In the Heart of the Sea (29 page)

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 Nantucket 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.

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 Donner 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.