The USS Essex is an American whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, launched in 1799. In 1820, while sailing the South Pacific Sea under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., the ship was attacked and sunk by sperm whales. Thousands of miles off the coast of South America, with little food and water, the 20 crew were forced to travel to land on the surviving whaling ship on board.
The men were severely dehydrated, starved, and exposed to the high seas, and survivors eventually had to eat the bodies of the already dead crew members. When it turns out that wasn't enough, the crew draws lots to decide who they're willing to sacrifice to keep the others alive. More than three months after the sinking of the Essex, seven crew members were cannibalized and the last of the eight survivors was rescued. First mate Owen Chase and cabin attendant Thomas Nixon later wrote down the ordeal. The tragedy attracted international attention and inspired Herman Melville to write his famous novel Moby-Dick in 1851.
The whale that struck Essex on November 20, 1820 (drawn by Thomas Nixon)
The Essex departed Nantucket on August 12, 1819, and was expected to sail for about two and a half years to the abundant whaling grounds off the west coast of South America. The total crew was 21 people. Among the sailors, there were seven blacks: William Bond, Samuel Reed, Richard Peterson, Henry DeWitt, Lawson Thomas, Charles Short and Isaiah Shepard; [7] Four from outside Nantucket: SethWeeks, JosephWest, William Wright, and Isaac Cole; There was also an Englishman named Thomas Chappell. Captain George Pollard, First Officer Owen Chase, Second Officer Matthew Joy and other crew members Barzillai Ray, Charles Ramsdell, Benjamin Lawrence and Owen Coffin, and cabin attendant Thomas Nickerson, were all from Nantucket.
Two days after she left Nantucket, Essex was hit by a sudden storm in the Gulf Stream. She was knocked to the end of her beam and nearly sank. She lost her top sails, two whaling ships were destroyed and another was damaged. Captain Pollard chose to continue sailing without replacing both ships or repairing the damage.
In January 1820, after five weeks of sailing, the Essex sailed extremely slowly around Cape Horn. With this and earlier disturbing incidents, the crew began to talk about ominous omen. Their spirits were temporarily lifted when Essex embarked on a long spring and summer hunt in the warm waters of the South Pacific, sailing north along the west coast of South America to Atacamés, then the royal spectator area of Spanish rule in Quito (present-day Ecuador).
The crew was divided into three groups of six people each, each with one of the three available whaling vessels whenever a whale was seen; The remaining three remained on board to manage Essex. Each whaling ship was led by one of the three officers — Pollard, Chase and Joey — who each chose five other crew members.
In September 1820, a sailor named Henry DeWitt deserted Atacames, and the crew of the Essex was reduced to 20. While sailors had been fleeing the whaling ship,[8] the escape was bad news for Captain Pollard, as each of the ship's three whaling vessels required a crew of six. This meant that only two people would remain to guard Essex while whaling was going on, which was not enough to safely handle a vessel of Essex's size and type.
After discovering that the whale population in the area had been depleted, the crew met other whalers who told them about the newly discovered expansive hunting ground, known as the "offshore farm," located between 5 and 10 degrees south latitude and 105 and 125 degrees west longitude, about 2,500 nautical miles (4,600 kilometers) to the south and west. For whalers, it's a long way from known shores, and crews have heard rumors that many islands in the South Pacific are inhabited by cannibals.
When Essex finally reached the promised fishing grounds thousands of miles west of the South American coast, the crew couldn't find any whales for days. Tensions between officers in Essex, especially between Pollard and Chase. On November 16, when they finally found a whale, it surfaced directly from under Chase's boat, which ended to be "crashed... It's just fragments."
At 8 a.m. on November 20, 1820, the lookout saw the vent and the remaining three whaling ships set off in pursuit of a group of sperm whales. On the leeward side of Essex, Chase's whaling ship forked a whale with a harpoon, but its tail crashed into the ship and cracked a slit, forcing the crew to cut the harpoon line and return to Essex for repairs. Two miles to the wind, Pollard and Joey's boats each harpooned a whale and were towed toward the horizon far from Essex, which whalers dubbed the "Nantucket Sled."
Chase was repairing a damaged whaling ship aboard the Essex when crew saw an unusually large sperm whale bull (reportedly about 85 feet (26 meters) long) behaving erratically. It lay motionless on the water opposite the boat and began to swim towards the boat, gaining speed by shallow diving. The whale rammed the Essex, rocked from side to side, and then dived beneath her, surfacing near the starboard side of the ship. With its head resting on the bow and its tail resting on the stern, it remained motionless and seemed stunned. When Chase realized that its tail was only a few inches from the rudder, he was ready to harpoon it from the deck, easily irritated if the whale tried to kill it. Fearing leaving a ship thousands of miles from land that he could not steer, Chase hesitated. The whale recovered, swam a few hundred yards in front of the boat, and turned to face the bow.
I turned around and saw him about a hundred strokes [500 meters or 550 yards] directly ahead of us, descending at about 24 knots (44 km/h) at twice his normal speed, and it appeared in his face with ten times the anger and vengeance. The waves continued to swing violently with his tail, flying in all directions around him. About half of his head was exposed, and just so he came to us and hit the boat again.
— Owen Chase
The whale crushed the bow, causing the ship to fall back, and then its head finally broke free from the broken wood and swam away, never to appear again, allowing the Essex to sink quickly next to the bow. Chase and the rest of the sailors frantically tried to add rigging to the last remaining whaling ship, while butler William Bond ran underneath to collect the captain's undersea box and any navigation aids he could find.
The captain's boat was the first to reach us. He stopped so far from a boat, but couldn't say even a single syllable. He was completely overwhelmed by the sight in front of him. However, he was soon able to ask me, "My God, Mr. Chase, what's going on?" I replied, "We were burned by whales." ”
— Owen Chase
The reason for the whale attack is unknown. In The Heart of the Sea, author Nathaniel Philbrick speculates that it may have accidentally crashed into the ship first, or that the sound of the hammer aroused its curiosity when the whaler repaired the damaged whaling ship by nailing in a replacement plate. The frequencies and sounds of DingTalk may sound similar to those used by sperm whales to communicate and echolocate.
Owen Chase in his later years
Essex was hit about 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 kilometers) west of South America. After spending two days salvaging as many supplies as possible from the flooded shipwreck, the 20 sailors were ready to set off on three small whaling ships, realizing they simply did not have enough food and fresh water to land. Improvised masts and sails from Essex were installed on board, and planks were added to raise the gunwales and prevent large waves from spilling from both sides. In Pollard's nautical box, Bond's agile mind managed to keep it, which contained two sets of navigation equipment and two nautical charts. These were separated by Pollard and Chase's ships; Joey's ship doesn't have any way of sailing other than keeping it in sight of other vessels.
After examining the charts, officers deduced that the nearest known island, the Marquesas Islands, was more than 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) west and that Captain Pollard intended to travel to the islands, but the crew, led by Chase, expressed their concern that the islands might be inhabited by cannibals and voted to sail east instead of South America. Unable to sail against the wind, ships first need to sail 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) south to take advantage of the westerly belt to turn toward South America, which then remains 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) to the east. Even knowing that the route required them to travel twice as much as the route to the Marquesas Islands, Pollard agreed to the crew's decision and the ship headed due south.
Food and water were initially rationed, but most of it was soaked in seawater. The men ate this food first, although it increased their thirst. It took them about two weeks to finish eating the contaminated food, by which time the survivors had begun gargling with seawater and drinking their urine. Several giant tortoises captured from the Galapagos Islands were also brought aboard the whaling vessel, but their size made it impossible for the crew to take them all aboard.
Never designed for long voyages, all whaling ships were roughly repaired, and leakage during voyages was an ongoing and serious problem. After losing a piece of wood, the crew of one ship had to lean to one side, lifting the other out of the water until the other boat could get closer, allowing the sailors to nail a piece of wood into the hole. Storms and rough seas often plague these small whaling ships, and those who are not busy maneuvering and adjusting the sails spend most of their time fishing for water from bilges.
On December 20, just a month after the whale attack, the boats landed on uninhabited Henderson Island, a small raised coral atoll within the Pitcairn Islands, a modern British territory, just hours after the crew began to die of thirst. The men mistakenly believed they had landed on Ducie Island, a similar atoll 220 miles (350 kilometers) to the east. If they landed on Pitcairn Island, 120 miles (190 kilometers) southwest, they might be helped; The descendants of the survivors of HMSBounty still live there, who famously mutinied in 1789.
On Henderson Island, the crew of the Essex discovered a small freshwater spring below the tidal line, where the hungry crew fed on endemic birds, crabs, eggs and peppergrass. After just a week, they had basically exhausted the island's food resources. On December 26, they concluded that if they stayed any longer, they would starve to death. As most of the crew prepared to set sail again on the whaling ship, three men — William Wright, Seth Wicks and Thomas Chappell, the only white crew members who were not Nantucket natives — chose to stay in Henderson. Nearly a year after the sinking of the Essex, Lloyd's reported that Surrey rescued the three and took them to Port Jackson, Australia.
By Feb. 15, the three survivors on the Chase whaling ship were running out of food again. On February 18, 89 days after the sinking of the Essex, the British ship Indians discovered and rescued Chase, Lawrence and Nixon off the coast of Chile. A few days after the rescue, the empty whaling ship was lost in a storm when it was towed behind the Indians. On February 23, 93 days after the sinking of the Essex, Pollard's ship, now carrying only Pollard and Ramsdell, was rescued by the Nantucket whaling ship Dauphin off the coast of South America. Pollard and Ramsdell were completely separated at the time, they didn't even notice the Dauphin beside them, and they were terrified when they saw the person who rescued them. On March 5, Dauphin met the two brothers bound for Valparaiso and transferred them to her.
After a few days in Valparaiso, Chase, Lawrence and Nixon were transferred to the frigate Constellation to be cared for by the ship's doctor, who oversaw their recovery. After officials learned that three Essex survivors — Wright, Wicks and Chappell — had been left on Ducy Island (they were actually left on Henderson Island), authorities asked the merchant ship Surrey, which was already planning to cross the Pacific, to look for the man. The rescue was successful. On March 17, Pollard and Ramsdell reunited with Chase, Lawrence and Nixon. On April 5, 1821, when the last of the eight survivors was rescued, the bodies of the seven crew members had been devoured. Within months of returning to Nantucket, all eight went to sea again. Herman Melville later speculated that if they had followed Captain Pollard's advice and sailed to Tahiti, all would have survived.
Pollard returned to sea in early 1822 as captain of the whaling ship "Two Brothers". On his first voyage, she was wrecked in the French frigate shoal during a storm off the coast of Hawaii, after which he joined a merchant ship and was wrecked shortly thereafter near the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands). Pollard is now considered "Jonah" (unlucky), and no shipowner will trust him to sail again, so he is forced to retire. He then became Nantucket's night watchman. Every year on November 20, he reportedly locks himself in his room and fasts in memory of Essex soldiers. He died in Nantucket on January 7, 1870, at the age of 78.
Thomas Nixon in the 1870s
First mate Owen Chase returned to Nantucket on June 11, 1821, to find him with a 14-month-old daughter, whom he had never met. Four months later, he completed his account of the disaster, the most unusual and harrowing wreck of the whale ship Essex; Herman Melville was inspired by this to write his novel Moby Dick (1851). In December, Chase boarded the whaling ship Florida as first mate, and on every subsequent voyage he set out as captain of the Winslow until he was able to build his own whaling vessel, Charles Carrol. Chase sailed at sea for 19 years, returning home only briefly every two or three years, each time having a child.
His first two wives died while he was out to sea. He divorced him when he found out that his third wife had given birth 16 months after he last saw her, though he later raised the child as his own. In September 1840, two months after the divorce was completed, he married for the fourth and final time and retired from the whaling industry. Memories of Essex's harrowing experience haunt Chase, who suffers from terrible headaches and nightmares. Later in his life, he began hiding food in the attic of his Nantucket house on Orange Street and was eventually sent to a shelter. He died in Nantucket on March 7, 1869, at the age of 73.
Cabin attendant Thomas Nickerson became a captain for the Merchant Marine Service and in his later years wrote his account of the sinking, entitled The Essex was sunk by a whale and the crew's ordeal in an open boat. Nixon wrote the record in 1876, 56 years after the sinking, and was not lost until 1960; The Nantucket Historical Society was published in 1984. He died in February 1883 at the age of 77.
The other surviving crew members met a different fate:
Thomas Chapple died of plague fever in East Timor while serving as a missionary.
William Wright was missing during a hurricane in the West Indies.
Charles Ramsdell died in Nantucket on July 8, 1866, at the age of 62.
Benjamin Lawrence died in Nantucket on March 28, 1879, at the age of 80.
On September 12, 1887, Seth Weeks died in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, becoming the last Essex survivor.
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