In the Heart of the Sea

attention.” But he had other motives as well. Writing the narrative offered him an opportunity to represent himself—a young officer in need of another ship—as positively as possible.
    Chase’s account is necessarily focused on what happened on his own boat. However, the majority of the deaths—nine out of eleven—occurred on the other two boats, and Chase’s description of these deaths is limited to a brief summation at the end of his narrative. It would be difficult for any reader of Chase’s book alone to appreciate the true scope of the disaster. In particular, the fact that five out of the first six men to die were black is never commented on by Chase. By keeping many of the most disturbing and problematic aspects of the disaster offstage, Chase transforms the story of the Essex into a personal tale of trial and triumph.
    It is in his account of the decisions made prior to the ordeal in the whaleboats that the first mate is the most self-serving. He chooses not to mention that he was the one, along with Matthew Joy, who urged Captain Pollard to continue on after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream even though several whaleboats had been lost. He also makes the officers’ decision to sail for South America sound as if it were mutually agreed upon from the start when, according to Nickerson, Pollard had initially proposed to sail for the Society Islands. More important, Chase is careful to conceal that he had the opportunity to lance the whale after the first attack—a fact that would not be revealed until the publication of Nickerson’s account 163 years later.
    Chase’s fellow Nantucket survivors, particularly Captain Pollard, undoubtedly felt that their side of the story had not been adequately told in the first mate’s account of the disaster. (Herman Melville would later report that Pollard had been moved to write, “or caused to be [written] under his own name, his own version of the story”—a narrative that has not come to light.) But it wasn’t just Chase’s fellow crew members who felt slighted by the publication of the Essex narrative. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would observe during a visit to the island in 1847, Nantucketers are “[v]ery sensitive to everything that dishonors the island because it hurts the value of stock till the company are poorer.” The last thing they wanted placed before the nation and the world was a detailed account of how some of their own men and boys had been reduced to cannibalism. Chase’s account pulled no punches on this issue, employing two exclamation marks when it came to the initial proposal to eat Isaac Cole. No matter how straitened a man’s circumstances, many believed, he did not attempt to enrich himself by sensationalizing the sufferings of his own people. Significantly, Chase’s next voyage would not be on a Nantucket whaleship. That December he traveled to New Bedford, where he sailed as first mate on the Florida, a whaleship without a single Nantucketer in the crew. Even though his family remained on the island, Chase would not sail on a ship from his home port for another eleven years.
    George Pollard, however, was given the ultimate vote of confidence. On November 26, 1821, a little more than three months after returning to Nantucket and just a few days after the appearance of Chase’s narrative, he set sail for the Pacific as captain of the Two Brothers. But perhaps the most extraordinary endorsement Pollard received came from two of his crew members. For Pollard wasn’t the only Essex man aboard the Two Brothers; two others had chosen to serve under him again. One was Thomas Nickerson. The other was Charles Ramsdell, the boy who had spent ninety-four days in a whaleboat with him. If there was someone who had come to know Captain Pollard, it was Charles Ramsdell.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    Consequences

    G EORGE POLLARD TOOK TO his second command with optimism that was remarkable, considering what had happened to his first. In the winter of 1822 he successfully brought the Two Brothers around the Horn, headed her up the west coast of South America, and provisioned her at the Peruvian port of Payta. In mid-August the Two Brothers spoke the U.S. Navy schooner Waterwitch. Aboard the Waterwitch was a twenty-four-year-old midshipman named Charles Wilkes. As it so happened, Wilkes had finished reading Chase’s narrative of the Essex disaster only the day before. He asked the captain of the Two Brothers if he was any relation to the famous George