In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (National Book Award Winner)

by Nathaniel Philbrick

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.”

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,”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The next morning they returned to the wreck. As soon as DeBlois scrambled up the side, he saw “the prints of the [whale’s] teeth on the copper.. . . The hole was just the size of the whale’s head.” As DeBlois cut away the masts to right the ship, the ship’s bell continued to clang with the rhythmic heave of the sea. “[A] more mournful sound never fell on my ears,” he remembered. “It was as though it was tolling for our deaths.”

Five months later, the crew of the Rebecca Simms succeeded in killing the whale that sank the Ann Alexander. By then the bull appeared “old, tired, and diseased.” Its sides were shaggy with twisted harpoons and lances; huge splinters were found embedded in its head. The whale yielded between seventy and eighty barrels of oil.

Old age was not kind to Owen Chase. His memory of his sufferings in an open boat never left him, and late in life he began hiding food in the attic of his house on Orange Street. By 1868 Chase was judged “insane.” The headaches that had plagued him ever since the ordeal had become unbearable. Clutching an attendant’s hand, he would sob, “Oh my head, my head.” Death brought an end to Chase’s suffering in 1869.

In April 1879, Nickerson’s last surviving crew member in the first mate’s boat, Benjamin Lawrence, died. All his life, Lawrence had kept the piece of twine he’d made while in the whaleboat. At some point it was passed on to Alexander Starbuck, the Nantucketer who had taken over Obed Macy’s role as the island’s historian. In 1914, Starbuck would donate the piece of twine, wound four times into a tiny coil and mounted in a frame, to the Nantucket Historical Association. Written within the circle of twine was the inscription “They were in the Boat 93 Days.”

But if the island’s inhabitants once ventured to the far corners of the world, today it seems as if the world has made its way to Nantucket. It is not whaling, of course, that brings the tourists to the island, but the romantic glorification of whaling—the same kind of myths that historically important places all across America have learned to shine and polish to their economic advantage.

Some have praised the officers of the Essex for their navigational skills, but it was their seamanship, their ability to keep their little boats upright and sailing for three months in the open ocean, that is even more astonishing. Captain Bligh and his men sailed almost as far, but they had the coast of Australia and a string of islands to follow, along with favorable winds. Bligh’s voyage lasted forty-eight days; the Essex boats were out for almost twice as long.

Claude Rawson, the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University, spoke to me about the tendency of those who have been reduced to survival-cannibalism to speak openly about the experience—often to the horror of their listeners (personal communication, November 13, 1998). The loquacity of the sixteen survivors of an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972 made possible Piers Paul Read’s now famous account of survival-cannibalism, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.

Weeks confirmed that the freshwater spring never again appeared above the tide line. According to the oceanographer James McKenna, it is more than likely that an exceptionally high (and low) spring tide, combined with other factors such as the phase of the moon and variations in the orbital patterns of the sun and moon, were what gave the Essex crew temporary access to the spring in late December of 1820