March 1, 2013
Herman Melville, circa 1860. Photo: Wikipedia
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.
Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby-Dick from the 1820 whale attack on the Essex. Photo: Wikipedia
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: Wikipedia
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.
The whaleship Essex, “stove by a whale” in 1821. Photo: Wikipedia
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.
