Cannibalism, Shipwreck and a Giant Whale: The Story of the Essex

“Amazement and despair now wholly took possession of us.” - Owen Chase

On 20 November 1820, somewhere in the enormous emptiness of the Pacific Ocean, the roles of hunter and hunted were suddenly reversed. For more than a year, the crew of the American whaleship Essex had travelled thousands of miles searching for sperm whales. Their job was to find them, chase them in small wooden boats, drive harpoons into their bodies and kill them for the valuable oil contained within. That morning, however, an enormous sperm whale turned towards the Essex and did something almost unheard of. It attacked the ship, not once, but twice. Within minutes the 238-ton vessel was mortally damaged and twenty men were left floating in the Pacific in three tiny whaleboats. What followed was considerably worse than the sinking itself.

The Essex had left Nantucket on 12 August 1819 under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr. Nantucket was then one of the centres of the global whaling industry and the Essex had previously developed a reputation as a successful ship. It was already around twenty years old but had undergone repairs and was considered seaworthy. The voyage was expected to last more than two years, during which the crew would travel deep into the Pacific hunting sperm whales and filling the ship with barrels of valuable oil.

Whaling was an extraordinarily dangerous occupation. When a whale was spotted, men climbed down from the relative safety of their ship into small open boats and rowed towards an animal that could weigh tens of tonnes. A harpooner would then deliberately attach the boat to the whale using a barbed iron and rope. If the whale fled, the boat could be dragged behind it at tremendous speed in what became known as a Nantucket sleighride. If the whale decided to fight instead, its enormous tail and jaws were capable of smashing the boat to pieces. The entire industry essentially relied upon repeatedly attacking enormous sea mammals and hoping that they behaved predictably.

The Essex encountered trouble almost immediately. Only two days after leaving Nantucket, a violent squall knocked the ship onto its side and destroyed two of its whaleboats. Captain Pollard considered returning home, but the damage was repaired and the voyage continued. After rounding Cape Horn, the Essex entered the Pacific and eventually reached the Galápagos Islands, where the crew collected giant tortoises that could be kept alive aboard the ship and eaten during the long voyage ahead.

Their visit to the Galápagos produced another incident that, with hindsight, reads almost like an omen. Crewman Thomas Chappel secretly started a fire on Charles Island, now Floreana, apparently as a prank. Setting fire to an extremely dry island turned out to be one of those jokes where the consequences quickly overwhelm the humour. The flames spread uncontrollably and the sailors were forced to escape through the burning vegetation towards their boats. The Essex sailed away while the island continued to burn behind them.

Less than a month later, on the morning of 20 November, the lookout spotted a group of sperm whales. The crews lowered their whaleboats and began the hunt. First Mate Owen Chase successfully harpooned one whale, but the animal struck his small boat with its tail and smashed a hole in it. Chase was forced to cut the harpoon line and return to the Essex for repairs while Captain Pollard and the other boats continued chasing whales some distance away.

While Chase worked aboard the Essex, he noticed an enormous sperm whale near the ship. He later estimated it to be approximately 85 feet long, unusually large even for a sperm whale. At first the animal appeared calm, but then it turned towards the vessel and accelerated directly at it. The whale slammed its head into the Essex with such force that men were thrown from their feet and the entire vessel shook as though it had struck a rock. The animal passed beneath the ship and surfaced nearby, apparently stunned by the collision, while Chase realised that the Essex was beginning to take on water.

Then the whale came back. This time it approached considerably faster, with its enormous head partly above the water and its tail churning the sea behind it. Chase later interpreted its behaviour as deliberate rage or vengeance, although it is impossible to know what the whale was actually doing. What is certain is that it struck the Essex for a second time, smashing into the bow with devastating force and crushing its timbers. The whale then disappeared into the Pacific, leaving behind a ship that was effectively destroyed.

Captain Pollard returned in his whaleboat to find the Essex sinking. He asked Chase what had happened and received one of the simplest explanations imaginable for such an extraordinary event: “We have been stove by a whale.” The crew salvaged whatever they could, including navigational equipment, bread, water, firearms and sails, before abandoning the ship. Twenty men were now divided between three open whaleboats thousands of miles from home.

The survivors now faced a decision that would have horrific consequences. Islands in the Marquesas and Society Islands were considerably closer than South America, but many of the sailors had heard stories of cannibalism among Pacific islanders and were terrified of being eaten if they landed there. Instead, they decided to sail towards the coast of South America, an immensely longer journey across open ocean. It became one of the cruellest ironies in maritime history because the men who avoided the nearest islands through fear of cannibals would eventually resort to cannibalism themselves.

Food and water were immediately rationed. Each man received tiny quantities of bread and water while the three boats attempted to cross thousands of miles of ocean. Salt water soaked their clothing and damaged their supplies, while the sun burned them during the day and cold tormented them at night. Their lips cracked, their tongues swelled and their bodies gradually began consuming themselves. Chase eventually guarded the remaining provisions with a loaded pistol because stealing even a small amount of food could potentially condemn another man to death.

After around a month at sea, the men discovered an uninhabited island now known to have been Henderson Island. To twenty starving sailors it initially appeared miraculous. They found birds, eggs, crabs and fish and also discovered a small source of fresh water. They consumed virtually everything they could catch, including parts of fish they would ordinarily have discarded. Unfortunately, the island could not provide enough food and water to sustain all of them for long.

Most of the men therefore decided to return to the boats and continue towards South America. Three, Thomas Chappel, Seth Weeks and William Wright, chose to remain behind on the island. At the time, staying on an isolated piece of land in the middle of the Pacific must have seemed almost suicidal. Ironically, it proved to be one of the best decisions anyone made during the entire disaster. All three were eventually rescued alive.

Conditions among those who returned to sea deteriorated rapidly. Men began dying from starvation and dehydration, and the survivors eventually made the dreadful decision to eat the bodies of those who died naturally. Owen Chase later described the horror of deciding not to bury crewman Isaac Cole at sea. Cole's body instead became food for the remaining men, allowing them to survive for a little longer. What had once been unthinkable gradually became a matter of simple survival.

The situation aboard Captain Pollard's boat became even worse. By February 1821, four men remained alive and there was nothing left to eat. They finally agreed to draw lots to decide which of them would be killed so that the others might survive. The fatal lot fell to 17-year-old Owen Coffin, Pollard's young cousin. Pollard reportedly offered to protect him, but Coffin accepted the result.

A second drawing determined who would carry out the killing, and that responsibility fell to Charles Ramsdell. Coffin was shot and his body was consumed by the remaining men. Pollard had left Nantucket as a captain responsible for protecting his crew and now found himself surviving by eating his own cousin. Few maritime disasters demonstrate more brutally how quickly ordinary morality can collapse when human beings are pushed to the edge of starvation.

The three whaleboats had become separated during the ordeal and several of the men disappeared permanently into the Pacific. Chase's boat eventually fared better. On 18 February 1821, after almost three months of suffering, Chase, Benjamin Lawrence and teenage cabin boy Thomas Nickerson were spotted by the British brig Indian. They were so weak that they had to be helped aboard.

Captain Pollard and Charles Ramsdell remained at sea for several more days before being discovered by the whaleship Dauphin on 23 February. The two skeletal men were found in the bottom of their small boat surrounded by the remains of their dead companions. Of the twenty men who had escaped the sinking Essex, only eight ultimately survived, including the three who had remained behind on Henderson Island.

Owen Chase returned to Nantucket and published his account of the disaster in 1821. Remarkably, he later returned to the whaling industry and eventually became a captain himself. George Pollard also returned to sea, which suggests either extraordinary courage or an impressive unwillingness to take a hint. He was given command of another whaleship called the Two Brothers. It sank too.

Pollard survived the second shipwreck, but his career as a captain was effectively finished. He eventually returned to Nantucket and became the town's night watchman. Years later Herman Melville met the elderly Pollard and was deeply impressed by him. Melville already knew the story of the Essex because, while working aboard a whaling ship himself, he had obtained a copy of Owen Chase's account from Chase's son.

The image of a giant sperm whale turning on its hunters and destroying their ship remained with Melville. In 1851 he published Moby-Dick, the story of Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of an enormous white sperm whale that ultimately destroys his ship. The Essex had become part of one of the most famous novels ever written, although the real story of the ship and its crew was arguably strange and horrific enough without any embellishment.

Practically everything about the Essex disaster seems deliberately designed for a novel. The ship nearly capsized days after leaving home, a crewman set fire to an island, a whale destroyed a vessel that had travelled across the world specifically to kill whales, and the survivors avoided nearby islands because they feared cannibals only to become cannibals themselves. Their captain survived, returned to the sea and then managed to lose another ship.

Perhaps the strangest character in the entire story, however, disappeared after only a few minutes. Nobody can say with certainty why the sperm whale struck the Essex. The first collision may have been accidental, the animal may have perceived the vessel as a threat or rival, or noises from repairs aboard the ship may have affected its behaviour. Chase believed the whale deliberately attacked them, but more than two centuries later there is no way to know what was happening inside its enormous head. What we do know is that on 20 November 1820, a group of men went into the Pacific Ocean to hunt whales. One enormous sperm whale turned towards the hunters, struck their ship twice and left them stranded thousands of miles from safety. The whale vanished into the Pacific and was never seen again, but the destruction it left behind inspired one of the greatest works of American literature and one of the most disturbing survival stories ever recorded.

For once, the whale won.