In the Heart of the Sea

have forgotten about the tragedy. In 1824 Samuel Comstock led the crew of the Nantucket whaleship Globe in a bloody mutiny and public attention was directed away from the Essex. Ten years later, however, with the publication of an article about the wreck in the North American Review, interest returned. Over the next two decades, numerous accounts of the Essex disaster appeared. One of the most influential versions of the story was included in a popular children’s schoolbook, William H. McGuffey’s The Eclectic Fourth Reader. It would become difficult to grow up in America without learning some form of the Essex story.
    In 1834 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal of his conversation with the seaman about the white whale and the Essex. When Emerson visited Nantucket in 1847, he met Captain Pollard and, in a letter to his young daughter back home in Concord, Massachusetts, described the sinking of the Essex: “[A] great sperm whale was seen coming with full speed toward the vessel: in a moment he struck the ship with terrible force, staving in some planks and causing a leak: then he went off a little way, and came back swiftly, the water all white with his violent motion, and struck the ship a second frightful blow.”
    In 1837 Edgar Allan Poe made use of the more ghoulish aspects of Chase’s account in his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Lots are drawn, men are eaten, and one sailor dies in horrible convulsions. Decades before the Donner Party became snowbound in the foothills of the Sierras, the Essex brought a scandalous tale of cannibalism to the American public.
    But it would be left to Herman Melville to make the most enduring use of the whaleship’s story. Moby-Dick contains several detailed references to the attack of the whale on the Essex, but it is the climax of the novel that draws most heavily on Chase’s narrative. “Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect,” Melville writes of the white whale’s assault on the Pequod. Upon impact, the whale, just as Chase describes in his account, dives beneath the ship and runs “quivering along its keel.” But instead of attacking the already sinking ship for a second time, Moby Dick turns his attention to the whaleboat of Captain Ahab.
    Moby-Dick proved to be both a critical and financial disappointment, and in 1852, a year after its publication, Melville finally visited Nantucket. He traveled to the island in July with his father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw, the same judge who had granted Owen Chase’s divorce twelve years earlier. Like Emerson before him, it wasn’t Chase, now a retired whaling captain living off the income from his investments, whom Melville sought out, but rather George Pollard, the lowly night watchman.
    Melville appears to have stayed at the Ocean House, on the corner of Centre and Broad Streets, diagonally across from the home in which George and Mary Pollard had been living for decades. Late in life Melville wrote of the Essex ’s captain: “To the islanders he was a nobody—to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming even humble—that I ever encountered.”
    In the years to come, Melville’s professional life as a novelist would go the way of Pollard’s whaling career. Without a readership for his books, the author of Moby-Dick was forced to take a job as a customs inspector on the wharves of New York City. Although he ceased writing novels, he continued to write poetry, in particular a long, dark poem called Clarel, in which there is a character based on Pollard. After two disastrous voyages, the former captain becomes “A night patrolman on the quay / Watching the bales till morning hour / Through fair and foul.” Melville felt a powerful kinship with the captain of the Essex, and his description of the old seaman is based as much upon himself as it is on the man he met on the streets of Nantucket:
    Never he smiled;
    Call him, and he would come; not sour
In spirit, but meek and reconciled:
Patient he was, he none withstood;
Oft on some secret thing would brood.
    BY 1835, when Obed Macy published, with the assistance of William Coffin, Jr., his History of Nantucket, New Bedford had eclipsed the island as America’s leading whaling port. The Nantucket Bar—a mere nuisance in the early days of the Pacific whale fishery—had developed into a major obstacle to prosperity. The whaleships had become so large that they could no longer cross the Bar without being almost