200th Anniversary of the Essex Sinking

On November 20, 1820, an enraged sperm whale rammed and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 1,300 miles from the nearest land. Twenty sailors survived the attack and quickly outfitted their three small whaleboats to make a journey to safety. They could only carry limited food and water, and could only hope that their supplies would last them as they slowly sailed for land across miles of open water. Three months later, five emaciated survivors were picked up by passing ships, three more remained stranded on a deserted island, and twelve men were dead—seven of them eaten in desperation by their starving shipmates. Their tale of choices, survival, and leadership astonished the maritime community, eventually serving as part of the inspiration for Moby-Dick.

shipwrecks

Shipwrecks sometimes ruined whaling careers. For George Pollard, Nantucket whaler and captain of the Essex, the proverbial lightning struck twice. After safely returning home in the summer of 1821, Pollard set out again that fall in command of the Two Brothers, another whaler bound back for the Pacific. The ship struck a reef in Febraury 1823 in shoals to the northwest of the Hawaiian Islands, and, although he was reluctant to abandon ship, his crew safely evacuated to the nearby whaler Martha. Pollard never received another command.

In 2008, NOAA marine archeologists discovered the wreck of the Two Brothers. Working at the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawai’i, they discovered a cooking pot and anchor 15 feet down on the seabed. Further exploration led by Dr. Kelly Gleason revealed more pots, bricks, grinding stones, and harpoons—all artifacts pointing to whaling activity in the early 1800s.

While the Two Brothers wreck claimed no lives, other shipwrecks involved the tragic loss of life. In these situations, marine archaeologists followed the same protocols as their land-based colleagues, respecting mariners’ watery graves.

The Paphanaumokuakea Marine National Monument is a World Heritage monument encompassing 583,000 square miles of ocean waters, including ten islands and atolls of the northwestern Hawaiian island.

After 1820, it became known among whalemen that the equatorial Pacific was a promising region to hunt the prized sperm whale. Charts by Charles Haskins Townsend documented the number of whales captured “along the line.”

Whaling in the Pacific led to increased worldwide awareness of atolls and islands in the Pacific. Some of these islands were populated by indigenous peoples, who began trading with the increasingly frequent whaleships. Other islands were uninhabited, and European and American captains often gave them new names. Nantucket captain Elisha Folger named one island “New Nantucket” in 1818. Subsequently, New Bedford captain Michael Baker claimed the island and gave it another name—his own. He sold the island to investors, and it was eventually mined for guano by the American Guano Company.

a

cannibalism and “custom of the sea”

Life at sea occasionally ended in tragedy. When vessels foundered in the age of sail, and crews found themselves in remote waters far from aid, sailors relied on their considerable professional skills to try to save themselves. But circumstances often outmatched them. If food and water ran short, cannibalism sometimes ensured survival, and a sympathetic public was likely to forgive such extreme necessities upon return to land. The common expression for these acts of survival was “the custom of the sea.”

Melville’s Moby-Dick drew from the story of the Essex, albeit with dramatized effect. In Moby-Dick, it seems as if the whole crew of the Pequod craved a cannibal diet—if Melville never fed his characters flesh, he still described their whale prey with an anatomy and behavior parallel to a hunted man.

Another famous shipwreck with cannibalism was the 1816 wreck of the French frigate Medusa, whose raft of 151 survivors floated for two weeks until an English bark rescued fifteen men. The wreck of the British yacht Mignonette in 1884 found the survivors in legal trouble for murdering a shipmate for food. This event changed the “custom of the sea” from a tragic but accepted necessity to a legal crime. As a consequence, fewer mariners admitted to cannibalism, although it still happened.

Cannibalism among shipwrecked sailors was openly acknowledged in the days of sail, and castaways often admitted to drawing lots to decide who would live and who die. Yet it is clear that these lotteries were rarely fair, and the strong typically ate the weak. In disaster after disaster, passengers perished before sailors, boys before men, and Blacks before whites. So, too, perhaps, among the men of the Essex. Was it a coincidence that only Nantucketers remained in the boats at the end, or that only white men survived, or that only non-Nantucketers elected to remain on Henderson Island? We may never know for sure, but the questions are there to be asked, further darkening what, by any measure, was a journey of nearly unimaginable horror.

a

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault. La Balsa de la Medusa (Musee du Louvre) 1818–19.

Nat Philbrick

save the date

Michael Harrison Friday, November 20 at 5:30pm Join us for a special Essex virtual event on the 200th anniversary of its sinking with best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick and NHA Obed Macy Research Chair, Michael Harrison

To learn more and purchase tickets, visit NHA.org

at what cost?

In Moby-Dick, only Ishmael survived the voyage of the Pequod, his shipmates perishing from Ahab’s maniacal pursuit of the white whale. To be sure, many real Nantucketers also died from the actions of angered sperm whales, and some certainly perished due to the poor judgement of their captains. But disease and shipboard accidents were also leading causes of death among Nantucket whalers, as well as among Nantucket fishermen and merchant sailors more generally. Research carried out at the NHA has identified a minimum of 1,131 seafarers lost aboard Nantucket vessels between 1724 and 1896. Their sacrifices stand as a testament to the human cost of whaling, fishing, and trading from a small island community.

The whole point of whaling was to capture and kill whales, but reckoning the total number of whales killed throughout the history of Nantucket is complicated. Whalers sometimes recorded individual whales in their logbooks, but that number did not matter to them. What mattered was the amount of oil the whales yielded, measured in barrels, and whalers kept scrupulous record of the number of barrels they gathered. Oil totals were so important they were always reported when one ship gathered news from another in mid-ocean. Even when there was other news to report from the voyage, the oil total was paramount. A typical case from the Nantucket Inquirer, April 2, 1835: “Spoken off Port Spain, Trinidad, Dec 5, by brig Carroll arr at Phila. Sch Harmony, Swain of this port, in distress, 100 bbls.”

Whalers captured a variety of whale species, such as northern and southern right whales, sperm whales, blackfish, and humpback whales. Individual whales varied greatly in size and might yield as few as 10 or as many as 100 barrels of oil. Scholarly consensus places the average yield at about 34 barrels per whale. Between 1760 and 1869, documented Nantucket voyages returned 1.1 million barrels of sperm oil. At 34 barrels per whale, that works out to more than 32,300 sperm whales. Nantucketers went whaling as early as 1690, and the historical record of their voyages is incomplete, so the total number of sperm whales killed in service to the island’s prosperity may be as high as 40,000, to say nothing of right whales and other species. This number may seem large, but it is not, compared to the devastation wrought by industrial whaling in modern times. Between 1900 and 1999, the world’s whalers killed 761,523 sperm whales, out of nearly 3 million whales killed in total.

Right page: A team of interns and volunteers scoured newspapers, account books, and whaling logs in an effort to quantify the Nantucket whaling industry’s death toll at sea. While the record will never be complete, the team identified more than 1,000 sailors who lost their lives in pursuit of “black gold.” The outliers represent years where whole crews are documented as lost at sea rather than individual sailors. Scrimshaw whale’s tooth with inscribed memorial to “Albert Gardner Lost at Sea 1840” Gift of Rick and Janet Sherlund. 2019.29.1.

whaling crew diversity

Melville gave his Pequod a diverse crew, mentioning 44 men from the U.S., northern and southern Europe, South America, Iceland, the Azores, China, and India. He epitomized this diversity in his four “harpooneers”: Queequeg the Pacific Islander, Dagoo the African, Fedallah the Indian “Parsee,” and Tashtego the Gay Head Native American. American whaling crews before the Civil War were in fact diverse, but never this diverse within a single voyage or among the ranks of the boatsteerers (harpooners).

During Nantucket’s earliest period of whaling, ca. 1690–1720, the English relied on Native American men to man their whaling boats. English settlement drastically altered the lifeways of the island’s Wampanoag people. Fishing and whaling became necessary economic alternatives for a native population that could no longer rely on the island’s land. As these fisheries developed, however, boats and equipment lay in the hands of the English, leaving Native people to provide the bulk of the labor. White men did not form a majority of the island’s whaling workforce until about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Nantucket whaling crews of the 1820s to the 1850s were comprised of a mix of local and off-island men, mostly Americans but supplemented by Europeans and increasing numbers of Azoreans, Cape Verdeans, and Pacific Islanders over time. Nantucket whaleship masters were nearly always white men from Nantucket; the mates were often but not exclusively islanders. Because seasoned merchant mariners avoided the tedious and dirty life of whaling, the industry hired many landsmen and provided meaningful economic opportunities for otherwise marginalized workers, particularly Blacks, Native Americans, and poor whites.

White stereotypes cast Native Americans as natural hunters, which helped skilled men from the Mashpee and Gay Head Wampanoag communities to advance to the ranks of boatsteerers and mates. Melville’s “wild Indian” Tashtego is a poor depiction of this core group of American whalemen.

Black men, both freemen and escaped slaves, often made up between 25 and 40 percent of Nantucket crews. While they earned nearly the same as their white shipmates, they were customarily excluded from specialized roles higher than cook and steward. Notable exceptions include Captain Absalom Boston and the all-Black crew of the Industry in 1822; Peter Green, who commanded the John Adams in 1823 after the captain died and a whale carried off the first mate; and the all-Black crew of the Loper, who harvested a remarkable 2,280 barrels of oil in just 14 months in 1829–30 and were feted by the ship’s owners on their return with the toast, “Black skin—the best skin a whaleman can see.”

American whalers routinely stopped at the islands of the Azores and Cape Verde to lay in provisions and hire additional crewmen. Beginning in the eighteenth century, some of these seamen came to Nantucket and stayed, creating a Portuguese-speaking community that in the mid- to late-nineteenth century anchored further immigration from the Atlantic Islands to New England. American whalers also hired Pacific Islanders from the places they stopped to rest and reprovision in the South Seas. No Queequegs here: Pacific Islanders commonly selected—or were assigned—simple nicknames instead of their real names when signed aboard: John Mowee, Peter Mowey, Joe Maui, Kanakkoe Bill, Robert Coffin “Canacker”, and Jack Lewis “Canaka” all served on Nantucket ships before 1858. (Even Queequeg was entered as “Quohog” on Pequod’s roll.)

Crew list for ship Barclay, 1832. NHA Purchase, with support from Patricia and Thomas Anathan. RL2020.23

In imagining a crew for the Pequod, Melville took the reality of 1840s American whaling and exaggerated it, making his crew artificially hyper-diverse for literary purposes. While Ahab and the mates conform to real-world demographics, Melville’s harpooners are racial stereotypes of savage hunters; in fact, he never calls them by their rightful title, boatsteerer, but invents the word “harpooneer” to focus on their skills with the spear. To honor the actual men who worked in island whaling, we need to look beyond Melville’s literary creations and celebrate the real men who sailed Nantucket’s whalers.