9/10/2023 0 Comments Captain george pollard jr.![]() Slowly foundered, and Pollard tried to come up with a plan. ![]() The men were unwilling to leave the doomed Essex as it Some, Chase observed, “had no idea of the “We have been stove by a whale,” his first mate answered.Īnother boat returned, and the men sat in silence, their captain Pollard saw his ship in distress from a distance, then returned to see the Essex in ruin. The water rushed into the ship so fast, the only thing the crew couldĭo was lower the boats and try fill them with navigational instruments,īread, water and supplies before the Essex turned over on its side. Hit the bow directly under the cathead and disappeared for good. Us again.” Chase spotted the whale, his head half out of water, bearingĭown at great speed-this time at six knots, Chase thought. The pumps working when one man cried out, “Here he is-he is making for The crew was addressing the hole in the ship and getting “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as ifĭistracted with rage and fury,” Chase recalled. The whale passed underneath the ship and began thrashing in the With “such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on The Essex, “coming down for us at great celerity,” Chase would Then, after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for In length, he estimated-lying quietly in the distance, its head facing It was Chase who spotted a very big whale-85 feet The crew called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-oldįirst mate, had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while Had harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what Many years later Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland,Īnd the fire was believed to have caused the extinction of both theįloreana Tortoise and the Floreana Mockingbird.Įssex First Mate Owen Chase, later in life.īy November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex Pollard was furious, and swore vengeance on whoever set theįire. Pollard’s men barely escaped, having to run through flames, and aĭay after they set sail, they could still see smoke from the burning Prank, one of the crew set a fire, which, in the dry season, quickly Galapagos, where the crew collected sixty 100-pound tortoises. To restock, the Essex anchored at Charles Island in the They decided to sail for distant whaling grounds in the South Pacific, The 20-man crew found the waters off South America nearly fished out, so Still, Pollard continued, making it to Cape Horn five weeks later. The 87-foot-long ship was hitīy a squall that destroyed its topgallant sail and nearly sank it. Was supposed to last two and a half years. The trouble for Essex began, as Melville knew, on August 14,ġ819, just two days after it left Nantucket on a whaling voyage that “But I can tell you no more-my head is on fire at the recollection,” Mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowingįate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. Nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless Ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex Unassuming, even humble-that I ever encountered.” Nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly That the captain surely carried with him. The Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the Was marked as unlucky at sea-a “Jonah”-and no owner would trust a ship Was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers.īut when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain ![]() Incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. The ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries,ĭined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously onlyĪnd on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, Home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, Steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick or, The Whale,ĭespite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales.
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