Wreck of the Whaleship Essex
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Wreck of the Whaleship Essex Overview
The morning of 20 November 1820 was a doomed one for the whaleship ESSEX. More than 1,000 miles from land in the South Pacific, the ship was sunk, rammed by a sperm whale. Twenty sailors managed to collect some bread and water before pulling away in three frail boats, but only eight survived what was to follow: three months of despair and debilitating exhaustion at sea. Owen Chase was one of those survivors. After returning to Nantucket, his journal of the ESSEX's perilous voyage was published. But Chase only lived to tell the tale because he had eaten his dead ship-mates...
Wreck of the Whaleship Essex Specifications
On November 20, 1820, a sperm whale repeatedly rammed the whaleship Essex, causing her to sink. The 20-man crew were left in three small, open boats in the middle of the Pacific with little food and only 200 gallons of water. Bereft of charts, the boats sailed due east in the hopes of sighting land. Battered by storms, the boats became separated. Some 90 days later, a few men were rescued--but not before they had been forced to make a terrible decision.
I have no language to paint the horrors of our situation. To shed tears was indeed altogether unavailing and withal unmanly; yet I was not able to deny myself the relief they served to afford me.This harrowing, first-hand account by First Mate Owen Chase was originally published in 1821, just months after he returned home to Nantucket, and the unfortunate Essex and her crew passed into legend. Twenty years after the wreck, young William Chase, Owen's son, was serving on the Lima when it met another whaler called the Acushnet. The crews spent some time together, and Chase told his father's story to 21-year-old Herman Melville, and lent him a copy of his father's book. The story clearly caught Melville's imagination--"The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me"--and ten years later he published Moby Dick. Literary inspiration aside, The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex is a well-told, truly gripping tale. As Gary Kinder (who, as the author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, knows a thing or two about shipwrecks) notes in his introduction, "As you sit in your chair, the subliminal thought recurs: My god, this really happened." --Sunny Delaney
