A Nantucket whaler
The Essex was a whaleship out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the island that was at the time the leading centre of American whaling. She was a fairly small and old vessel, built in the late eighteenth century, and she sailed on 12 August 1819 under Captain George Pollard Jr., bound for the Pacific whaling grounds. Owen Chase was the first mate. The crew numbered twenty, and many of the men were young and inexperienced.
Whaling voyages of this kind often lasted two or three years, and vessels travelled to remote parts of the world in search of sperm whales, valued for their oil. The work was hard and dangerous, and shipboard daily life was shaped by the hunt and the processing of the whales. The Essex’s voyage took her round Cape Horn and into the Pacific, where she had mixed success in finding whales.
The attack
On 20 November 1820, the Essex was in the open Pacific, about 2,000 nautical miles west of the coast of South America. Whaleboats were launched to chase a group of sperm whales. According to the accounts, a very large whale then struck the ship, backed off, and struck again, damaging the bow so severely that the hull began to fill. The crew, those who remained aboard, could not save her, and the ship was abandoned on her side.
The main sources for the event are the narrative published by Owen Chase in 1821 and, much later, an account by the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, written in his old age and rediscovered in the twentieth century. Other crew members gave their versions. They do not agree in every detail, which is normal for survivors’ accounts written long afterwards, but they agree on the main outline. Attacks by whales on ships were rare, but this one was well documented.
Three small boats
The crew had three whaleboats, which were small open boats designed for chasing whales, not for long ocean passages. They were equipped with a few supplies saved from the sinking, including some bread and water, and a small amount of equipment. The men considered sailing to the nearest islands, but feared that those islands were inhabited by cannibals, a belief that was incorrect but common among sailors at the time. Instead, they decided to sail south and east, hoping to reach the coast of South America by finding the winds that would carry them.
That choice made the journey far longer. Over the following weeks, the boats were beset by thirst, hunger and exhaustion. They landed at one point on Henderson Island, a small island with limited food and water, where they spent about a week. Three men decided to stay there rather than risk the sea again. The other seventeen set out again in the boats.
What happened next
The boats drifted apart. As the men died of starvation and exhaustion, those who remained took the decision to survive by eating the bodies of the dead. Later in the ordeal, in one of the boats, lots were drawn to decide who would be sacrificed, and a young man named Owen Coffin, Captain Pollard’s cousin, was selected. These events are known from the survivors, who spoke about them reluctantly, and they are a subject treated with care by historians. They are part of the record because the survivors themselves told of them.
Chase’s boat was picked up by a ship called the Dauphin in February 1821. Pollard’s boat was found by another vessel, the Indian, a few days later. A third boat disappeared, and its three men were never seen again. The three men left on Henderson Island were rescued by another ship in April 1821. In all, eight of the twenty men survived.
After the rescue
The survivors were taken to Chile and then home. Pollard returned to sea and later commanded another whaler, the Two Brothers, which was also wrecked in 1823. He was then given work ashore, and he later served as a night watchman in Nantucket. Chase became a captain and published his narrative. The Nantucket community received the survivors with sympathy, but the episode also unsettled a town whose living depended on the whale fishery.
The link with Moby-Dick
The story had a lasting effect on literature. Herman Melville, who worked on a whaler himself in the early 1840s, read Chase’s narrative and wrote notes in a copy. He used the idea of a whale striking and sinking a ship in his novel Moby-Dick, published in 1851. Melville’s story is fiction, and its characters and plot are his own, but the Essex gave it a real-world precedent.
Whaling in context
The sinking of the Essex was unusual, but the dangers of the work were normal. The history of whaling vessels shows that the industry grew from small coastal boats to ocean-going ships processing oil on board. The trade later spread south, and the later decades of the century saw voyages deep into the Southern Ocean, which is the subject of Antarctic whaling. Provisions on such ships were meagre by comparison to naval standards, and the lack of shipboard provisions after a loss was the immediate cause of the Essex survivors’ suffering.
The Essex disaster is remembered as one of the most extraordinary survival stories at sea. It is told in the words of those who lived it, and, although some details are uncertain, the central events are well supported by the evidence.