The True-Life Horror That Inspired ‘Moby-Dick’ The whaler Essex was indeed
sunk by a whale—and that’s only the beginning In July of 1852, a
32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new
novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and
tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit
to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist,
Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local
dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had
previously only imagined. And on his last day on Nantucket he met the
broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had
been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had
inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years
old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to
captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on
a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a
“Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again. Pollard lived out
his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman. National
Treasure: The Mold Behind the Miracle of Penicillin Melville had written
about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale
sinking his ship. During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely
“exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not
end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the
horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. “To the
islanders he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive
man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.” Pollard
had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his
rescue from the Essex ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. To
Bennet, the tale was like a confession. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days
and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving
crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the
harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen
Coffin. “But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the
recollection,” Pollard told the missionary. “I hardly know what I say.”
The trouble for Essex began, as Melville knew, on August 14, 1819, just
two days after it left Nantucket on a whaling voyage that was supposed to
last two and a half years. The 87-foot-long ship was hit by a squall that
destroyed its topgallant sail and nearly sank it. Still, Pollard
continued, making it to Cape Horn five weeks later. But the 20-man crew
found the waters off South America nearly fished out, so they decided to
sail for distant whaling grounds in the South Pacific, far from any
shores. To restock, the Essex anchored at Charles Island in the Galapagos,
where the crew collected sixty 100-pound tortoises. As a prank, one of the
crew set a fire, which, in the dry season, quickly spread. Pollard’s men
barely escaped, having to run through flames, and a day after they set
sail, they could still see smoke from the burning island. Pollard was
furious, and swore vengeance on whoever set the fire. Many years later
Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland, and the fire was believed
to have caused the extinction of both the Floreana Tortoise and the
Floreana Mockingbird. Essex First Mate Owen Chase, later in life. Photo:
Wikimedia Commons By November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage
and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex had
harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what the crew
called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-old first mate,
had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while Pollard went whaling. It
was Chase who spotted a very big whale—85 feet in length, he
estimated—lying quietly in the distance, its head facing the ship. Then,
after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for the Essex, “coming
down for us at great celerity,” Chase would recall—at about three knots.
The whale smashed head-on into the ship with “such an appalling and
tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces.” The whale passed
underneath the ship and began thrashing in the water. “I could distinctly
see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury,”
Chase recalled. Then the whale disappeared. The crew was addressing the
hole in the ship and getting the pumps working when one man cried out,
“Here he is—he is making for us again.” Chase spotted the whale, his head
half out of water, bearing down at great speed—this time at six knots,
Chase thought. This time it hit the bow directly under the cathead and
disappeared for good. The water rushed into the ship so fast, the only
thing the crew could do was lower the boats and try fill them with
navigational instruments, bread, water and supplies before the Essex
turned over on its side. Pollard saw his ship in distress from a distance,
then returned to see the Essex in ruin. Dumbfounded, he asked, “My God,
Mr. Chase, what is the matter?” “We have been stove by a whale,” his first
mate answered. Another boat returned, and the men sat in silence, their
captain still pale and speechless. Some, Chase observed, “had no idea of
the extent of their deplorable situation.” The men were unwilling to leave
the doomed Essex as it slowly foundered, and Pollard tried to come up with
a plan. In all, there were three boats and 20 men. They calculated that
the closest land was the Marquesas Islands and the Society Islands, and
Pollard wanted to set off for them—but in one of the most ironic decisions
in nautical history, Chase and the crew convinced him that those islands
were peopled with cannibals and that the crew’s best chance for survival
would be to sail south. The distance to land would be far greater, but
they might catch the trade winds or be spotted by another whaling ship.
Only Pollard seemed to understand the implications of steering clear of
the islands. (According to Nathaniel Philbrick, in his book In the Heart
of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, although rumors of
cannibalism persisted, traders had been visiting the islands without
incident.) Thus they left the Essex aboard their 20-foot boats. They were
challenged almost from the start. Saltwater saturated the bread, and the
men began to dehydrate as they ate their daily rations. The sun was
ravaging. Pollard’s boat was attacked by a killer whale. They spotted
land—Henderson Island—two weeks later, but it was barren. After another
week the men began to run out of supplies. Still, three of them decided
they’d rather take their chances on land than climb back into a boat. No
one could blame them. And besides, it would stretch the provisions for the
men in the boats. Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby-Dick from the
1820 whale attack on the Essex. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By mid-December,
after weeks at sea, the boats began to take on water, more whales menaced
the men at night, and by January, the paltry rations began to take their
toll. On Chase’s boat, one man went mad, stood up and demanded a dinner
napkin and water, then fell into “most horrid and frightful convulsions”
before perishing the next morning. “Humanity must shudder at the dreadful
recital” of what came next, Chase wrote. The crew “separated limbs from
his body, and cut all the flesh from the bones; after which, we opened the
body, took out the heart, and then closed it again—sewed it up as decently
as we could, and committed it to the sea.” They then roasted the man’s
organs on a flat stone and ate them. Over the coming week, three more
sailors died, and their bodies were cooked and eaten. One boat
disappeared, and then Chase’s and Pollard’s boats lost sight of each
other. The rations of human flesh did not last long, and the more the
survivors ate, the hungrier they felt. On both boats the men became too
weak to talk. The four men on Pollard’s boat reasoned that without more
food, they would die. On February 6, 1821—nine weeks after they’d bidden
farewell to the Essex—Charles Ramsdell, a teenager, proposed they draw
lots to determine who would be eaten next. It was the custom of the sea,
dating back, at least in recorded instance, to the first half of the 17th
century. The men in Pollard’s boat accepted Ramsdell’s suggestion, and the
lot fell to young Owen Coffin, the captain’s first cousin. Pollard had
promised the boy’s mother he’d look out for him. “My lad, my lad!” the
captain now shouted, “if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man
that touches you.” Pollard even offered to step in for the boy, but Coffin
would have none of it. “I like it as well as any other,” he said. Ramsdell
drew the lot that required him to shoot his friend. He paused a long time.
But then Coffin rested his head on the boat’s gunwale and Ramsdell pulled
the trigger. “He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would say, “and nothing of
him left.” By February 18, after 89 days at sea, the last three men on
Chase’s boat spotted a sail in the distance. After a frantic chase, they
managed to catch the English ship Indian and were rescued. Three hundred
miles away, Pollard’s boat carried only its captain and Charles Ramsdell.
They had only the bones of the last crewmen to perish, which they smashed
on the bottom of the boat so that they could eat the marrow. As the days
passed the two men obsessed over the bones scattered on the boat’s floor.
Almost a week after Chase and his men had been rescued, a crewman aboard
the American ship Dauphin spotted Pollard’s boat. Wretched and confused,
Pollard and Ramsdell did not rejoice at their rescue, but simply turned to
the bottom of their boat and stuffed bones into their pockets. Safely
aboard the Dauphin, the two delirious men were seen “sucking the bones of
their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.” The five Essex
survivors were reunited in Valparaiso, where they recuperated before
sailing back for Nantucket. As Philbrick writes, Pollard had recovered
enough to join several captains for dinner, and he told them the entire
story of the Essex wreck and his three harrowing months at sea. One of the
captains present returned to his room and wrote everything down, calling
Pollard’s account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my
knowledge.” Years later, the third boat was discovered on Ducie Island;
three skeletons were aboard. Miraculously, the three men who chose to stay
on Henderson Island survived for nearly four months, mostly on shellfish
and bird eggs, until an Australian ship rescued them. Once they arrived in
Nantucket, the surviving crewmen of the Essex were welcomed, largely
without judgment. Cannibalism in the most dire of circumstances, it was
reasoned, was a custom of the sea. (In similar incidents, survivors
declined to eat the flesh of the dead but used it as bait for fish. But
Philbrick notes that the men of the Essex were in waters largely devoid of
marine life at the surface.) Captain Pollard, however, was not as easily
forgiven, because he had eaten his cousin. (One scholar later referred to
the act as “gastronomic incest.”) Owen Coffin’s mother could not abide
being in the captain’s presence. Once his days at sea were over, Pollard
spent the rest of his life in Nantucket. Once a year, on the anniversary
of the wreck of the Essex, he was said to have locked himself in his room
and fasted in honor of his lost crewmen. By 1852, Melville and Moby-Dick
had begun their own slide into obscurity. Despite the author’s hopes, his
book sold but a few thousand copies in his lifetime, and Melville, after a
few more failed attempts at novels, settled into a reclusive life and
spent 19 years as a customs inspector in New York City. He drank and
suffered the death of his two sons. Depressed, he abandoned novels for
poetry. But George Pollard’s fate was never far from his mind. In his poem
Clarel he writes of; A night patrolman on the quay Watching the bales till
morning hour Through fair and foul. Never he smiled; Call him, and he
would come; not sour In spirit, but meek and reconciled: Patient he was,
he none withstood; Oft on some secret thing would brood.