by Walter Karp
To the whaling men of Nantucket, the year 1819 promised good fortune. The island’s fleet, ravaged by the War of 1812, numbered sixty-one vessels, and fresh hunting grounds had been discovered in the equatorial waters of the central Pacific. These new areas lay 17,000 sailing miles away in ill-charted seas, but Nantucket whalers routinely made voyages few explorers could match. Reaching the grounds usually meant rounding Cape Horn, but Nantucketers knew those waters well and had been navigating them since 1792, chasing sperm whales, whose oil lit the music-filled ballrooms of Europe. On this voyage, the tune would turn - the whales would have their revenge. The story would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.
The doomed bear no marks of distinction. When the Essex sailed for the southern seas on August 12, 1819, it was a typical Nantucket whaler with a typical whaling crew. The ship was a tubby 238-tons with three-master masts, and it was provisioned for two-and-a-half years without putting into port. Nantucket’s whaling men disliked depending on the land. The chief officers were experienced seamen: George Pollard, recently first mate of the Essex, was now, at age thirty, its captain. His comparative youth was not unusual; whaling was a young man’s occupation. Owen Chase, recently boatsteerer on the Essex, age twenty-three, was its first mate.
Foreigners in the twenty-man crew included one Englishman, one from Portugal, two Cape Codders from Barnstable, and six African Americans, whose presence was commonplace. Nantucket’s ship owners, half of them Quakers, cared nothing about race. “Uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped,” as Melville was to put it, they wanted crews of courage and character and common sense. Hunting the sperm whale, whose twenty-foot tails could splinter a boat, was too dangerous and exacting for lesser men.
For the first fifteen months of the Essex’s voyage, nothing eventful occurred. There were storms, spills, and bruises - routine hazards of the hunt. By January 1820, the Essex had sailed back and forth around the Horn in gales so fierce and seas so mountainous that it had taken five weeks to make the brief passage. For several months after, the ship and its crew hunted off the coast of Chile. They slaughtered eight whales, then heading north off the Peruvian coast, they brought in several more. Already, the cruise was proving successful.
In October, the men of the Essex sailed for the uninhabited Galápagos Islands, which a young naturalist named Charles Darwin was to visit fourteen years later aboard HMS Beagle. They repaired a leak and stocked up on turtles, which they would later slaughter for meat, before plunging westward along the equator to the new whaling waters.
On the morning of November 20, two of the ship’s whaleboats hunted. Captain Pollard commanded one; Second Mate Matthew Joy, the other. First Mate Chase was onboard the Essex with a crew of five, making repairs to a third whaleboat.
Chase saw it first - a sperm whale a ship’s length away, by his estimation more than eighty feet long, swimming toward the bow of the Essex. He wasn’t alarmed, however. The sheer strength and size of the animal makes it dangerous to hunt in small whaleboats, but no whale had ever attacked a large ship. “I involuntarily ordered the boy at the helm to put it hard up, intending to sheer off and avoid him,” Chase later wrote.
What happened next shocked him and his men. His order was scarcely spoken before the whale, at full speed, struck the ship with its head. The Essex trembled from the blow, and “we looked at each other with perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech.” Minutes later, a man shouted: “Here he is - he is making for us again!” Having passed under the Essex, the whale had turned to ram it once more. To Chase, it appeared “with twice his ordinary speed, and . . . with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect.” This time when it struck, the whale crushed the bow of the Essex. Grabbing what they could, the men on board jumped into a whaleboat, pulled at its oars until they were clear of the ship, then sat in silence and despair as they watched the Essex slowly heel on its side and settle into the vast, empty sea.
Chase and his sailors sat in their whaleboat “absorbed in our own melancholy reflections.” Meanwhile, the steerer of Captain Pollard’s boat spied the grim scene. “Oh, my God,” he cried, “where is the ship?” Pollard leapt to his feet and saw the ship’s masts and sails dipping into the sea. He fell back into the boat, ashen-faced. “My God, Mr. Chase,” he called out, “what is the matter?” Chase answered, “We have been stove in by a whale.”
The plight of the Essex men, shipless and in three tiny boats on the vast Pacific, was almost hopeless. Their location - devoid of islands and maritime traffic - was, according to Chase’s reckoning: 0°40′ south latitude, 119° west longitude. To the east, the nearest landfall was Peru - 2,400 miles away, but even that coast was out of reach, because along the equator the ocean current runs westward and winds are scarce. A southeast voyage would have been worse; below the equator, the southerly trade winds would blow directly against the whaleboats’ small square sails. There was nothing due south but a few distant speckles of land and nothing beyond them but Antarctica.
Only one direction held promise. The Marquesa Islands lay 1,500 miles southwest of them. Favoring winds and a west-running current made the voyage feasible, but they dared not sail there. “We feared,” Captain Pollard later explained, “that we should be devoured by cannibals if we cast ourselves on their mercy.” Had the insular Nantucket men known it, the Marquesas were friendly Polynesian territories. A U.S. naval commander had claimed them for the United States in 1813. And making the whale's revenge all the richer, their dread of cannibalism would prove a more grisly irony than they could have imagined.
To reach safety, Pollard and Chase had no choice but to attempt an immense zig-zag south to 25° south latitude, 1,900 miles away. There, in variable, often westerly, winds, they would make for Chile, some 2,200 miles away due east. It was a daunting prospect. The twenty men would have to make a 4,100-mile voyage in three open whaleboats, 500 miles farther than even Captain William Bligh had gone in the launch of the HMS Bounty, thirty-one years before. Nor did the Essex crew have sturdy, powerfully built launches to carry them through the caprices of sea and wind. The Nantucket whaleboat was a remarkable vessel, so light and buoyant it could keep its bow above “the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas,” as Melville put it. Unfortunately, it was as frail as it was buoyant, a boat made for easy repair since it was likely to be damaged by a whale at least once during a hunt. All that stood between a whaleboat’s crew and the ocean depths was a half-inch of overlapping cedar planks. The Essex men didn’t want to ponder too closely how such a fragile, leaky craft would fare over 4,000 miles, through shark-infested waters and tropical gales.
GNAWING DREAD, HOWEVER, assailed them only at nightfall, according to Chase’s account. On the morning of the disaster, they acted with the whalingman’s customary skill and dispatch. Captain Pollard ordered the sails and masts of the stricken ship cut away so it might right itself sufficiently to allow them to go aboard for supplies. Eventually, they got into the hold by chopping a hole in the exposed hull of the ship. By midday, they had managed to obtain 600 pounds of bread, 135 gallons of water, six live Galapagos turtles, one musket, two pistols, some carpenter’s tools, two pounds of nails, two compasses, two quadrants, and two navigational manuals. They had, Chase reckoned, about sixty days’ worth of food, but no way, aside from dead reckoning, to calculate their position.
That night, after fastening long lines from their boats to the wreck of the Essex, the men tried to sleep, but only a few succeeded. Some wept while others railed against the events that had befallen them. Even Chase, the most unshakable of them, could not rest. The “horrid aspect and malignancy of the whale” haunted him. Not a single man, he recalled, had eaten all day. Shock and apprehension robbed them of their appetites.
The next morning, cheered by the sun, the men completed the final preparations for their open-boat voyage. Stripping spars and light sails from the wreck, they rigged each whaleboat with a second mast, a flying jib, and two spritsails. For protection against high seas, they stripped cedar planks from the Essex and nailed them to the sides of the whaleboats. There was nothing left to do, but the shipwrecked men made no move to embark. They weren’t ready to cut themselves free from their ship. “Wrecked and sunken as she was,” Chase wrote, “we could scarcely discard from our minds the idea of her continuing protection. . . We continued sitting in our places, gazing upon the ship as though she had been an object of tenderest affection.” The terrors of the journey before them, the thought of their frail open boats paralyzed the men of the Essex for twenty-four hours more.
Not until 12:30 p.m. November 22, three days after the whale’s attack, did the three vessels set forth. Captain Pollard commanded the first boat, Joy the second, and Chase the third. Because of its weak, patched-up condition, Chase’s boat carried one less man aboard than the others, six to their seven. As they sailed south, their eyes remained fixed on the Essex until she disappeared from sight. “It seemed,” Chase said, “as if in abandoning her we had parted with all hope.” They were determined to keep the three boats together, bound, said Chase, by “a desperate instinct” and the comfort each crew derived from the sight of their mates a few boat-lengths away.
A grim routine quickly set. The daily ration per man was a half pint of water - one-eighth the usual shipboard allotment - and the ship’s biscuit weighing one pound three ounces – meager enough, but it would soon seem a feast. At night, as storms raged, the three officers struggled to keep the little fleet together. In rough seas, the men bailed. In the relative calm, they patched leaks, some small, some large. Three days after the sinking of the Essex, from well below the water line, water poured into Chase’s boat. Sailors nailed a plank over the hole, knowing that one loose nail could doom them. Another three days passed, and a twelve-foot shark attacked Captain Pollard’s boat. Then men beat it off, but it was clear Nantucket’s sea hunters had now become the hunted.
Their progress was perilously slow. On December 8, sixteen days after cutting loose from the Essex, the three boats, had only reached 17° south latitude, roughly 600 miles south of the sinking, a rate of less than forty miles per day. Once they reached the twenty-fifth latitude, they hoped to make swifter passage.
The first signs of starvation began to appear: the steady weakening of wasting limbs, the gripping bowels, the fitful sleep that brings not rest but tormenting dreams of meals. On December 10, when a few flying fish struck a sail and landed in the bottom of Chase’s boat, the men gobbled them up raw and alive - bones, scales, entrails, and all.
ONLY THE WEATHER brought solace. The late spring air was warm, and the sea spray tepid, but summertime in the southern seas was soon upon them. From December 11 through 16, the whaleboats barely moved. The sun beat down on the men. With their ration now a half-pint of water per day, their lips swelled and cracked, dried saliva caked the insides of dry mouths. Thirst now added to the torment of semi-starvation. To escape the sun, some men dropped overboard and hung from the side of the boat. It was a perilous form of relief; the men were weak, and it took three of them to drag a soaking mate back in.
On December 14, despite the hunger and thirst, Chase made a decision. He calculated the distance still to go and the provisions on hand, he cut the rations to half biscuit per day. A few days later, he slashed the water ration to a quarter pint a day per man. As a precaution, Chase kept the remaining supplies by his side and slept with a loaded pistol in his hand, but there was no attempt to steal. Under his steady leadership, discipline remained firm, while the sufferings of the men increased with each passing day.
When dawn broke on December 20, one month after the whale rammed the Essex, the boats completed the first leg of their journey, reaching the twenty-fifth latitude. Still, they had only a slender chance of reaching Chile. Death by starvation, or worse, by thirst, seemed to be their likely fate. Of the six emaciated wretches in the first mate’s boat, two had already abandoned hope and were sunk in apathy, utterly indifferent to their fate.
Then, at 7:00 a.m., one of Chase’s men shouted, “There is land!” The men roused themselves. By sheer luck, the three whaleboats had come upon an islet in the empty reaches of the southern seas. “It appeared at first a low white beach,” recalled Chase, “and lay like a basking paradise before our longing eyes.” It took four hours to reach it and every ounce of strength the men had to crawl out of their boats and wade to shore, where they flung themselves to the ground in relief.
THEY REACHED, OR so they believed, the uninhabited atoll of Ducie Island, but their reckoning of longitude was wrong. Blown off course by southeasterly winds, they had, in fact, landed on an uncharted islet known today as Henderson’s Island, some 200 miles west-northwest of Ducie and 3,200 miles from the Chilean coast. It also lay 120 miles from what was to become one of the most famous islets in the Pacific, Pitcairn Island - already at this time the secret refuge of the HMS Bounty mutineers and a haven that a Nantucket whaling ship had first discovered twelve years before. Unfortunately, the navigating manuals of the Essex did not indicate its existence.
When the men began foraging for food, they quickly discovered that their providential landfall was something less than a paradise. They found food only in small quantities – a few birds, birds’ eggs, berries, edible grasses, and a crab or two in the tidal pools on the beach. Water remained a life-and-death problem. A search party for hours crawled around the rocky outcroppings near the beach in search of a spring, yet they found little. The next day, in a state of desperation, the men crawled over the rocky hills, inspecting every crack and crevice, hammering at the rock in an increasingly frantic search for a freshwater spring. Once again, the search proved futile. That evening, Pollard told his weary men that unless they found water the next day, they had no choice but to abandon the island and return to the sea.
The following morning, after more hours of searching, Chase was ready to give up. Then he heard happy cries from the beach: Someone had found water. “At one moment, I felt an almost choking excess of joy, and at the next, I wanted the relief of a flood of tears.” Henderson’s Island had hidden its treasure well. A spring of fresh water burbled from a rocky cleft where at high tide, six feet of sea rolled over it. Twice daily at low tide, however, it offered precious water to fill the whaleboats’ depleted kegs. Whatever else might befall the crew, they would be spared the worst of agonies – dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. That night, for the first time since the sinking, Chase slept an untroubled sleep.
For the next two days, the men foraged for food, while at each low tide, continuing to fill up their water kegs. Too weak to climb hills, their foraging range was limited, and they were quickly depleting the island’s resources. On Christmas Day - their fifth day on the island - not a morsel of food could be found. So they made a hard decision. They thought of sailing the boats to another part of the island and beginning foraging afresh from there; perhaps in time, a whaling ship would rescue them. After the suffering so much, anything might seem preferable to returning to the sea. But the illusion of safety did not seduce them; the island’s eighteen square miles simply could not feed twenty men indefinitely. Seventeen of them agreed to leave as soon as their water kegs were filled and their leaky boats repaired. The three men who elected to say - William Wright and Seth Weeks of Barnstable and Thomas Chappie of Plymouth, England – preferred the passive misery of the semi-barren island to the inevitable perils of the ocean. They soon discovered what lay in store for castaways on Henderson’s Island: the skeletons of eight shipwrecked mariners.
For the second and final leg of their voyage, Pollard and Chase now sketched out a course. Instead of sailing blindly for the remote South American coast, they set a course south-southeast for Easter Island, 900 miles from Ducie and 1,100 miles from
their existing location. If they missed that speck in the sea, 2,000 miles would still separate them from South America. With the prospect of failure in mind, Captain Pollard wrote a brief account of the shipwreck of the Essex, put it in a tin box, and nailed the box to a tree. At 10:00 a.m. on December 27, seventeen emaciated survivors boarded their whaleboats. The three who chose land did not see their comrades off. The castaways could not bear the parting from those whose sufferings they had shared for so long.
FOR SEVEN DAYS, the boats, sailing together as before, made their way toward Easter Island, home of friendly Polynesians and Moai and grim stone monuments of monolithic human figures. On January 3, however, they were caught for hours in a heavy squall that blew them far off course. Easter Island now lay east-northeast of them and directly upwind, meaning there was no way to reach it. The three boat commanders had no choice but to steer for the islands of Juan Fernandez, 2,500 miles away.
Starvation began to take its toll. The first man to die was Second Mate Joy, who had been somewhat sickly, the others recalled, since leaving Nantucket. His ailments had probably been minor, but after fifty days with little food, the smallest frailty becomes the deadliest disease. At dawn on January 11, 1821, Joy’s body was sewn up in his clothes, weighted with a stone, and “consigned,” said Chase, “in solemn manner to the ocean.”
Two nights later, with a fierce gale blowing, Chase peered through the gloom and spray to see check on the other two boats. They were nowhere in sight. Heading into the wind, Chase drifted anxiously for an hour hoping to come upon them, but they had vanished. He and his men were now alone in the immensity of the Pacific. Chase wrote: “We had lost the cheering of each other’s faces, that which, strange as it is, we so much required in both our mental and bodily distresses.” According to his January 14 calculations, they had sailed only 900 miles eastward since leaving Henderson’s Island. If they continued at that rate, it would take five weeks to reach the Juan Fernandez Islands. Chase, the relentless realist, once again cut the food rations. Now, five starving men would each have to survive on one-and-a-half ounces of ship’s bread a day.
