In the Heart of the Sea

on the island, for sharing with me his memory of the Pollard anecdote.
    What is known about Owen Chase’s life after the Essex disaster is recounted by Heffernan in Stove by a Whale (pp. 119-45). Emerson recorded his conversation with the sailor about the white whale and the Winslow/Essex on February 19, 1834 ( Journals, vol. 4, p. 265). Melville’s memories of meeting Chase’s son and seeing Chase himself are in the back pages of his copy of the Essex narrative (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, pp. 981-83). Although Melville did apparently meet Owen Chase’s son, he went to sea after Owen had retired as a whaling captain and mistook someone else for the former first mate of the Essex. Even if Melville didn’t actually see Chase, he thought he did, and it would be Melville’s sensibility that would largely determine how future generations viewed the Essex disaster: through the lens of Moby-Dick. Melville’s remarks concerning Chase’s learning of his wife’s infidelity are also recorded in his copy of the narrative (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, p. 995).
    In “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket,” Nickerson tells of what happened after the crew was taken to Oahu on the Martha: “all of the crew of the Two Brothers were safely landed and as the whaling fleet were at the time in that port, each took their own course and joined separate ships as chances offered.” Heffernan speaks of Ramsdell’s being captain of the General Jackson in Stove by a Whale (p. 152); the computerized genealogical records at the NHA show that Ramsdell’s first wife, Mercy Fisher, bore four children and died in 1846, and that his second wife, Elisa Lamb, had two children. The Brooklyn City Directory lists a Thomas G. Nickerson, shipmaster, living on 293 Hewes as late as 1872. Benjamin Lawrence’s obituary appeared in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (April 5, 1879). Nickerson writes in his narrative about the fates of William Wright and Thomas Chappel. Seth Weeks’s obituary appeared in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror (September 24, 1887); it concludes: “He became blind for some years past, and ended his life in sweet peace and quiet among his own people, always highly respected and honored.”
    Edouard Stackpole recounts the anecdote about Nantucketers’ not talking about the Essex in “Aftermath” in the NHA edition of Nickerson’s narrative (p. 78). For an account of the island’s reputation as a Quaker abolitionist stronghold, see my “ ‘Every Wave Is a Fortune’: Nantucket Island and the Making of an American Icon”; Whittier writes about Nantucket in his ballad “The Exiles,” about Thomas Macy’s voyage to the island in 1659. I discuss the success of the almost all-black crew of the Loper in Away Off Shore (pp. 162-63). Frederick Douglass ends the first edition of the narrative of his life with his speech at the Nantucket Atheneum.
    Thomas Heffernan traces the literary uses of the Essex story in his chapter “Telling the Story” (pp. 155-82). The author of an article in the Garrettsville (Ohio) Journal (September 3, 1896) about the return of the Essex trunk to Nantucket provides convincing evidence of the impact the Essex story had on America’s young people: “In McGuffey’s old ‘Eclectic Fourth Reader’ we used to read that account. It told about whalers being in open whale-boats two thousand miles from land. . . . Such accounts as that make impressions on the minds of children which last.” Testifying to how far the story of the Essex spread is a ballad titled “The Shipwreck of the Essex, ” recorded in Cornwall, England. The ballad takes many liberties with the facts of the disaster, claiming, for example, that lots were cast no less than eight times while the men were still on Ducie Island (in Simpson’s Cannibalism and the Common Law, pp. 316-17). Emerson’s letter to his daughter about the Essex is in his collected letters, edited by Ralph Rusk, vol. 3 (pp. 398-99). On Melville’s one and only visit to Nantucket, see Susan Beegel’s “Herman Melville: Nantucket’s First Tourist.” Melville recorded his impressions of George Pollard in the pages of Chase’s Narrative (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, pp. 987-88).
    On Nantucket’s decline as a whaling port and the Great Fire of 1846, see my Away Off Shore (pp. 195-98, 203-4, 209-10). Christopher Hussey, in Talks About Old Nantucket, writes about how the burning slick of oil surrounded the firefighters in the shallows