The Real Moby Dick

On August 12, 1819, the whaleship Essex departed Nantucket Island with a crew of twenty men bound for the Pacific Ocean on what was expected to be a routine two-and-a-half-year whaling voyage. Just over a year later, on November 20, 1820, roughly 2,000 miles west of South America, an 85-foot bull sperm whale rammed the ship twice with what first mate Owen Chase described as deliberate malice, sinking her in minutes.

The twenty crew members escaped in three small whaleboats with limited provisions and faced an impossible decision about where to sail. Fearing reports of cannibalism in the nearby Marquesas Islands, they chose to head for the distant coast of South America, a journey of more than 3,000 miles across open ocean. After a month at sea they landed on the uninhabited Henderson Island on December 20, 1820, where they found a freshwater spring and foraged on birds, crabs, and peppergrass, but exhausted the island's resources within a week. Three men elected to stay behind while the remaining seventeen pushed off on December 27, 1820.

What followed was a ninety-three-day ordeal of starvation, dehydration, exposure, and eventual cannibalism that remains one of the darkest survival stories in maritime history. The first four men to die and be consumed were all Black sailors, a pattern that raises uncomfortable questions about how rations and resources were distributed along racial lines. When the dead were gone and starvation loomed again, the men in Captain George Pollard's boat drew lots to determine who would be sacrificed. The lot fell to 17-year-old Owen Coffin, Pollard's own cousin, who was shot by his closest friend Charles Ramsdell and consumed by the survivors.

Chase's boat was rescued on February 18, 1821, by the British brig Indian, and Pollard's boat was picked up five days later by the Nantucket whaleship Dauphin. The three men on Henderson Island were rescued by the Australian vessel Surry on April 9, 1821. Of the twenty men aboard the Essex, only eight survived. Owen Chase published his firsthand account later that year, and it would go on to inspire Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick.

Chase spent his final years hoarding food and suffering debilitating headaches before dying on March 7, 1869. Pollard lost a second ship, the Two Brothers, in February 1823 and spent the rest of his life as a night watchman on Nantucket, fasting every November 20 in memory of his lost crew until his death on January 7, 1870.

Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 book In the Heart of the Sea brought the full story back to a wide audience and won the National Book Award, and Ron Howard adapted it into a film in 2015 starring Chris Hemsworth.

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