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,”
