In the Heart of the Sea (32 page)

At the height of its influence more than 150 years ago, Nantucket had led the new nation toward its destiny as a world power. “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada,” Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “let the English overswarm all India, and lay out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's.” But if the island's inhabitants once ventured to the far corners of the world, today it seems as if the world has made its way to Nantucket. It is not whaling, of course, that brings the tourists to the island, but the romantic glorification of whaling-the same kind of-myths that historically important places all across America have learned to shine and polish to their economic advantage. Yet, despite the circus (some have called it a theme park) that is modern Nantucket, the story of the Essex is too troubling, too complex to fit comfortably into a chamber of commerce brochure.

Unlike, say, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, who put themselves in harm's way then had the luck to live out an Edwardian fantasy of male camaraderie and heroism, Captain Pollard and his crew were simply attempting to make a living when disaster struck in the form of an eighty-five-foot whale. After that, they did the best they could. Mistakes were inevitably made. While Captain Pollard's instincts were sound, he did not have the strength of character to impose his will on his two younger officers. Instead of sailing to Tahiti and safety, they set out on an impossible voyage, wandering the watery desert of the Pacific until most of them were dead. Like the Donner Party, the men of the Essex could have avoided disaster, but this does not diminish the extent of the men's sufferings, or their bravery and extraordinary discipline.

Some have praised the officers of the Essex for their navigational skills, but it was their seamanship, their ability to keep their little boats upright and sailing for three months in the open ocean, that is even more astonishing. Captain Bligh and his men sailed almost as far. but they had the coast of Australia and a string of islands to follow, along with favorable winds. Bligh's voyage lasted forty-eight days; the Essex boats were out for almost twice as long.

From the beginning the Nantucketers in the crew took measures to provide one another with the greatest possible support without blatantly compromising the safety of the others. Although rations appear to have been distributed equally, it was almost as if the Nantucketers existed in a protective bubble as off-island crew members, first black then white, fell by the wayside until the Nantucketers had, in the case of Pollard's crew, no choice but to eat their own. The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure. It is a tragedy that happens to be one of the greatest true stories ever told.

Evidence of the disaster and of the men who survived it can still be found on the streets of Nantucket. Captain Pollard's red-shingled house on Centre Street has long since become a gift shop. On the corner of the building a small plaque reads, “Built by Captain William Brock in 1760. Later owned by Captain George Pollard Junior of the whaling ship Essex. Herman Melville spoke to Captain Pollard, whose story was the basis for Moby-Dick.” In an age when most of the island's historic houses have been renovated several times over, Owen Chase's home remains one of the last unchanged houses on Orange Street, its dark green trim and water-stained clapboards evoking the somber disquiet of the captain's final years. The boarding house where Thomas Nickerson once entertained his guests with tales of the Essex still stands on North Water Street-one of many buildings now associated with a large hotel.

The Whaling Museum devotes a small exhibit to the story of the ship that was sunk by a whale. There is a crew list from the Essex's next-to-last voyage that includes the signatures of George Pollard, Owen Chase, Obed Hendricks, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Chappel. There is Obed Macy's wharf book, in which the merchant and historian recorded the financial details involved in selling the Essex's oil in 1819. For some reason, the ship's trunk found bobbing in the Pacific after the sinking is not on view. The one personal memento of the tragedy, probably used because it takes up so little display space in the crowded museum, is Benjamin Lawrence's tiny piece of twine.

But it is the newly acquired skeleton of the sperm whale, oozing oil in the Nantucket Historical Association shed, that speaks most powerfully to the tragedy of the whaleship Essex. The nourishing, lifesaving bones of their dead comrades were what Pollard and Ramsdell clung to so fiercely even after their ordeal had ended. And it is bones that Nantucketers cling to now, tangible reminders of a time when the island was devoted to the business of transforming whales into money.

In Moby-Dick Ishmael tells of seeing the skeleton of a sperm whale assembled in a grove of palm trees on a South Pacific island. “How vain and foolish,” he says, “for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton... Only in the heart of quickest perils; oniy when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.” But, as the survivors of the Essex came to know, once the end has been reached and all hope, passion, and force of will have been expended, the bones maybe all that are left.

NOTES

For anyone wanting to know more about the Essex disaster, there is no better resource than Thomas Farel Heffernan's Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex. In addition to the complete text of Chase's narrative, Heffernan's book includes (with the notable exception of the Nickerson narrative) all the relevant accounts left by other survivors. Heffernan's chapters of analysis-including discussions of what happened to the survivors and how the story of the Essex was disseminated-are models of scholarly rigor and readability. Edouard Stackpole's pamphlet The Loss of the Essex, Sunk by a Whale in Mid-Ocean provides a useful summary of the ordeal, as does his chapter about the disaster in The Sea-Hunters, an important book for anyone wanting to know more about Nantucket and whaling. Stackpole's introduction to Thomas Nickerson's The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale published by the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) is also essential. A new edition of Nickerson's narrative is now available from Penguin. Henry Carlisle's novel The Jonah Man contains a fascinating treatment of the Essex disaster. If Carlisle takes a novelist's license with some of the facts (Pollard, for example, is depicted as the son of a farmer, when it was Chase whose father was a “yeoman”), his account provides a convincing portrayal of both the ordeal and the community of Nantucket.

The NHA's collections contain a myriad of documents relating to the Essex. In addition to Obed Macy's “wharf book,” in which he recorded how much the oil was sold for after the ship's return in April 1819 and how the money was divided among the owners and crew, there are documents detailing the leftover provisions that were sold at auction that month, along with costs associated with repairs performed in South America. From documents in the NHA'S Edouard Stackpole collection, it is possible to recreate, in part, the makeup of the crews aboard the Essex prior to her last voyage.

I would also like to direct the reader's attention to the works of two underappreciated whalemen-turned-authors. Because he was often critical of the Quaker whalemen of Nantucket, William Comstock has been virtually ignored by island historians. Yet his A Voyage to the Pacific, Descriptive of the Customs, Usages, and Sufferings on Board of Nantucket WhaleShips andZj/e of Samuel Comstock (William's brother and infamous leader of the bloody Globe mutiny) contain some of the best existing accounts of whaling in the early nineteenth century. William Hussey Macy was one of the most insightful and articulate whalemen Nantucket ever produced. Unfortunately, Macy's book, There She Blows!, has been forgotten, even though several subsequent and widely read authors relied upon it for information. Originally promoted as a book for children, Macy's work is much more than that, providing a detailed and vivid account of a boy's introduction to both the town of Nantucket and life aboard a whaler.

preface: February23,1821

My account of the rescue of the second Essex whaleboat is based largely on the description provided in Charles Murphey's 220-stanza poem published in 1877, a copy of which is at the NHA. Murphey was the third mate of the Dauphin and tells how the boat was sighted to leeward before the Dauphin bore down to determine its identity. Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely's journal records that the two Essex survivors were “in a most wretched state, they were unable to move when found sucking the bones of their dead Mess mates, which they were loath to part with” (cited in Heffernan, p. 99). For an account of the discovery of Thomas Nickerson's manuscript, see Edouard Stackpole's foreword in the edition of the narrative published by the NHA in 1984 (p. 7) and Bruce Chadwick's “The Sinking of the Essex” in Sail. A brief biography of Leon Lewis is in volume 2 of Albert Johannsen's The House of Beadle and Adams (pp. 183-86). Charles Philbrick's poem about the Essex, “A Travail Past,” is in Nobody Laughs, Nobody Cries (pp. 111-27).

Thomas Nickerson's remarks are from his original holograph manuscript entitled The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale (NHA Collection 106, Folder 1). In some instances, the spelling and punctuation have been adjusted to make Nickerson's prose more accessible to a modern-day audience.

According to Walter Folger, Jr., a part-owner of the Essex, there were a total of seventy-seven “ships and vessels employed in the whale fishery in 1819 from Nantucket” in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with seventy-five ships in the Pacific Ocean alone in 1820 (NHA Collection 118, Folder 71). In “Ajournal of the most remarkable events commenced and kept by Obed Macy” (NHA Collection 96, Jour-na!3,Nov. 13,1814-April 27,1822),Macy(who acted as the town'scen-sus taker in August 1820) records that 7,266 people lived on the island.

Josiah Quincy compares Nantucket to Salem in 1801 (Crosby, p. 114). Joseph Sansom details the appearance of the Nantucket waterfront in 1811 (Crosby, p. 140); another good description of the wharves is found in William H. Macy's There She Blows! (pp. 12-15, 19-21). William Comstock's Voyage to the Pacific (pp. 6-7) describes a voyage during the same time frame as the Essex. The account of the young Nantucket boys on the waterfront is from Macy (p. 20).

The Essex's specifications are spelled out in her original 1799 register, describing her as having “two decks and three masts and that her length is eighty seven feet, seven inches her breadth twenty five feet her depth twelve feet six inches and that she measures two hundred thirty eight tons; and seventy two ninety fifths that she is a square sterned ship has no Gallery and no figure head” (in Heffernan, p. 10). In a roster of Nantucket vessels that sailed in 1815, the Essex is listed as having left the island on July 13, with Daniel Russell as Master, George Pollard, Jr., as second mate, and Owen Chase as part of the crew; she returned on November 27,1816, and sailed again on June 8,1817 (NHA Collection 335, Folder 976). Her complete crew list for the 1817 voyage is in NHA Collection 15, Folder 57.

In his invaluable Nantucket Scrap-Basket (which is greatly indebted to William H. Macy's earlier There She Slows!), William F. Macy provides this definition of awalk: “Araised platform on the roof of many old Nantucket houses, from which to look off to the sea. Never called 'Widow's Walk,' 'Captain's Walk,' or 'Whale Walk,' as often written

nowadays [in 1916], but always just 'the walk.' Writers and others please note.” Obed Macy mentions the comet in his journal on July 7 and 14,1819. The New Bedford Mercury speaks of the comet in its July 9 and July 23 editions. A part-owner of the Essex is mentioned in connection with the comet in a letter (dated July 16) from a contributor in Plymouth. “Mr. Walter Folger, of Nantucket, has been here this week, in attendance on the Court, as awitness, andhas here continued his observations on the comet, which had been commenced at home. He brought with him a sextant and a small telescope.” The sea serpent is mentioned in the June 18 and August 6 editions of the Mercury. I talk about the development of Indian debt servitude on Nantucket in Abram'sEyes (pp. 157-60). See also Daniel Vicker's “The First Whalemen of Nantucket,” William and Mary Quarterly.

For an account of Burke's speech about the American whale fishery, see my '“Every Wave Is a Fortune': Nantucket Island and the Making of an American Icon” in New England Quarterly. William Comstock begins his description of a whaling voyage on a Nantucket whaler with a pointed discussion of the way in which islands foster a unique cultural attitude: “Islands are said to be nurseries of Genius, an assertion which would be wonderfully supported, if we could prove Greece and Rome to have once been two snug little detached parcels of land, situated in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea; and Germany a resurrection of the quiescent Atlanta. I am rather inclined to attribute this opinion to the overweening patriotism of our neighbor, John Bull, whose sea washed isle produced better things than all the rest of the world can afford; although, perhaps America can match him in thunder and lightning” (Voyage to the Pacific, p. 3). Ralph Waldo Emerson was on Nantucket in 1847; he also records in his journal “A strong national feeling” (vol. X. p. 63) on the island.

In his History, Obed Macy tells of the whaling prophecy and the appearance of Ichabod Paddock (p. 45), Hussey's killing of the first sperm whale (p. 48), and the exhibition of a dead whale on the Nantucket waterfront in 1810 (p. 151). J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described Nantucket as an oil-fertilized sandbank in Letters from an American Farmer (p. 142). For an account of the coming of Quakerism to Nantucket, see my Away Off Shore (pp. 78-87) and also Quaker Nantuckei by Robert Leach and Peter Gow (pp. 13-30). Peleg Folger's poem is quoted in Obed Macy's History (pp. 279-81).

Welcome Greene was the Quaker visitor to Nantucket in 1821 who