sperm whales have done better than other large cetaceans hunted by man. Today there are between one and a half to two million sperm whales, making them the most abundant of the world's great whales.
As late as 1845, whalemen were confident that the sperm whale stocks were in no danger of diminishing. They did comment, however, on how the behavior of the whales had changed. “They have indeed become wilder,” one observer wrote, “or as some of the whalers express it, 'more scary,' and, in consequence, not so easy to capture.” Like the whale that had attacked the Essex, an increasing number of sperm whales were fighting back.
In 1835 the crew of the English whaleship Pusie Hall were forced into full retreat by what they termed a “fighting whale.” After driving away four whaleboats, the whale pursued them back to the ship. The men hurled several lances at the whale “before it could be induced to retire.” In 1836, the Lydia, a Nantucket whaleship, was struck and sunk by a sperm whale, as was the Two Generals a few years later. In 1850, the Pocahontas, out of Martha's Vineyard, was rammed by a whale but was able to reach port for repairs. Then, in 1851, the year that Moby-Dick was published, a whaleship was attacked by a sperm whale in the same waters where the Essex had been sunk thirty-one years before.
The Ann Alexander, a whaleship out of New Bedford, was under the command of one of the fishiest captains in the Pacific, John DeBlois. In a letter to the ship's owner, DeBlois boasted that he had succeeded in killing every whale he had ever fastened to. But in August of 1851, just to the south of the equator and about five hundred miles east of the Galapagos, Captain DeBlois met his match.
It was a large solitary bull, what DeBlois called “a noble fellow!” Two boats were lowered, and the fight was on. Almost immediately the whale rushed after the mate's boat. “[I]n an instant [the boat] was crushed like so much paper in his mighty jaws,” DeBlois wrote. After rescuing the first mate's crew, DeBlois was joined by the second mate in another whaleboat. They divided the men among them and resumed the chase. Almost immediately, however, the whale attacked the mate's boat and immediately destroyed it. DeBlois was forced to stop the pursuit, pick up the scattered crew, and return to the Ann Alexander.
By this point, DeBlois recounted, “my blood was up, and I was fully determined to have that whale, cost what it might.” As he stood at the ship's bow with a lance in his hand, the captain told the helmsman whereto steer. The whale was, DeBlois wrote, an “artful beast,” allowing them to gain, only to hurry ahead before the captain could throw his weapon.
Suddenly the whale sank, then turned and surfaced only yards in front of the ship. DeBlois hurled the lance, but it was too late. The whale's massive head struck the bow of the ship, knocking DeBlois off his feet. Convinced that the Ann Alexander had been stove, he ran below to check for damage, but all proved tight.
DeBlois ordered his men to lower another boat. The mate objected, insisting that to do so would be suicide. Since it was already close to dusk, DeBlois reluctantly decided to wait until morning. “Just as I gave these orders,” the captain remembered, “I caught a glimpse of a shadow as it seemed to me.” It was the whale hurtling through the water toward the Ann Alexander. It struck the ship “a terrible blow,” DeBlois wrote, “that shook her from stem to stern.”
Even before he went below to inspect the damage, he could hear water pouring into the hold. The captain rushed to his cabin to get the navigational instruments they would need in the whaleboats. As the mates readied the two remaining boats, DeBlois went below one more time, but the cabin was so full of water that he was forced to swim to safety. By the time he returned to the deck, both whaleboats had rowed clear of the ship. He leaped from the railing and swam to the mate's boat.
Almost immediately his men began, in DeBlois's words, “[to] upbraid me, saying, '0 Captain, you ran too much risk of our lives!'
“'Men,' I replied, 'for God's sake, don't find fault with me! You were as anxious as I to catch that whale, and I hadn't the least idea that anything like this would happen.'“
The next morning they returned to the wreck. As soon as DeBlois scrambled up the side, he saw “the prints of the [whale's] teeth on the copper... The hole was just the size of the whale's head.” As DeBlois cut away the masts to right the ship, the ship's bell continued to clang with the rhythmic heave of the sea. “[A] more mournful sound never fell on my ears,” he remembered. “It was as though it was tolling for our deaths.”
The ship was almost completely submerged, and the waves broke over the captain's head. Eventually he was joined by the mate, and the two of them attempted to cut through the deck and locate some provisions and fresh water. By noon, about half the crew of twenty-four had found the courage to climb aboard the wreck and search for food. Several of the men had begun to grumble that they should immediately set sail for the Marquesas, two thousand miles to the west. DeBlois told the crew to assemble at the rail of the ship, where he asked “if they wanted me to advise them.” Amajority of the men nodded their heads. Although he knew it wasn't what they wanted to hear, he told them that there weren't enough provisions to reach the Marquesas. Instead, they should sail their boats (which possessed centerboards) north toward the equator, where they might be spotted by a ship bound for California. Begrudgingly, the men agreed. Before they left, DeBlois took up a'nail and scratched a message into the ship's taffrail: “Save us-we poor souls have gone in two boats to the north on the wind.”
The mate had twelve men in his boat, the captain thirteen. The crew wanted to stay together, but once again DeBlois overruled them. “'No' says I, 'my object is to have one boat go ahead, if it sails faster. and the other follow in the same course, so that if the first boat is picked up, say, a hundred miles ahead, their rescuers can bear down to the other boat.'
“Our parting was a solemn sight,” he wrote, “if ever there was one in this world. We never expected to meet again on earth, and the strong men who had braved all sorts of dangers, broke down and wept like children.” The mate's boat soon surged ahead. It wasn't long before DeBlois's men “became clamorous for food.” They had had nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. But their captain felt it was too early to begin eating what little food they had. “My mind was filled with all the stories I had ever heard of shipwrecks,” he remembered, “where the famishing men had been often driven to eating their shipmates' bodies.” He thought, of course, of the Essex and how some of the men had drawn lots. “Pictures of this sort were enough to drive one wild,” he wrote, “when he felt that the same ordeal was before him.”
At dusk, DeBlois stood up on the stern of his whaleboat for one final look before darkness came on. In the distance, ahead of the mate's boat, he saw the sail of a ship. “I tried to sing out, 'Sail ho,'“ he recalled, “but I couldn't speak a word.” By nightfall all of the crew were safely aboard the whaleship Nantucket.
Five months later, the crew of the Rebecca Simms succeeded in killing the whale that sank the Ann Alexander. By then the bull appeared “old, tired, and diseased.” Its sides were shaggy with twisted harpoons and lances; huge splinters were found embedded in its head. The whale yielded between seventy and eighty barrels of oil.
When Herman Melville received word of the sinking of the Ann Alexander, he could not help but wonder if the writing of his Essex-bused novel had mystically conjured up the reappearance of a ship-ramming whale. “Ye Gods!” he wrote a friend. “What a Commentator is this Ann Alexander whale... I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”
Nantucket, once the whaling capital of the world, was all but a ghost town by the time the last survivors of the Essex disaster began to pass away. Charles ramsdell was the first of the Nantucketers to die, in 1866. Throughout his life he was known for his reticence concerning the Essex, in part, one islander surmised, because of his role as Owen Coffin's executioner.
Old age was not kind to Owen Chase. His memory of his sufferings in an open boat never left him, and late in life he began hiding food in the attic of his house on Orange Street. By 1868 Chase was judged “insane.” The headaches that had plagued him ever since the ordeal had become unbearable. Clutching an attendant's hand, he would sob, “Oh my head, my head.” Death brought an end to Chase's suffering in 1869.
George Pollard followed his former first mate the next year. The obituary was careful to note that Pollard had been known on the island as something more than the captain of the Essex: “For more than forty years he has resided permanently among us; and leaves a record of a good and worthy man as his legacy.”
In the 1870s, Thomas Nickerson returned to Nantucket and moved into a house on North Water Street, not far from where his parents were buried in the Old North Burial Ground. Instead of whales, Nantucketers were now after summer visitors, and Nickerson developed a reputation as one of the island's foremost boardinghouse keepers. One of his guests was the writer Leon Lewis, who, after hearing Nickerson tell about the Essex, proposed that they collaborate on a book about the disaster.
Nickerson had talked with Charles Ramsdell about his experiences in the whaleboat with Pollard; he had also spoken with Seth Weeks on Cape Cod about his time on Henderson Island. As a consequence, Nickerson's narrative provides information that was unavailable to Chase. He also includes important details about the voyage prior to the whale attack. But Nickerson, like Chase before him, was not above adjusting his account to suit his own purposes. Not wanting to be remembered as a cannibal, he claims that the men in Chase's boat
did not eat the body of Isaac Cole. Instead, he insists, it was the extra bread made available to them by the deaths of Cole and Peterson that “enabled us to exist until relieved.” He also chose not to recount how, toward the end of the ordeal, he suddenly decided it was his turn to die.
In April 1879, Nickerson's last surviving crew member in the first mate's boat, Benjamin Lawrence, died. All his life, Lawrence had kept the piece of twine he'd made while in the whaleboat. At some point it was passed on to Alexander Starbuck, the Nantucketer who had taken over Obed Macy's role as the island's historian. In 1914, Starbuck would donate the piece of twine, wound four times into a tiny coil and mounted in a frame, to the Nantucket Historical Association. Written within the circle of twine was the inscription “They were in the Boat 93 Days.”
Eighteen years earlier, in 1896, the Nantucket Historical Association had received another donation associated with the Essex. Sometime after the ship sank in November 1820, a small chest, ten by twenty inches, was found floating in the vicinity of the wreck. Leather-bound and studded with brass nails, it may have been used by Captain Pollard to store the ship's papers. It was picked up by the crew of a passing ship and sold to John Taber, a whaleman then on his way home to Providence, Rhode Island. In 1896, Taber's daughter, who had since moved to Garrettsville, Ohio, decided that the chest rightfully belonged on Nantucket and donated the artifact to the historical association.
It was all that remained of the whaleship Essex-a battered box and a ragged piece of string.