WHO SHOT OWEN COFFIN?
After the Essex collided with a whale on November 20, 1820, in the South Pacific west of the Galápagos Islands, most of the stunned crew determined to row their tiny open boats some three thousand miles east to the South American coast. Their decision was based in part on a fear of cannibals on nearby islands to the West. Covering such a vast distance into a formidable trade wind without restocking provisions along the way, however, seemed suicidal. Ducie Island, located due south, appeared an ideal spot to restock. After landing on Henderson Island, seventy miles west of Ducie, they soon found their resources depleted and abandoned their quest for the Chilean coast. Instead, they resolved to make the more reasonable journey to Easter Island, a third of the way to South America. Such a decision apparently reflected the crew’s diminished fear of cannibals and a corresponding willingness to employ their diplomatic skills to avert any danger. With acute starvation and malnutrition setting in, they felt they had no choice but to travel for the aptly named isle, site of their potential rebirth and resurrection.1
But undoing their original plan to sail for South America proved more difficult than anticipated. This was because following that plan, and the journey to Henderson Island, had set them on a more difficult trajectory for Easter Island, which was a tantalizing several hundred miles due east of the wreckage site. In their ill-equipped open boats with makeshift canvas sails, which had been frantically slashed from the masts of the sinking Essex, the sailors were helpless against the stiff gales that tossed them about. The best trajectory they could muster was a derelict southeastern stagger.2 The elements played havoc with their eastbound tack, as if controlled by a vengeful Poseidon bearing down on Odysseus. As in the ancient Greek depiction of Odysseus’s seafaring struggles, the sufferings of the Essex seamen against the elements can be traced to one rash action.3
That decision, at the wreckage site more than a thousand miles to the North, was engineered by the first mate, Owen Chase, who had roused the crew’s support to sail for the mainland, overturning Captain George Pollard Jr.’s plan to cover one-third that distance, following a favorable southwesterly wind for the Marquesas Islands or Tahiti. The decision instead to sail due south placed them virtually out of reach of Easter Island, apparently dooming them to a slow journey toward South America. Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, who inadvertently kills his father and then does all he can to avoid the horrifying prospect of wedding his mother, the sailors may have tried to escape their fate, only to realize its grim inevitability. As is widely known, the Oedipus story centering on unintended consequences borne of good intentions seized the imagination of Sigmund Freud; likewise, the saga of the Essex, including its rich psychological elements, riveted antebellum readers.4
The Essex trauma would feature its own archetypical taboos rivaling those of Oedipus Rex. Namely, Oedipus kills his own father, and Pollard issues the order to kill his own teenage cousin. As if randomly choosing a crew member to execute for sustenance were not weighty enough, Owen Coffin was the beloved son of Pollard’s aunt and uncle, with whom he had been close on Nantucket. On February 2, 1821, the day Coffin died, he was eighteen and Pollard was twenty-nine, making the captain something between a father and a brother figure to the youth, with whom he shared a family resemblance.5 In the innumerable retellings of the Essex tragedy, this killing of one’s kin becomes the iconic moment of terror, the men’s darkest hour. Oedipus’s moment of terror lies in his realization that he was his father’s killer; like Oedipus, Pollard would have preferred to die than consume the flesh of his own relative.6 And murder, in this instance, preceded cannibalism, adding to the realization of the crew’s, and Pollard’s, darkest nightmare.
The most conspicuous scene separating one Essex account from another is the shooting of Owen Coffin. No other detail is more contested, or retold with such ritual significance, as the drawing of lots that eventuated in his execution. With four men left in Pollard’s open boat and all provisions depleted, including the flesh and blood of their dead shipmates, they resolved to draw straws. After Coffin drew the fatal straw, Pollard offered to take his place. Refusing, Coffin accepted his fate, which was solemnly delivered in a single gunshot.7
Many retellings of the lottery exaggerated and sensationalized the facts for dramatic effect.8 “The Shipwreck of the Essex,” a ballad published in Cornwall, England, offers a remarkable measure of the distance traveled by the Essex story, the speed at which it traveled, and the liberties taken with Chase’s Narrative. The ballad distorts the deadly lottery by sentimentalizing Coffin, who “was to die, / For his wife and poor children most bitterly did cry.” Of course the teenage Coffin had neither wife nor children. Nor does the poet miss the full dramatic import of the parricide suggested in Pollard’s complicity in the killing of his cousin: “the captain and cabin boy…cast lots who should die, / But it happened to fall on the poor cabin boy.” The ballad also, in attempting to portray the selection process as exceedingly fair and democratic, reports falsely that, instead of once, “eight different times lots amongst them were drawn.”9 Such rhetoric presumably reflected an attempt to divert attention from the savagery to follow. Thus the event and the actions of the sailors are characterized simultaneously as murderous and empathetic. In turn, this tableau of seeming contradiction resonated more than any other with those who encountered the story.
The sacrifice of Owen Coffin tapped for audiences a powerful realization that they, too, might draw the short straw in their personal lotteries. They also sympathized more basically with Coffin’s death. For Melville himself, the first reading of Chase’s narrative was moving precisely because he, sailing on the Acushnet, had recently passed the site of the tragedy. Even more powerful than geographic proximity was a sense of shared mortal risk linked with traveling aboard a whaling vessel. This could happen to me, Melville apparently understood while at the gam. Could I take the bullet if so selected? Alternatively, could he pull trigger against his best friend and coconspirator, Toby, who had defected from the Acushnet while on Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas Islands? The ghost of Owen Coffin undoubtedly haunted Melville in 1841, as he recalled how “the reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.”10 That surprising effect for those encountering the story merged a palpable sense of mortality with the more complicated moral conundrum associated with killing a shipmate to survive. Melville, along with twenty years of readers and tale tellers before him, acutely felt this human vulnerability.11
The shooting of Owen Coffin was the signal event of both Chase’s Narrative and the journal that the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson ultimately sought to publish decades later. Coffin’s death, as intimated already, signified a blood ritual not unlike that spurred by Ahab, when he exhorts the crew to pledge death to Moby Dick in the “Quarter-Deck” chapter. The communal embrace of cannibalism brought about the galling realization among the crew that the practice would continue as long as provisions were inadequate and the men were starving. The civilized method of the lottery, indeed, would give way to the most primitive acts imaginable.
Not only does the killing of Coffin symbolize the transformation of the civilized ambassadors of American whaling into savage brutes. It also raises questions about the leadership errors that might have prompted this outcome. Such questions more pointedly challenge the fairness with which the lottery itself was carried out. The familial relationship between Coffin and Pollard, furthermore, casts doubt on the captain’s concern for a relative. Such concern was highly valued by the culture. Questions include the following: Was Coffin’s killing unnecessary? Was Pollard to blame? Did Pollard sin unpardonably by failing to intervene and take the bullet himself? Or was Chase to blame for his own earlier errors of preemptive leadership? Other rudimentary questions, such as who shot Owen Coffin and what event followed another, are difficult to answer, given the wild variance in the documentary evidence.
This question of who shot Coffin renders our otherwise respectable Essex seamen at their moment of deepest crisis. As the sensational detail that helped sell so many books, the corresponding scene captures the transformation of the men at the journey’s breaking point. The rawest component of their experience may have been the “whisper of necessity” that likely crept upon them.12
Chase’s Narrative, the ur-text of the Essex tragedy, states clearly, “On the 1st of February, having consumed the last morsel, the captain and the three other men that remained with him, were reduced to the necessity of casting lots. It fell upon Owen Coffin to die, who with great fortitude and resignation submitted to his fate.” Chase, through his ghostwriter, then relates that “they drew lots to see who would shoot him: he placed himself firmly to receive his death, and was immediately shot by Charles Ramsdale [sic]” and not Captain Pollard. The narrator sympathizes with Ramsdell, as his name was correctly spelled, for suffering the “hard fortune it was to become his executioner.”13
Although long considered authoritative, Chase’s account contains huge omissions designed to grant credit to the writer at Pollard’s expense. In particular, Chase did not include Pollard’s offer to take Coffin’s lot for him. In Nickerson’s rendition, moreover, it was Pollard and not Ramsdell who shot Coffin. His account states that when “they were compelled again to cast lots,” identifying “who should draw the fatal trigger,” destiny rather than ill-luck pointed to the captain. “As if fate would have it, the awful die turned upon Captain Pollard[.] For a long time [he] declared that he could never do it, but finally had to submit.” At stake in determining who shot Coffin was Pollard’s reputation as hero or coward. A hero would have not permitted the killing of his own kinsman eleven years his junior, but instead would have taken the bullet for him. Nickerson clearly suggests that Pollard had precisely this inclination, given that the captain insisted “that he would take the lot himself, but to this Coffin would not listen for a moment.”14
Indeed, for failing to follow through on his purported offer to Coffin, Pollard was later maligned on Nantucket. This detail was so unsettling to most locals that they twisted the facts further to vilify Pollard, as Cyrus Townsend Brady reported in an early twentieth-century study on Nantucket lore surrounding the incident. Even as late as 1904, Brady writes, “a tradition still current in Nantucket has it that the lot fell to the captain, whereupon his cousin, already near death, feeling that he could not survive the afternoon, offered and insisted upon taking his [cousin’s] place.”15 Here, then, it hadn’t been Coffin who drew the fatal straw but Pollard, who was portrayed as both an unforgivable coward and even a swindler of his own relative.
Like the Nantucket rumor suggesting that Pollard had drawn the lot himself, however, Nickerson’s narrative of the critical moment represents a callous lie. Both, of course, seize on the implication that Pollard missed an opportunity to show loyalty to his crew by sacrificing his life for them. More subtly, Nickerson’s account, written in 1876, more than a half-century after the event, shares with the Nantucket rumor a desire to punish Pollard for allowing the situation to unfold to begin with.16 The willingness of the Nantucket community to alter details to blame Pollard suggests a deeper cathartic function in finding a scapegoat, for reasons moral and practical, after tragedy strikes. The effect is not only to cleanse the survivors of any sense of guilt or shame for partaking in cannibalism, but also to exonerate Nantucket for supporting the perilous commercial whaling enterprise altogether. Placing the smoking gun in Pollard’s hand indeed exculpates the surviving crew and the entire whaling industry, while reinforcing the reasonableness of the dangers of the trade so as to encourage and perpetuate its continuation as usual.17
When Pollard returned to Nantucket after his rescue, he brought news of Coffin’s death to the youth’s mother, who herself turned on Pollard, blaming him for failing to save her son. As for Nickerson, in his 1876 letter pitching his story to the pulp journalist Leon Lewis, he offers a token defense of Pollard’s honor but more prominently portrays the captain as an object of scorn. In the hands of a sensationalist like Lewis, such an introduction would have been sure to lead to Pollard’s ruined reputation. In Nickerson’s perfunctory defense, “Captain Pollard was not nor could he be thought to have dealt unfairly with this trying matter.” But the very next sentence shifts to Coffin’s mother’s reaction: “On [Pollard’s] arrival he bore the awful message to the mother as her son desired, but she became almost frantic with the thought, and I have heared [sic] that she never could become reconciled to the captain’s presence.” Thereafter, Nickerson again limply defends the captain, writing that he “lived on the island, greatly respected by all whose business or pleasure brought them in contact with and died lamented by a large circle of friends.” But this circle obviously did not include Coffin’s mother, or the rumormongers responsible for the claim that Pollard had handed the lot to his vulnerable cousin. In Nickerson’s alteration of the narrative, wherein the captain, rather than Ramsdell, “pulls the fatal trigger,” the former cabin boy is playing into the deceptive narrative inaugurated by his shipmate Owen Chase.18
As a tavern owner on Nantucket in his final decades, Nickerson was positioned at the heart of the small island’s gossip mill. Despite having participated in the event himself, he undoubtedly had been exposed to its myriad narratives, and apparently believed the hard angle on Pollard would capture Lewis’s imagination and ultimately prove most salable. Oddly, the compendium of notes he had furnished for Lewis contradicts his version of the event described in the letter. In the notes he alleges that Coffin “was immediately shot by Charles Ramsdell who became his executioner by fair lot.” Was this simply an error accountable to Nickerson’s advancing age and shaky memory? Or was this an intentional alteration of the facts designed to spice up the tale, which he anticipated would bring handsome profits through installments in the New York Ledger, Lewis’s home paper? Further, had Nickerson, deciding to embellish the event in the letter, simply neglected to go back to his memoir, labeled “Desultory Sketches from a Seaman’s Log,” to revise this key detail? Most likely, Nickerson would not have enjoyed the onerous task of searching through the fair copy of 105 leaves written in his own hand to make the change, especially since he had already invested considerable time penciling in revisions and additions to the manuscript near the time he transferred it to Lewis.
Such controversy over the drawing of the lots was no trivial matter, but in fact determined Pollard’s ungenerous and unjust reception by Coffin’s mother and the Nantucket community. Pollard’s recovery from the trauma, seen in his surprisingly stable mental condition and will to survive literally in darkness as a night watchman, suggests that his former actions were unassailable. The historical revisionism at his expense suggested not only a classic example of scapegoating but also a morally unambiguous way of understanding an extremely complex set of circumstances. Perhaps Coffin’s mother and the Nantucket community were seeking somehow to define ideal behavior by delineating its opposite in the invented actions and behaviors of the captain.
According to Nickerson’s original account, Pollard actually advised against using the lottery in the first place, preferring to simply await the first death, evidence that further exonerates him from the claim that he pursued the lottery with the malicious goal of sacrificing his cousin. For their parts, both Chase and Nickerson confirm that Coffin insisted on going through with the lottery, perhaps with the intention of sacrificing himself. For all antebellum versions of the narrative, the larger Christian context would suggest Coffin as the self-sacrificial messiah. One survivor, Thomas Chappel, even published his account in 1824 under the imprint of London’s Religious Tract Society. Although Chappel’s evangelical strains are the most thorough and strident of all—he makes the tale into a Christian object lesson on how prayers will be answered by a benevolent God—Chase does not neglect the opportunity to appeal to pious readers by liberally applying theological dogma to his tale.
MERCIES OF OUR CREATOR?
Interestingly, Melville himself could see through these strained attempts at creating a religious allegory, especially one that illustrates the presence of a divine and loving providence. In Moby-Dick, particularly in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” a prevailing nihilism reveals Melville’s deep skepticism toward naïve trust in a caring and protecting God. The deity is repeatedly portrayed instead as a weaver alternately deaf to the prayers of humans, as in the chapter “A Bower in Arsicades,” or too busy weaving time in His tapestry to notice, let alone aid, the drowning Pip, whose cowardice during a whale chase nearly kills him. Pip does not receive the comforting hand of consolation that, in “The Counterpane,” soothes a youthful Ishmael when he has spent a disorienting sixteen hours isolated in his bedroom as punishment for a misdeed. The “supernatural hand seemed placed in mine” appears only in this separate childhood memory, whereas most of the novel locates a deity in natural convergences, energies, and rhythms—as in weaving a mat with Queequeg in “The Mat-Maker” chapter, beholding the stunning beauty of the whale’s brow, tail, and skeleton.19
Indeed, instances in the novel of an anthropomorphized God usually feature characters like Ahab and Pip totally disillusioned with His indifference and the meaningless universe He has created, or conversely, zealots like Gabriel of “The Jeroboam’s Story,” who scream prophecies of doom to those who violate God’s will. Indeed, through the whale’s agency, God’s righteous retribution corrects the disobedience of Jonah in Father Mapple’s sermon, just as the killing of Radney the instant he is to punish Steelkilt in “The Town-Ho’s Story” comes by way of a deus ex machina whale blasting the sadistic captain into the sea. God’s sharpshooting is also on display when Harry Macey, despite Gabriel’s archangelic warnings to desist, presses on after the White Whale and is miraculously plucked from a crowded whaleboat and sent to his watery death, leaving the remaining crew totally unharmed. Gabriel’s shrieking “prophecies of the speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity” foretell the divine retribution exacted on the sinner Macey, just as Jonah and Radney are punished by a just intervening God in the form of a whale. God is unambiguous in meting out justice, as Macey, at the height of his profane frenzy, “was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s head; but the mate for ever sank.”20
In using the Essex story to support his argument that a whale can plausibly attack a ship, and that a captain can find a specific whale in the ocean, Melville thus portrays the whale’s swift destructive power: “Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than ‘ten minutes’ she settled down and fell over.” Strikingly, Melville points to divine agency in determining the fate of Pollard’s next command, when he “once more sailed for the Pacific…but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers.”21 The reference here is to pagan Greek gods rather than the Judeo-Christian biblical God of mercy in Radney and Jonah’s examples, both of which Melville himself treats with skeptical irony, thereby questioning the credible existence of such a consistent and reliable God.
In Chappel’s Religious Tract Society rendition of the Essex tale, he seeks rhetorically to illustrate the power of prayer and divine providence, unlike Melville, who in “The Affidavit” uses the event to illustrate how an aggressive whale, with one swift blow, can sink an entire ship. To bear such “severe trials,” Chappel asserts, “belief in God and trust in him” is “absolutely necessary.” He continues: “It is particularly important that seamen whose troubles and dangers are so numerous should bear this in mind.” And he insists that “the soul that is led by the teaching of the Holy Spirit to draw near to the Savior will find support under all the troubles of life. It will find that peace which the world cannot give.”
For Chappel and his two shipmates, attributing their good fortune to a benevolent deity makes sense, given that their rescue by Captain Raine of the Surry—correlating to the “devious cruising Rachel,” which saves Ishmael as he bobs above the wreckage on Queequeg’s sealed coffin—seemed fated. Rather than sail for South America with Chase and Pollard, they had elected to stay on Henderson Island, only to deplete their provisions and stand at the brink of death. In ascribing his group’s rescue to providence, true to his Christian orientation, he focuses especially on one mate who zealously summons the strength to swim out to the Surry, nearly drowning in the process. Here, yet again, “the same Providence which had hitherto protected, now preserved him” quite actively.22
As for Chase and Pollard, Chappel can only lament their “deplorable and painful history,” in which they were “sustained by the dead bodies of their companions.” He meanwhile omits mention of their willingness to shoot one of their own. Troubling Chappel’s formulation here is his inability to account for Chase and Pollard’s ill-fortune. Was it that they, unlike Chappel and his mates, had failed to trust enough in God, or to “pray earnestly to God for the knowledge of his truth”? Although they indeed survived, and in large part due to cannibalism, they did not benefit from the protective divine powers that aided “these men [who] prayed earnestly for deliverance from their sufferings.” Chappel thus offers a model for the reader to emulate, asking rhetorically, “Can you be less earnest respecting your soul?”23
On display in Chappel’s account is a search for moral structure and guidance in a chaotic universe. Thus, the question emerges whether Christianity holds up under circumstances such as those seen with the Essex. As the next chapter explores, Chase invokes providence to explain his experience, a proposition Melville found patently absurd. In Melville’s copy of the Narrative, a telling annotation appears in the following passage: “There was not a hope now remaining to us but that which was derived from a sense of the mercies of our Creator. The night of the 18th was a despairing era in our sufferings.” The phrase mercies of our Creator in the context of such brutal misfortune struck the novelist as bizarre and incongruous.24 How could a Creator subjecting these men to such torture be construed as merciful? Given what they had been through, and how often their prayers had seemingly been ignored, how could they hold out belief in a deity? Melville underlined the phrase, and set a question mark in parentheses at the end of the sentence.
COFFIN’S LAST WORDS
In his account, Nickerson clearly wished to cast Coffin as a Christ figure nobly accepting his sacrificial role. With the Christ position occupied, Pollard is cast as something of a tragic figure, although with a compromised dignity that contrasted with Melville’s own admiring sense of the real-life captain. As for Coffin, his insistence on the lottery’s fairness and his self-possessed articulation of his desire to whisper “a parting message to his dear mother and family” ultimately uphold Pollard’s unassailable stature in his cousin’s eyes. Coffin’s mother, as we have seen, could never share her son’s apparent reverence for Pollard, whether or not she believed it was he or Ramsdell who pulled the trigger. Avoiding him for the rest of her life, despite living on the same small island, she considered Pollard’s insufficient will to resist the lottery’s outcome to be his unforgivable crime. Only following through on Pollard’s original suggestion—that the crew members nourish themselves on whoever should die first, with the implication being that this person might be Pollard—would have marked an acceptable outcome, in Coffin’s mother’s view. Pollard’s instinct, for its part, issued from his Quaker worldview, which Philbrick reminds us opposed killing and games of chance, both of which the cannibalistic lottery entailed.25
Coffin’s exoneration of his cousin would seem to put to rest any question about the captain’s negligence. All the same, the perception of Coffin as a messiah figure, with the consumption of his remains directly echoing the Christian Communion, easily slips Pollard into the role of a misunderstood leader caught in a moral quagmire. Coffin’s mother likely felt that Pollard should have insisted on his initial suggestion, resisting the lottery to the end and realizing the protective paternal role she expected him to embody. However unjust the interpretive errors of Nickerson or Coffin’s mother, Pollard does emerge as a possible tragic hero displaying a distinct shortcoming.
If a flaw can be found in Pollard, it is his exceeding flexibility and broader support for democracy, attributes that under different circumstances could have garnered sympathy. Indeed, agreeing to the lottery demonstrated his belief in untainted democracy—with an equal risk for each man, regardless of age or rank. The more consequential display of Pollard’s “fatal flaw,” however, may have occurred some 1,500 miles to the Northwest, when perhaps he was too conciliatory in dispensing with his suggestion to sail west toward the Marquesas or Tahiti. An alternative explanation is that he was simply avoiding a potential subversion of his authority that might lead to mutiny, especially given how few provisions the crew had salvaged from the sinking Essex. His responsiveness to the crew’s pleas to head for a civilized port may indeed have arisen from the ascendance of Chase, the second-in-command, who was actually present during the whale’s assault on the ship.
Nickerson, in his account, exploits such perceptions of Pollard’s tragic qualities, and their consequences for the crew, by also placing the gun in the captain’s hand. Not only would Pollard here be forced to eat his cousin, but he would also kill him, a titillating irony, given his resistance to the lottery from the outset. Fascinatingly, Nickerson so manipulates the text for dramatic value but does not reckon, in his letter to Lewis, with the contradiction between Coffin’s forgiveness of his uncle and Coffin’s mother’s inability to forgive. Yet the story of Pollard’s relaying of the message invariably shows his humanity. Through an act of principle and courage, he has intended to console and pacify his relative, only to inflame her. Here, a sort of “flaw” of sensitivity emerges again, with the captain possibly unable to predict Coffin’s mother’s reaction. She likely could not, or did not wish to, empathize with the impossibly complex moral conundrum faced by the Essex captain and his crew. In her grief, she likely had no patience for psychological vagaries or contending with the base need to survive.
Some readers may hear an echo between Coffin’s parting message and Kurtz’s last words—“The horror! The horror!”—in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). But unlike Conrad’s narrator Marlow, who lies to Kurtz’s beloved back in Europe to mollify her, Pollard does not alter Coffin’s message for the boy’s mother. Whatever comparisons may be made, the evidence shows that Pollard’s message was too painful for Coffin’s mother, and she lashed out at the messenger. This was her overarching response regardless of which detail she fixed on: the possibility that Pollard had drawn the lot, according to Nantucket legend; his lack of insistence on rejecting the lottery; or his insufficient resolve to take the bullet himself. Most fundamentally, she would have preferred right then to be talking to her own son rather than to her nephew.
In his letter to Lewis, Nickerson seizes on this “truly trying moment [in which] the son of a beloved sister [was] to fall by their hands.”26 Falsely sympathetic to Pollard, Nickerson was eager to cull full dramatic impact, with its dramatic irony, from Pollard’s delivery and Coffin’s mother’s furious reaction—and he manipulated other details of the story, as submitted to Leon Lewis, with his audience similarly in mind. Nickerson took a similar approach to Pollard’s implication in cannibalism. The author, for example, excludes himself from the consuming of crew member Isaac Cole. Instead he describes himself surviving “by means of the small pittance meted out for the share” of bread made available upon the death of Cole and another crew member, Richard Peterson. He likewise cast himself as following Pollard’s suggestion, later overturned, that “let whatever would come, we would never draw lots after our food had quite gone for each other’s death, but leave all with God.”
But the mere invocation of drawing lots indicated that this path might ultimately be taken. The step toward cannibalism represented a crucial breaching of all civilized taboos, a burst into survivalist necessity, and just one trigger pull from the next source of sustenance. Writes Chase: “We consented, however at this time,” in the agreement to commit contingency cannibalism, “in case one should die first the others could if they thought proper subsist upon our remains with the hope that some one might carry the news to our friends.” In a stroke of divine mercy—interpreted alternatively as a punishment for forcing them to kill their own crew—“God designed it should be otherwise and again gave his protecting arm and saved us from the very jaws of death.”27
Omitted conspicuously from Nickerson’s account, alongside his participation in cannibalism, is his descent into temporary madness, recorded by Chase. His will broken late in the surviving crew’s voyage on the open boats, Nickerson sank into a passive despondency so profound that Chase himself feared being “unexpectedly overtaken by a like weakness, or dizziness of nature, that would bereave me at once of both reason and life.” Were Nickerson to have died in this state, he hardly would be remembered as meeting death with dignity. With seeming high drama, the fourteen-year-old cabin boy “laid down, drew a piece of canvass over him, and cried out, that he had wished to die immediately.” Chase describes his own futile efforts to rally Nickerson’s spirit and, in the process, reveals a perception of the boy’s particular cowardice: “I saw that he had given up, and I attempted to speak a few words of comfort and encouragement to him, and endeavored to persuade him that it was a great weakness and even wickedness to abandon a reliance upon the Almighty, while the least hope, and a breath of life remained.” Nickerson emerges from this description as the antithesis of Chappel’s model of pious endurance. Even worse, the cabin boy did not even respond to the prospect that the sailors “would be gaining the land before the end of two days more.” He had clearly convinced himself, without reason, that he would die, given that he was physically stronger, if not psychologically so, than he thought. However dispiriting the journey, Nickerson emerges as a childish, stubborn believer in his own demise: “A fixed look of settled and forsaken despondency came over his face: he lay for some time silent, sullen and sorrowful” locked in “unaccountable earnestness.”28
We see, then, how offering his own version of events allowed Nickerson to preserve, even rescue, his reputation. This applied to both cannibalism and a perceived irrational childishness, with the latter quality reappearing in Melville’s Pip, who jumps overboard when approaching a whale. We can further understand why Nickerson would want to redirect attention to Pollard, who was dead by the time the former cabin boy tried to publish his account, as a purported coward, however “sympathetic” Nickerson’s superficial narrative. Maligned in Chase’s account for giving up—and just on the verge of being saved—Nickerson seeks to create an alternative to Chase’s portrayal of him as the antithesis of Christian virtue. While absenting himself from the narrative for obvious reasons, Nickerson readily construes Pollard as a captivating figure mixing a lack of foresight with all-too-human intentions.
EXCELLENT SUGGESTION
In Chase’s Narrative, as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a novel portraying a ship on which cannibalism occurs, the first to suggest the drawing of lots for cannibalism is the first chosen. After suggesting the crew randomly select the executioner, Ramsdell himself draws the undesirable lot. Nickerson represents an exception here, in choosing Pollard as the assigned killer for dramatic impact—as well as perhaps to downplay the democratic nature of the exercise by casting Pollard, the authority figure, as the shooter. Poe, by sharp contrast, portrays the Ramsdell figure suggesting the lottery as a paragon of fair-minded idealism.
In Poe’s novel, Pym’s resistance to a lottery for cannibalism, much like Pollard’s, reflects an earnest attempt to avoid “the most horrible alternative which could enter into the mind of man.” But given the circumstances, according to crewman Richard Parker, since they “had now held out as long as human nature could be sustained; that it was unnecessary for all to perish, when, by the death of one, it was possible, and even probable, that the rest might be finally preserved.” Further, the other two mates, Augustus and Peters, had agreed to the lottery, placing Pym in the minority. Like Pollard, Pym eventually succumbs to the collective will. But even in Poe’s narrative, the surface sympathy is absent, replaced by a stewing animosity that explodes into a knife brawl pitting Pym against Parker. Again echoing Pollard, Pym’s vow to never allow the lottery includes the fiery oath that “if [Parker] attempted in any manner to acquaint the others with his bloody and cannibal designs, I would not hesitate to throw him into the sea.”29 Little did he know, but Parker had already convinced the others to partake of his plan.
Pym later confesses no democratic kinship and Christlike self-sacrificial love for Parker. Instead, as he puts it, “the fierceness of a tiger possessed my bosom, and I felt towards my fellow creature, Parker, the most intense, the most diabolical hatred.” Rather than submitting to a horrific necessity, Poe’s characters dispense with their inhibitions in a primal frenzy. This is the case once Parker himself chooses the lot initiating “the consummation of the tragedy in the death of him who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing it about.” Once the controlled process of selection has ended, Pym and his mates become savages themselves, never once pausing to deliberate over drawing again to determine a killer, as Ramsdell had done with the Essex crew. Parker’s death is immediate; he is “stabbed in the back by Peters”; his remains “appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim.” The men then proceed to take off “the hands, feet, and head, throwing them, together with the entrails, into the sea,” and unceremoniously “devoured the rest of the body” like the brutes they had now become.30
Writing in the 1830s, Poe was well aware of Chase’s Narrative, given that he had been close friends with Jeremiah N. Reynolds, author of Mocha Dick: White Whale of the Pacific (1832) and a lecturer on scientific sea expeditions, and was steeped in the era’s nautical narrative culture. Further, Poe seems to pick up on a tendency of politicians, who as candidates call for broader self-sacrifice, whether regarding taxes or liberties, only to promote their own personal interests in the long run. Unlike Chase and Nickerson, Poe makes no appeal to the patriotic and pious, but rather mocks the spokesperson for such, Parker, by having him endure the sacrifice he had extolled for the good of the group. The unsentimental devouring of Parker reveals the ultimate baseness of human nature, versus the wispiness of oratory.
Long before Charles Olson wrote Call Me Ishmael (1947), his seminal work of Melville criticism, Pollard’s reputation on Nantucket had evolved from the rumor-tinged calumny of the days following the Essex wreck. Olson begins his work by emphatically citing the Essex ordeal as not just one source but the “first fact” of Moby-Dick. Olson then lays out carefully selected details to illustrate his book’s overarching design. In Olson’s telling, Coffin’s death appears as an almost organic outcome of the situation, initiated by a joint decision, all but erasing any controversy or innuendo regarding Pollard’s role. Later in the volume, Olson makes liberal use of Melville’s notes on Chase’s Narrative, especially those indicating his sympathy for the stricken captain. When it comes to Pollard’s possible role in a parricide, Olson establishes distance, impartially narrating the events that would lead to Moby-Dick’s genesis. “Within three days,” he writes, “these four men, calculating the miles they had to go,” and thus executing a consensual resolution, “decided to draw two lots, one to choose who should die that the others might live, and one to choose who should kill him.”31
In this account Pollard goes unmentioned and no man—namely Ramsdell—is identified as the one to suggest drawing lots to determine the shooter. Human agency and free will are virtually removed as drivers of the event, and “the youngest, Owen Coffin, serving on his first voyage as a cabin boy” with the wholesome objective “to learn his family trade, lost,” becoming the object of a dark but necessary act. Olson interestingly highlights the ritual quality of the human sacrifice to extract its full significance. It is not Coffin’s body, but that of Isaac Cole, a common seaman from Barnstable, that becomes the body of Christ in Olson’s narration. The ritual process seems to occur spontaneously, given that it “happened to them this once, in this way: they separated the limbs from the body, and cut all the flesh from the bones, after which they opened the body, took out the heart, closed the body again, sewed it up as well as they could and committed it to the sea. They drank of the heart and ate it. They ate a few pieces of the flesh and hung the rest.” Cole is the focus here, but Olson also highlights the consumption of the ship’s African American crewmen, who were the first to die. The disposal of the crew’s black members, Olson observes, mirrors the elite devouring the laboring classes through exploitation and economic domination.
Aboard Chase’s boat, Cole “was forced,” in one of the many passive constructions Olson employs to signify the fated nature of the ordeal, “to propose to his two men, Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson, that they should partake of their own flesh.” Crucially, these men had lived on the bodies of the first to die, the African American crewmen. No emphasis on the dread of eating of one’s “own flesh” appears in this narration. Instead, the writer rather mechanically reports that “Lawson Thomas, Negro, died and was eaten. Again two days and Isaac Shepherd, Negro, died and was eaten.”32 In Olson’s telling, eating blacks for the white crewmen is not nearly as appalling as devouring fellow whites, or one’s kin such as Coffin. The black crew dies early and quickly, likely owing to malnutrition perhaps resulting from unequal access to provisions on the open boats. Indeed, Chase reports of one particular black crewman whom he apprehends for raiding the rations.33 Blacks are never once considered in any Essex accounts to assume the Christ role, yet they indeed provide for the crew’s first sustenance in the form of human flesh. The lack of consensus on the fitness of African Americans for heaven may have played into their omission from Christ narratives, as the question of whether blacks could be Christianized was hotly debated even among New Englanders, who were by no means exclusively abolitionists. Indeed, from the Northern perspective, blacks were considered to be of a wholly distinct racial category or “species of mankind” than whites, according to many popular pseudoscientific studies. As such, the racial “other” was removed enough from whiteness that its members might have been considered to be comparatively more suitable as nourishment.34 Nathaniel Philbrick notes that “a disturbing racial aspect to the rumors of cannibalism that sailors swapped” was confirmed by a Maori chief, who claimed that “black men had a much more agreeable flavor than white.” Captain Benjamin Worth, whose command led him to New Zealand’s shores in 1805, insisted that this view was accepted as fact among Nantucket whalemen. Blacks begged him not to land on remote islands inhabited by cannibals because “natives preferred Negro flesh to that of the white man.”35 Indeed, the logic of cannibalism here suggests that, alongside “taste,” racial difference may have helped lift the taboo when it came to whites consuming blacks. Homogeneity, conversely, highlighted the act as an extension of self-consumption, epitomized by Pollard’s partaking of his own kin’s body.
Thus one can perceive a continuum marked at one end by flesh closest to one’s own genetics and race—here coded “white,” according to conventional antebellum racial ideology—and at the other by animal flesh. African American flesh, somewhere in between, was associated with moral dilemmas tied to the slaveholder-slave dynamic. In a sense, white slaveholders had been long been “consuming” their black slaves in the South. As the examples thus far have shown, consuming black flesh was less of a taboo than consuming white flesh. Moreover, the practice was typically not treated with the same ritual or symbolic significance as that applied to white-on-white cannibalism, or cannibalism associated with one’s kin. In a lengthy section on “workers,” Olson elaborates on this exploitation of blacks, particularly the culture’s valuing of their bodies without heed to their spirits.36 He describes them as the bone and muscle driving the whaling industry, with, I would add, the black sailor the most exploited member of this class. He writes: “The money and the glory” of the whaling venture “came later, on top with the exploiters. And the force went down, stayed where it always does,” according to his neo-Marxist formulation, “at the underpaid bottom.” This situation was marked by maintenance of the “lowest wages and miserable working conditions,” making these 1840s crews “the bottom dogs of all nations and all races.”37
Echoing the broader U.S. economic system, the men resolved to starve the black sailors and eat them first. As the evidence shows, their deaths were almost routinely grouped together and treated without ceremony.38 This was the case even though, for the Essex crew, it was a first foray into cannibalism. Because blacks were then considered, at best, less than fully human, they could evidently be consumed without either ritual or psychological burden. In one sense, Olson’s account perpetuates the belittling of the black sailor’s life, in his indifferent rattling off of the names of black sailors killed and then consumed—a tendency also apparent in Chase’s Narrative. But in another sense, his emphasis on the exploitation of workers across ethnic and national boundaries represents a distinctly progressive strain in his account.
As implied thus far, Olson is careful not to scapegoat any of the Essex crew members for bringing about their regrettable circumstances. Such a tactic would have obscured his emphasis on a fated event playing out for a contingent of men who seemed to act as one rather than as warring factions. Indeed, his desire to write the mythological and literary history of Moby-Dick as a work of prose poetry naturally leads him to eschew a focus on the minute details and debates that captivated nineteenth-century audiences. Yet scapegoating had its purpose both for the survivors and Nantucket islanders—that all could maintain their collective dignity and cleanse themselves of the taint of cannibalism. Cannibalism came to stand for a maddening and highly visible display of human sin and vulnerability, a flaw like that in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark.” Eradicating all its traces was paramount after the Essex disaster, explaining the rush to vilify Pollard. According to the timeless practice of collective scapegoating, his flaws and sins were magnified so that they came to define his identity, exonerating all others who might be implicated. Indeed, the lottery system itself was designed to pre-exonerate those involved in the sea murder and cannibalism. One is reminded of the black box at the heart of Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery,” which functions as an icon for democracy that inadvertently has become a vehicle for such scapegoating and social cleansing through human sacrifice.
In The Jonah Man, a 1984 novelized version of the Essex tragedy, Henry Carlisle depicts an imagined yet telling scene in which Chase meets Pollard on Nantucket. In it, the fictional Chase says nothing of his own participation in cannibalism. The scene points not only to how the Essex tale has moved into the twentieth century but also to the particular enduring desire to hear the human story behind these whalemen. Carlisle craftily captures Chase’s dodging of the subject, an evasion that Nickerson would likewise attempt. After Chase tells of the whale’s assault, Pollard poses the critical question: “And that’s all?” This stuns Chase, who, still unwilling to divulge his own participation in the unspeakable, “reflected a moment…then said, ‘Even if there was anything more to it we’d never fathom it, so what’s the use of thinking about it?’ ”39 As the chapter to follow will show, this exchange epitomizes Chase’s character. His method, unlike Pollard’s, was to live down the event through aggressive dissociation from both the taboo of cannibalism and the liabilities attendant to his fatal decisions—decisions that would ultimately force the crew to mull their alternatives to starvation.