Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  For the Nantucketer, the whale was not so much a living, breathing creature as it was, according to one commentator, “a self-propelled tub of high-income lard.” Whales were described by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a “60-barrel whale”), and although the whaleman took careful note of the mammal’s habits, he made no attempt to think of it as anything more than a potential prize that would add to his own personal glory and wealth. The whaleman was a hunter, pure and simple, and to concern himself with the feelings and motivations of his prey was unthinkable.

  But on November 20, 1820, an event occurred that would require at least one crew of whalemen to begin to see it from the whale’s perspective. The Essex, a converted sealer and China trader originally out of Salem, had a reputation as a lucky ship; that was one of the reasons why Thomas Nickerson, an orphan and not yet fourteen, decided to sign on, even though the “black and ugly” ship bore a disturbing resemblance, according to an account Nickerson wrote as an old man, to Noah’s Ark.

  Nickerson soon discovered that the average crew on a Nantucket whaler was not exactly a bold and hardy group of experienced seamen. Much had changed since the early days of the colonial fishery, when a Nantucket sloop was manned almost exclusively by sailors from the island. Now, with bigger vessels and only a handful of local Indians and blacks, Nantucket shipowners were forced to look beyond the island for crew members, actively recruiting “greenhands” who had no sailing experience whatsoever. In the case of the Essex, it was not until the arrival of a Boston packet containing seven African-American crew members that Captain Pollard was finally able to order his men to set sail.

  Since only the officers (all, of course, Nantucket men) knew what they were doing, it was not a pretty sight. According to Nickerson, “All was bustle, confusion and awkwardness, that is, on part of the crew. The officers were smart active men, and were no doubt some [what] piqued at having such a display of awkwardness in full view of their native town. Nor was it until we had passed the eastern end of the island that our top gallant sails were set and all sails trimmed to the breeze.”

  It would not take long, however, before the crew of the Essex had become trained in not only how to sail their ship but also how to kill whales. In Nickerson’s words, “experience has since taught me that a few months on board will make even the greenest capable of executing the general orders of the ship.” This did not mean, of course, that all crew members were regarded as equals on a Nantucket whaler. Since only the island-born were destined to become officers, it was perhaps inevitable that an “us versus them” mentality typified crew relations. According to one commentator, “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.” Indeed, among the crew of the Essex, the “honor” of being a native Nantucketer would soon prove to be a matter of life and death.

  A little more than a year into the voyage, the Essex was approximately midway between the Galápagos and Marquesas Islands, a thousand miles from the nearest land. Two of the ship’s whaleboats had fastened to whales while back on board the Essex the first mate, Owen Chase, directed the repair of his damaged boat in hopes of soon joining the hunt. Nickerson was at the helm when an eighty-five-foot sperm whale was sighted approaching the ship at approximately three knots. Once he became aware of the situation, Chase ordered the boy to “put the helm hard up,” but the time for evasive maneuvers was past. Several members of the crew cried out that the whale was “coming afoul of the ship” just as it crashed into the Essex’s side, knocking the entire crew off their feet and shaking the ship “like a leaf.” It was soon discovered that the whale had surfaced along the starboard side of the ship, providing the crew with an excellent opportunity to stab it with a lance. Chase, however, chose not to attack in fear that the whale might snap off the rudder with its tail. In hindsight, wrote Nickerson, this would have been the lesser of two evils.

  Eventually the whale swam off about 300 yards ahead, turned quickly around and once again came at the ship, this time at twice its original speed. When it collided with the Essex, the whale’s blunt head acted like a massive battering ram, easily smashing in the bow, and as the whale swam away to leeward, the ship began to fill up with water. Immediately, Chase ordered the crew to unlash the spare whaleboat as the steward went below to retrieve the captain and mate’s chests as well as two quadrants and navigational guides. By the time the whaleboat was in the water, the ship had begun to go down; they were barely two boat-lengths away when it “fell over to windward.”

  In shock and amazement, they waited for the other two whaleboat crews to realize that something had happened to the ship. By the time Captain Pollard returned, the first mate “could scarcely recognize his countenance, he appeared to be so much altered, awed, and overcome, with the oppression of his feelings, and the dreadful reality that lay before him.” Prior to this catastrophe, Pollard, although a first-time captain and “a man of few words,” had demonstrated that he was perfectly capable of strong and determined leadership. At one point during the voyage when his crew complained about their provisions, he had flown into a rage, throwing down his hat and stamping on it before shouting, “I’ll kill the whole bunch of you together and then bang up North-West and go home!” Although the expression was somewhat peculiar (Nickerson, for one, did not know what it meant), this was considered conduct perfectly becoming a Nantucket sea captain.

  But now, as he looked upon the capsized wreck that had once been his noble command, Pollard was hardly the “spitfire” he had once been. He turned to the first mate and asked, “My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?” Chase’s reply: “We have been stove by a whale.”

  For a Nantucketer, it was as if the whole order of creation had been turned upside down. Here was a whale—“proverbial for its insensibility and inoffensiveness,” according to Chase—that had fought back with “decided, calculating mischief.” How could this be? But the more Chase and the others thought about it, the more they became convinced that they had been the victims of “premeditated violence” on the part of the whale: “His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal [or pod of whales] which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.” That a whale might not only think but also act as a man would do was terrifying to contemplate, especially since it was now obvious just how easily a whale could turn the Nantucketers’ self-proclaimed “exterminating warfare” into a pitiful display of human frailty.

  In any event, the crew of the Essex had been forced into a full retreat. But first they had preparations to make. In order to right the wreck, they chopped off the masts, enabling them to retrieve some casks of bread, water, and a few of the hundreds of turtles they had collected in the Galápagos Islands for meat. They also built up the sides of their three whaleboats to increase their seaworthiness while rigging two short masts and sails on each boat. By now the many casks of oil on board the Essex had begun to burst, sending out a vast slick of whale oil across the water. It was time to decide on a course of action.

  According to Chase’s account, he was the first one to bring up the matter with Captain Pollard, who seemed reluctant to abandon the ship. Chase also makes it sound as if the decision not to sail for the nearby Marquesas or Society Islands and go instead for the west coast of South America—a voyage of more than 3,000 miles!—was mutually agreed upon from the start. Nickerson, however, gives a different account. Writing more than fifty years after the incident, and without the perspective of a first mate attempting to put what would prove to be a bad decision in the best possible light, he claimed that Pollard initially proposed that they sail for the Society Islands (only ten days away) but that Chase and the second mate convinced him to sail instead to the east. The fear was that the islands to the west were inhabited by cannibals. As it would turn out, by deciding to go for
South America, after first heading south to avoid what were known as the “kona” storms, the whalemen would be forced to act out their own worst fears more than twenty-five years before the Donner Party.

  Although the officers of the Essex have had their apologists, who claim it was the only thing they could have done given their limited knowledge of the Pacific islands and the direction of the prevailing winds and currents, Nickerson was less sympathetic, attributing the decision to “gross ignorance or a great oversight somewhere,” adding, “How many warm hearts have ceased to beat in consequence of it.” Indeed, easterly winds and currents would push them so far south and west that after their first month of sailing they would be actually farther from the South American coast than when they had started!

  Five days after leaving the Essex, Pollard’s whaleboat was attacked at night by what they believed to be a killer whale. As the crew fought it off with their sprit poles (used to hold up the sail from the mast), the sixteen-foot whale smashed a hole in the fragile whaleboat’s bow. Although they did their best to repair the damage, all three boats were in such bad shape that if they had been on Nantucket, Nickerson claimed he would not have felt safe sailing ten miles in any one of them.

  Soon the men began to experience overwhelming pangs of thirst and hunger. But Pollard and his officers remained steadfast in their daily allotment of only a single “biscuit” (weighing a little more than a pound) and a half pint of water per man. In order to stay together, the three boats sailed in a line, raising up lanterns or shooting off pistols when they inevitably lost track of one another at night. During the day, the sun was almost unbearable, particularly in the frequent calms. When those who knew how to swim slipped over the side to cool themselves, they did not have the strength to get back into the boat and had to be pulled in by their companions. At one point a few flying fish fell into Chase’s boat, only to be eaten whole—scales and all—by the starving crew.

  Then on December 20th, after almost a full month, they sighted land—a small island that proved to be more of a tease than a salvation. After eating every bird and crab they could get their hands on and finally finding a source of water, they realized that the island could not support a population of twenty men for much longer, so they decided to push on, this time hoping to reach Easter Island to the east. But when it came time to leave, three of the men expressed their decision to stay on the island rather than risk another passage. Since this would give the others more provisions, it was readily agreed to, although emotions ran so high at the time of the whaleboats’ leave-taking that the three remaining crew members—all of them off-islanders—elected not to come down to the beach to say good-bye.

  With the wind howling from the west, the whaleboats were now making good time and in the right general direction; unfortunately, it soon became clear that they had missed Easter Island. They now decided to steer for the islands of Juan Fernández and Más Afuera off the South American coast, more than 2,500 miles away. On January 10th, the second mate, Matthew Joy, who had been “not well” throughout the voyage, died. The next night Chase’s boat was separated from the other two in a severe storm. Not long after that, Chase nearly shot one of his men for attempting to steal bread.

  The Nantucketers now knew what it was like to be the prey in a vast, carnivorous ocean. At one point a large shark snapped at the steering oar of Chase’s boat in “fearless malignity” but did no serious damage. Then a school of dolphins spent a day swimming beside their boat but not close enough to be caught. Nickerson’s reaction: “Poor devils, how much they are now our superiors and yet not know it.” Chase and his crew next found themselves in the midst of a pod of sperm whales, “foaming and thrashing past us in a most furious manner.” No doubt remembering the incident that had brought them to this point, the whalemen were so fearful of these “intruders” that they thought about taking out their oars and rowing to safety but soon realized that they did not have the strength. The Nantucketers, proverbial for their courage and determination, could not help but lapse into despondency, knowing that they “might at any moment sink beneath this vast extent of ocean, leaving scarcely a momentary bubble.”

  Two days later, Richard Peterson, a sixty-year-old black sailor, died; on February 8th, more than two and a half months after leaving the Essex, Isaac Cole became delirious and then died in the midst of horrible convulsions. With their provisions about to run out, Chase proposed that they do the unthinkable—that they use Cole’s body for food. So, after they had “separated his limbs from his body, and cut all the flesh from the bones,” and then taken out his heart, which was “eagerly devoured,” they buried Cole as “decently as we could.” Nine days later, after subsisting on strips of Cole’s cooked flesh, they sighted a sail and were saved.

  Meanwhile, Pollard and crew had become separated from the third boat, which would never be seen again. They, too, resorted to cannibalism as four men (all of them black) died within the space of thirteen days. But by February 1st the four remaining crew members—Pollard, Owen Coffin (Pollard’s much younger cousin), Charles Ramsdell, and Barzillai Ray (all Nantucketers)—were without anything left to eat. Pollard would later give this account of what followed next:What could we do? We looked at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds, but we held our tongues. I am sure that we loved one another as brothers all the time; and yet our looks told plainly what must be done. We cast lots, and the fatal one fell on my poor cabin boy (Owen Coffin). I started forward instantly, and cried, “My lad, my lad, if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.” The poor emaciated boy hesitated a moment or two; then, quietly laying his head down upon the gunnel of the boat, he said, “I like it as well as any other.” He was soon dispatched, and nothing of him left.

  On February 10th, Barzillai Ray died and was also eaten, and then on February 23rd, almost within sight of the Chilean coast, Pollard and Ramsdell were finally saved. According to one account, “They were unable to move when found sucking the bones of their dead messmates, which they were loth to part with.”

  Eventually the three who had elected to stay on the island were saved, making them the only non-Nantucketers to survive the ordeal. Whether or not it was a question of “survival of the fittest,” if you were not a Nantucket man (or boy), you did not make it out of the Essex whaleboats alive.

  With the exception of the captain, the survivors returned to Nantucket on the whaleship Eagle; Pollard remained in South America to recuperate and then returned aboard the Two Brothers . Incredibly, almost all the survivors returned to the sea. Pollard, in particular, seems to have had the psychological strength to handle circumstances that might have easily unhinged a lesser man. Shortly after his arrival on Nantucket, he fulfilled his promise to Owen Coffin and went to the boy’s mother (and Pollard’s aunt) to inform her personally of the circumstances surrounding her son’s death. According to Nickerson, “She became almost frantic with the thought, and I have heard that she never could become reconciled to the Capt.’s presence.”

  Not long after his return to the island, where he was almost universally “thought not to have dealt unfairly with this trying matter,” Pollard was made captain of the ship that had brought him home, the Two Brothers. Given the horrific nature of his past experiences, he accepted this new command with remarkable optimism. During a gam off the coast of South America with the U.S. Navy schooner Waterwitch, he freely and “modestly” recounted the story of the Essex and then was asked “how he could think of again putting his foot on board ship to again pursue such a calling.” According to the Navy midshipman with whom he was speaking, “He simply remarked that it was an old adage that the lightning never struck in the same place twice.”

  Unfortunately for Captain Pollard, lightning would indeed strike twice. On February 11, 1823, not far from the Hawaiian Islands, the Two Brothers struck an uncharted reef and sank; this time, however, all the crew were saved after only a short time in their whaleboats. Although this was once again an unavo
idable act of God, the thirty-one-year-old Pollard returned to Nantucket knowing that his whaling career had ended. At one point during his trip home he confessed to a fellow passenger, “And now I am utterly ruined. No owner will ever trust me with a whaler again, for all will say I am an unlucky man.”

  Pollard spent the rest of his days as a night watchman on Nantucket, living with his wife (they had no children) in their home on Center Street, now the Seven Seas Gift Shop. Beginning with Owen Chase’s account of the disaster, published in 1821, the story of the Essex would gradually acquire national and even international fame, and for many the most intriguing figure in the drama was the star-crossed captain. In fact, when notables such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville visited the island, they often made a point of seeking out Pollard. In the back of his copy of Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Essex disaster, Melville wrote, “sometime about 1850–3—saw Capt. Pollard on the island of Nantucket, and [exchanged] some words with him. To the islanders he was a nobody—to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming even humble—that I ever encountered.”

  There were reasons why Pollard was a “nobody” on Nantucket. He represented the dark side of the Nantucket Dream—a “marked man” whose life had proven that the island’s private frontier, the Pacific Ocean, not only was a place of opportunity and promise but also a place where the worst could happen even to the best of men. Among a people who were, according to Emerson, “very sensitive to everything that dishonors the island,” the horrendous experiences of Pollard and the others were not to be discussed. In fact, when the daughter of an Essex survivor was asked about the disaster, she replied, “We do not mention this in Nantucket.”

  As far as Nantucketers were concerned, it was men such as Obed Starbuck who were the proper subjects of conversation, men whose lives proved that whaling was the noble and glorious pursuit it was supposed to be. Indeed, when examined in the context of the Essex disaster, two of the toasts delivered during the owner-sponsored Loper banquet are very revealing: “To War: that war which causes no grief, the success of which produces no tears—war with the monsters of the deep,” and “Death to the living and long life to the killers—/ Success to wives of sailors, / And greasy luck to whalers.” The message was clear: whaling was a war without a down side, a field of bravery that ultimately enabled its heroes to “settle down . . . in the bosom of domestic life” just as Starbuck had done after his third Loper voyage.