The whale that sank the Essex gave Melville the ending of Moby-Dick
In November 1820 a huge sperm whale charged the Nantucket whaler Essex twice and sent her to the bottom of the Pacific, some 2,000 nautical miles from South America. Twenty men took to three small boats. Only eight survived, and their story inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
Essex was launched in 1799 and had a reputation as a lucky ship: her previous six voyages had turned good profits. Yet at 88 feet she was small for a three-masted whaler. She left Nantucket on August 12, 1819, expecting to be away about two and a half years, under 29-year-old captain George Pollard Jr., with 21-year-old Owen Chase as first mate and 14-year-old Thomas Nickerson as cabin boy. Days out, a squall in the Gulf Stream knocked her on her side and wrecked two whaleboats, but the mates talked Pollard into sailing on.
Rounding Cape Horn took over a month. Off Peru the crew filled 450 barrels of oil in two months, then heard of a rich offshore ground more than 1,000 miles out to sea. Stocking up in the Galápagos, they took hundreds of giant tortoises alive as food, and a boatsteerer, Thomas Chappel, lit a prank fire that swept almost all of Charles Island; years later Nickerson found it still a blackened waste.
On November 20, 1820, with two boats away chasing whales and Chase repairing a third aboard, the crew watched an unusually large bull, reportedly about 85 feet long, lie still facing the ship and then swim at it. It rammed Essex, dived under her, then turned and hit again head-on, smashing the bow. The ship went down, and the men salvaged what food and water they could.
After a month adrift they reached uninhabited Henderson Island. Three chose to stay and were rescued in April 1821. The other seventeen set out again for South America and endured thirst, starvation and exposure until the survivors resorted to eating the dead. When rescue came in February 1821, three months after the sinking, just five of them were alive. Chase and Nickerson both wrote accounts, and the disaster drew international attention before shaping Melville's 1851 novel.
Source: Essex (whaleship)
