In the Heart of the Sea

island’s inhabitants. An irate Nantucketer responded in words that might have been applied to Owen Chase: “We have a spy amongst us, who, like other spies, sends abroad his cowardly reports where he thinks they can never be disproved” ( Nantucket Inquirer [April 18, 1822]). According to Alexander Starbuck’s list of whaling voyages in the History of Nantucket, the Two Brothers left Nantucket on November 26, 1821. Nickerson speaks of being a part of the Two Brothers’ crew (along with Charles Ramsdell) in a poem titled “The Ship Two Brothers ” (NHA Collection 106, Folder 3½).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Consequences
    My account of the Two Brothers’ last voyage is based primarily on Nickerson’s poem “The Ship Two Brothers ” and his prose narrative “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket,” both previously unpublished and in NHA Collection 106, Folder 3½. The first mate of the Two Brothers , Eben Gardner, also left an account of the wreck, which is at the NHA. Charles Wilkes, the midshipman on the Waterwitch who recorded his conversation with George Pollard, would become the leader of the United States Exploring Expedition. As Heffernan points out, there is the possibility that Wilkes also met Owen Chase in 1839 when four of the expedition’s ships, along with the Charles Carroll, were anchored for several weeks at Tahiti (pp. 130-31). Wilkes’s account of his meeting with Captain Pollard is included in Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798-1877 and is quoted at length in Heffernan (pp. 146-48).
    Edouard Stackpole tells of Frederick Coffin’s discovery of the Japan Ground in The Sea-Hunters (p. 268); not all whaling scholars are convinced that Coffin was the first to find the whaling ground. George Pollard may have been taught how to perform a lunar observation by the Two Brothers’ former captain, George Worth, during the two-and-a-half-month cruise back to Nantucket from Valparaiso in the spring and summer of 1821. Although both Pollard and Captain Pease of the Martha were convinced that they had run into an uncharted shoal, Nickerson reveals in his letter to Leon Lewis that both he and the Martha ’s first mate, Thomas Derrick, believed it to be French Frigate Shoal, an already well-known hazard to the west of the Hawaiian Islands.
    George Bennet’s account of his meeting with George Pollard originally appeared in Journal of Voyages and Travels by the Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet, Esq. Deputed from the London Missionary Society. Concerning a character based on Pollard, Melville writes in the poem Clarel:
    A Jonah is he?—And men bruit
The story. None will give him place
In a third venture.
    Nickerson tells of Pollard’s single voyage in the merchant service in his “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket.” The rumor about George Pollard’s switching lots with Owen Coffin is recorded by Cyrus Townsend Brady in “The Yarn of the Essex, Whaler” in Cosmopolitan (November 1904, p. 72). Brady wrote that even though the tradition was “still current in Nantucket,” he doubted its veracity.
    My thanks to Diana Brown, granddaughter of Joseph Warren Phinney, for providing me with a copy of the relevant portions of the original transcript of Phinney’s reminiscences, recorded by his daughter, Ruth Pierce. Ms. Brown has published a selection of her grandfather’s reminiscences under the title “Nantucket, Far Away and Long Ago,” in Historic Nantucket (pp. 23-30). In a personal communication (August 9, 1998), she explains Phinney’s relation to Captain Pollard: “Captain Warren Phinney, his father, married Valina Worth, the daughter of Joseph T. Worth and Sophronia Riddell (June 6, 1834). Sophronia Riddell was, I believe, the sister of Mary Riddell who married Captain Pollard. After bearing three daughters, she died in 1843. Shortly after that, he was married to Henrietta Smith, who died the end of 1845, the year Joseph Warren was born. His father died about five years after this in a ship disaster on one of the Great Lakes, so he was then brought up by his grandmother and grandfather Smith. He of course was not a blood relative to the Pollards, but they were part of his extended family.” The rumor about George Pollard’s making light of having eaten Owen Coffin is recorded in Horace Beck’s Folklore and the Sea (p. 379). As late as the 1960s, the tradition was still being repeated on Nantucket; my thanks to Thomas McGlinn, who attended school