page_title: Essex (whaleship)
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Essex (whaleship) / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographic portrait of Thomas Nickerson. Served as the cabin boy on the ship Essex, sunk by a whale, November 20, 1820, west of the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. Wrote account of sinking.
context_page_description: Essex was an American whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799. In 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., she was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. Stranded thousands of miles from the coast of South America with little food and water, the 20-man crew was forced to make for land in the ship's surviving whaleboats.
  The men suffered severe dehydration, starvation, and exposure on the open ocean, and the survivors eventually resorted to eating the bodies of the crewmen who had died. When that proved insufficient, members of the crew drew lots to determine whom they would sacrifice so that the others could live. A total of seven crew members were cannibalized before the last of the eight survivors were rescued, more than three months after the sinking of the Essex. First mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson later wrote accounts of the ordeal. The tragedy attracted international attention, and inspired Herman Melville to write his famous 1851 novel Moby-Dick.
context_section_description: Pollard returned to sea in early 1822 to captain the whaleship Two Brothers. It was wrecked on the French Frigate Shoals during a storm off the coast of Hawaii on his first voyage, after which he joined a merchant vessel, which was wrecked off the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands) shortly thereafter. By now Pollard was considered a "Jonah" (unlucky), and no ship owner would trust him to sail on a ship again, so he was forced to retire. He subsequently became Nantucket's night watchman. Every November 20, he would reportedly lock himself in his room and fast in memory of the men of Essex. He died in Nantucket on January 7, 1870, aged 78.
  First Mate Owen Chase returned to Nantucket on June 11, 1821, to find he had a 14-month-old daughter he had never met. Four months later he had completed an account of the disaster, the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex; Herman Melville used it as one of the inspirations for his novel Moby-Dick (1851). In December, Chase sailed as first mate on the whaler Florida, and then as captain of Winslow for each subsequent voyage, until he could afford to build his own whaler, Charles Carrol. Chase remained at sea for 19 years, only returning home for short periods every two or three years, each time fathering a child. His first two wives died while he was at sea. He divorced his third wife when he found she had given birth 16 months after he had last seen her, although he subsequently brought up the child as his own. In September 1840, two months after the divorce was finalized, he married for the fourth and final time and retired from whaling. Memories of the harrowing ordeal on the Essex haunted Chase, and he suffered terrible headaches and nightmares. Later in his life, he began hiding food in the attic of his Nantucket house on Orange Street and was eventually institutionalized. He died in Nantucket on March 7, 1869, aged 73.
  The cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, became a captain in the Merchant Service and late in his life wrote his own account of the sinking, titled The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats. Nickerson wrote this account 56 years after the sinking, in 1876, and it was lost until 1960; the Nantucket Historical Association published it in 1984. He died in February 1883, aged 77.
  The other surviving crew members met various fates:
  Thomas Chappel died of plague fever in Timor, while working as a missionary.
  William Wright was lost in a hurricane in the West Indies.
  Charles Ramsdell died in Nantucket on July 8, 1866, aged 62.
  Benjamin Lawrence died in Nantucket on March 28, 1879, aged 80.
  Seth Weeks died in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1887, the last of the Essex survivors to die.
caption: Thomas Nickerson in the 1870s
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