In the Heart of the Sea (38 page)

accused by the island's Quaker hierarchy of robbing the Nantucket Bank, wrote an eloquent defense that proved the crime had been committed by off-islanders; see my Away Off Shore (pp. 156-59). I also speak of William Coffin, Jr.'s qualifications as ghostwriter of Chase's narrative in Away Off Shore (pp. 158, 249). The statement regarding William Coffin's “enthusiastic love of literature” appeared in an obituary in the Nantucket Inquirer (May 2, 1838). An announcement concerning the publication of Chase's narrative appeared in the Inquirer (November 22,1821).

Melville recorded having heard of a narrative by Captain Pollard in the back pages of his copy of Chase's book (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, p. 985). Ralph Waldo Emerson's remarks concerning the Nantucketers' sensitivity to “everything that dishonors the island” appears in his 1847 journal entries about the island (p. 63). In 1822, an anonymous letter would appear in a Boston paper questioning the religious character of the island's inhabitants. An irate Nantucketer responded in words that might have been applied to Owen Chase: “We have a spy amongst us, who, like other spies, sends abroad his cowardly reports where he thinks they can never be disproved” (Nantucket Inquirer [April 18,1822]). According to Alexander Starbuck's list of whaling voyages in the History of Nantucket, the Two Brothers left Nantucket on November 26, 1821. Nickerson speaks of being a part of the Two Brothers' crew (along with Charles Ramsdell) in a poem titled “The Ship Two Brothers” (NHA Collection 106, Folder 3J£).

My account of the Two Brothers'last voyage is based primarily on Nickerson's poem “The Ship Two Brothers” and his prose narrative “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket,” both previously unpublished and in NHA Collection 106, Folder 3%. The first mate of the Two Brothers, Eben Gardner, also left an account of the wreck, which is at the NHA. -Charles Wilkes, the midshipman on the Waterwitch who recorded his conversation with George Pollard, would become the leader of the United States Exploring Expedition. As Heffernan points out, there is the possibility that Wilkes also met Owen Chase in 1839 when four of the expedition's ships, along with the Charles Carroll, were anchored for several weeks at Tahiti (pp. 130-31). Wilkes's account of his meeting with Captain Pollard is in eluded in Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798-1877 and is quoted at length in Heffernan (pp. 146-48).

Edouard Stackpole tells of Frederick Coffin's discovery of the Japan Ground in The Sea-Hunters (p. 268); not all whaling scholars are convinced that Coffin was the first to find the whaling ground. George Pollard may have been taught how to perform a lunar observation by the Two Brothers' former captain, George Worth, during the two-and-a-half-month cruise back to Nantucket from Valparaiso in the spring and summer of 1821. Although both Pollard and Captain Pease of the Martha were convinced that they had run into an uncharted shoal, Nickerson reveals in his letter to Leon Lewis that both he and the Martha's first mate, Thomas Derrick, believed it to be French Frigate Shoal, an already well-known hazard to the west of the Hawaiian Islands.

George Bennet's account of his meeting with George Pollard originally appeared m Journal of Voyages and Travels by the Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet, Esq. Deputed from the London Missionary Society. Concerning a character based on Pollard, Melville writes in the poem Clarel:

A Jonah is he?-And men bruit The story. None will give him place In a third venture.

Nickerson tells of Pollard's single voyage in the merchant service in his “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket.” The rumor about George Pollard's switching lots with Owen Coffin is recordedby Cyrus Townsend Brady in “The Yarn of the Essex, Whaler” in Cosmopolitan (November 1904, p. 72). Brady wrote that even though the tradition was “still current in Nantucket,” he doubted its veracity.

My thanks to Diana Brown, granddaughter of Joseph Warren Phinney, for providing me with a copy of the relevant portions of the original transcript of Phinney's reminiscences, recorded by his daughter, Ruth Pierce. Ms. Brown has published a selection of her grandfather's reminiscences under the title “Nantucket, Far Away and Long Ago,” in Historic Nantucket (pp. 23-30). In a personal communication (August 9. 1998), she explains Phinney's relation to Captain Pollard: “Captain Warren Phinney, his father, married Valina Worth, the daughter of

Joseph T. Worth and Sophronia Riddell (June 6,1834). Sophronia Riddell was, I believe, the sister of Mary Riddell who married Captain Pollard. After bearing three daughters, she died in 1843. Shortly after that, he was married to Henrietta Smith, who died the end of 1845, the year Joseph Warren was born. His father died about five years after this in a ship disaster on one of the Great Lakes, so he was then brought up by his grandmother and grandfather Smith. He of course was not a blood relative to the Pollards, but they were part of his extended family.” The rumor about George Pollard's making light of having eaten Owen Coffin is recorded in Horace Beck's Folklore and the Sea (p. 379). As late as the 1960s, the tradition was still being repeated on Nantucket; my thanks to Thomas McGlinn, who attended school on the island, for sharing with me his memory of the Pollard anecdote.

What is known about Owen Chase's life after the Essex disaster is recounted by Heffernan in Stove by a Whale (pp. 119-45). Emerson recorded his conversation with the sailor about the white whale and the Winslow/Essexon February 19,1834 (Journals, vol. 4, p. 265). Melville's memories of meeting Chase's son and seeing Chase himself are in the back pages of his copy of the Essex narrative (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, pp. 981-83). Although Melville did apparently meet Owen Chase's son, he went to sea after Owen had retired as a whaling captain and mistook someone else for the former first mate of the Essex. Even if Melville didn't actually see Chase, he thought he did, and it would be Melville's sensibility that would largely determine how future generations viewed the Essex disaster: through the lens of Moby-Dick. Melville's remarks concerning Chase's learning of his wife's infidelity are also recorded in his copy of the narrative (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, p. 995).

In “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket,” Nickerson tells of what happened after the crew was taken to Oahu on the Martha: “all of the crew of the Two Brothers were safely landed and as the whaling fleet were at the time in that port, each took their own course and joined separate ships-as chances offered.” Heffernan speaks of Ramsdell's being captain of the General Jackson in Stove by a Whale (p. 152); the computerized genealogical records at the NHA show that Ramsdell's first wife, Mercy Fisher, bore four children and died in 1846, and that his second wife, Elisa Lamb, had two children. The Brooklyn City Directory lists a Thomas G. Nickerson, shipmaster, living on 293 Hewes as late as 1872. Benjamin Lawrence's obituary appeared in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (April 5, 1879). Nickerson writes in his narrative about the fates of William Wright and Thomas Chappel. Seth Weeks's obituary appeared in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (September 24, 1887); it concludes: “He became blind for some years past, and ended his life in sweet peace and quiet among his own people, always highly respected and honored.”

Edouard Stackpole recounts the anecdote about Nantucketers' not talking about the Essex in “Aftermath” in the NHA edition of Nickerson's narrative (p. 78). For an account of the island's reputation as a Quaker abolitionist stronghold, see my “'Every Wave Is a Fortune': Nantucket Island and the Making of an American Icon”; Whittier writes about Nantucket in his ballad “The Exiles,” about Thomas Macy's voyage to the island in 1659. I discuss the success of the almost all-black crew of the Loper in Away Off Shore (pp. 162-63). Frederick Douglass ends the first edition of the narrative of his life with his speech at the Nantucket Atheneum.

Thomas Heffernan traces the literary uses of the Essex story in his chapter “Telling the Story” (pp. 155-82). The author of an article in the Garrettsville (Ohio) Journal (September 3, 1896) about the return of the Essex trunk to Nantucket provides convincing evidence of the impact \heEssex story had on America'syoungpeople: “InMcGuffey's old 'Eclectic Fourth Reader' we used to read that account. It told about whalers being in open whaleboats two thousand miles from land... Such accounts as that make impressions on the minds of children which last.” Testifying to how far the story of the Essex spread is a ballad titled “The Shipwreck of the Essex,” recorded in Cornwall, England. The ballad takes many liberties with the facts of the disaster, claiming, for example, that lots were cast no less than eight times while the men were still on Ducie Island (in Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Lau. pp. 316-17). Emerson's letter to his daughter about the Essex is in his collected letters, edited by Ralph Rusk, vol. 3 (pp. 398-99). OnMelville's one and only visit to Nantucket, see Susan Beegel's “Herman Melville: Nantucket's First Tourist.” Melville recorded his impressions of George Pollard in the pages of Chase's Narrative (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, pp. 987-88).

On Nantucket's decline as a whaling port and the Great Fire of 1846, see my Away Off Shore (pp. 195-98, 203-4, 209-10). Christopher Hussey, in Talks About Old Nantucket, writes about how the burning slick of oil surrounded the firefighters in the shallows of the harbor

(p. 61); see also William C. Macy's excellent account of the fire in Part III of Obed Macy's History ofNantucket (pp. 287-89). Concerning the Oak, Nantucket's last whaling vessel, Alexander Starbuck writes: “Sold at Panama, 1872; sent home 60 bbls sperm, 450 bbls. [right] whale. Nantucket's last whaler” (p. 483).

The statistics concerning the number of sperm whales killed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are from Dale Rice's “Sperm “Whale” (p. 191); see also Davis et al.'s In Pursuit of Leviathan (p. 135) and Hal Whitehead's “The Behavior of Mature Male Sperm Whales on the Galapagos Islands Breeding Grounds” (p. 696). Charles Wilkes (the same man who, as a midshipman, talked with George Pollard) recorded the observation that sperm whales had “become wilder” in vol. 5 of Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (p. 493). Alexander Starbuck collected accounts of whale attacks on ships in History of the American Whale Fishery(pp. 114-25). Captain DeBlois's description of his encounter with the whale that sank the Ann Alexander is in Clement Sawtell's The Ship Ann Alexander of New Bedford, 1805-1851 (pp. 61-84). Melville speaks of the “Ann Alexander whale” in a letter dated November 7,1851, to Evert Duyckinck in his Correspondence^. 139-40).

In a letter dated November 15, 1868, to Winnifred Battie, Phebe Chase tells of seeing Owen Chase: “[H]e called me cousin Susan (taking me for sister Worth) held my hand and sobbed like a child, saying O my head, my head[.] [I]t was pitiful to see the strong man bowed, then his personal appearance so changed, didn't allow himself decent clothing, fears he shall come to want” (NHA Collection 105, Folder 15). For information concerning Nickerson, see Edouard Stackpole's foreword to the NHA edition of Nickerson's narrative (pp. 8-11). My thanks to Aimee Newell, Curator of Collections at the NHA, for providing me with information about Benjamin Lawrence's circle of twine and the Essex chest. See “A Relic of the Whaleship Essex” in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (August 22, 1986) and “A Valuable Relic Preserved” in the Garrettsville Journal (September 3,1896).

epilogue: Bones

Information on the sperm whale that washed up on Nantucket at the end of 1997 comes from the following sources: articles by Dionis Gauvin and Chris Warner in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (January 8,1998); articles by J. C. Gamble in the Nantucket Beacon (January

6, 1998); “The Story of Nantucket's Sperm Whale” hy Cecil Barron Jensen in Historic Nantucket (Summer 1998, pp. 5-8); and interviews conducted in May and June of 1999 with Edie Ray, Tracy Plaut, Tracy Sundell, Jeremy Slavitz, Rick Morcom, and Dr. Karlene Ketten. Dr. Wesley Tiffney, Director of the University of Massachusetts-Boston Field Station, spoke with me about erosion at Codfish Park (personal communication, June 1999).

The whale necropsy was supervised by Connie Marigo and Howard Krum of the New England Aquarium. The cutting up of the whale was directed by Tom French of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Working with French were David Taylor, a science teacher at Triton Regional High School in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and three of Taylor's students. It was fitting that Taylor and his students were from Newburyport, which was where many of Nantucket's first settlers had come from in the seventeenth century. The Nantucket Historical Association was officially granted the whale skeleton by the National Marine Fisheries Service in the winter of 1998.

According to Clay Lancaster's Holiday Island, Thomas Nickerson operated a guest house on North Water Street in the mid-1870s (when he met the writer Leon Lewis), but had relocated to North Street (now Cliff Road) by 1882 (p. 55). An advertisement in the Inquirerand Mirror (June 26,1875) announces Nickerson's having opened “a family boardinghouse [with] several large airy and commodious rooms, with all the comforts of a home.” My thanks to Elizabeth Oldham for bringing this ad to my attention.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Andrews, Deborah C. “Attacks of Whales on Ships: A Checklist.” Melville Society Extracts (May 1974), pp. 3-17.

Ansel, Willits D. The Whaleboat: A Study of Design, Construction and Use from 1850-1970. Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1978.

Ashley, Clifford W. The Yankee Whaler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926.

Askenasy, Hans. Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1994.

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Valiant Friend: The Life ofLucretia Mott. New York: Walker, 1980.

Barker, Francis, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, eds. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Barrow, Sir John. The Mutiny of the Bounty. Boston: David R. Godine, 1980.