DAMAGE CONTROL
In the wake of the Essex tragedy, Owen Chase behaved with the urgency of a man drowning. In order to preserve his career, he rushed into print with his version of the story, casting himself as the consummate survivor. Most curious of all was that he had virtually emblazoned his tale of suffering and survival—a testament to the human spirit—with a giant “For Sale” sign. By seeking to avert any suspicion of cowardice, with his heroic story steeped in the entrepreneurial and Christian values tightly held in antebellum culture, Chase harnessed the era’s commercial rhetoric in his Narrative as part of his elaborate plan for damage control.
Reading Chase’s Narrative, one is struck by his desire to survive with the greatest dignity possible. But his efforts, at every turn, also seem trained on his release from any blame, as couched in his ghostwriter’s suave prose. In The Jonah Man, Henry Carlisle’s novel of the Essex saga, Chase appears exactly in this character, refusing to accept his part in the ordeal. As detailed toward the close of chapter 1, Chase demurs at Pollard’s question regarding the wreck’s aftermath: “And that’s all?” Chase, ever smooth and superficial, “smiled and said, ‘We just had a little bad luck.’ ” Pollard, in response, is flush with emotion as “fever swept through me.”1 Although Chase would enjoy a lucrative and lengthy whaling career and set the blueprint for nearly all subsequent retellings of the Essex tragedy with his Narrative, he would pay dearly for his unwillingness to reckon with his demons. Unlike Pollard, who directly addressed the horrors of the Essex experience, Chase repressed the truth—and ultimately descended into madness.
In beginning to understand Chase’s approach, one must note that the drawing of lots that led to Owen Coffin’s death was but one episode in a lengthy history of killing at sea for survival. More generally, even as the custom had been accepted to some extent, killing one’s shipmate could be very much like murdering a beloved relative. Shipmates frequently forged intense bonds over years and looked out for one another’s safety. Toby of Melville’s Typee (1846) and the majestic Jack Chase of his Redburn (1849) are two such fictional companions who correspond to real shipmates the author deeply revered. Killing such companions, although this occurs in Billy Budd, would have been wildly intolerable even in Melville’s imagination. As for Charles Ramsdell, who pulled the trigger against Owen Coffin only after expressing his reluctance to do so, the question indeed arises whether he had committed a murder—in his own perception, that of his mates, and that of the public.
Pollard’s all-too-human wail of regret in 1823, two months after the sinking of the Two Brothers, was simultaneously a lament for the dead and a confession of a captain’s complicity in the event. Daniel Tyerman, a well-traveled agent of the London Missionary Society responsible for surveying Pacific and Far Eastern missions, reported that Pollard delivered his tale “in a tone of despondency never to be forgotten by him who heard it,” with the captain wincing in agony as he spoke. “My head is on fire at the recollection,” he confessed, in telling how he “cried out, ‘My lad, my lad, if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.’ The poor emaciated boy hesitated a moment or two; then, quietly laying his head down upon the gunnel of the boat, he said, ‘I like my lot as well as any other.’ ”2 Coffin’s hesitation here indicates he might very well have taken up Pollard’s offer. Should Pollard, then have exploited that slight hesitation to show himself as a true hero and protective paternal figure? The recollection indeed was too much for Pollard to bear.
Even as Chase projected full composure in his print rendering of the tale, this doesn’t mean he could speak of it without breaking down. Nantucketer Jethro Macy wrote in 1821 that though of “firm mind and strong constitution of body,” Chase’s “sufferings have been such that it is impossible for him to talk much about it; even the parts most distant from the worst start the tears, his voice falters.” Macy’s next observation is telling of Chase’s trajectory, particularly his parlaying of the Essex disaster into a successful career: “strong efforts mixed with smiles mark his disjointed sentences.”3 Those disjointed sentences would be transformed by his hired writer. Given Chase’s emerging reputation for dissembling self-promotion, it is little wonder why Melville and Emerson did not visit him, instead gravitating toward Pollard, who, better than any survivor, embodied the tremors of the experience.
CHASING AWAY GHOSTS: THE FIRST MATE’S GHOSTWRITER
Whereas Chase donned a forced smile in his Narrative and, when he could, in his personal demeanor, Pollard never comported himself in this way. Melville accordingly describes Pollard’s traits in his epic poem Clarel: “Never he smiled; / Call him, and he would come; not sour / In spirit, but meek and reconciled; / Patient he was, he none withstood.” But he was not without his scars, for “Oft on some secret thing would brood.”4 Melville initially felt Chase “to have been the fittest person to narrate the thing” in print, likely because he was on another boat during its most intense moment—the shooting of Owen Coffin. That distance, along with the fact that he was not captain, may have allowed Chase greater objectivity. But what Melville found in Chase’s Narrative was not reportorial objectivity but instead a veneer of completeness despite its glaring omission of an explanation for the pivotal decision to sail for South America.
For Chase’s narrative Melville detected a ghostwriter, seeing how he served as a kind of defense attorney and character witness in one. “There seems no reason to suppose that Owen himself wrote the Narrative,” Melville concluded. “It bears obvious tokens of having been written for him; but at the same time, its whole air plainly evinces that it was carefully and conscientiously written to Owen’s dictation of the facts—It is almost as good as tho’ Owen wrote it himself.” This last qualification, it would seem, might indicate a surprising fidelity to the facts, given its “whole air.” Yet by that phrase Melville means something entirely different. Whole alludes to the narrative’s seamless coherence, including its succession of events and unmistakable attention to details—from catching flying fish by sail and devouring them whole to Nickerson’s delirium—that only a survivor could recall. But the causal connections crafted to tie together the events, particularly those that turned fatal such as the decision to sail for the mainland—an error Melville had recorded with astonishment—struck Melville as the work of a ghostwriter under Chase’s close surveillance. Melville knew also that employing a ghostwriter would help whitewash complicity in a terrible strategic decision that “might have been avoided,” particularly obvious in how they, “strange to tell, knew not that for more than twenty years the English missionaries had been resident in Tahiti.”5
Historians have variously conjectured three different identities for Chase’s ghostwriter, who so deftly helped him hide truths ascertainable only by readers as astute as Melville. Samuel Jenks, the easiest to rule out, was editor of the Nantucket Inquirer, first published in June 1821. Between fielding submissions, soliciting contributions, scribbling editorials, and setting type to meet his paper’s first deadlines, he likely would not have been able to compose the Narrative by the following month. Yet his “self-important, inflated rhetoric,” contrary to Thomas Heffernan’s speculation, was actually consonant with that of the Narrative, which openly aggrandizes Chase’s heroism far more than it achieves a “sensitive, imaginative, and timelessly literary” finish.6 Heffernan, writing in 1981, has also proposed that Jenks’s father-in-law, William Coffin, had written the Narrative. This was based on Coffin’s skilled prose in a pamphlet seeking to exonerate himself from involvement in a 1795 Nantucket bank robbery. Coffin was an older man with ample time to write Chase’s Narrative, but the age discrepancy between the two probably would not have allowed for the intimacy necessary to produce such a nuanced work. The ghostwriter was more likely a young man at the beginning of his career, and who thus could sympathize more deeply with Chase’s plight.
William Coffin’s son, meanwhile, William Jr., had a freshly minted Harvard degree and would later ghostwrite William Lay and Cyrus Hussey’s Mutiny on Board the Whaleship Globe (1828) and Obed Macy’s History of Nantucket (1834). Besides the Essex, the Globe would become the period’s most spectacular nautical disaster in American print culture; Coffin Jr.’s original account profoundly shaped innumerable retellings including that featured in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The eventual author of such a powerful and highly publicized seafaring disaster is likely to have also penned Chase’s account. Although it was his first time writing in such a genre, Coffin Jr. had experience authoring pamphlets for the temperance movement, and thus was skilled in the art of rhetorical persuasion. Such experience meant that he was even more qualified than an attorney to “defend” Chase, given his access to the potent literary devices of sentimentality and sensationalism. He understood the earliest forms of what we would now call a mass audience, and could strike a sympathetic chord with great success, according to Nantucket historian Helen Winslow Chase.7 Likewise his own father, accused of a crime he did not commit, had used the literary market as his means of self-defense. For Chase’s objective, then, Coffin Jr. was a perfect match.
Poe registers his appreciation, and perhaps disdain, for the prevalence of ghostwriters in contemporary nautical tales by prefacing his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym under the name of his fictional narrator and protagonist, who alludes to “Mr. Poe” as his ghostwriter. The challenge of solving the mystery of the “real” author’s identity fascinated audiences well into the nineteenth century, just as the question of authorship and autobiography fueled much interest in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.8 Poe’s fictional narrator Pym claims in his preface to have originally considered throwing his imperfect, yet totally authentic, account of his voyage before the public. He continues, “Its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being received as truth” but that such a move would have demanded exceptional bravery and “trust in the shrewdness and common sense of the public.” Out of modesty he turns the manuscript of his “factual account” over to Poe, who then resolves to work it into a “pretended fiction.” Pym nonetheless contends that the resulting version will convey his authentic experience: “I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative” were strong enough to throw off any “score of popular incredulity.” A ruse in itself, this claim called attention to the common inclusion of fabricated material in seafaring narratives, a tendency largely facilitated by fluid ideas about authorship. Just as it is difficult to parse Chase’s particular influence on his Narrative—an issue that perplexed Melville to no end—Poe as Pym also sounds this note in his preface: “Even to those readers who have not seen the Messenger, it will be unnecessary to point out where his portion ends and my own commences; the difference in point of style will be readily perceived”—which of course it is not.9 I hereby confess to falling prey to exactly the folly Poe parodies here—who can resist it?—of parsing a sea story to discern its “true” author, and thus join the ranks of other historians who bear this dubious distinction. It is not so much a frivolous foible to pursue this question for Chase, however, given the utter necessity of weighing the relative veracity of his versus subsequent narratives of the Essex story. I also consider this act essential for deducing the various motives of the storytellers.
Relentless self-promotion has likewise followed the nautical genre. Chase begins with a confession of writing for financial gain, a gesture also made by Poe in Pym. This is not as tawdry an admission as it may at first appear, but like Walt Whitman’s poem, “To Rich Givers,” frankly acknowledges self-advertisement for the sake of finding a donor. “Why should I be ashamed,” Whitman asks, “to advertise for” and “to cheerfully accept” the various forms of patronage that keep him solvent, such as “a little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money.” Whitman’s proud embrace of his human impulse, no doubt, would have appeared indiscreet, or taboo, in antebellum culture.10 In Pym, in a scene describing the protagonist’s attempt to turn a countermutiny by frightening the tyrants into submission, Poe similarly confesses his profit motive in offering his writings to the public: “I made up my mind, however, to sell my life as dearly as possible, and not to suffer myself to be overcome by any feelings of trepidation.”11 Indeed, Chase, whether he admitted it or not, was also selling his life “as dearly as possible” to live down his error at sea.
Chase’s Narrative helped safeguard his reputation from scrutiny. Selling it aggressively was the best way he knew of to achieve this objective, as he announces in “To the Reader.” Here, he demonstrates an awareness of the literary marketplace and, in particular, of “the private stories of individuals…and the injuries which have resulted from the promulgation of fictitious histories, and in many instances, of journals entirely fabricated for the purpose.”12 The “injuries” referred to here are those to reputation, not body, and the faked sea tales he notes, designed to impugn character, were the very sort he most feared. Chase knew that by printing his story first, he could preempt and discredit any subsequent renderings that might cast him in an unflattering light. Chase acts much in the same spirit as his ghostwriter’s father, William Coffin, who had eloquently defended himself from the slanderous bank robbery allegations. His expressed worry that falsified nautical accounts could “undervalue the general cause of truth” reflects both a rhetorical ploy to invest himself with steady authenticity and an admission of his own paranoia that his negligence in the tragedy be might disclosed by rumor or the press.13
Chase dubiously situates the Narrative in the scholarly genre of “any department of the arts or sciences…founded in fact.” With an eye to entertainment value, he promises “new and astonishing traits of human character” for both the serious “philanthropist and philosopher” and, democratically, for “every description of readers.” He continues this self-advertisement by claiming his descriptions are intrinsically interesting and thus not in the least amplified for sensationalistic effect. He ends the note in the spirit of Whitman by expressing “the hope of obtaining something of remuneration” for his tale. He justifies his plea based on the financial hit he incurred from the destruction of the Essex, claiming to have “lost all the little I had ventured, but my situation and the prospects of bettering it.”14 Describing his Narrative as an entrepreneurial venture, notably, could ally him with other industrious readers who might have had to reinvent themselves professionally for survival in the turbulent, surging economy of the 1820s, when all trades felt the beginnings of the market revolution.15
Once a man of considerable means, whose prospects “seemed to smile upon me,” Chase now finds it “all in one short moment destroyed….”16 As for the financial effect of the shipwreck, he certainly lost less money than the boat’s owners had, but as first mate, he likely invested at least modestly in the voyage’s search for profitable whale oil. A study for the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms that “from 1820 onward, 39 percent of captains had shares in the voyages in which they participated.” Further, “these shares were not negligible” since “they averaged from about 10 to almost 30 percent.”17 Chase’s purported economic ruin from the sinking of the Essex is therefore grossly exaggerated; Pollard, meanwhile, given these data, would likely have suffered the worst financial loss of all the survivors. If anyone were justified in selling “a short history of my sufferings” in exchange for “something of remuneration,” it was Pollard.
Rather than modestly recover his losses, Chase aimed to cash in on demand in a surging free-market economy. His humility was a sure ruse. Among noncaptains, the losses incurred on failed voyages consisted of “bonus payments that depended upon the amount of oil or bone (or both) taken. Like the performance bonuses written into the contracts of major-league baseball players, these bonuses were designed to spur employees on to high levels of performance.” Chase may be more accurately understood as grousing about extra earnings lost through “a slush fund made from the sale of goods brought along to trade with South Sea islanders, Africans, or Inuit.” The crew, like the captain in this case, “probably supplemented their incomes nicely in this way”; however, “it is unlikely that trade represented a major part of their total earnings,” as economic historians Lance Davis and Charles Nordhoff report.18
Like in Harriet Wilson’s preface to her now famous autobiographical novel, Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), among the first ever written by an African American, Chase claims in his note to readers to be writing hungry and out of economic necessity. But far from the situation experienced by Wilson, who was near starvation and needed funds to save her ill child’s life, Chase, like most whalemen, was something of a gambler, who in truth was lamenting the earnings that might have been.19 Sebastian Junger, in his stellar profile of 1990s New England swordfishermen, observes the popularity for these seamen of Dick Francis horse racing novels, “which [seem] to appeal” to them “because it’s another way to win or lose huge amounts of money.” So popular that they “get passed around the fleet ‘at about four hundred miles per hour,’ ” according to one fisherman, Junger speculates “they’ve probably been to the Grand Banks [of New Foundland] more times than the men themselves.”20 Indeed, for Chase, writing about the Essex was a kind of high-stakes gamble, like whaling itself. Along with material rewards, the payoff promised fame.
Upon Chase’s return to Nantucket on June 11, 1820, time was of the essence to craft his Narrative. The whaling community had been well aware that Nuku Hiva and the islands around Tahiti were inhabited by peaceful indigenous people who had communed near an expansive royal chapel that housed a large contingent of missionaries. These peaceful natives, reported on in the New Bedford Mercury as early as April 28, 1819, meant that at least some portion of the broader public might begin to question the Essex sailors’ decision not to tack West, as Pollard had advocated. They in turn might deduce that Chase’s thwarting of this move was the real cause of the disaster, and not a murderous whale, as Chase argued. This was why the urgency of the situation must have struck the first mate like a blow to the head.
If all New England learned, based on survivors’ testimony, that Chase had led the resistance against Pollard’s argument for sailing west, then the first mate could face permanent ignominy in a region known for its puritanical intolerance of sinners. He did not, therefore, savor public gratitude for his survival. As would John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s Crucible, Chase set forth to defend his name with the very best resources available.
The quest for a ghostwriter began, and once he secured the services of Coffin Jr., he initiated a highly impressive rhetorical defense of his reputation. Chase’s method of constructing his own defense, which bleeds into an appeal for celebrity, points to how, according to literary scholar Leo Braudy, writers seeking fame exhibit a larger sense of “the nature of commercial civilization, [and] the expansion of…media, as much as they are about the special nature or the special self-consciousness of an individual.”21 As implied thus far, Chase’s special self-consciousness derived from his pivotal role in an event so traumatic and brutal that it called into question whether the perils of the trade were worth such profound costs.
As important as securing an effective ghostwriter was Chase’s match with the New York publisher and bookseller William B. Gilley. Although running a small shop, Gilley specialized, based on a 1819 source, “in a varied selection of current and popular books—Thomson, Southey, Watts, and Smollett, along with a large number of moralistic and didactic works,” with the latter resonating well with the role of providence in Chase’s Narrative.22 But more crucially, Gilley was known for tales of shipwrecks on the South Seas, and worked closely with Matthew Carey of Philadelphia, the most powerful publisher of the day with the broadest distribution network. Heffernan speculates that Chase may indeed have gone with his manuscript to Carey, who redirected him to Gilley. Exemplifying the cooperation between the two firms, arrangements were made for Gilley to print William Parry’s Voyages of Discovery on the condition that he would send Carey forty copies. Despite having an ostensibly modest publisher, Chase was actually engaging the largest print market available, reaching the expanding literate audiences of New York and Philadelphia. Here, one must remember that this was an era of starkly limited publishing options, before mass-circulation outlets such as the New York Ledger, later used by Nickerson, emerged for such narratives. Whether or not Chase first approached Carey, he was likely more than satisfied to have the New York publisher of nautical tales, celebrity writers, and didactic moral tracts publish his story.23
Despite conducting himself with a self-seriousness that suggested a desire for long-term renown, Chase’s fame would prove ephemeral. As Braudy writes, “If fame includes such an element of turning away from us, celebrity stares us right in the face, flaunting its performance and trying desperately to keep our attention.”24 Chase does both by self-consciously courting his audience and by turning his head away, insisting he is telling modest unvarnished truth alone.
For the sake of comparison, the contemporary fictional film Anonymous (2011) centers on ghostwriting as it pertains to Shakespeare. The politics of playwriting during the Elizabethan era were such that an influential and well-to-do gentleman like the Earl of Oxford, whom the filmmakers conjecture to be the real author of the plays, could not afford to subject himself to the political controversy most plays attracted. Many playwrights at the time were executed for staging content with treasonous views; Oxford may have wanted to avoid the glare of political scrutiny that could draw such violence against him and thus may have conscripted a young actor named William Shakespeare to conceal his identity. For Chase, the temporal circumstances were reversed. Unlike the plays of Oxford, Chase’s story, nonfiction in this case, was yet to be told. So he sought, with the help of a ghostwriter, to construct a personal narrative that could ward off would-be critics, transforming them into backers or perhaps even adorers. Oxford, for his part, had already written his plays when he solicited a plausible creature of the theatre, Shakespeare, as his stand-in to conceal his identity. In both cases, whatever the sequence, we witness authors managing their works and themselves into the market.
“COMMERCIAL EXCITEMENT”
As the market for literature developed, authors increasingly “fed and nurtured some aspect of the audience’s narcissism.”25 In this fashion Chase reinforced his audience members’ best image of themselves, kowtowing to both their Christian moral sentimentality and free-market capitalism. His first order of business after appealing for “remuneration” in exchange for his tale was to render a robust defense of the whaling industry, which Melville would echo in bombastic legalistic rhetoric in Moby-Dick’s “The Advocate” chapter. Yet unlike Chase, Melville peppers his appeal with intentionally facetious, outlandish claims conflating Queequeg with George Washington. Chase’s discussion of whaling, meanwhile, is pure “commercial excitement,” not unlike the Narrative he is weaving before our eyes. His emphasis on the whaling industry’s rise to power, which is “as important and general a branch of commerce as any belonging to our country,” evades the inevitable issue of internal competition among neighboring whaling firms, and thus skirts the inconvenient truth of economic “cannibalism.” Just as Chase elides human cannibalism in converting the Essex tale into one of providential resurrection, he avoids the unpleasant difficulties of the broader whaling industry. He also finds a useful enemy in the British—and an opportunity for mercantile triumph. In particular, he cites the “extensive and powerful competition” from the British, whose whalers benefited from subsidies and tax breaks; he then implores the U.S. government to aid its own commercial whaling firms through similar measures. British whalers, he contends, “are enabled to realize a greater profit from the demand and price of oil in their markets,” and thus put the American whaling industry at a distinct disadvantage.26
Chase asks in “To the Reader” and the “Preface,” as we have seen, for personal aid from potential buyers of his book as well as U.S. government aid for the industry. Given that Chase planned to spend his career as a whaling captain, the appeal for favorable industry treatment has the outward look of patriotism but could ultimately boost his own career—and profits. His future survival, he postulates, calls “for the want of a deserved government patronage.”27 Whaling is “a most hazardous business; involving many incidental and unavoidable sacrifices,” he explains in a thinly veiled allusion to the killing of Owen Coffin, “the severity of which it seems cruel to increase by neglect or refusal of a proper protection.” Thus starved of proper financial support, he reasons, an already struggling trade sinks deeper into brutish, even cannibalistic means for survival. The U.S. government, he clearly implies, is the real culprit behind the practice of cannibalism by American sailors, and the failure to support their increasingly competitive circumstances is tantamount to causing cannibalism itself. The claim fits Chase’s larger plan in the Narrative to shift scrutiny away from his negligence. The American government receives the blame here, just as another large, unwieldy force capable of great destruction—an eighty-five-foot sperm whale—does later in his tale.
Chase’s desire to exculpate himself did not preclude his equally powerful desire to entertain. His Narrative works from the assumption that for readers of gothic fiction, according to Poe’s formulation, “the appalling horror…where most suffering has been experienced” is attributed more to “a kind of anticipative horror, lest the apparition might possibly be real, than to an unwavering belief in its reality.”28 The suspension of disbelief, therefore, actually intensifies the reader’s fright, according to Poe’s theory. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, exemplifying this theme, the protagonist, Pym, stages a countermutiny by playing on the crew’s superstition and guilt and dressing up as a recently deceased shipmate, whose bloated and discolored body has been conspicuously visible to the crew for days. At the sight of the dressed-up Pym, one unsuspecting crew member drops dead of fear, killed by “anticipative horror.” Poe’s commentary on the gothic nautical tale draws upon the conventional standard set by Chase’s own Narrative, which, although nonfiction, sought the same effect on readers. Commercial excitement by way of anticipative horror was an objective shared by both Poe and Chase.29
Like the sensational narrative effect Chase seeks to achieve in the literary market through his grisly tale, a whaleman’s work is characterized by the “commercial excitement” of vigorous ambition, according to Chase. Situating Nantucket fishermen among the professions, unlike those who “labour only for their temporary existence,” Chase argues that whalemen like himself “have an ambition and pride among them which seeks after distinguishment and promotion.” This is not so much an appeal to dignify the common sailor’s experience as it is a defense of his own professional ambition, one uncommon to most whalemen yet to command their first voyage. But on his open boat, Chase tasted what it was like to captain his own ship, albeit under extremely compromised conditions. Much of the Narrative therefore is Chase’s justification of his own skills and qualifications with an eye toward securing a career as a whale captain. His assertion that “almost all” seamen in the whaling industry “enter the service with views of their own command” is very much self-reflexive, if not entirely true.30 Indeed, a relatively high rate of turnover occurred among common whalemen, as two-thirds of original crews never returned to their home port, but instead deserted, were discharged, or died on the voyage.
Many common sailors, therefore, may have initially approached the trade with the ambition to eventually become captain, only to succumb to the temptations of shore, thereby showing a lack of discipline precisely contrary to what was needed to reach their stated goal. Given multiple desertions, discharges, reenlistments, and a practice of island-hopping, many sailors engaged in something akin to global hitchhiking. Further, most whaleboat laborers had a disincentive to stay with a crew. In particular, according to one study that looked at crew members, a laborer’s “wage entitled him, as time went on, to a smaller fractional share of the voyages for which he shipped.” In other words, common sailors saw their wages decrease as productivity dropped off toward the latter portions of long voyages. Their economic exploitation derived from the “gradually deteriorating character and efficiency of the crews,” especially after a voyage’s first six months, which by then usually saw an accumulation of injuries, illnesses, and even fatalities, most often by drowning or falls from the masthead or yardarm onto the deck. Captains were also tempted “to exploit…inferior crews” as they accumulated oil, freely substituting such capital gains by paying in kind rather than dollars for labor.31
Whereas Chase may have accurately depicted himself as a mate seeking advancement, his insinuation that professional ambition characterized entire whale crews down to boatsteerers and cabin boys is less convincing. The industry did not allow the necessary avenues for advancement into the position of mate, captain, and owner. These were positions occupied by individuals with special privileges or connections that moved them up the hierarchy more rapidly. Sailors grinding out voyages at lowly ranks tended to stay in those positions, with the exception of the extraordinarily dedicated and fortuitous. The nineteenth-century New England intellectual Orestes Brownson’s assessment of pre–Civil War Northern wage laborers, and their regrettable conditions, applies to the era’s nautical workers. “The employer has him at his mercy,” he observes. “No man born poor has ever risen to the class of the wealthy.” This reflected a sobering recognition of the hurdles standing in the way of true socioeconomic progress. Class mobility and permeability may in fact have characterized American society during the prewar market revolution, but wage labor was too often a recipe for stasis. “Rich he may become, but it has not been by his own manual labor,” Brownson astutely notes.32 Indeed, as the wages of unskilled sea laborers steadily declined, those of officers rose. “It is difficult to see how, given these wage differentials, the whaling industry could have continued to recruit trained Americans for enlisted jobs over the two antebellum decades,” the social scientist Lance E. Davis observes, noting that the whaling industry instead relied heavily on unskilled Americans and foreigners alike. “The presence of both professional and amateur gamblers” among the era’s typical crewmen “may indicate something about the degree of risk aversion shared by at least the American component of that crew,” whose members were lured by the prospect of a lucky voyage, with an impressive haul, which would convert to profits that would overshadow otherwise meager wages.33 It is telling indeed that, as Hester Blum observes, “the definition of a strike as a labor action came into use after Royal Naval sailors struck their sails—in the nautical meaning of ‘strike,’ to take down or put away—in protest of poor conditions and low wages in the Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797.”34
Surviving a voyage—at least 50 out of 754 commanders whose careers were limited to a single voyage perished at sea—often encouraged this gambling mentality among officers as well as common crewmen. According to Davis, “a successful first voyage might convince a captain to get out [on the open sea] while there was still time.”35 Experience and access to data about the richest whaling waters of course mitigated that risk. Yet unlike most land-based industries, whaling lacked access to a reliable and transparent set of data. “Informational asymmetries in whaling,” as Davis describes it, abounded.36 The Essex crew’s reliance on the seriously flawed New American Practical Navigator, by Nathaniel Bowditch, was a prime example.
Cannibalism can be a metaphor for a type of economic failure, with the savage free market mocking the very notion of building civilization through profitable enterprise. For the whaling industry, this principle was epitomized by the skillful manipulation of an ever dynamic and elusive body of nautical knowledge. The race for knowledge preceded the race for whales. Thus “agents tried to gain advantages over their competitors by restricting access to knowledge of the routes and timing of whale migrations.”37 Captains who transferred between firms, of course, had little reason to keep these secrets, standing to profit by sharing knowledge on matters such as migration patterns, currents, and the seasonal movement of whales. Chase did this expertly as part of the quintessential Yankee enterprise, fueled by an uncommon drive for mastery and control, seemingly a compensatory psychological response to his literal and emotional lack of direction as a decision maker during the Essex journey.
And Chase’s later success as a whaleman was unparalleled. Of more than a half-century of captains on the Winslow, which sailed under dozens of commands from 1802 to 1858, no one matched his feats. Between 1828 and 1830, he had the top two richest outings in the vessel’s history, boasting 1,906 and 1,800 barrels of sperm oil landed or sent home on back-to-back ventures hailing from New Bedford. After manning the helm for three of the five most profitable voyages of the Winslow’s history, his two outings on the Charles Carroll totaled an ungodly eight years at sea, with but one three-month layover in Nantucket from March to August 1836. Just as he did for the Winslow, Chase set the record for the most profitable run of the Charles Carroll’s existence. In that time his relentless pursuit of whales would net 5,288 barrels of oil, a sum unparalleled in the industry. With profits dwarfing those of other captains sailing at the time—Thomas S. Andrews would garner just more than 3,300 units in the Charles Carroll’s next two ventures—Chase’s productivity strongly indicates his total immersion in the profession, an obsession just as extraordinary and unprecedented as the traumatic Essex disaster itself.38
If Chase’s post-Essex career was marked by these attributes, it was likely only because he knew too well the horror of disorientation at sea. Melville would seize upon this nightmare of being lost with an unreliable guidebook in both Redburn and Clarel. Chase’s copy of the New American Practical Navigator was hardly new. His edition while on the Essex, and the latest to be published, was probably dated to 1817, or three years old, but contained data virtually identical to its previous 1802 version. It would erroneously indicate that the Essex had landed on Ducie rather than Henderson Island. Nevertheless, Chase’s guidebook was hardly useless, unlike those depicted in Melville’s Pierre and Redburn. Pierre, Melville’s protagonist, finds an engrossing pamphlet on the compromise between idealistic vision and earthly ambition that promises to unlock the mystery of his life only to discover that its conclusion is torn off. Redburn, meanwhile, is thrown into Liverpool after a transatlantic voyage with his father’s antiquated guidebook, which promises him the England of his dreams. Instead, he confronts a glaring gap between book and reality, concluding that “guidebooks are the least reliable in all literature…old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old, but how few of those former places can their posterity trace amid avenues of modern erections.”39 He had naïvely assumed the book would navigate him through the crookedest streets, enabling him “to march through them in the darkest night, and even run for the most distant dock on a pressing emergency.” Like the life buoy on the Pequod in Moby-Dick that sinks like a stone when thrown to one drowning mate, Redburn’s guidebook fails to serve its function and instead is a “miserable cicerone to the modern.”40 Tellingly, the book bears a copyright of 1802, the same year data were compiled and remaining unchanged in the later 1817 edition of the Practical Navigator.
Judging from the massive success of his four voyages on the Winslow and Charles Carroll, Chase appears to have been armed with an abundance of accurate information regarding the location of whales. After sailing with the Florida just eighteen months on the heels of the Essex voyage, Chase took the helm of the Winslow in August 1825 for his first command. The voyage garnered 1,440 barrels of oil, a rich reward for having reached the prized Japanese cruising grounds. By 1832 Chase had established his reputation as one of the most successful captains in the industry. Reflecting this stature, the Charles Carroll was built specifically for him by David Joy, the second cousin of Matthew Joy, one of the first Essex crewman to die of starvation. With Joy’s blessing, and a freshly minted vessel boasting a 376-ton hold, Chase would return with an astonishing 2,610 barrels of oil. Not only would this be the largest single profit-earning voyage of his career, but Chase would also revisit the same waters that had claimed the Essex, and even land on Tahiti and the other islands he had convinced Pollard to avoid in 1820. The journey also brought him into contact with the world’s most celebrated captain of the era, Charles Wilkes, who was then leading the United States Exploring Expedition. It would appear that Chase had lived down his previous catastrophic decisions by redoubling his efforts to master the sea—geographically, financially, and politically.
TOWARD NEAREST LAND
But the man who wrote the Narrative in 1820 was hardly so secure and accomplished. His language everywhere strains to defend his courage and deflect accusations of cowardice. In describing his “profession” as “one of great ambition and full of honorable excitement,” he effectively casts himself as a representative and ambassador of this noble occupation. The more he defines the trade, the more he rhetorically defends his honor, since by nature “the coward is marked with that peculiar aversion” among whalers.41 Melville would qualify this formulation through the fictional first mate of the Pequod: “‘I will have no man in my boat,’ said Starbuck, ‘who is not afraid of a whale.’ By this, he seems to mean not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from a fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.”42 Whereas Chase aligns whaling with the type of bravery that “distinguishes our public naval service,” Melville here finds virtue in caution. Ironically, Chase would never advocate caution as a virtue in the early going of his Narrative.
In his description of the wreck’s aftermath, Chase deliberately obscures his lead role in swaying Pollard from sailing to the relatively nearby Marquesas. One would never suspect he had so strenuously recruited the crew’s support in this campaign, since he notes that his first suggestion to Pollard was that “no time should be lost in making the best of our way towards the nearest land.” He makes it appear as though he never really resisted at all. Chase craftily evades the actual unfolding of the decision, as reported by historian Nathaniel Philbrick: “After the whale attack, Captain Pollard suggested that they sail for the Society Islands. Instead of sticking with his initial decision (which would have probably resulted in the deliverance of the entire crew),” Philbrick notes further, “Pollard yielded to the objections of Chase and second mate Matthew Joy, who advocated sailing for South America.”43 Far worse than Pollard’s yielding to this pressure was the fact that he had faced resistance to his sensible decision to begin with. Chase hides his own major role in the deliberations by characterizing the decision-making body as “a council” consisting of “twenty men.” The plural pronoun we is operative here; once out on the open boats, Chase reverts to the first-person voice in order to reestablish his heroism in the ordeal. Yet if indeed Chase had first proposed to sail to the nearest land, why had he not pressed for it? “We examined our navigators,” he reports, “to ascertain the nearest land, and found it was the Marquesas.” Absolutely no mention is made here of any dangers associated with the islands’ indigenous peoples, making the Marquesas the obvious ideal destination, even according to the logic of Chase’s account. Mention of the Society Islands, by contrast, raises the crew’s fear that “if inhabited we presumed they were by savages, from whom we had as much to fear as from the elements or even death itself,” all unalterable forces. The alarm about the Society Islands, but not the Marquesas, provides a key insight into the psychology behind the crew’s fatal decision.
Chase does not mention his principal role in pushing the slippery-slope logic according to which the Marquesas would be too dangerous by sheer proximity to the Society Islands. “These islands we were entirely ignorant of,” he confesses. Driven by ignorance and fear, the crew was also constrained by Pollard’s “opinion that this was the season of the hurricanes which prevail in the vicinity of the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii], and that consequently it would be unsafe to steer for them.”44 So with only their navigation handbook, and advice from Pollard to avoid the Sandwich Islands (but no charts), we are led to believe that the decision to sail for South America came by default, a natural and virtually inevitable resolution to the dilemma.
The testimony even spuriously casts Chase as desiring to sail for the Marquesas, based on his claim that he had first insisted on sailing for the “nearest land.” In fact Chase depicts himself speaking on his own behalf only once in this scene—to make this suggestion, which in retrospect would have saved all their lives. The only sense of his complicity with the decision to sail for South America surfaces in his rhetorical appeal for sympathy regarding the crew’s ignorance of the Society Islands, which fueled their fear of savages. As we saw, he casts the native threat as being as insurmountable as “the elements and even death itself.” But in all this he is hardly confessing so much as appearing to sympathize with the error. His claim, further, is that the crew was ignorant of and fearful specifically of the Society Islands rather than the Marquesas, which suggests that the latter were a plausible destination. One can imagine the crew’s wild and persistent screams of desperation led by Chase, who irrationally vetoed going for the thoroughly civilized Marquesas, just two days away with favorable winds. Pollard, as noted earlier, knew his refusal might very well have triggered a mutiny.
Once the remaining crew took to their boats and set sail for South America, a killer whale struck Pollard’s boat, making “a considerable breach in the bows…through which the water had begun to pour fast.” Pollard could not afford to underreact, given the recent loss of the main ship, and thus he “immediately took measures to remove his provisions into the second mate’s boat and mine, in order to lighten his own.” Such action may have appeared totally appropriate, yet Chase nonetheless condemns it by alleging Pollard was “imagining matters to be considerably worse than they were.”45 Such a characterization, however, would have better applied to Chase himself during the decision-making tussle. Pollard here was not overreacting so much as wisely protecting provisions from an alarming gush of water into the boat’s hull.
Chase not only unfairly faults Pollard for excessive alarm—he also blames the crew’s slow progress on the wait for his open boats. He complains of having to “heave to immediately and set a light, by which the missing boat might be directed to us.” These lagging boats indeed wasted precious time. But Chase also insinuates that if his boat were sailing alone, his superior navigational skills would have brought the crew to shore in time to avert starvation. The Narrative makes an argument for Chase’s fitness for future command even beyond this show of superior nautical skill. The crew, for example, was in possession of two large turtles, and Chase gives himself outsize credit for proposing to kill one for sustenance. “I need to say that the proposition was hailed with the utmost enthusiasm,” writes Chase, the apparent benevolent provider and caretaker of his men. He imagines himself the host of this, “I may say[,] exquisite banquet.”46 Later in the journey, after landing on Henderson Island, Chase presents a moment of near perfect harmony between his private will and that of the crew. “I made a silent determination in my own mind,” he recalls, “to remain [on the island] at least four or five days,” regardless of any dissenting views. But, according to Chase, “I found no difference in the views of any of us as to this matter,” a finding that may have pointed to his skills of persuasion, already displayed in his earlier argument to head toward South America.47
The issue of dissenting views and misconduct among the men loomed large as the weeks wore on aboard their open boats. The situation had all the ingredients of mutiny—starving men vying for a dwindling supply of food presented a powder keg that threatened to burst into a wild raid on the provisions and overthrow of Chase. In the Narrative, Chase builds this tension toward such a scene, which erupts when he apprehends a black sailor in the process of filching bread. In his account Chase heroically springs to action and forces a trembling gunpoint confession out of the thief. Although the sailor’s crime “loudly called for a prompt and signal punishment,” Chase credits himself for exercising restraint, assuming the role of caring patriarch driven by sympathy, for “every humane feeling of nature plead in his behalf.”48 In Nickerson’s account Chase is hardly the brave, gun-wielding disciplinarian stopping a black scoundrel, according to the first mate’s racist portrayal of the sailor. We discover, in Nickerson, that the sailor is but a harmless “good old man,” more pathetic than sinister.49 Was Chase’s the “fresh eyewitness account” and objective, authoritative text of the Essex disaster? Thomas Heffernan defends it as such, claiming that “the story of the Essex is Chase’s story,” one not only boasting reportorial accuracy, but—as noted before—merit worthy of canonization for its “sensitive, timeless, imaginative, and literary” attributes.50 Heffernan is far too reverent, and even worshipful, of Chase, seemingly because of the Narrative’s status as the Moby-Dick original.
Heffernan argues that “the biggest single ‘if only’ of the whole Essex story” was the group’s failure to head west from Henderson Island for about a hundred miles to Pitcairn Island. Relatedly, one 1847 captain’s log laments, “What a pity that they did not know of Pitcairn Island for they might [have] been to it in a few days or even one day with a good breeze.”51 Upon their rescue the survivors on Henderson, as Heffernan notes, were taken directly to Pitcairn in only a day, appearing to confirm the speculation that this was the crew’s best chance for survival. Nevertheless, similar fortune likely would have been found in the Marquesas or Tahiti, where there were plenty of provisions and connections to homeward-bound vessels, as Melville had pointed out in his notes.
In truth, the biggest “if only” had already occurred upon the crew’s eastward departure from the wreckage site. There had been the known coast of South America, providing some psychological ease, versus the unknowns of the westward islands. In this regard, the blow from the vessel’s loss must have had the crew scrambling for any possible sense of certainty and protection. If they could not exactly retrace their steps to the South American mainland, then they could attempt a shortcut toward a port such as Valparaiso, Saint Mary’s, or Decamas—or die trying. Decamas, on the coast of Peru, was the last mainland port the crew had visited prior to the sinking of the Essex, and thus a place they associated with replenishing stocks of food, wood, and water.52 This stop had impressed them, particularly Chase, as one of comfort and utility, a very portal to civilization apart from hostile natives and attacking whales.
But necessity ultimately forced the crew to land on an unknown island after all, at precisely the wrong time. Easter Island, alas, might have been exactly the threatening environment the sailors had envisioned in the Marquesas or Tahiti. A few years later, in 1825, records show natives looting the Surry after receiving gifts from Captain F. W. Beechey. When Beechey ordered the natives to retreat at once, they responded by bloodying the crew with heavy stones, drawing warning gunfire that became deadly when one chief failed to outrun the bullets. Previously, it is worth noting, voyages headed by Jean-François La Pérouse (1786) and Thomas Raine (1821) went ashore on Easter Island without experiencing any such turmoil.
In the 1820s shipping out of Nantucket, as Nickerson recalls, took “three weeks [of] labor…in getting the ship rigged and over the bar, there to await her loading and that too to be accomplished by the assistance of lighters.”53 New Bedford, by contrast, was a deepwater port, both navigable and safe, which thus gradually became the industry’s preferred point of origin. Seasoned crew and officers like Chase were at a premium in this new commercial hub; no stigma attached itself to Chase in this cosmopolitan whaling center, which was decidedly rougher, more diverse, and bent on profit than close-knit Nantucket, an island that carefully guarded its prestigious status as the cradle of the whaling industry. Indeed, New Bedford was where Chase would begin his quest to make up for the harpoon he had failed to throw at Old Tom (a failure discussed in later chapters). Indeed, had that notorious whale been killed, the Essex crew likely would have survived. For the next two decades Chase would effectively loose his anguish on all the whales of the oceans, killing as many of them as any ship captain alive at the time. Clearing his name of any liability in the Essex disaster was the crucial first step toward beginning his illustrious career, and his Narrative was designed to serve that purpose. Some saw through him, and understood the full weight of his actions. Decades later, Nickerson, then the owner of a Nantucket tavern and boardinghouse, would seek profit and honor by telling his version of events.