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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  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 D
onner 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.