In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby-Dick

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  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.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Consequences

  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 Na
ntucket 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.