In the Heart of the Sea

Carroll, Eunice Chase, Owen Chase’s third wife, gave birth to a son, Charles Fredrick. Herman Melville would be told of how Chase received the news, and inevitably the future author of Moby-Dick would compare the plight of the former first mate of the Essex to that of George Pollard. “The miserable pertinaciousness of misfortune which pursued Pollard the captain, in his second disastrous and entire shipwreck did likewise hunt poor Owen,” Melville wrote, “tho’ somewhat more dilatory in overtaking him the second time.” Melville was told that Chase had received letters “informing him of the certain infidelity of his wife. . . . We also heard that his receipt of this news had told most heavily upon Chase, and that he was a prey to the deepest gloom.”
    A matter of days after his return to Nantucket in the winter of 1840, Chase filed for divorce. On July 7, the divorce was granted, with Chase taking over legal guardianship of Charles Frederick. Two months later, Chase was married for the fourth time, to Susan Coffin Gwinn. In the previous twenty-one years, he had spent only five at home. He would now remain on Nantucket for the rest of his life.
     
    THE other Essex survivors also returned to the sea. Once they’d been delivered to Oahu after the wreck of the Two Brothers, Thomas Nickerson and Charles Ramsdell soon found berths on other whaleships. In the 1840s Ramsdell served as captain of the General Jackson out of Bristol, Rhode Island; he would marry twice and have a total of six children. Nickerson eventually tired of the whaling life and became a captain in the merchant service, relocating to Brooklyn, New York, where he and his wife, Margaret, lived for a number of years. They had no children.
    Benjamin Lawrence served as captain of the whaleships Dromo and Huron, the latter out of Hudson, New York, home of the Essex ’s second mate, Matthew Joy. Lawrence had seven children, one of whom would die at sea. In the early 1840s, Lawrence, like Chase, retired from the whaling business and purchased a small farm at Siasconset, on the east end of the island of Nantucket.
    Less is known about the three off-islanders rescued from Henderson Island. The two Cape Codders, Seth Weeks and William Wright, continued as crew members on the Surry, voyaging throughout the Pacific until they made their way to England and back to the United States. Wright was lost at sea in a hurricane off the West Indies. Weeks eventually retired to Cape Cod, where he would outlive all the other Essex survivors.
    The Englishman Thomas Chappel returned to London in June 1823. There he contributed to a religious tract that wrung every possible spiritual lesson from the story of the Essex disaster. Nickerson later heard of the Englishman’s death on the fever-plagued island of Timor.
     
    ALTHOUGH townspeople continued to whisper about the Essex well into the twentieth century, it was not a topic a Nantucketer openly discussed. When the daughter of Benjamin Lawrence was asked about the disaster, she replied, “We do not mention this in Nantucket.”
    It wasn’t just the fact that the men had resorted to cannibalism. It was also difficult for Nantucketers to explain why the first four men to be eaten had been African American. What made this a particularly sensitive topic on Nantucket was the island’s reputation as an abolitionist stronghold—what the poet John Greenleaf Whittier called “a refuge of the free.” Instead of the Essex, Nantucket’s Quakers preferred to talk about how the island’s growing black community to the south of town, known as New Guinea, participated in the booming whaling economy.
    In 1830 Captain Obed Starbuck and his almost all-black crew returned after a voyage of only fourteen and a half months with 2,280 barrels of oil. A headline in the Nantucket Inquirer announced,
    “GREATEST VOYAGE EVER MADE.” Spirits ran so high that the black sailors in the crew paraded up Main Street proudly shouldering their harpoons and lances. Less than ten years later, an escaped slave living in New Bedford was invited to speak at an abolitionist meeting at the island’s Atheneum library. The African American’s name was Frederick Douglass, and his appearance on Nantucket marked the first time he had ever spoken before a white audience. This was the legacy Nantucket’s Quaker hierarchy wanted the world to remember, not the disturbing events associated with the Essex.
    For a time, at least, off-islanders seemed to