In the Heart of the Sea

have been distributed equally, it was almost as if the Nantucketers existed in a protective bubble as off-island crew members, first black then white, fell by the wayside until the Nantucketers had, in the case of Pollard’s crew, no choice but to eat their own. The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure. It is a tragedy that happens to be one of the greatest true stories ever told.
     
    EVIDENCE of the disaster and of the men who survived it can still be found on the streets of Nantucket. Captain Pollard’s red-shingled house on Centre Street has long since become a gift shop. On the corner of the building a small plaque reads, “Built by Captain William Brock in 1760. Later owned by Captain George Pollard Junior of the whaling ship Essex. Herman Melville spoke to Captain Pollard, whose story was the basis for Moby-Dick. ” In an age when most of the island’s historic houses have been renovated several times over, Owen Chase’s home remains one of the last unchanged houses on Orange Street, its dark green trim and water-stained clapboards evoking the somber disquiet of the captain’s final years. The boarding house where Thomas Nickerson once entertained his guests with tales of the Essex still stands on North Water Street—one of many buildings now associated with a large hotel.
    The Whaling Museum devotes a small exhibit to the story of the ship that was sunk by a whale. There is a crew list from the Essex ’s next-to-last voyage that includes the signatures of George Pollard, Owen Chase, Obed Hendricks, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Chappel. There is Obed Macy’s wharf book, in which the merchant and historian recorded the financial details involved in selling the Essex ’s oil in 1819. For some reason, the ship’s trunk found bobbing in the Pacific after the sinking is not on view. The one personal memento of the tragedy, probably used because it takes up so little display space in the crowded museum, is Benjamin Lawrence’s tiny piece of twine.
    But it is the newly acquired skeleton of the sperm whale, oozing oil in the Nantucket Historical Association shed, that speaks most powerfully to the tragedy of the whaleship Essex. The nourishing, lifesaving bones of their dead comrades were what Pollard and Ramsdell clung to so fiercely even after their ordeal had ended. And it is bones that Nantucketers cling to now, tangible reminders of a time when the island was devoted to the business of transforming whales into money.
    In Moby-Dick Ishmael tells of seeing the skeleton of a sperm whale assembled in a grove of palm trees on a South Pacific island. “How vain and foolish,” he says, “for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton.. . . Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.” But, as the survivors of the Essex came to know, once the end has been reached and all hope, passion, and force of will have been expended, the bones may be all that are left.

NOTES
    FOR ANYONE WANTING to know more about the Essex disaster, there is no better resource than Thomas Farel Heffernan’s Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex. In addition to the complete text of Chase’s narrative, Heffernan’s book includes (with the notable exception of the Nickerson narrative) all the relevant accounts left by other survivors. Heffernan’s chapters of analysis—including discussions of what happened to the survivors and how the story of the Essex was disseminated—are models of scholarly rigor and readability. Edouard Stackpole’s pamphlet The Loss of the Essex, Sunk by a Whale in Mid-Ocean provides a useful summary of the ordeal, as does his chapter about the disaster in The Sea-Hunters, an important book for anyone wanting to know more about Nantucket and whaling. Stackpole’s introduction to Thomas Nickerson’s The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale published by the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) is also essential. A new edition of Nickerson’s narrative is now available from Penguin. Henry Carlisle’s novel The Jonah Man contains a fascinating treatment of the Essex disaster. If Carlisle takes a novelist’s license with some of the facts (Pollard, for example, is depicted as the son of a farmer, when it was Chase whose father was a “yeoman”), his account