September 27, 2010 • 20 mins
Although Herman Melville's opus is a work of fiction, it was inspired by real-life events. In this episode, Katie and Sarah explore the story of the real-life Moby Dick -- and the unfortunate vessel that encountered it in the Pacific.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey. And Sarah and
I were talking books earlier, like we do. And I
keep meaning to read Twenty Leagues under the Sea because
(00:23):
I hear maybe a gnar whale makes an appearance. I
don't even remember that. It's been so long since I
read that book. I was probably like ten years old
or something. My aunt Kim gave me a big batch
of Jules Verne books and I raced through them. I
remember my favorite one though, was The Mysterious Island. That
was a very cool book. And I've been calling Sarah
(00:44):
steampunk since we went to dragon Con and we're talking
about the influences of Jules Verne on the steampunk movement.
But he would be a good podcast subject, she swears
she is not. There's this other great American novel that
I keep meaning to read, Moby Dick. And when you
love a book enough, it often inspires you to learn more.
At least it does us um about the author, about
(01:06):
the time period, about the circumstances surrounding the writing of
the book, and it's extra exciting when a beloved book
has its basis in fact, and that is the case
with Moby Dick and a whale ship called the Essex.
So if you were a nineteenth century elementary schooler, you
wouldn't have missed this story in history class. But somehow
(01:27):
or another, it has been lost over the years, and
that's a shame because it's a really crazy story. So
we're going to give you some context because it's what
makes history makes sense. And when I think Nantucket, I
think Nantucket reads because I know a lot of very
puppy people um who have weddings involving lobster. But our
story does not take place in modern times, and no
(01:50):
whalers wore shirts with an actual whale logo on the
whale Yeah, vineyard vines. Whaling today is generally not considered
a noble pursuit, but you know, hey, neither is eating
sled dogs. But it worked at the time, right. The
economy of Nantucket for a really long time there was
based on whale hunting, and it makes the town a
(02:14):
very very wealthy place. So Native Americans in New England
were known to butcher dead whales that had washed up
on or near shore, but no one got into boats
to hunt the creatures until the seventeenth century. It's a
little crazy to do that. Well, you're going to find
out they were searching for right whales, which was an
actual designation of some whales um but they were also
(02:37):
known as the right ones to kill because these baileeen
whales stuck close to the shore and Nantucketers and Indians
would go shore whaling together guests who was captain, and
these little boats. And according to the new Bedford Whaling Museum,
the whalers harpooned their prey, and this instrument that they
harpooned them with had ropes attached to it that ended
(02:58):
in wooden floats, and the whale would exhaust itself pulling
these floats, and when it got tired enough, the whalers
could lance it and take it back to the shore
to harvest the blubber and the whale bone. So we've
got to establish what you use all this stuff for.
The blubber is boiled down to make oil, which was
used for a long time, and lamps and candles, and
(03:20):
I mean it was it was how people use light.
The whale bone was used for stays, and we saw
kind of a lot of corsets that dragon con but I,
for one, don't really miss the days of course the
tree they're just Scarlett O'Hara. But whaling didn't become a
really big business until the eighteenth century, and that's when sailors,
(03:41):
after hunting those right whales almost to extinction, realized that
there were much bigger whales further out. Those are the
sperm whales. And sperm whales are deep divers like minar whale,
and they're the biggest toothed whale. They like squid, and
they're in every ocean, sometimes dive being three thousand, three
(04:01):
hundred feet down according to the American Cetacean Society, and
they're not usually white. Sorry Melville, but the characteristic that
most interested the whalers was what was in a sperm
whales head. No, not its brain. It's sperm sti. So
this definitely requires a little explanation. It's called the sperm
steti because people thought it was the whale semen. It's not.
(04:26):
But it's really this type of wax and it didn't
have a smell, so it could be used in makeup
and candles and used to lubricate machines, and supposedly those
candles burned brightest, and according to Encyclopedia Britannica quote, the
former official unit of illumination, the candle power, was defined
(04:46):
as the light given off by a candle of pure
spermatty burning at a rate of seven point seven seven
six grams twenty grains per hour. So there you have
a candle power and the stuff in a whale's head.
But if you were really, really lucky, you might also
find some ambergris, which is this weird stuff that forms
(05:07):
in the intestines of sperm whales and it can come
out either end, but the bigger pieces of it come
out of a whale's mouth, which is why it's often
known as whale vomit. And squid beaks are sometimes found
in it, So maybe the ambergris is a way of
protecting the whales insides. But when it first comes out
it's really gross and smells like dung according to some scientists.
(05:32):
But if you find it in the ocean after it's
been there for a while, it smells fantastic and it's
used in the best of the best perfumes because it
makes the scent stick. According to an article on our
site by Julia Lytton, and some people say it's also
an aphrodisiac. I have to wonder how people discover the
uses for things like this. For for both of the
(05:53):
things we just mentioned that sound really gross in one case,
kind of stinky. I mean, how do you figure out
I'm not getting whale bomb for your birthday, Sarah? How
about that? Maybe just a nice perfume? Give me the
converted form. When whaling was at its peak, Ambergris was
literally worth its weight in gold. So this is a
big deal. Let's get back to our whale hunters though. Okay,
(06:16):
So the island of Nantucket is the heart of the
whaling industry, or it was at the time. You didn't
like my jokes and having the outline so that it
was the blubber of the whaling industry. Ha ha, Yeah,
that's From eighteen hundred to eighteen forty it was considered
the whaling capital of the world. And according to the
(06:36):
Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce. Uh, that's that's pretty big designation.
I'd say others put its heyday sometime between seventeen fifty
and eighteen fifty, but this was it. This was where
everything happened Nantucket. Nobody was better at hunting the sperm whale,
and the quakers of the island had a corner on
(06:56):
the market, and therefore they had a corner and the money.
So to go farther and farther in the ocean, whalers
would need bigger and better ships, and also a way
to deal with the blubber and such on board instead
of hauling it back to shore, because you know, rot
before they got there. So we will introduce the try works,
which was um this combination of two pots known as
(07:19):
tripots in a furnace, and that was a way that
you could boil your oil on board a ship, and
fresh blubber made better oil anyway, So this was a huge,
huge step to process the whale on the ship. You
don't have the rotten carcass anymore, you don't have the
thousands of pounds of whale meat that you're toting or
(07:40):
carried back. You can stay out there for a long
time condensing the blubber into the precious oil. But you
would think if you've got these giant pots of oil
and also a lot of fire, it might be a
bit dangerous. And it was fires on board of course
we're very possible, but more dangerous were the whales themselves,
because don't go around chasing giant whales in tiny little
(08:03):
boats and expect always to come out of already seeing
what whales can do to ponies in a recent episode.
And so you can imagine Nathaniel philbrick in in the
Heart of the Sea, which is an excellent book that
I just started reading, but it's pretty much the definitive
account of the Essex related that in eighteen ten there
were forty seven fatherless children on Nantucket, you know, pretty
(08:25):
small island, and a quarter of the women over twenty
three were widows. So you sent your men off to
see knowing that there was a very good chance they
might not come back. And by the time we get
to the American Revolution, these ships are going further than
they have ever been before, to the Falkland Islands, to
the west coast of Africa. Um. Other ports were starting
(08:47):
to become players in the whaling industry, like New Bedford. Yeah,
but Nantucket was still the leader. And the American Revolution,
of course slow things down a little bit. It makes
sending out ships more difficult. And same deal with the
War of eighteen twelve but by the Treaty of Ghent
Uh it was time to go back to see and
that was in eighteen fourteen, and it's in August eighteen
(09:09):
nineteen that a particular ship set sail, the Essex. And
just to give you a little about whaling ships, all
of these details come from the new Bedford Whaling Museum
as well. Um Our usual whaling ship was about three
hundred tons and it had the try works on board.
Like we mentioned before, the Essex was a little bit
smaller than that, and each whale ship carried three to
(09:31):
five small whale boats with it because obviously you can't
chase a whale with a menship now, and there were
planks on the starboard side so men could stand there
to cut up the whales. So I'm just you know,
if you try to picture it, this ship out in
the middle of nowhere, these tiny boats chasing after whales,
this the fire and the oil all on board, and
(09:54):
men cutting up these gigantic whales on a ship, I'm
just imagine, and how flippery everything would be with the
greasy whale blubber everywhere and the the rocking ship. And
it's easy to see why this was such a dangerous profession.
I'm so clumsy to begin with. I'm pretty sure I
would slide from one end to the other and go
(10:16):
directly overboard. So the further these ships were out at sea,
of course, the longer the journeys were, and oftentimes it
would it would take years for one mission. Um ships
carried enough provisions for about four years, and they would
usually have approximately thirty men on board, and the men
weren't paid a wage, so it wasn't like you got
(10:39):
a big chunk of money up front or got some
sort of hourly salary for the amount of time you worked. Instead,
they got a share in the profits when they came
back to shore with all their wear whale oil. So
it was a pretty good incentive to kill as many
whales as possible, even if it meant staying out for
(11:00):
a really long time, even if it meant risking your life, right,
it was worth the risk for them. So the Essex
set sail with a lot of Nantucket men and also
some black men and some off islanders. Nantucket men were
very snobby and they would have preferred to have all
Nantucket men aboard, but they sort of ran out to
(11:20):
be because a lot of them were dying in the
real Some of the off islanders were called coups, which
was quite an insult. And they had planned for a
trip of two to three years, but they knew they'd
have to go even farther than Cape Horn where others
were going. Um. Some said that even the whales off
of Chili and Peru were completely gone. So the new
(11:41):
place to go was way way out in the Pacific,
farther than pretty much every whaling ship had ever gone. Um.
But that's where the money was. This quote almost untraversed ocean,
according to first mate Owen Chase. So they went, yeah,
and the trip didn't go well. Almost from the start
there were nearly blown over, they lost boats, they weren't
(12:02):
seeing whales, and then it got much much worse on
November and okay, so the sailors finally saw a pot
of whales and sent two of the ship's boats to
to chase the pod to get some oil and everything.
But the cabin boys spotted something that was really really strange,
(12:23):
an eighty five ft eighty ton whale way too close
to the boat. It was about a hundred yards away,
then thirty five yards away, and it was heading straight
toward them, and I tried to turn the boat, but
there wasn't enough time. It hit them and then went
under scraped the bottom of the boat, resurfaced, looked at
(12:45):
them for a second, and came at them again at
six knots, directly toward the boat. And we have a
quote from first mate Owen Chase, who would later write
a book about his experiences called Narrative of the Most
Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex. They
had some good, very descriptive title. Then, yes, we're not
(13:05):
allowed to have titles that long. Our producer won't let
us quote. I could distinctly see him smile, his jaw together,
as if distracted with rage and fury. I turned around
and saw him about one rods directly ahead of us,
coming down, apparently with twice his ordinary speed, And to
me at that moment it appeared with tenfold fury and
(13:26):
vengeance in his aspect. So according to him, the captain
cried out, my god, Mr Chase, what is the matter,
And he answers, we have been stove by a whale.
So the ship has a huge hole in the bottom
and it sinks quickly. Where are we at we're in
the middle of the Pacific and a whale has just
(13:48):
attacked us. So luckily, unlike the Titanic, they had these
little whale boats in good working order with supplies on board.
We've got twenty one men and three boats, and they
were divi gide it up according to status. Among the boats.
Captain George Pollard Jr. Had the Nantucket men, the first
mate had some more Nantucket men, some black men, and
(14:10):
one off Islander, and the third mate had all off
Islanders and black men. And if they ate and drank
practically nothing, they might just might have enough supplies for
sixty days. Their supplies were two casks of bread, a
hundred nine gallons of water, musket and powder, tools, and
(14:30):
a few turtles for eating, not for pets. No, So
they have two options, and the first was to head
to the Tahitian Islands, which were about one thousand, two
hundred miles away, but they were afraid that if they
went there they might run into cannibals. So, yeah, that's
that's interesting. So they decided instead on another plan to
(14:55):
head south and perhaps the winds would carry them all
the way to Chili. But the journey wasn't easy. There
were all these storms. There's of course sun just beating
down all the time. Their sharks, I mean, maybe you
never know, you might even run into another pot of
whales again. And seawater got into the hardtack. So I'm
(15:15):
sure it was so delicious to begin with you now,
so it's it's immediately a really bad time in these
little boats. And the boats landed in the Pitcairn Islands
for a time, but unfortunately not the same one as
our guys from the bounty did, because there wasn't much
there besides water and some birds, and certainly not enough
to feed all of them. But three men decided to
(15:37):
stay and the rest headed back to the sea. But
they had run out of the supplies they had, and
it was clear that, you know, disaster and despair are
on the way. They began to die. And when the
first men died, they were given a proper burial at sea,
you know, a respectful burial um. But that didn't last
(16:02):
for much longer. The other men are even eating their shoes,
but soon starvation and dehydration set in along with these hallucinations.
And if that doesn't sound too terrible to you, this
is Phil Brick's description of what happens when you remain
dehydrated for so long. Quote, the tongue swells to such
proportions that it squeezes past the jaw. The eyelids crack,
(16:26):
and the eyeballs begin to weep tears of blood. So
what are they going to do? And this is where
the really terrible stuff comes in, because when the next
man died, they did what they had to do to
stay alive. They ate him. And here's a quote from Chase.
We separated the limbs from the body and cut all
(16:48):
the flesh from the bones, after which we opened the body,
took out the heart, closed it again, sewing it up
as decently as we could, and then committed it to
the sea. And every man who died off to that
suffered the same fate. But then no one died for
a while, and lots were chosen, and a man was
(17:08):
murdered and devoured by his comrades. Six men in total
were eaten, and then off the coast of Chili in February,
an American whale ship came up against this boat that
looked a little bit funny, and when they looked into it,
they found two men sucking on human bones. They were
(17:30):
covered in salt and blood and sores. They're disoriented, their
wild eyed, they didn't know who they were. They even
tried to hide from their rescuers, you know, crouching against
the sides of the boat. And these were two of
the survivors, and eight men survived. Total, five were rescued
from the sea, three from the island, and all of
(17:51):
sudden done. They had been at sea for ninety three days,
and according to Philbrick, they sailed four thousand, five hundred
miles across the Pacific. That's more than Bly after the bounty.
That's more than Shackleton to South Georgia. Owen Chase wrote
about the experience, and so did the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson.
Um but it was a very famous ordeal. Pretty quickly,
(18:15):
and Herman Melville read the story of the Essex while
aboard and New Bedford whale ship, and he said, the
reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and
so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck, had
a surprising effect on me. Moby Dick was published in
eighteen fifty one, and it was a flop, and Chase
(18:35):
went on to captain his own whale ship but later
he went insane and stored crackers in his attic just
in case, and that brings us to Listener Mail. So
today's edition of Listener Mail is real mail, and in
fact it is this amazing handmade card from Haley. Yeah,
(18:58):
lots of people have have suggested the Whaleship Essex, but
Haley was the first to do so. She recommended that
Phil Brick book um and yeah, she made this card
with a chip and it has the date in November
whaleship at six funk triple exclamation point. But the best
part is the angry sperm whale, very angry. He even
(19:21):
has an eyebrow. He's slanted eyebrows, so you can see
the fury and the vengeance in his visage. And it's
pretty clear that he's headed at the ship at approximately
six month. And she is the one to m She's
the one who swayed our opinion and finally decided that
finally decided our minds that this is something that we
should do. So thank you to Haley and for all
(19:42):
the others who suggested the Whaleship Essex. If you would
like to send us an email with some topic ideas,
where its history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at missed in History and we
have a Facebook fan page. Should come find us and
keep up with what we're doing. And if you're interested
in Ambergris, we have an article called how can whale
(20:06):
vomit help Me Retire? That you can find if you
search our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you Missed in History Glass blog on
the how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey. And Sarah and
I were talking books earlier, like we do. And I
keep meaning to read Twenty Leagues under the Sea because
(00:23):
I hear maybe a gnar whale makes an appearance. I
don't even remember that. It's been so long since I
read that book. I was probably like ten years old
or something. My aunt Kim gave me a big batch
of Jules Verne books and I raced through them. I
remember my favorite one though, was The Mysterious Island. That
was a very cool book. And I've been calling Sarah
(00:44):
steampunk since we went to dragon Con and we're talking
about the influences of Jules Verne on the steampunk movement.
But he would be a good podcast subject, she swears
she is not. There's this other great American novel that
I keep meaning to read, Moby Dick. And when you
love a book enough, it often inspires you to learn more.
At least it does us um about the author, about
(01:06):
the time period, about the circumstances surrounding the writing of
the book, and it's extra exciting when a beloved book
has its basis in fact, and that is the case
with Moby Dick and a whale ship called the Essex.
So if you were a nineteenth century elementary schooler, you
wouldn't have missed this story in history class. But somehow
(01:27):
or another, it has been lost over the years, and
that's a shame because it's a really crazy story. So
we're going to give you some context because it's what
makes history makes sense. And when I think Nantucket, I
think Nantucket reads because I know a lot of very
puppy people um who have weddings involving lobster. But our
story does not take place in modern times, and no
(01:50):
whalers wore shirts with an actual whale logo on the
whale Yeah, vineyard vines. Whaling today is generally not considered
a noble pursuit, but you know, hey, neither is eating
sled dogs. But it worked at the time, right. The
economy of Nantucket for a really long time there was
based on whale hunting, and it makes the town a
(02:14):
very very wealthy place. So Native Americans in New England
were known to butcher dead whales that had washed up
on or near shore, but no one got into boats
to hunt the creatures until the seventeenth century. It's a
little crazy to do that. Well, you're going to find
out they were searching for right whales, which was an
actual designation of some whales um but they were also
(02:37):
known as the right ones to kill because these baileeen
whales stuck close to the shore and Nantucketers and Indians
would go shore whaling together guests who was captain, and
these little boats. And according to the new Bedford Whaling Museum,
the whalers harpooned their prey, and this instrument that they
harpooned them with had ropes attached to it that ended
(02:58):
in wooden floats, and the whale would exhaust itself pulling
these floats, and when it got tired enough, the whalers
could lance it and take it back to the shore
to harvest the blubber and the whale bone. So we've
got to establish what you use all this stuff for.
The blubber is boiled down to make oil, which was
used for a long time, and lamps and candles, and
(03:20):
I mean it was it was how people use light.
The whale bone was used for stays, and we saw
kind of a lot of corsets that dragon con but I,
for one, don't really miss the days of course the
tree they're just Scarlett O'Hara. But whaling didn't become a
really big business until the eighteenth century, and that's when sailors,
(03:41):
after hunting those right whales almost to extinction, realized that
there were much bigger whales further out. Those are the
sperm whales. And sperm whales are deep divers like minar whale,
and they're the biggest toothed whale. They like squid, and
they're in every ocean, sometimes dive being three thousand, three
(04:01):
hundred feet down according to the American Cetacean Society, and
they're not usually white. Sorry Melville, but the characteristic that
most interested the whalers was what was in a sperm
whales head. No, not its brain. It's sperm sti. So
this definitely requires a little explanation. It's called the sperm
steti because people thought it was the whale semen. It's not.
(04:26):
But it's really this type of wax and it didn't
have a smell, so it could be used in makeup
and candles and used to lubricate machines, and supposedly those
candles burned brightest, and according to Encyclopedia Britannica quote, the
former official unit of illumination, the candle power, was defined
(04:46):
as the light given off by a candle of pure
spermatty burning at a rate of seven point seven seven
six grams twenty grains per hour. So there you have
a candle power and the stuff in a whale's head.
But if you were really, really lucky, you might also
find some ambergris, which is this weird stuff that forms
(05:07):
in the intestines of sperm whales and it can come
out either end, but the bigger pieces of it come
out of a whale's mouth, which is why it's often
known as whale vomit. And squid beaks are sometimes found
in it, So maybe the ambergris is a way of
protecting the whales insides. But when it first comes out
it's really gross and smells like dung according to some scientists.
(05:32):
But if you find it in the ocean after it's
been there for a while, it smells fantastic and it's
used in the best of the best perfumes because it
makes the scent stick. According to an article on our
site by Julia Lytton, and some people say it's also
an aphrodisiac. I have to wonder how people discover the
uses for things like this. For for both of the
(05:53):
things we just mentioned that sound really gross in one case,
kind of stinky. I mean, how do you figure out
I'm not getting whale bomb for your birthday, Sarah? How
about that? Maybe just a nice perfume? Give me the
converted form. When whaling was at its peak, Ambergris was
literally worth its weight in gold. So this is a
big deal. Let's get back to our whale hunters though. Okay,
(06:16):
So the island of Nantucket is the heart of the
whaling industry, or it was at the time. You didn't
like my jokes and having the outline so that it
was the blubber of the whaling industry. Ha ha, Yeah,
that's From eighteen hundred to eighteen forty it was considered
the whaling capital of the world. And according to the
(06:36):
Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce. Uh, that's that's pretty big designation.
I'd say others put its heyday sometime between seventeen fifty
and eighteen fifty, but this was it. This was where
everything happened Nantucket. Nobody was better at hunting the sperm whale,
and the quakers of the island had a corner on
(06:56):
the market, and therefore they had a corner and the money.
So to go farther and farther in the ocean, whalers
would need bigger and better ships, and also a way
to deal with the blubber and such on board instead
of hauling it back to shore, because you know, rot
before they got there. So we will introduce the try works,
which was um this combination of two pots known as
(07:19):
tripots in a furnace, and that was a way that
you could boil your oil on board a ship, and
fresh blubber made better oil anyway, So this was a huge,
huge step to process the whale on the ship. You
don't have the rotten carcass anymore, you don't have the
thousands of pounds of whale meat that you're toting or
(07:40):
carried back. You can stay out there for a long
time condensing the blubber into the precious oil. But you
would think if you've got these giant pots of oil
and also a lot of fire, it might be a
bit dangerous. And it was fires on board of course
we're very possible, but more dangerous were the whales themselves,
because don't go around chasing giant whales in tiny little
(08:03):
boats and expect always to come out of already seeing
what whales can do to ponies in a recent episode.
And so you can imagine Nathaniel philbrick in in the
Heart of the Sea, which is an excellent book that
I just started reading, but it's pretty much the definitive
account of the Essex related that in eighteen ten there
were forty seven fatherless children on Nantucket, you know, pretty
(08:25):
small island, and a quarter of the women over twenty
three were widows. So you sent your men off to
see knowing that there was a very good chance they
might not come back. And by the time we get
to the American Revolution, these ships are going further than
they have ever been before, to the Falkland Islands, to
the west coast of Africa. Um. Other ports were starting
(08:47):
to become players in the whaling industry, like New Bedford. Yeah,
but Nantucket was still the leader. And the American Revolution,
of course slow things down a little bit. It makes
sending out ships more difficult. And same deal with the
War of eighteen twelve but by the Treaty of Ghent
Uh it was time to go back to see and
that was in eighteen fourteen, and it's in August eighteen
(09:09):
nineteen that a particular ship set sail, the Essex. And
just to give you a little about whaling ships, all
of these details come from the new Bedford Whaling Museum
as well. Um Our usual whaling ship was about three
hundred tons and it had the try works on board.
Like we mentioned before, the Essex was a little bit
smaller than that, and each whale ship carried three to
(09:31):
five small whale boats with it because obviously you can't
chase a whale with a menship now, and there were
planks on the starboard side so men could stand there
to cut up the whales. So I'm just you know,
if you try to picture it, this ship out in
the middle of nowhere, these tiny boats chasing after whales,
this the fire and the oil all on board, and
(09:54):
men cutting up these gigantic whales on a ship, I'm
just imagine, and how flippery everything would be with the
greasy whale blubber everywhere and the the rocking ship. And
it's easy to see why this was such a dangerous profession.
I'm so clumsy to begin with. I'm pretty sure I
would slide from one end to the other and go
(10:16):
directly overboard. So the further these ships were out at sea,
of course, the longer the journeys were, and oftentimes it
would it would take years for one mission. Um ships
carried enough provisions for about four years, and they would
usually have approximately thirty men on board, and the men
weren't paid a wage, so it wasn't like you got
(10:39):
a big chunk of money up front or got some
sort of hourly salary for the amount of time you worked. Instead,
they got a share in the profits when they came
back to shore with all their wear whale oil. So
it was a pretty good incentive to kill as many
whales as possible, even if it meant staying out for
(11:00):
a really long time, even if it meant risking your life, right,
it was worth the risk for them. So the Essex
set sail with a lot of Nantucket men and also
some black men and some off islanders. Nantucket men were
very snobby and they would have preferred to have all
Nantucket men aboard, but they sort of ran out to
(11:20):
be because a lot of them were dying in the
real Some of the off islanders were called coups, which
was quite an insult. And they had planned for a
trip of two to three years, but they knew they'd
have to go even farther than Cape Horn where others
were going. Um. Some said that even the whales off
of Chili and Peru were completely gone. So the new
(11:41):
place to go was way way out in the Pacific,
farther than pretty much every whaling ship had ever gone. Um.
But that's where the money was. This quote almost untraversed ocean,
according to first mate Owen Chase. So they went, yeah,
and the trip didn't go well. Almost from the start
there were nearly blown over, they lost boats, they weren't
(12:02):
seeing whales, and then it got much much worse on
November and okay, so the sailors finally saw a pot
of whales and sent two of the ship's boats to
to chase the pod to get some oil and everything.
But the cabin boys spotted something that was really really strange,
(12:23):
an eighty five ft eighty ton whale way too close
to the boat. It was about a hundred yards away,
then thirty five yards away, and it was heading straight
toward them, and I tried to turn the boat, but
there wasn't enough time. It hit them and then went
under scraped the bottom of the boat, resurfaced, looked at
(12:45):
them for a second, and came at them again at
six knots, directly toward the boat. And we have a
quote from first mate Owen Chase, who would later write
a book about his experiences called Narrative of the Most
Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex. They
had some good, very descriptive title. Then, yes, we're not
(13:05):
allowed to have titles that long. Our producer won't let
us quote. I could distinctly see him smile, his jaw together,
as if distracted with rage and fury. I turned around
and saw him about one rods directly ahead of us,
coming down, apparently with twice his ordinary speed, And to
me at that moment it appeared with tenfold fury and
(13:26):
vengeance in his aspect. So according to him, the captain
cried out, my god, Mr Chase, what is the matter,
And he answers, we have been stove by a whale.
So the ship has a huge hole in the bottom
and it sinks quickly. Where are we at we're in
the middle of the Pacific and a whale has just
(13:48):
attacked us. So luckily, unlike the Titanic, they had these
little whale boats in good working order with supplies on board.
We've got twenty one men and three boats, and they
were divi gide it up according to status. Among the boats.
Captain George Pollard Jr. Had the Nantucket men, the first
mate had some more Nantucket men, some black men, and
(14:10):
one off Islander, and the third mate had all off
Islanders and black men. And if they ate and drank
practically nothing, they might just might have enough supplies for
sixty days. Their supplies were two casks of bread, a
hundred nine gallons of water, musket and powder, tools, and
(14:30):
a few turtles for eating, not for pets. No, So
they have two options, and the first was to head
to the Tahitian Islands, which were about one thousand, two
hundred miles away, but they were afraid that if they
went there they might run into cannibals. So, yeah, that's
that's interesting. So they decided instead on another plan to
(14:55):
head south and perhaps the winds would carry them all
the way to Chili. But the journey wasn't easy. There
were all these storms. There's of course sun just beating
down all the time. Their sharks, I mean, maybe you
never know, you might even run into another pot of
whales again. And seawater got into the hardtack. So I'm
(15:15):
sure it was so delicious to begin with you now,
so it's it's immediately a really bad time in these
little boats. And the boats landed in the Pitcairn Islands
for a time, but unfortunately not the same one as
our guys from the bounty did, because there wasn't much
there besides water and some birds, and certainly not enough
to feed all of them. But three men decided to
(15:37):
stay and the rest headed back to the sea. But
they had run out of the supplies they had, and
it was clear that, you know, disaster and despair are
on the way. They began to die. And when the
first men died, they were given a proper burial at sea,
you know, a respectful burial um. But that didn't last
(16:02):
for much longer. The other men are even eating their shoes,
but soon starvation and dehydration set in along with these hallucinations.
And if that doesn't sound too terrible to you, this
is Phil Brick's description of what happens when you remain
dehydrated for so long. Quote, the tongue swells to such
proportions that it squeezes past the jaw. The eyelids crack,
(16:26):
and the eyeballs begin to weep tears of blood. So
what are they going to do? And this is where
the really terrible stuff comes in, because when the next
man died, they did what they had to do to
stay alive. They ate him. And here's a quote from Chase.
We separated the limbs from the body and cut all
(16:48):
the flesh from the bones, after which we opened the body,
took out the heart, closed it again, sewing it up
as decently as we could, and then committed it to
the sea. And every man who died off to that
suffered the same fate. But then no one died for
a while, and lots were chosen, and a man was
(17:08):
murdered and devoured by his comrades. Six men in total
were eaten, and then off the coast of Chili in February,
an American whale ship came up against this boat that
looked a little bit funny, and when they looked into it,
they found two men sucking on human bones. They were
(17:30):
covered in salt and blood and sores. They're disoriented, their
wild eyed, they didn't know who they were. They even
tried to hide from their rescuers, you know, crouching against
the sides of the boat. And these were two of
the survivors, and eight men survived. Total, five were rescued
from the sea, three from the island, and all of
(17:51):
sudden done. They had been at sea for ninety three days,
and according to Philbrick, they sailed four thousand, five hundred
miles across the Pacific. That's more than Bly after the bounty.
That's more than Shackleton to South Georgia. Owen Chase wrote
about the experience, and so did the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson.
Um but it was a very famous ordeal. Pretty quickly,
(18:15):
and Herman Melville read the story of the Essex while
aboard and New Bedford whale ship, and he said, the
reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and
so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck, had
a surprising effect on me. Moby Dick was published in
eighteen fifty one, and it was a flop, and Chase
(18:35):
went on to captain his own whale ship but later
he went insane and stored crackers in his attic just
in case, and that brings us to Listener Mail. So
today's edition of Listener Mail is real mail, and in
fact it is this amazing handmade card from Haley. Yeah,
(18:58):
lots of people have have suggested the Whaleship Essex, but
Haley was the first to do so. She recommended that
Phil Brick book um and yeah, she made this card
with a chip and it has the date in November
whaleship at six funk triple exclamation point. But the best
part is the angry sperm whale, very angry. He even
(19:21):
has an eyebrow. He's slanted eyebrows, so you can see
the fury and the vengeance in his visage. And it's
pretty clear that he's headed at the ship at approximately
six month. And she is the one to m She's
the one who swayed our opinion and finally decided that
finally decided our minds that this is something that we
should do. So thank you to Haley and for all
(19:42):
the others who suggested the Whaleship Essex. If you would
like to send us an email with some topic ideas,
where its history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at missed in History and we
have a Facebook fan page. Should come find us and
keep up with what we're doing. And if you're interested
in Ambergris, we have an article called how can whale
(20:06):
vomit help Me Retire? That you can find if you
search our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you Missed in History Glass blog on
the how stuff works dot com home page
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Tracy Wilson
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