Cape Cod History

1820: Sperm Whale rams, sinks, Nantucket Whaling Ship

Moby Dick and the White Whale REALLY happened
And it happened to a Nantucket ship

On this day in 1820, the whaling ship Essex, shown on right, on a two-and-a-half year voyage out of Nantucket was repeatedly rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the South Pacific.

Twenty crew members took to three small whaling boats and, after a brief stint on an island without enough food to sustain them,  spent more than three months adrift on the open ocean.  Hunger,  disease and the weather took a fearsome toll and only eight of the crew survived.

The grim episode seized the imagination of novelist Herman Melville, whose epic "Moby-Dick"  published three decades later recounted a similar fate for the fictional whaleship Pequot.

In 2000, Nantucket resident Nathaniel Philbrick's compelling bestseller, "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" was published, making the saga known to a much wider audience. 

The Ship and its Crew
Both the Captain and the First Mate of the Essex, George Pollard and Owen Chase, had served on the ship's previous voyage. Due to the success of that voyage, both had been promoted. Pollard was, at only 29, one of the youngest men ever to command a whaling ship. Owen Chase was a mere 23. The youngest member of the crew was the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, who was only 15.

The Essex itself was an elderly ship, but had recently been totally refitted. At 87 feet long and weighing 238 tons, unladen, the ship was small for a whaler. The Essex was fitted with four separate whaleboats, of around 20 to 30 feet in length, which were launched from the main ship. These boats were built for speed rather than durability, being 'Clinker built', with planks that overlap rather than lying flush with each other.

Ironically, the success of previous voyages had also left the Essex with a reputation as a 'lucky' ship... BBC.