In the Heart of the Sea

life.” Phinney fondly remembered how Mary Pollard would lay her husband down on the kitchen table and measure him for a new pair of pants. Instead of a harpoon, this former whaleman wandered the streets “with a long hickory pole with an iron hook at the end, under his arm.” The pole not only enabled him to adjust the town’s whale-oil street lamps but proved useful in persuading the children to be in their homes by the curfew. Pollard took his duties so seriously that he was known, according to Phinney, as the town “gumshoe”—a streetwise detective familiar with the intimate details of an island whose population would grow from seven thousand to ten thousand over the next two decades.
    Phinney, like every other Nantucketer, knew the story of the Essex and had even heard the rumor about how “the man who drew the lot had his place taken by a young boy.” To Phinney and everyone else who actually knew Pollard, it was impossible that “this man” could have been George Pollard. (According to the version of the rumor Phinney heard, the man whose place was taken by Owen Coffin “had a wife and babies,” and as everyone knew, the Pollards were childless.)
    There was another rumor about Captain Pollard. It claimed that a newly arrived off-islander innocently asked him if he had ever known a man named Owen Coffin. “Know him?” Pollard was reputed to have replied. “Why, I et him!”
    Pollard’s friends didn’t credit that story either. They knew that he was incapable of mocking the memory of the men who had died in the Essex whaleboats. Even though he had been able to put the tragedy behind him, he never ceased to honor those who had been lost. “Once a year,” Phinney remembered, “on the anniversary of the loss of the Essex, he locked himself in his room and fasted.”
     
    AS A whaleman, Owen Chase would enjoy the success that had eluded George Pollard. His personal life, however, proved less fortunate.
    Chase’s first voyage after the sinking of the Essex, as first mate aboard the New Bedford whaleship Florida, lasted less than two years and reaped two thousand barrels of oil. When he returned to Nantucket in 1823, he found a second child, Lydia, toddling in the wake of her older sister, Phebe Ann, now approaching four. Chase chose to remain on-island for the birth of his next child, a son, who was named William Henry. Owen’s wife, Peggy did not recover from the delivery. She died less than two weeks later. Owen was now a twenty-seven-year-old widower with three children to care for.
    In the fall and winter of 1824-25 he came to know a woman with whom he already shared a special bond. Nancy Slade Joy was the widow of Matthew Joy, second mate of the Essex. She and Matthew had been married for two years before her husband had shipped out for the last time. In June of 1825, nine months after the death of Peggy Chase, the widow and widower were married, and Nancy became the stepmother of Owen’s three children. Two weeks later, Chase purchased a house from his father on the outskirts of Orange Street’s “Captain’s Row.” In early August, Chase sailed for New Bedford, where he took command of his first vessel, the Winslow. He was twenty-eight years old, the same age Pollard had been when he had become captain of the Essex.
    The Winslow was a small whaleship and carried only fifteen men. On July 20, 1827, after a voyage of almost two years, she returned to New Bedford with 1,440 barrels of oil. Chase returned to Nantucket, paid off the $500 mortgage on his house, and was back in New Bedford by the second week in August. The emotions of Nancy Chase, who had lived with her husband for less than two months back in the summer of 1825, can only be imagined when she learned that Owen was departing almost immediately on another voyage aboard the Winslow.
    Soon after her departure, the Winslow was damaged in a tremendous gale and limped back to New Bedford in October for repairs. The owners decided to take the opportunity to enlarge the ship to 263 tons, allowing Chase to spend nine months with his wife and three children back on Nantucket. Leaving again in July 1828, he filled his newly modified ship in two years and was back on Nantucket in the summer of 1830.
    It is naturally tempting to read into Chase’s post- Essex career an Ahab-like quest for revenge. There is, in fact, a tiny shred of evidence to indicate that even if Chase was not motivated by a desire to find and kill the whale that had