In the Heart of the Sea

sunk the Essex, other whalemen said he was.
    In 1834, seventeen years before the publication of Moby-Dick, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson shared a coach with a sailor who told of a whale (and a white whale at that) known for bashing up whaleboats with its jaw. The seaman claimed that a whaleship had been fitted out of New Bedford called the Winslow or the Essex, he wasn’t sure which, to kill this whale and that the creature had been finally dispatched off the cost of South America. One can only wonder if Emerson recorded a garbled account of how Owen Chase, the new captain of the Winslow and the former first mate of the Essex, succeeded in avenging himself on the whale that had caused him so much hardship and pain.
    Whatever the case may be, Chase’s almost decade-long professional banishment from Nantucket ended soon after his return from his second full voyage as captain of the Winslow. At the age of thirty-three he was offered command of what was to be one of the largest ships in the Nantucket whale fishery. Until then, almost all the island’s ships were built on the mainland in places such as Rochester and Hanover, Massachusetts. But whaling had brought a tremendous surge of wealth to the island. The profit margins were now high enough that it was deemed economically feasible to build a whaleship at the island’s Brant Point Shipyard, even though all the materials had to be transported across Nantucket Sound. Over the next two years, the 376-ton, copper-fastened whaleship Charles Carroll took shape under Chase’s experienced eye, and with an investment of $625 he was given a 1/32 owners’ share in the vessel.
    Chase’s first voyage as captain of the Charles Carroll was a financial success. After three and a half years, he returned in March 1836 with 2,610 barrels of oil, almost twice the return of his first voyage as captain aboard the Winslow. But the voyage came at a great personal cost. Nine months after her husband left the island, Nancy Chase gave birth to a daughter, Adeline. A few weeks later, Nancy was dead. Greeting their father at the wharf in the spring of 1836 were Phebe Ann, almost sixteen; Lydia, thirteen; William Henry, eleven; and Adeline, two and a half—a girl who had no memory of her mother and had never known her father.
    Chase wasn’t home a month before he had remarried. Eunice Chadwick was just twenty-seven years old, and she now had four stepchildren to care for. By the end of August, after less than five months of marriage, she was waving good-bye to her new husband. This was to be Chase’s last voyage as a whaling captain. He was forty years old and, if all went well, would be able to retire to his house on Orange Street.
    Also in the Pacific during this period was a young man whose whaling career was just beginning. Herman Melville first signed on in 1840 as a hand aboard the New Bedford whaleship Acushnet. During a gam in the Pacific, he met a Nantucketer by the name of William Henry Chase—Owen Chase’s teenage son. Melville had already heard stories about the Essex from the sailors aboard the Acushnet and closely questioned the boy about his father’s experiences. The next morning William pulled out a copy of Owen’s Essex narrative from his sea chest and loaned it to Melville. “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea,” Melville remembered, “and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.”
    Later in the voyage, during a gam with another whaleship, Melville caught a glimpse of a Nantucket whaling captain whom he was told was none other than Owen Chase. “He was a large, powerful well-made man,” Melville would later write in the back pages of his own copy of Chase’s narrative, “rather tall; to all appearances something past forty-five or so; with a handsome face for a Yankee, and expressive of great uprightness and calm unostentatious courage. His whole appearance impressed me pleasantly. He was the most prepossessing-looking whalehunter I think I ever saw.” Although Melville appears to have mistaken another whaling captain for Chase, his description is remarkably similar to a surviving portrait of Owen Chase. It depicts a confident, almost arrogant face—a man completely at ease with the responsibility of command. But Chase’s professional assurance would not prepare him for the news he heard midway through his final voyage.
     
    SIXTEEN months after her husband sailed aboard the Charles