The story of the Essex belongs especially to its first mate, Owen Chase, who became the historian of the disaster. Within a few months of the Essex survivors’ return to Nantucket, a New York publisher brought out a thin volume under Owen Chase’s name that told the story of the Essex and its crew. Herman Melville tells us how he came to read the book. The Acushnet, on which Melville had sailed from Fairhaven on his first whaling voyage, had gammed an unidentified Nantucket ship:
In the forecastle I made the acquaintance of a fine lad of sixteen or thereabouts, a son of Owen Chace. I questioned him concerning his father’s adventure; and when I left his ship to return again the next morning (for the two vessels were to sail in company for a few days) he went to his chest & handed me a complete copy … of the Narrative. This was the first printed account of it I had ever seen, … The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me.1
When Melville turned to the writing of Moby-Dick, the little book that William Henry Chase had lent him at sea was to provide the ending of the novel. In chapter 45 of Moby-Dick Melville again spoke of Owen Chase and quoted from Owen’s book some passages that are awesome enough in themselves but become more awesome in Melville’s eerily reverential reference to them.
Other authors learned the story and borrowed it. McGuffey’s readers made the tale familiar to generations of school children, and popular writers on the sea have continued to recount accurate and inaccurate versions of the story.1
From some familiar and many new sources the story of Owen Chase and the Essex has been collected in the book that follows. At the appropriate point in the book the teller will become Owen Chase himself: his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex is a vivid and compelling account into which not a touch of quaintness has crept in a century and a half. It is the indispensable document on the Essex.
This study is indebted to so many people that I could not dedicate a page apiece to them. My very first thanks go to Owen Chase’s collateral descendants, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Chase, Aurora, New York, and Mrs. Isabell Chase Burnett, Ithaca, New York. I would not even have started on this book without the documents, information, and encouragement they lent to the undertaking. Owen Chase’s great-great-granddaughters, Isabelle and Margaret Tice, were also most kind and helpful.
Then come the Nantucketers: my debt to Edouard Stackpole, Louise Hussey, Helen Winslow, and Andre Aubuchon, accumulated over many long weeks spent in the Peter Foulger Museum, is massive.
From the descendants of the English captain who rescued three of the Essex survivors from Henderson Island I have received the most generous and painstaking attention to all inquiries: the Honourable E. P. T. Raine, C. B. E., E.D., his aunt Margaret Fane De Salis, and his brother Maxwell Raine.
At the National Archives I have had the help of many of the staff, of whom I must mention Kenneth Hall, Gibson Smith, William F. Sherman, James Harwood, and Terry Matchette; at the Library of Congress I am indebted to John McDonough, Manuscript Historian, and to the staff of the Manuscript Division.
I also thank Wilson Heflin; Louise Coulson; Charles Paddack, M.D.; Charlotte Giffin King; Douglass Fonda; Eugenio Pereira Salas; Patricia Reynolds, La Trobe Librarian, the State Library of Victoria; Suzanne Mourot, Mitchell Librarian, the State Library of New South Wales; D. Troy, Acting Senior Archivist of the Archives Authority of New South Wales; Robert Langdon of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau; Irene Moran, University of California at Berkeley; Mona L. Dearborn, National Portrait Gallery; Bruce Barnes, formerly of the New Bedford Free Public Library; Marion V. Bell, Enoch Pratt Free Library; V. J. Kite, Avon County Library Service; G. D. Harraway, Office of the Governor of Pitcairn Island; the Earl of Dundonald; Mrs. Leroy T. Taylor; Mrs. Mary K. Norton; the late Chester Simkin; Mr. and Mrs. Ray Lewis; Carlos Lopez; Sonia Pinto Vallejos; Franklin Proud; Eduardo Reyes; Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Davies; Nicholas Carbo; Suzanne M. Zobel; William Omeltchenko; J. Stephen Taylor; Rollo G. Silver, Claude L. Chappell; John Tebbel; Mr. and Mrs. John Donahue; Frank Muhly and Bunny Harvey; and three experts on a chemical question: Richard Rapp, Rutgers University; G. H. Lording, the British Phosphate Commissioners; and Arthur Notholt, Institute of Geological Sciences (London).
The help of the following institutions has been indispensable: the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the International Marine Archives, Inc., the Nantucket Historical Association, the Nantucket Atheneum, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, the Harvard University Library, the Berkshire Atheneum, the British Library, the Library of University College (London), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), the Scottish Record Office, the American Printing History Society, the Kendall Whaling Museum, the National Library of Australia, the National Library of New Zealand, the Devon Library Services, the Devon Family History Society, the Devon Record Services, the Operational Archives of the Naval History Department, the Explorers’ Club, the Seaman’s Church Institute Library, and the Dukes County Historical Society.
Jay Leyda, from whom a word on the subject would be prized, read the manuscript and had many words on it, for which I am most grateful. Wilson Heflin and Helen Winslow were also kind enough to read and advise. All have my thanks and my assurance that the shortcomings of the book are no faults of theirs. Jeanne Widmayer’s help in preparing the manuscript went far beyond the call of duty.
STOVE BY A WHALE
Chapter One
OWEN CHASE
IT LIES so far out in the sea, that tiny sickle of land, that one wonders how the Indians ever found it. The old legend, retold in chapter 14 of Moby-Dick, that an Indian baby was carried out over the ocean in an eagle’s talons and that the parents pursued it in a canoe until they fell upon Nantucket, seems to be a right myth for the island, even though one who has caught sight of Nantucket on a clear day from one of the modest elevations north of Hyannis knows there were more pedestrian—or remigian—ways of coming upon it.
The voyager who makes the crossing today steps onto an island that has, with some appropriateness, almost exactly the shape that Thomas More gave to his island of Utopia. But this island is a built-up desert, a sandbar, albeit one of the most enterprising and prosperous sandbars in history. Even saying it is a desert calls for some qualification. It is fertile for many plants—including secret patches of heather; Nantucketers do not import weeds, as Herman Melville facetiously suggested, or send overseas for wood to plug a hole. But what Melville said about the Nantucketers’ energetic business with the whale needs no qualification: “And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.”1 When Melville wrote, Nantucket meant whaling wherever its name was spoken; the ant-hill was known in most nations that had ocean ports.
American whaling did not begin on Nantucket; it had already started on Long Island in the middle of the seventeenth century before Nantucket was settled.2 Immemorially known to Indians and by white men discovered in 1602, Nantucket was sold to a group of partners in 1659, one of whom, Thomas Macy, became the island’s first white settler. Nantucketers, the old histories relate, began their whaling business around 1668 when a whale entered their harbor and stayed three days, long enough for them to fashion a harpoon and kill it. In 1672 they engaged James Lopar to conduct whaling in partnership with the town; in 1690 they brought over the—quite literally—legendary Ichabod Paddack from Cape Cod to school them in whaling. (Ichabod was real, but he is probably most remembered for the yarn—now spun in children’s books—about his frequent Jonah-like visits to the bowels of a whale where he was welcomed by an enticing mermaid.) Shore whaling yielded to the fitting out of thirty-ton vessels for six-week cruises and seventy-ton vessels for longer cruises down the Atlantic and to the Grand Banks. In 1712 Christopher Hussey killed the