หน้าหลัก In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex



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Table of Contents


Title Page


Copyright Page


CHAPTER ONE - Nantucket

CHAPTER TWO - Knockdown


CHAPTER FOUR - The Lees of Fire




CHAPTER EIGHT - Centering Down


CHAPTER TEN - The Whisper of Necessity

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Games of Chance

CHAPTER TWELVE - In the Eagle’s Shadow








Praise for In the Heart of the Sea

“In the Heart of the Sea brings a wrenching tale of death and destruction magnificiently to life. In addition to being an incredibly gripping tale of survival, Philbrick’s book is an amazingly intimate and detailed look at life aboard a nineteenth-century whaling ship. Much as Melville did in Moby-Dick, the author takes the reader and makes him part of the crew.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Reading of the disaster in Philbrick’s book, you don’t wonder why Melville was captivated by it: What happened to the Essex and its men is fodder for an adventure story as nerve-wracking as the illfated expeditions that make modern bestsellers like The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air. It is suspenseful, heartbreaking and sickening, rife with the kind of human folly and cultural hubris that allow readers to imagine how they would escape such a horrid fate, and make young novelists recklessly philosophical.”

—L.A. Weekly

“[A] fabulously well-told story . . . In the Heart of the Sea turns out to be much more than just a sea story, though it would stand tall on that basis alone. And what a story. In the Heart of the Sea would have been a page-turner if it had been fiction. As a real-life adventure, it’s compelling and chilling from start to finish.”

—Wilmington News Journal

“Compelling . . . Philbrick does an admirable job of bringing to life not only an engrossing story of endurance, but also of t; he whaling tradition itself. He records the crew’s increasingly dismal prospects for survival in a language worthy of Melville’s best foreboding prose.”

—The Houston Chronicle

“As both a historical companion to Moby-Dick and perhaps the most thrilling sea tale of all time, In the Heart of the Sea speaks to the same issues of class, race and our relationship to nature that permeate the classic works of Melville.”

—Tampa Tribune & Times

“If you loved Titanic and gobbled up The Perfect Storm then In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick is just for you. It’s a seat-of-your-pants, real life tale. . . . These pages rock and roll as good as any contemporary action yarn . . . a grand tale of derring-do, of guts and gumption and of starvation and survival . . . While the tale is tragic, reading about it is a voyage that’s well worth taking.”

—New York Post

“Both historically thoughtful and highly entertaining . . . he weaves a fascinating discussion of Nantucket’s history into the Essex drama.”

—Pittsburgh Gazette

“A splendid yarn.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“Mesmerizing . . . a story even sweeps week would find hard to top . . . [this] is one book you wouldn’t vote off a deserted island.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“This is heady stuff, a surefire formula for an engrossing book . . . much more than another disaster story tailored to the interests of prurient readers. Accompanied by helpful maps, ample notes, a bibliography and index, it’s a work of masterful scholarship that never intrudes on the high adventure quotient of the narrative.”

—Raleigh News & Observer

“A superbly written, tension-filled book . . . Whether as a brilliant follow-up to Moby-Dick or as an exciting and harrowing sea story all its own, this is an epic that deserves classic status.”


“Nathaniel Philbrick’s admirable telling of the Essex story gains its power from his adherence to the simple brutal facts . . . all this Philbrick shows with a clarity and an economy that in no way slows his narrative, but lends it an awful, mounting inexorability . . . [told] with verve and authenticity, sure to become again what it has been from its earliest whisperings—a classic tale of the sea.”

—San Francisco Chronicle



Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War and Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition, 1838-1842, winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize. Since 1986 he has lived on Nantucket Island.

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Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2001

Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2000

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permissions to reprint excerpts from

Lord Weary’s Castle by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1946 and renewed 1974

by Robert Lowell.

eISBN : 978-1-101-22157-0

1. Essex (Whaleship) 2. Shipwrecks—Pacific Ocean. I. Title.

G530.E76 2000

910′.9164—dc21 99-053740

Frontispiece, images on title page and chapter openings,

and tailpiece by David Lazarus

Ship diagrams on pages xviii and 35 © 2000 L. F. Tantillo

Maps on pages 46-47 and 179 by Jeffrey L. Ward


And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against thee: Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as a heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.

—EXODUS 15:7-8

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale

Who spewed Nantucket bones in the thrashed swell. . . .

This is the end of running on the waves;

We are poured out like water. Who will dance

The mast-lashed master of Leviathans

Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?


“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”


February 23, 1821

LIKE A GIANT BIRD of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.

Harvesting sperm whales—the largest toothed whales in existence—was no easy matter. Six men would set out from the ship in a small boat, row up to their quarry, harpoon it, then attempt to stab it to death with a lance. The sixty-ton creature could destroy the whaleboat with a flick of its tail, throwing the men into the cold ocean water, often miles from the ship.

Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the high-grade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age. That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined.

For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island called Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the coast of southern New England. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucket’s whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call “Quakers with a vengeance.”

It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, just a few months into what would be a three-year voyage, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. And on that February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusual—a boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The ship’s captain, the thirty-seven-year-old Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft with keen curiosity.

He soon realized that it was a whaleboat—double-ended and about twenty-five feet long—but a whaleboat unlike any he had ever seen. The boat’s sides had been built up by about half a foot. Two makeshift masts had been rigged, transforming the rowing vessel into a rudimentary schooner. The sails—stiff with salt and bleached by the sun—had clearly pulled the boat along for many, many miles. Coffin could see no one at the steering oar. He turned to the man at the Dauphin’s wheel and ordered, “Hard up the helm.”

Under Coffin’s watchful eye, the helmsman brought the ship as close as possible to the derelict craft. Even though their momentum quickly swept them past it, the brief seconds during which the ship loomed over the open boat presented a sight that would stay with the crew the rest of their lives.


Instead of greeting their rescuers with smiles of relief, the sur vivors—too delirious with thirst and hunger to speak—were disturbed, even frightened. They jealously clutched the splintered and gnawed-over bones with a desperate, almost feral intensity, refusing to give them up, like two starving dogs found trapped in a pit.

Later, once the survivors had been given some food and water (and had finally surrendered the bones), one of them found the strength to tell his story. It was a tale made of a whaleman’s worst nightmares: of being in a boat far from land with nothing left to eat or drink and—perhaps worst of all—of a whale with the vindictiveness and guile of a man.


But the point at which Melville’s novel ends—the sinking of the ship—was merely the starting point for the story of the real-life Essex disaster. The sinking seemed to mark the beginning of a kind of terrible laboratory experiment devised to see just how far the human animal could go in its battle against the savage sea. Of the twenty men who escaped the whale-crushed ship, only eight survived. The two men rescued by the Dauphin had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific—farther by at least 500 miles than Captain William Bligh’s epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackleton’s equally famous passage to South Georgia Island.

For nearly 180 years, most of what was known about the calamity came from the 128-page Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, written by Owen Chase, the ship’s first mate. Fragmentary accounts from other survivors existed, but these lacked the authority and scope of Chase’s narrative, which was published with the help of a ghostwriter only nine months after the first mate’s rescue. Then, around 1960, an old notebook was found in the attic of a home in Penn Yan, New York. Not until twenty years later, in 1980, when the notebook reached the hands of the Nantucket whaling expert Edouard Stackpole, was it realized that its original owner, Thomas Nickerson, had been the Essex’s cabin boy. Late in life, Nickerson, then the proprietor of a boardinghouse on Nantucket, had been urged to write an account of the disaster by a professional writer named Leon Lewis, who may have been one of Nickerson’s guests. Nickerson sent Lewis the notebook containing his only draft of the narrative in 1876. For whatever reason, Lewis never prepared the manuscript for publication and eventually gave the notebook to a neighbor, who died with it still in his possession. Nickerson’s account was finally published as a limited-edition monograph by the Nantucket Historical Association in 1984.

In terms of literary quality, Nickerson’s narrative cannot compare to Chase’s polished account. Ragged and meandering, the manuscript is the work of an amateur, but an amateur who was there, at the helm of the Essex when she was struck by the whale. At fourteen, Nickerson had been the youngest member of the ship’s crew, and his account remains that of a wide-eyed child on the verge of manhood, of an orphan (he lost both his parents before he was two) looking for a home. He was seventy-one when he finally put pen to paper, but Thomas Nickerson could look back to that distant time as if it were yesterday, his memories bolstered by information he’d learned in conversations with other survivors. In the account that follows, Chase will get his due, but for the first time his version of events is challenged by that of his cabin boy, whose testimony can now be heard 180 years after the sinking of the Essex.

WHEN I was a child, my father, Thomas Philbrick, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of several books about American sea fiction, often put my brother and me to bed with the story of the whale that attacked a ship. My uncle, the late Charles Philbrick, winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize in 1958, wrote a five-hundred-line poem about the Essex, “A Travail Past,” published posthumously in 1976. It powerfully evoked what he called “a past we forget that we need to know.” Ten years later, as it happened, in 1986, I moved with my wife and two children to the Essex’s home port, Nantucket Island.

I soon discovered that Owen Chase, Herman Melville, Thomas Nickerson, and Uncle Charlie were not the only ones to have written about the Essex. There was Nantucket’s distinguished historian Edouard Stackpole, who died in 1993, just as my own research was beginning. There was Thomas Heffernan, author of Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex (1981), an indispensable work of scholarship that was completed just before the discovery of the Nickerson manuscript. Finally, there was Henry Carlisle’s compelling novel The Jonah Man (1984), which tells the story of the Essex from the viewpoint of the ship’s captain, George Pollard.

Even after I’d read these accounts of the disaster, I wanted to know more. I wondered why the whale had acted as it did, how starvation and dehydration had affected the men’s judgment; what had happened out there? I immersed myself in the documented experiences of other whalemen from the era; I read about cannibalism, survival at sea, the psychology and physiology of starvation, navigation, oceanography, the behavior of sperm whales, the construction of ships—anything that might help me better understand what these men experienced on the wide and unforgiving Pacific Ocean.

I came to realize that the Essex disaster had provided Melville with much more than an ending to one of the greatest American novels ever written. It had spoken to the same issues of class, race, leadership, and man’s relationship to nature that would occupy him throughout Moby-Dick. It had also given Melville an archetypal but real place from which to launch the imaginary voyage of the Pequod: a tiny island that had once commanded the attention of the world. Relentlessly acquisitive, technologically advanced, with a religious sense of its own destiny, Nantucket was, in 1821, what America would become. No one dreamed that in a little more than a generation the island would founder—done in, like the Essex, by a too-close association with the whale.



George Pollard, Jr.


Owen Chase


Matthew Joy


Benjamin Lawrence ∙ Obed Hendricks

Thomas Chappel


William Bond


Owen Coffin • Isaac Cole • Henry De Witt

Richard Peterson • Charles Ramsdell • Barzillai Ray

Samuel Reed • Isaiah Sheppard • Charles Shorter

Lawson Thomas • Seth Weeks • Joseph West

William Wright


Thomas Nickerson

Sail Plan of the

Whaleship Essex

Deck Plan of the Whaleship Essex



IT WAS, HE LATER REMEMBERED, “the most pleasing moment of my life”—the moment he stepped aboard the whaleship Essex for the first time. He was fourteen years old, with a broad nose and an open, eager face, and like every other Nantucket boy, he’d been taught to “idolize the form of a ship.” The Essex might not look like much, stripped of her rigging and chained to the wharf, but for Thomas Nickerson she was a vessel of opportunity. Finally, after what had seemed an endless wait, Nickerson was going to sea.




It was a scene already familiar to Thomas Nickerson. The children of Nantucket had long used the waterfront as their playground. They rowed decrepit whaleboats up and down the harbor and clambered up into the rigging of the ships. To off-islanders it was clear that these children were a “distinctive class of juveniles, accustomed to consider themselves as predestined mariners. . . . They climbed ratlines like monkeys—little fellows of ten or twelve years—and laid out on the yardarms with the most perfect nonchalance.” The Essex might be Nickerson’s first ship, but he had been preparing for the voyage almost his entire life.

He wasn’t going alone. His friends Barzillai Ray, Owen Coffin, and Charles Ramsdell, all between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, were also sailing on the Essex. Owen Coffin was the cousin of the Essex’s new captain and probably steered his three friends to his kinsman’s ship. Nickerson was the youngest of the group.



NANTUCKET was a town of roof dwellers. Nearly every house, its shingles painted red or left to weather into gray, had a roof-mounted platform known as a walk. While its intended use was to facilitate putting out chimney fires with buckets of sand, the walk was also an excellent place to look out to sea with a spyglass, to search for the sails of returning ships. At night, the spyglasses of Nantucket were often directed toward the heavens, and in July of 1819, islanders were looking toward the northwest sky. The Quaker merchant Obed Macy, who kept meticulous records of what he determined were the “most extraordinary events” in the life of his island, watched the night sky from his house on Pleasant Street. “The comet (which appears every clear night) is thought to be very large from its uncommonly long tail,” he wrote, “which extends upward in opposition to the sun in an almost perpendicular direction and heaves off to the eastward and nearly points for the North Star.”

From earliest times, the appearance of a comet was interpreted as a sign that something unusual was about to happen. The New Bedford Mercury, the newspaper Nantucketers read for lack of one of their own, commented, “True it is, that the appearance of these eccentric visitors have always preceded some remarkable event.” But Macy resisted such speculation: “[T]he philosophical reasoning we leave to the scientific part of the community, still it is beyond a doubt that the most learned is possessed of very little undoubted knowledge of the subject of cometicks.”



Nantucket’s English settlers, who began arriving in 1659, had been mindful of the sea’s dangers. They had hoped to support themselves not as fishermen but as farmers and shepherds on this grassy, pond-speckled crescent without wolves. But as the increasing size of the livestock herds, combined with the growing number of farms, threatened to transform the island into a wind-blown wasteland, Nantucketers inevitably looked seaward.

Every fall, hundreds of right whales appeared to the south of the island and remained until the early spring. So named because they were “the right whale to kill,” right whales grazed the waters off Nantucket much like seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths. While English settlers at Cape Cod and eastern Long Island had already been hunting right whales for decades, no one on Nantucket had had the courage to pursue the whales in boats. Instead they left the harvesting of whales that washed up onto the shore (known as drift whales) to the Wampanoag.

Around 1690, a group of Nantucketers was standing on a hill overlooking the ocean where some whales were spouting and playing with one another. One of the onlookers nodded toward the whales and the ocean beyond. “There,” he asserted, “is a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will go for bread.” In fulfillment of his prophecy, a Cape Codder by the name of Ichabod Paddock was soon thereafter lured across Nantucket Sound to instruct the islanders in the art of killing whales.

Their first boats were only twenty feet long, and they launched them from the beaches along the island’s south shore. Typically a whaleboat’s crew was comprised of five Wampanoag oarsmen, with a single white Nantucketer at the steering oar. Once they’d killed the whale, they towed it back to the beach, where they removed the blubber and boiled it into oil. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, English Nantucketers had instituted a system of debt servitude that provided them with a steady supply of Wampanoag labor. Without the island’s native inhabitants, who outnumbered Nantucket’s white population well into the 1720s, the island would never have become a successful whaling port.

In the year 1712, a Captain Hussey, cruising in his little boat for right whales along Nantucket’s south shore, was blown out to sea in a fierce northerly gale. Many miles out, he glimpsed several whales of a type he had never seen before. Unlike a right whale’s vertical spout, this whale’s spout arched forward. In spite of the high winds and rough seas, Hussey managed to harpoon and kill one of the whales, its blood and oil stilling the waves in an almost biblical fashion. This creature, Hussey quickly realized, was a sperm whale, one of which had washed up on the island’s southwest shore only a few years before. Not only was the oil derived from the sperm whale’s blubber far superior to that of the right whale, providing a brighter and cleaner-burning light, but its block-shaped head contained a vast reservoir of even better oil, called spermaceti, that could be simply ladled into an awaiting cask. (It was spermaceti’s resemblance to seminal fluid that gave rise to the sperm whale’s name.) The sperm whale might be faster and more aggressive than the right whale, but it was far more enriching. With no other means of support, Nantucketers dedicated themselves to the single-minded pursuit of the sperm whale, and they soon outstripped their whaling rivals on the mainland and Long Island.





Nantucket had created an economic system that no longer depended on the island’s natural resources. The island’s soil had long since been exhausted by overfarming. Nantucket’s large Wampanoag population had been reduced to a handful by epidemics, forcing shipowners to look to the mainland for crew. Whales had almost completely disappeared from local waters. And still the Nantucketers prospered. As one visitor observed, the island had become a “barren sandbank, fertilized with whale-oil only.”

THROUGHOUT the seventeenth century, English Nantucketers resisted all attempts to establish a church on the island, partly because a woman by the name of Mary Coffin Starbuck forbade it. It was said that nothing of consequence was done on Nantucket without Mary’s approval. Mary Coffin and Nathaniel Starbuck had been the first English couple to be married on the island, in 1662, and had established a lucrative outpost for trading with the Wampanoag. Whenever an itinerant minister came to Nantucket looking to establish a congregation, he was firmly rebuffed by Mary Starbuck. Then, in 1702, Mary succumbed to a charismatic Quaker minister named John Richardson. Speaking before a group assembled in the Starbucks’ living room, Richardson succeeded in moving Mary to tears. It was Mary Starbuck’s conversion to Quakerism that established the unique fusion of spirituality and covetousness that would make possible Nantucket’s rise as a whaling port.

Quakers or, more properly, members of the Society of Friends, depended on their own experience of God’s presence, the “Inner Light,” for guidance rather than relying on a Puritan minister’s interpretation of scripture. But Nantucket’s ever growing number of Quakers were hardly free-thinking individuals. Friends were expected to conform to rules of behavior determined during yearly meetings, encouraging a sense of community that was as carefully controlled as that of any New England society. If there was a difference, it was the Quaker belief in pacifism and a conscious spurning of worldly ostentation—two principles that were not intended to interfere, in any way, with a person’s ability to make money. Instead of building fancy houses or buying fashionable clothes, Nantucket’s Quakers reinvested their profits in the whale fishery. As a result, they were able to weather the downturns that laid to waste so many mainland whaling merchants, and Mary Starbuck’s children, along with their Macy and Coffin cousins, quickly established a Quaker whaling dynasty.

Nantucketers saw no contradiction between their livelihood and their religion. God Himself had granted them dominion over the fishes of the sea. Peleg Folger, a Nantucket whaleman turned Quaker elder, expressed it in verse:Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale,

That wondrous monster of a mighty length;

Vast is his head and body, vast his tail,

Beyond conception his unmeasured strength.

But, everlasting God, thou dost ordain

That we, poor feeble mortals should engage

(Ourselves, our wives and children to maintain),

This dreadful monster with a martial rage.


THE town that Thomas Nickerson knew had a ramshackle feel about it. All it took was one walk through its narrow sandy streets to discover that despite the stately church towers and the occasional mansion, Nantucket was a far cry from Salem. “The good citizens of [Nantucket] do not seem to pride themselves upon the regularity of their streets [or] the neatness of their sidewalks,” observed a visiting Quaker. The houses were shingled and unpretentious and, as often as not, included items scavenged from ships. “[H]atchways make very convenient bridges for gutters . . . ; a plank from the stern of a ship—having the name on it—answers the double purpose of making a fence—and informing the stranger if he can be at a loss—in what town he is.”

Instead of using the official street names that had been assigned for tax purposes in 1798, Nantucketers spoke of “Elisha Bunker’s street” or “Captain Mitchell’s.” “The inhabitants live together like one great family,” wrote the Nantucketer Walter Folger, who happened to be a part-owner of the Essex, “not in one house, but in friendship. They not only know their nearest neighbors, but each one knows all the rest. If you should wish to see any man, you need but ask the first inhabitant you meet, and he will be able to conduct you to his residence, to tell what occupation he is of, and any other particulars you may wish to know.”

But even within this close-knit familial community, there were distinctions, and Thomas Nickerson was on the outside looking in. The unhappy truth was that while Nickerson’s mother, Rebecca Gibson, was a Nantucketer, his father, Thomas Nickerson, had been from Cape Cod, and Thomas Junior had been born in Harwich in 1805. Six months later, his parents moved him and his sisters across the sound to Nantucket. It was six months too late. Nantucketers took a dim view of off-islanders. They called them “strangers” or, even worse, “coofs,” a term of disparagement originally reserved for Cape Codders but broadened to include all of those unlucky enough to have been born on the mainland.

It might have earned Thomas Nickerson some regard on the island if his mother had at least come from old Nantucket stock, with a last name like Coffin, Starbuck, Macy, Folger, or Gardner. Such was not the case. On an island where many families could claim direct descent from one of the twenty or so “first settlers,” the Gibsons and Nickersons were without the network of cousins that sustained most Nantucketers. “Perhaps there is not another place in the world, of equal magnitude,” said Obed Macy, “where the inhabitants [are] so connected by consanguinity as in this, which add[s] much to the harmony of the people and to their attachment to the place.” Nickerson’s friends and shipmates Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Barzillai Ray could count themselves as part of this group. Thomas might play with them, go to sea with them, but deep down he understood that no matter how hard he might try, he was, at best, only a coof.


On the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets was the Friends’ immense South Meeting House, built in 1792 from pieces of the even bigger Great Meeting House that once loomed over the stoneless field of the Quaker Burial Ground at the end of Main Street. Just because Nickerson had been brought up a Congregationalist didn’t mean he had never been inside this or the other Quaker meetinghouse on Broad Street. One visitor claimed that almost half the people who attended a typical Quaker meeting were not members of the Society of Friends. Earlier that summer, on June 29, Obed Macy recorded that two thousand people (more than a quarter of the island’s population) had attended a public Quaker meeting at the South Meeting House.


On all the beauty there collected

And gaze with wonder while in sessions

On all the various forms and fashions.


What is surprising is how rarely Nantucketers, even young and adventurous Nantucketers like Nickerson and company, strayed beyond the gates of the little town. “As small as [the island] is,” one whale-oil merchant admitted in a letter, “I was never at the extreme east or west, and for some years I dare say have not been one mile from town.” In a world of whales, sea serpents, and ominous signs in the night sky, all Nantucketers, whalemen and landsmen alike, looked to the town as a sanctuary, a fenced-in place of familiar ways and timeless ancestral alliances, a place to call home.


The imprinting of a young Nantucketer began at the earliest age. The first words a baby was taught included the language of the chase—“townor,” for instance, a Wampanoag word meaning that the whale has been sighted for a second time. Bedtime stories told of killing whales and eluding cannibals in the Pacific. One mother approvingly recounted how her nine-year-old son attached a fork to the end of a ball of darning cotton and then proceeded to harpoon the family cat. The mother happened into the room just as the terrified pet attempted to escape, and unsure of what she had found herself in the middle of, she picked up the cotton ball. Like a veteran boatsteerer, the boy shouted, “Pay out, mother! Pay out! There she sounds through the window!”


Instead of toasting a person’s health, a Nantucketer offered invocations of a darker sort:Death to the living,

Long life to the killers,

Success to sailors’ wives

And greasy luck to whalers.


In old age, Nickerson still visited the graves of his parents in the Old North Burial Ground. In 1819, during the last few weeks before his departure aboard the Essex, he undoubtedly made his way to this fenced-in patch of sun-scorched grass and walked among its canted stones. Nickerson’s father had been the first of the parents to die, on November 9, 1806, at the age of thirty-three. His gravestone read:Crush’d as the moth beneath thy hand

We moulder to the dust

Our feeble powers can ne’er withstand

And all our beauty’s lost.


How soon the bubble’s broke

Adam and all his numerous race

Are Vanity and Smoke.

Nickerson, who was raised by his grandparents, wasn’t the only orphan aboard the Essex. His friend Barzillai Ray had also lost both his parents. Owen Coffin and Charles Ramsdell had each lost a father. This may have been their closest bond: each of them, like so many Nantucketers, was a fatherless child for whom a ship’s officer would be much more than a demanding taskmaster; he would be, quite possibly, the first male authority figure the boys had ever known.

PERHAPS no community before or since has been so divided by its commitment to work. For a whaleman and his family, it was a punishing regimen: two to three years away, three to four months at home. With their men gone for so long, Nantucket’s women were obliged not only to raise the children but also to run many of the island’s businesses. It was largely the women who maintained the complex web of personal and commercial relationships that kept the community functioning. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, whose classic Letters from an American Farmer describes his lengthy stay on the island a few years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, suggested that the Nantucket women’s “prudence and good management . . . justly entitles them to a rank superior to that of other wives.”

Quakerism contributed to the women’s strength. In its emphasis on the spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes, the religion fostered an attitude that was in keeping with what all Nantucketers saw plainly demonstrated to them every day: that women, who on Nantucket tended to be better educated than the island’s men, were just as intelligent, just as capable as their male counterparts.


Some of the Nantucket wives adapted quite well to the three-years-away, three-months-at-home rhythm of the whale fishery. The islander Eliza Brock recorded in her journal what she called the “Nantucket Girl’s Song”:Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea,



For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace,


Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh.



The mantle of power and responsibility settled upon the Nantucket woman’s shoulders on her wedding day. “[N]o sooner have they undergone this ceremony,” said Crèvecoeur, “than they cease to appear so cheerful and gay; the new rank they hold in the society impresses them with more serious ideas than were entertained before.. . . [T]he new wife . . . gradually advises and directs [the household]; the new husband soon goes to sea; he leaves her to learn and exercise the new government in which she is entered.”

To the undying outrage of subsequent generations of Nantucket loyalists, Crèvecoeur claimed that many of the island’s women had developed an addiction to opium: “They have adopted these many years the Asiatic custom of taking a dose of opium every morning, and so deeply rooted is it that they would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence.” Why they took the drug is perhaps impossible to determine from this distance in time. Still, the portrait that emerges—of a community of achievers attempting to cope with a potentially devastating loneliness—makes the women’s dependence on opium perhaps easier to understand. The ready availability of the drug on the island (opium was included in every whaleship’s medical chest) combined with the inhabitants’ wealth may also help to explain why the drug was so widely used in Nantucket.


THOMAS Nickerson may have enjoyed his first moments aboard the Essex, exploring her dark, hot interior, but the thrill was soon over. For the next three weeks, during the warmest summer anyone could remember, Nickerson and the gradually accumulating crew of the Essex labored to prepare the ship. Even in winter, Nantucket’s wharves, topped by a layer of oil-soaked sand, stank to the point that people said you didn’t see Nantucket when you first rounded the lighthouse at Brant Point, you smelled it. That July and August the stench rising from the wharf must have been pungent enough to gag even a veteran whaleman.

At that time on Nantucket it was standard practice to have the newly signed members of a whaleship’s crew help prepare the vessel for the upcoming voyage. Nowhere else in New England was a sailor expected to help rig and provision his ship. That was what riggers, stevedores, and provisioners were for. But on Nantucket, whose Quaker merchants were famous for their ability to cut costs and increase profits, a different standard prevailed.

Whalemen did not work for wages; they were paid a share, or lay—a predetermined portion of the total take—at the end of the voyage. This meant that whatever work a shipowner could extract from a sailor prior to a voyage was, in essence, free or, to Nickerson’s mind, “a donation of . . . labor” on the part of the sailor. A shipowner might advance a seaman some money to help him purchase the clothing and equipment necessary for the voyage, but it was deducted (with interest) from his lay at the conclusion of the voyage.

As cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson had what was known as a very “long” (or meager) lay. Although the ship papers from the Essex’s 1819 voyage have vanished, we know that Nickerson’s predecessor, the cabin boy Joseph Underwood of Salem, received a 1/198 lay for the previous voyage. Given that the Essex’s cargo of 1,200 barrels of sperm oil sold for about $26,500, Underwood was paid, once the expenses of the voyage were deducted from the gross and his personal expenses were deducted from his own portion, a grand total of about a $150 for two years’ work. Although this was a pitiful wage, the cabin boy had been provided with room and board for two years and now had the experience to begin a career as a whaleman.

By the end of July, the Essex’s upper works—just about everything at deck level and above—had been completely rebuilt, including a new layer of pine decking and a cookhouse. At some point—probably before Nickerson joined the crew—the Essex was laid over on her side for coppering. Immense block-and-tackle systems were strung from the ship’s masts to the wharf to haul the ship onto her side. The exposed bottom was then sheathed in copper to protect the ship from marine growth, which could turn her four-inch-thick oak hull planking into a soft, porous veneer.


The ever lengthening voyages around Cape Horn were another concern. “The ship[s] being so long at sea without much repairs,” Obed Macy would write in his journal, “must shorten the durations of the ships [by] many years.” Indeed, the Essex had undergone several days of repairs in South America during her previous voyage. She was an old ship caught up in a new era of whaling, and no one knew how much longer she would last.

Owners were always reluctant to invest any more money in the repair of a ship than was absolutely necessary. While they had no choice but to rebuild the Essex’s upperworks, there could well have been suspicious areas below the waterline that they chose to address at a later time, if not ignore. That summer, the Essex’s principal owners, Gideon Folger and Sons, were awaiting delivery of a new, much larger whaleship, the Aurora. This was not the year to spend an inordinate amount of money on a tired old vessel like the Essex.

NANTUCKET’S shipowners could be as fierce in their own bloodless way as any whaleman. They might “act the Quaker,” but that didn’t keep them from pursuing profits with a lethal enthusiasm.

In Moby-Dick, one of the Pequod’s owners is Bildad, a pious Quaker whose religious scruples do not prevent him from extorting cruelly long lays from the crew (he offers Ishmael a 1/777 lay!). With his Bible in one hand and ledgerbook in the other, Bildad resembles a lean, Quakerly John D. Rockefeller, his mind and soul devoted to the cold calculus of making a whaling voyage pay.

There were some observers who claimed that, rather than leading the islanders to prosperity and grace, Quakerism was at the root of whatever evil flourished in the sharp business practices of Nantucket’s shipowners. According to William Comstock, who penned an account of a whaling cruise from Nantucket in the 1820s, “Unfortunately, the anger which [the Quakers] are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart, and, while they make professions of love and good will . . . , the rancor and intense malevolence of their feelings poisons every generous spring of human kindness.”

Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, two major shareholders in the Essex, were prominent members of the island’s Quaker upper class. Yet, according to Nickerson, Macy, in charge of outfitting the Essex that summer of 1819, attempted to cut costs by severely underprovisioning the ship. In this practice he was not alone. “[T]he owners of whale-ships too frequently neglect to victual their ships properly,” Comstock wrote, “depending on the Captain to stint his crew in proportion to his means, by which a few dollars are saved to the rich owners, while the poor hard laboring sailor famishes with hunger.” While it would be unfair to point to Paul Macy as responsible, even in part, for the grief that eventually awaited the men of the Essex, the first step toward that future began with Macy’s decision to save a little money in beef and hardtack.

On Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, people didn’t invest in bonds or the stock market, but rather in whaleships. By purchasing shares in several ships rather than putting their money in a single vessel, islanders spread both the risk and the reward throughout the community. Agents such as Macy and Folger could expect a total return on their whaling investments of somewhere between 28 and 44 percent per year.

Making this level of profitability all the more remarkable was the state of the world’s economy in 1819. As Nantucket continued to add ship after ship to her fleet, mainland businesses were collapsing by the hundreds. Claiming that the “days of our fictitious affluence is past,” a Baltimore newspaper reported that spring on “dishonored credits, deserted dwellings, inactive streets, declining commerce, and exhausted coffers.” Nantucket remained an astonishing exception. Just as its isolated situation many miles out to sea enabled it to enjoy the warming influence of the Gulf Stream (providing for the longest growing season in the region), Nantucket existed, at least for the time being, in its own benign climate of prosperity.

Between July 4 and July 23, ten whaleships left the island, most heading out in pairs. The wharves were busy with laborers long into the night, all caught up in the disciplined frenzy of preparing whale-ships for sea. But Gideon Folger, Paul Macy, and the Essex’s captain, George Pollard, knew that all the preparations would be for naught if they couldn’t find a crew of twenty-one men.

Since there were only so many Nantucketers to go around, shipowners relied on off-islanders with no previous sailing experience, known as “green hands,” to man their vessels. Many came from nearby Cape Cod. Shipping agents in cities up and down the East Coast also provided the owners with green hands, often sending them to Nantucket in groups aboard packet ships.

A green hand’s first impression of the island was seldom positive. The young boys loitering on the waterfront inevitably harassed the new arrivals with the cry “See the greenies, come to go ileing.” (“Oil” was pronounced “ile” on Nantucket.) Then followed a walk from Straight Wharf to the base of Main Street, where a clothing and dry goods store served as the “grand resort and rendezvous of seafaring men.” Here men looking for a berth or just killing time (known as “watching the pass” on Nantucket) spent the day in a haze of tobacco smoke, lounging on an assortment of benches and wooden boxes.

On this island of perpetual motion, job-seeking seamen were expected to whittle. It was the way a man whittled that let people know what kind of berth he expected. A whaleman with at least one voyage under his belt knew enough to draw his knife always away from him. This signaled that he was looking for a boatsteerer’s berth. Boatsteerers, on the other hand, whittled in the opposite direction, toward themselves; this indicated that they believed they were ready to become a mate. Not knowing the secret codes that Nantucketers had developed, a green hand simply whittled as best he knew how.

Many of the green hands felt as if they had found themselves in a foreign country where the people spoke a different language. All Nantucketers, even the women and little children, used nautical terms as if they were able-bodied seamen. According to one visitor, “Every child can tell which way the wind blows, and any old woman in the street will talk of cruising about, hailing an old messmate, or making one bring to, as familiarly as the captain of a whaleship, just arrived from the northwest coast, will describe dimension to a landlubber by the span of his jibboom, or the length of his mainstay.” For the green hands, whose first taste of the sea may have been on the packet ship to Nantucket, it was all a bewildering blur, particularly since many of the islanders also employed the distinctive “thee and thou” phrasing of the Quakers.

Compounding the confusion was the Nantucketers’ accent. It wasn’t just “ile” for “oil”; there was a host of peculiar pronunciations, many of which varied markedly from what was found even as nearby as Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard. A Nantucket whaleman kept his clothing in a “chist.” His harpoons were kept “shurp,” especially when “atteking” a “lirge” whale. A “keppin” had his own “kebbin” and was more often than not a “merrid” man, while a “met” kept the ship’s log for the entire “viege.”

Then there were all these strange phrases that a Nantucketer used. If he bungled a job, it was a “foopaw,” an apparent corruption of the French faux pas that dated back to the days after the Revolution when Nantucketers established a whaling operation in Dunkirk, France. A Nantucketer didn’t just go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, he went on a “rantum scoot,” which meant an excursion with no definite destination. Fancy victuals were known as “manavelins.” If someone was cross-eyed, he was “born in the middle of the week and looking both ways for Sunday.”

Green hands were typically subjected to what one man remembered as “a sort of examination” by both the shipowner and the captain. Recalled another, “We were catechized, in brief, concerning our nativity and previous occupation, and the build and physical points of each were looked to, not forgetting the eyes, for a sharp-sighted man was a jewel in the estimation of the genuine whaling captain.” Some green hands were so naive and poorly educated that they insisted on the longest lay possible, erroneously thinking that the higher number meant higher pay. The owners were all too willing to grant their wishes.

Whaling captains competed with one another for men. But, as with everything on Nantucket, there were specific rules to which everyone had to adhere. Since first-time captains were expected to defer to all others, the only men available to Captain Pollard of the Essex would have been those in whom no one else had an interest. By the end of July, Pollard and the owners were still short by more than half a dozen men.

ON AUGUST 4, Obed Macy stopped by the Marine Insurance Company at the corner of Main and Federal Streets to look at the thermometer mounted on its shingled exterior. In his journal he recorded, “93 degrees and very little wind, which has rendered it almost insupportable to be exposed to the rays of the sun.”

The next day, August 5, the fully rigged Essex was floated over the Nantucket Bar into deep water. Now the loading could begin in earnest, and a series of smaller craft called lighters began ferrying goods from the wharf to the ship. First to be stowed were the ground-tier casks—large, iron-hooped containers each capable of holding 268 gallons of whale oil. They were filled with seawater to keep them swollen and tight. On top of these were stowed casks of various sizes filled with freshwater. Firewood took up a great deal of space, as did the thousands of shooks, or packed bundles of staves, which would be used by the ship’s cooper to create more oil casks. On top of that was enough food, all stored in casks, to last two and a half years. If the men were fed the same amount as merchant seamen (which is perhaps assuming too much when it came to a Nantucket whaler), the Essex would have contained at least fourteen tons of meat (salt beef and pork), more than eight tons of bread, and thousands of gallons of freshwater. Then there were massive amounts of whaling equipment (harpoons, lances, etc.), as well as clothing, charts, sails (including at least one spare set), navigational instruments, medicine, rum, gin, lumber, and so on. In addition to the three newly painted whaleboats that were suspended from the ship’s davits, there were at least two spare boats: one stored upside down on a rack over the quarterdeck, another mounted on spare spars that projected over the stern.

By the time the men were done loading the Essex six days later—their labors briefly interrupted by a tremendous shower of rain duly noted by Obed Macy on August 9—the ship was almost as heavily laden as it would be with whale oil on her return to Nantucket. Explained one Nantucketer, “[T]he gradual consumption of provisions and stores keeps pace with the gradual accumulation of oil . . . , and a whaleship is always full, or nearly so, all the voyage.”

Something, however, was still missing: the men needed to fill the seven empty berths in the Essex’s forecastle. At some point, Gideon Folger put out the call to an agent in Boston for as many black sailors as the agent could find.

ALTHOUGH he wasn’t black, Addison Pratt came to Nantucket under circumstances similar to the ones that brought seven African Americans to the island and to service on the Essex. In 1820, Pratt found himself in Boston, looking for a ship:I soon commenced hunting for a voyage, but it was dull times with commerce as seamen’s wages were but ten dollars per month, and there were more sailors than ships in port, and I found it dull times for green hands. But after looking around for a few days I heard there were hands wanted to go on a whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. I made no delay, but hastened to the office and put down my name and received twelve dollars of advance money, which I laid out in sea clothes. . . . Six more hands were shipped for the same vessel, and we were all sent on board of a packet bound to Nantucket.

As Pratt’s account suggests, a whaling voyage was the lowest rung on the maritime ladder for a seaman. Nantucketers like Thomas Nickerson and his friends might look to their first voyage as a necessary step in the beginning of a long and profitable career. But for the men who were typically rounded up by shipping agents in cities such as Boston, it was a different story. Instead of the beginning of something, shipping out on a whaling voyage was often a last and desperate resort.

The seven black sailors who agreed to sign on for a voyage aboard the Essex—Samuel Reed, Richard Peterson, Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, William Bond, and Henry De Witt—had even fewer choices than Addison Pratt would in 1820. None of their names appear in Boston or New York directories from this period, indicating that they were not landowners. Whether or not they called Boston home, most of them had probably spent more than a few nights in the boardinghouses in the waterfront area of the North End of the city—a place notorious as a gathering place for itinerant seamen, black and white, looking for a berth.

As they boarded the packet for Nantucket, the seven African Americans knew at least one thing: they might not be paid well for their time aboard a Nantucket whaler, but they were assured of being paid no less than a white person with the same qualifications. Since the time when Native Americans had made up the majority of Nantucket’s labor force, the island’s shipowners had always paid men according to their rank, not their color. Some of this had to do with the Quakers’ antislavery leanings, but much of it also had to do with the harsh realities of shipboard life. In a tight spot, a captain didn’t care if a seaman was white or black; he just wanted to know he could count on the man to complete his appointed task.

Still, black sailors who were delivered to the island as green hands were never regarded as equals by Nantucketers. In 1807, a visitor to the island reported:[T]he Indians having disappeared, Negroes are now substituted in their place. Seamen of color are more submissive than the whites; but as they are more addicted to frolicking, it is difficult to get them aboard the ship, when it is about to sail, and to keep them aboard, after it has arrived. The Negroes, though they are to be prized for their habits of obedience, are not as intelligent as the Indians; and none of them attain the rank of [boatsteerer or mate].

It wasn’t lofty social ideals that brought black sailors to this Quaker island, but rather the whale fishery’s insatiable and often exploitative hunger for labor. “[A]n African is treated like a brute by the officers of their ship,” reported William Comstock, who had much to say about the evils of Nantucket’s Quaker shipowners. “Should these pages fall into the hands of any of my colored brethren, let me advise them to fly Nantucket as they would the Norway Maelstrom.” Even Nickerson admitted that Nantucket whaling captains had a reputation as “Negro drivers.” Significantly, Nantucketers referred to the packet that delivered green hands from New York City as the “Slaver.”

BY THE evening of Wednesday, August 11, all save for Captain Pollard were safely aboard the Essex. Anchored beside her, just off the Nantucket Bar, was another whaleship, the Chili. Commanded by Absalom Coffin, the Chili was also to leave the following day. It was an opportunity for what whalemen referred to as a “gam”—a visit between two ships’ crews. Without the captains to inhibit the revelry (and with the Bar between them and town), they may have seized this chance for a final, uproarious fling before the grinding discipline of shipboard life took control of their lives.

At some point that evening, Thomas Nickerson made his way down to his bunk and its mattress full of mildewed corn husks. As he faded off to sleep on the gently rocking ship, he surely felt what one young whaleman described as a great, almost overwhelming “pride in my floating home.”

That night he was probably unaware of the latest bit of gossip circulating through town—of the strange goings-on out on the Commons. Swarms of grasshoppers had begun to appear in the turnip fields. “[T]he whole face of the earth has been spotted with them . . . ,” Obed Macy would write. “[N]o person living ever knew them so numerous.” A comet in July and now a plague of locusts?

As it turned out, things would end up badly for the two ships anchored off the Nantucket Bar on the evening of August 11, 1819. The Chili would not return for another three and a half years, and then with only five hundred barrels of sperm oil, about a quarter of what was needed to fill a ship her size. For Captain Coffin and his men, it would be a disastrous voyage.

But nothing could compare to what fate had in store for the twenty-one men of the Essex.



ON THE MORNING of Thursday, August 12, 1819, a harbor vessel delivered Captain George Pollard, Jr., to the Essex. At twenty-eight, Pollard was a young, but not spectacularly young, first-time captain. Over the last four years he had spent all but seven months aboard the Essex, as second mate and then first mate. Except for her former captain, Daniel Russell, no one knew this ship better than George Pollard.

Pollard carried a letter from the Essex’s principal owners telling the new captain, in spare, direct prose, exactly what was expected of him. His predecessor, Daniel Russell, had received a similar letter prior to an earlier voyage. It had read:Respected Friend,

As thou art master of the Ship Essex now lying without the bar at anchor, our orders are, that thou shouldst proceed to sea the first fair wind and proceed for the Pacifick Ocean, and endeavour to obtain a load of Sperm Oil and when accomplished to make the best dispatch for this place. Thou art forbidden to hold any illicit trade. Thou art forbidden to carry on thyself or to suffer any person belonging to the ship Essex to carry on any trade except it should be necessary for the preservation of the ship Essex or her crew: wishing thee a short and prosperous voyage, with a full portion of happiness we remain thy friends.

In behalf of the owners of the ship Essex,

Gideon Folger, Paul Macy

Pollard felt the full weight of the owners’ expectations. He was thinking not only about the voyage ahead but also about what he was leaving behind. Just two months before, he and nineteen-year-old Mary Riddell had been married in the Second Congregational Church, of which Mary’s father, a well-to-do merchant and ropemaker was a deacon.

As he scrambled up the Essex’s side, then made his way aft to the quarterdeck, Captain Pollard knew that the entire town was watching him and his men. All summer, ships had been leaving the island, sometimes as many as four or five a week, but with the departure of the Essex and the Chili, there would be a lull of about a month or so before another whaleship would depart. For the entertainment-starved inhabitants of Nantucket, this would be it for a while.

Leaving the island was difficult aboard any whaleship, since most of the crew had no idea of what they were doing. It could be an agony of embarrassment for a captain, as the green hands bumbled their way around the deck or clung white-knuckled to the spars. The whole affair was carried out in the knowledge that the town’s old salts and, of course, the owners were watching and criticizing from the shade of the windmills up on Mill Hill.

With, perhaps, a nervous glance townward, Captain George Pollard gave the order to prepare the ship for weighing the anchors.

A WHALESHIP , even a small and old whaleship, was a complex and sophisticated piece of equipment. The Essex had three masts and a bowsprit. To the mast were fastened a multitude of horizontal spars known as yards, from which the rectangular sails were set. There was so much cordage, dedicated to either supporting the spars or controlling the sails (more than twenty in number), that, from the perspective of a green hand staring up from the deck, the Essex looked like the web of a giant rope-spinning spider.

That each one of these pieces of rope had a name was plainly laughable to a green hand. How could anyone, even after a three-year voyage, pretend to have any idea of what went where? For young Nantucketers such as Nickerson and his friends, it was particularly devastating since they had begun this adventure assuming they knew much more than they apparently did. “[A]ll was bustle, confusion and awkwardness, that is, on the part of the crew,” Nickerson remembered. “The officers were smart active men and were no doubt . . . piqued at having such a display of awkwardness in full view of their native town.”

Since he was required by custom to remain stationed at the quarterdeck, Pollard was all but powerless before this clumsy display. Doing his best to apply some method to the madness was the first mate, Owen Chase, stationed in the forward part of the deck. It was his duty to implement Pollard’s orders, and he shouted and cajoled the men as if every hesitation or mistake on their part were a personal insult.

Pollard and Chase had been together aboard the Essex since 1815, when Chase, at eighteen, had signed on as a common sailor. Chase had moved quickly through the ranks. By the next voyage he was a boat-steerer, and now, at only twenty-two, he was the first mate. (Matthew Joy, the Essex’s second mate, was four years older than Chase.) If all went well during this voyage, Chase would have a good chance of becoming a captain before he was twenty-five.

At five feet ten, Chase was tall for the early nineteenth century; he towered over Captain Pollard, a small man with a tendency toward stoutness. While Pollard’s father was also a captain, Chase’s father was a farmer. Perhaps because his father was a farmer on an island where seagoing men got all the glory, Chase was fired with more than the usual amount of ambition and, as he started his third voyage, he made no secret of his impatience to become a captain. “Two voyages are generally considered sufficient to qualify an active and intelligent young man for command,” he would write, “in which time, he learns from experience, and the examples which are set him, all that is necessary to be known.” He was six years younger than Captain Pollard, but Chase felt he had already mastered everything he needed to know to perform Pollard’s job. The first mate’s cocksure attitude would make it difficult for Pollard, a first-time captain just emerging from the long shadow of a respected predecessor, to assert his own style of command.

As the crew assembled spare hawsers and rope in preparation for weighing the anchor, Chase made sure everything was secured about the deck. Then he ordered the men to the windlass, a long, horizontally mounted wooden cylinder with a double row of holes at each end. Positioned just forward of the forecastle hatch, the windlass provided the mechanical advantage required to do the heavy lifting aboard the ship. Eight men were stationed at the two ends, four aft, four forward, each holding a wooden handspike.

Working the windlass in a coordinated fashion was as challenging as it was backbreaking. “To perform this the sailors must . . . give a sudden jerk at the same instant,” went one account, “in which movement they are regulated by a sort of song or howl pronounced by one of their number.”

Once the men had pulled the slack out of the anchor cable, or hove short, it was time for crew members who had been positioned aloft to loosen the sails from their ties. Pollard then ordered Chase (whom, in accordance with custom, he always addressed as “Mr. Chase”) to heave up the anchor and to let him know when it was aweigh. Now the real work began—a process, given the rawness of the Essex’s crew, that probably took an excruciatingly long time to perform: inching the huge, mud-dripping anchor up to the bow. Eventually, however, the anchor was lashed to the bulwarks, with the ring at the end of its shank secured to a projecting timber known as a cathead.

Now Pollard’s and Chase’s public agony began in earnest. There were additional sails to be set in the gradually building southwesterly breeze. A crack crew would have had all the canvas flying in an instant. In the Essex’s case, it wasn’t until they had sailed completely around Great Point—more than nine miles from where they’d weighed anchor—that the upper, or topgallant, sails were, according to Nickerson, “set and all sails trimmed in the breeze.” All the while, Pollard and his officers knew that the town’s spyglasses had been following them for each and every awful moment.

As cabin boy, Nickerson had to sweep the decks and coil any stray lines. When he paused for a few seconds to watch his beloved island fade from view behind them, he was accosted by the first mate, who in addition to cuffing him about the ears, snarled, “You boy, Tom, bring back your broom here and sweep clean. The next time I have to speak to you, your hide shall pay for it, my lad!”

Nickerson and his Nantucket friends may have thought they knew Chase prior to their departure, but they now realized that, as another young Nantucketer had discovered, “at sea, things appear different.” The mate of a Nantucket whaleship routinely underwent an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he left his island home, stepping out of his mild Quaker skin to become a vociferous martinet. “You will often hear a Nantucket mother boast that her son ‘who is met of a ship is a real spit-fire,’” William Comstock wrote, “meaning that he is a cruel tyrant, which on that island is considered the very acme of human perfection.”

And so Nickerson saw Owen Chase change from a perfectly reasonable young man with a new wife named Peggy to a bully who had no qualms about using force to obtain obedience and who swore in a manner that shocked these boys who had been brought up, for the most part, by their mothers and grandmothers. “[A]lthough but a few hours before I had been so eager to go [on] this voyage,” Nickerson remembered, “there [now] seemed a sudden gloom to spread over me. A not very pleasing prospect [was] truly before me, that of a long voyage and a hard overseer. This to a boy of my years who had never been used to hear such language or threats before.”


THAT evening the men were divided into two shifts, or watches. With the exception of the “idlers”—those such as the cook, steward, and cooper (or barrel maker), who worked in the day and slept at night—all the men served alternating four-hour stints on deck. Like children picking teams on a playground, the mate and second mate took turns choosing the men who would serve in their watches. “[T]he first step taken by the officers,” said William Comstock, “is, to discover who are natives of the island, and who are strangers. The honor of being a Roman citizen was not, in days of yore, so enviable a distinction, as it is on board one of these ships, to be a native of that sand bank, yclept Nantucket.” Once the Nantucketers had all been picked (with Nickerson taken by Chase), the mates chose among the Cape Codders and the blacks.

Next came the choice of oarsmen for the whaleboats, a contest that involved both mates and also Captain Pollard, who headed up his own boat. Since these were the men with whom a mate or a captain was going into battle, he took the selection of the whaleboat crew very seriously. “[T]here was much competition among the officers,” a whaleman remembered, “and evidently some anxiety, with a little ill-concealed jealousy of feeling.”

Once again, each officer attempted to man his boat with as many fellow Nantucketers as he could. Nickerson found himself on Chase’s boat, with the Nantucketer Benjamin Lawrence as a boatsteerer. Nickerson’s friend (and the captain’s cousin) Owen Coffin was assigned to Pollard’s boat along with several other Nantucketers. Matthew Joy, who as second mate was the lowest-ranking officer, was left without a single islander on his boat. The three remaining men not chosen as oarsmen became the Essex’s shipkeepers. It was their duty to handle the Essex when whales were being hunted.

The first day of a whaling voyage included yet another ritual—the captain’s speech to the crew. The tradition was said to date back to when Noah first closed the doors of the ark, and was the way the captain officially introduced himself. It was a performance that all aboard the ship—officers and green hands alike—attended with great interest.

As soon as Pollard began to speak, Nickerson was impressed by the difference between the captain and the first mate. Instead of shouting and cursing at the men, Pollard spoke “without overbearing display or ungentleman-like language.” He simply stated that the success of the voyage would depend on the crew and that the officers should be strictly obeyed. Any sailor who willfully disregarded an order, Pollard told them, would have to answer not just to the officers but to him. He then dismissed the men with the words “Set the watch, Mr. Chase.”

THE men of the Essex ate and slept in three different areas: the captain’s and mates’ cabins, in the aft portion of the ship; steerage, where the boatsteerers and young Nantucketers lived, just forward of the officers; and the forecastle—the cramped, poorly lit quarters in the extreme forward part of the vessel, separated from steerage by the blubber room. The divide between the forecastle and the other living quarters was not just physical but also racial. According to Addison Pratt, a green hand on a Nantucket ship in 1820, the forecastle was “filled with darkies” while the white sailors who weren’t officers lived in steerage. Reflecting the prejudices typical of a Nantucket whaleman, Thomas Nickerson considered himself “fortunate indeed to escape being so closely penned up with so large a number of blacks” in the Essex’s forecastle.

But the forecastle had its merits. Its isolation (the only way to enter it was from a hatchway in the deck) meant that its occupants could create their own world. When he sailed on a merchant voyage in the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, preferred the camaraderie of the forecastle to steerage, where “[y]ou are immediately under the eye of the officers, cannot dance, sing, play, smoke, make a noise, or growl [i.e., complain], or take an other sailor’s pleasure.” In the forecastle the African American sailors indulged in the ancient seafaring tradition of “yarning”—swapping stories about passages, shipmates, and wrecks, along with other tales of the sea. They danced and sang songs, often accompanied by a fiddle; they prayed to their God; and, in keeping with yet another oceangoing tradition, they second-guessed the captain and his officers.

Cross-section of the Whaleship Essex

BY THE following morning, many of the green hands found themselves in the throes of seasickness, “rolling and tumbling about the decks almost ready . . . to die or be cast in to the sea,” Nickerson remembered. Nantucketers had what they considered a sure-fire cure for seasickness, a treatment that more delicate mortals might have considered even worse than the malady. The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.

Chase was not about to coddle his queasy crew. That morning at eight bells sharp, he ordered all hands to clear the decks and prepare the ship for whaling. Even though the whale population in the waters to the southeast of the island along the edges of the Gulf Stream had been greatly diminished over the years, it was still quite possible to come across what Nantucketers called a shoal of sperm whales. Woe to the crew that was not ready when a whale was sighted.

But for a whale to be sighted, a lookout had to be positioned aloft—not a pleasing prospect for a crew of seasick green hands. Every man was expected to climb to the head of the mainmast and spend two hours in search of whales. Some of the men were so weak from vomiting that they doubted they had the strength to hold on to a pitching spar for two hours. One of them, Nickerson said, even went so far as to protest that it was “altogether absurd and unreasonable” to expect them to look for whales, and that he, for one, “should not go, and he hoped the captain would not expect it of him.”

The fact that this unnamed sailor specifically mentioned the captain instead of the first mate suggests that he was Pollard’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Owen Coffin. Miserable and genuinely fearful for his life, Coffin may have made a desperate, ill-advised appeal to his kinsman for a reprieve from the first mate’s discipline. But it was futile. According to Nickerson, whose narrative is not without irony, there followed a few “soft words” from the officers, along with “some little challenging of their spirits,” and it wasn’t long before all the green hands had taken a turn at the masthead.

LIKE a skier traversing the face of a mountain, a Nantucket whaleship took an indirect route toward Cape Horn, a course determined by the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean. First, pushed by the westerlies, the ship sailed south and east toward Europe and Africa. There she picked up winds called the northeast trades, which took her back across the ocean again, in the direction of South America. After crossing the equator in an often airless region known as the doldrums, she worked her way south and west through the southeast trades into an area of variable winds. Then she encountered the band of westerlies that could make rounding the Horn so difficult.

On the first leg of this southern slide down the Atlantic, there were provisioning stops at the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, where vegetables and livestock could be purchased for much less than they cost on Nantucket. These stops also gave the whalemen the opportunity to ship back any oil they might have obtained during their cruise across the Atlantic.

On August 15, three days out of Nantucket, the Essex was making good time toward the Azores, with the wind out of the southwest, coming directly over her starboard side, or beam. Having left Nantucket late in the season, the officers hoped to make up lost time. As usual, three topgallant sails were pulling from the upper yards, but on this day the Essex also carried at least one studding sail, a rectangle of canvas mounted on a special spar temporarily fitted to the end of the fore topsail yard.

Whaleships rarely set their studding sails, especially when they were in a region where whales might be sighted. Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry. Use of the studding sails meant that a captain wanted to wring the last possible quarter knot of speed from his ship. The sails were difficult to set and even harder to take down, especially with an inexperienced crew. Since the sails’ booms projected out beyond the yards, there was a danger of dipping them into the water if the ship should begin to roll from side to side. For a whaleship full of green hands to approach the often tempestuous waters of the Gulf Stream with her studding sails flying indicated an aggressive, if not foolhardy, attitude on the part of her commander.

With the extra sail area catching the wind, the Essex was moving well, probably at six to eight knots. The lookout spotted a ship ahead. Pollard ordered the helmsman to steer for her, and soon the Essex had caught up to what proved to be the whaleship Midas, five days out of New Bedford. Captain Pollard and the captain of the Midas exchanged shouted pleasantries, along with estimates of their longitude, and the Essex was soon pulling ahead, her entire crew undoubtedly enjoying the fact that their ship had proved to be what Nickerson called “the fastest sailor of the two.”

Later that day, the weather began to deteriorate. Clouds moved into the sky, and it grew suspiciously dark to the southwest. “The sea became very rough,” Nickerson remembered, “which caused the ship to roll and tumble heavily.” A storm seemed imminent, but the Essex “continued to carry a press of sail throughout the night and [the officers] had no cause to disturb the hands except for their respective watches.”

By the next morning they were in the Gulf Stream, and it was raining steadily. Nantucketers knew this eerily warm ocean current better than perhaps any other group of mariners. In the eighteenth century they had hunted sperm whales along its margins from Carolina to Bermuda. In 1786, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother, Abiah Folger, had been born on Nantucket, had used knowledge gleaned from his Nantucket “cousin,” whaling captain Timothy Folger, to create the first chart of the Gulf Stream.

Many considerations, both nautical and psychological, went into a decision to shorten sail. No captain wanted to be needlessly timid, yet taking unnecessary risks, especially at the beginning of a voyage that might last as long as three years, was unwise. At some point the conditions became so rough that Pollard elected to take in the fore and mizzen topgallant sails yet to leave flying the main topgallant and also the studding sails, usually the first sails taken down in worsening weather. Pollard may have wanted to see how the Essex performed when pushed to the limit. They sailed on, refusing to back down.

ACCORDING to Chase, they could see it coming: a large black cloud rushing toward them from the southwest. Now was surely the time to shorten sail. But once again they waited, deciding the cloud was an inconsequential gust. They would ride it out. As Chase would later admit, they “miscalculated altogether as to the strength and violence of it.”

In delaying, even for a second, shortening sail in the face of an approaching squall, Pollard was now flaunting his disregard of traditional seafaring wisdom. The officers of the British Navy had a maxim: “never to be overtaken unprepared by [a squall], as never to be surprised by an enemy.” It was said that the sharper and more defined the storm cloud, the worse the wind; thunder and lightning were also bad signs. When jagged streaks of lightning began to crackle out of the forbidding black sky and thunder boomed, Pollard finally began to issue orders. But it was too late.

In the face of an approaching squall, there were two options: either to point the ship into the oncoming wind, to relieve the pressure on the sails by letting them luff, or to turn almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction, away from the wind, and let the storm blow the ship with it. This relieved the pressure on the forward sails as they became partially becalmed in the shelter of the after ones. In the merchant service, in which ships were typically undermanned, some captains favored heading into the wind—what they called luffing through a squall—in part because heading up is the natural tendency of a sailing ship in a gust. Most captains, however, favored turning away from the wind—a strategy that required them to anticipate the arrival of the squall as the crew shortened the upper and aft sails. To attempt to bear away from the wind in the last few seconds before being struck by a squall was held to show “a poor appreciation of the squall, or a lack of watchfulness.”

This was precisely what happened to the Essex. As the squall approached, the helmsman was ordered to turn away from the direction of the wind and “run before it.” Unfortunately it took time for a ship the size of the Essex to respond to her rudder. When the gust slammed into the ship, she had just begun to turn and was sideways to the wind—the worst possible position.

For the green hands, the sound alone was terrifying: the shrieking of the wind across the rigging and then a frenzied flapping of sails and creaking of the stays and masts. The Essex began to lurch to leeward—slowly at first, the ponderous weight of the ship’s keel and ballast, not to mention the tons of stores stowed in her hold, refusing at first to yield, but then, as the wind increased, the ship inevitably succumbed to the merciless pressure of the wind.

When a ship is heeled over by forty-five degrees or more, her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw. No matter how much he weighs, if the end of the seesaw on the other side of the pivot point is long enough, it becomes a lever that will eventually lift him up into the air as the distant tip of the seesaw settles softly to the ground. In the case of the Essex, the masts and their wind-pressed sails became levers prying the hull toward the point of no return, forcing it over until the tips of the yards were buried in the water. The Essex had been rolled almost ninety degrees onto her side—knocked over on her “beam-ends,” in the language of the sea.

Those on deck clung to the nearest fixture, fearful that they might fall down into the lee scuppers, now under knee-deep water. Those below deck did their best to shield themselves from objects falling down around them. If he hadn’t abandoned it already, the ship’s cook was doing his best to scramble out of the cookhouse, the heavy stove and cookware threatening to burst through its frail wooden sides. The two whaleboats on the Essex’s port side had disappeared beneath the waves, pressed underwater by the massive weight of the capsized ship. According to Chase, “The whole ship’s crew were, for a short time thrown into the utmost consternation and confusion.”

Yet amid all the chaos there was, at least on deck, a sudden sense of calm. When a ship suffers a knockdown, her hull acts as a barrier against the wind and rain. Even though the ship had been slammed against the water, the men were temporarily sheltered from the howling forces of the wind. Pollard took the opportunity to pull the crew back together. “[T]he cool and undismayed countenance of the captain,” Nickerson remembered, “soon brought all to their sober senses.” The order was given to let go all the halyards and let the sheets run, but “the ship lay so far upon her side that nothing would run down as desired.”

If the squall continued to pin her on her beam-ends, the ship would begin to settle into the water as the sea rushed into the hull through her open hatchways. The longer she was over on her side, the greater the chances of the ballast and stores in her hold shifting to leeward, a disastrous turn of events from which she might never recover. Already the waves had wiped the cookhouse almost completely off the deck. As a last resort, it might be necessary to cut away the masts.

The rain poured down and the lightning flashed, and time slowed to a crawl as the men clung to the weather rail. But before the axes came into play, the ship twitched back to life. The men could feel it in their hands and feet and in the pits of their stomachs—an easing of the awful strain. They waited for another gust to slam the ship back down again. But no—the ballast continued to exert its gravitational pull, lifting the three masts until the yards came clear of the water. As the masts swung into the sky, seawater rushed across the deck and out the scuppers. The Essex shuddered to the vertical and was a ship again.

Now that the hull was no longer acting as a shield, the officers quickly realized that the squall had passed. But even if the wind had diminished, it was still blowing hard. The ship’s bow was now pointed into the wind, the sails blown back against the masts. The rigging creaked in an eerie, unfamiliar way as the hull wallowed in the rain-whipped waves. The deck shifted, and the green hands temporarily lost their balance. This time the ship wasn’t going over, she was going backward, water boiling up over the quarterdeck as her broad transom was pushed back against the waves, pummeling the spare whaleboat stored off the stern.

Going backward in a square-rigged ship was dangerous. The sails were plastered against the masts, making it almost impossible to furl them. The pressure placed an immense amount of strain on the stays and spars. Since the rigging had not been designed for loads coming from this direction, all three masts might come tumbling down, domino fashion, across the deck. Already the windows in the stern were threatening to burst open and flood the captain’s cabin. There was also the danger of breaking the ship’s tall, narrow rudder, which became useless as water pressed against it.

Eventually, the Essex’s bow fell off to leeward, her sails filled, and she was once again making forward progress. Now the crew could do what they should have done before the storm—shorten sail.

As the men aloft wrestled with the canvas, the wind shifted into the northwest and the skies began to brighten. But the mood aboard the Essex sank into one of gloom. The ship had been severely damaged. Several sails, including both the main topgallant and the studding sail, had been torn into useless tatters. The cookhouse had been destroyed. The two whaleboats that had been hung off the port side of the ship had been torn from their davits and washed away, along with all their gear. The spare boat on the stern had been crushed by the waves. That left only two workable boats, and a whaleship required a minimum of three, plus two spares. Although the Essex’s stern boat could be repaired, they would be without a single spare boat. Captain Pollard stared at the splintered mess and declared that they would be returning to Nantucket for repairs.

His first mate, however, disagreed. Chase urged that they continue on, despite the damage. The chances were good, he insisted, that they would be able to obtain spare whaleboats in the Azores, where they would soon be stopping to procure fresh provisions. Joy sided with his fellow mate. The captain’s will was normally the law of the ship. But instead of ignoring his two younger mates, Pollard paused to consider their arguments. Four days into his first command, Captain Pollard reversed himself. “After some little reflection and a consultation with his officers,” Nickerson remembered, “it was deemed prudent to continue on our course and trust to fortune and a kind providence to make up our loss.”

The excuse given to the crew was that with the wind now out of the northwest, it would have taken too long to return to Nantucket. Nickerson suspected that Chase and Joy had other motives. Both knew that the men had not taken kindly to their treatment by the mates. Seeing the knockdown as a bad omen, many of the sailors had become sullen and sour. If they returned to Nantucket, some of the crew would jump ship. Despite the seriousness of the loss of the whaleboats, it was not the time to return to port.

Not surprisingly, given that he was the object of much of the crew’s discontent, Chase, in his own account of the accident, never mentions that Pollard originally proposed turning back. As Chase would have it, the knockdown was only a minor inconvenience: “We repaired our damage with little difficulty, and continued on our course.” But Nickerson knew differently. Many of the Essex’s men were profoundly shaken by the knockdown and wanted to get off the ship. Whenever they passed a homeward-bound vessel, the green hands would lament, in the words of one, “O, how I wish I was onboard with them going home again, for I am heartily sick of these whaling voyages”—even though they had not yet even seen a whale.


First Blood

AFTER A PROVISIONING STOP in the Azores, which provided plenty of fresh vegetables but no spare whaleboats, the Essex headed south toward the Cape Verde Islands. Two weeks later they sighted Boavista Island. In contrast to the Azores’ green, abundant hills, the slopes of the Cape Verdes were brown and sere, with no trees to offer relief from the burning subtropical sun. Pollard intended to obtain some hogs at the island of Maio a few miles to the southwest.

The next morning, as they approached the island, Nickerson noticed that Pollard and his mates were strangely animated, speaking to each other with a conspiratorial excitement as they passed a spyglass back and forth, taking turns studying something on the beach. What Nickerson termed “the cause of their glee” remained a mystery to the rest of the crew until they came close enough to the island to see that a whaleship had been run up onto the beach. Here, perhaps, was a source of some additional whaleboats—something the men of the Essex needed much more desperately than pork.

Before Pollard could dispatch one of his own boats to the wreck, a whaleboat was launched from the beach and made its way directly toward the Essex. Aboard the boat was the acting American consul, Ferdinand Gardner. He explained that the wrecked whaler was the Archimedes of New York. While approaching the harbor she had struck a submerged rock, forcing the captain to run her up onto the beach before she was a total loss. Gardner had purchased the wreck, but he had on