A WHALE’S MOTIVES
In the Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), a text Melville consulted closely in writing Moby-Dick, the surgeon and natural historian Thomas Beale affirmed what the expanding whaling industry, with its escalating human casualties from confrontations with the species, had been loath to admit. The sperm whale, he concluded, is “remarkably timid, and is readily alarmed by the approach of a whale boat.” Thus “it is difficult to conceive any object in nature calculated to cause alarm to this leviathan.”1 Such sources of alarm do include swordfish, which commonly attack sperm whales. The whale responds not hostilely but by vigorously pumping its dorsal fin to attain top speed, often darting upward to breach into the open air.2 Although not predators, swordfish can nonetheless injure whales, and such breaching helps explain the whale’s response to the whalemen discussed earlier. On the rare occasions when killer whales hunt sperm whales, the latter typically cluster in a herd, responding socially in concert rather than individually with violent retaliation.3 An approaching whaleboat, likewise, was less likely to provoke an attack than to elicit clustering and eventual flight from potential confrontation. Although the sperm whale’s head appears built for combat—its spermaceti case is located at the very fore of its brow, providing for ideal head protection in high-impact collisions, not unlike a boxing glove designed to maximize the blow delivered, while minimizing damage to the fighter’s fist—the animal’s nature is distinctly peaceful, as seen in its response to conflict by diving deeper and outracing its predators.
Whaling historian Eric Jay Dolin explains that the sperm whale’s forehead, and spermaceti case, is a vestige from its prehistoric ancestors, whose males commonly rammed each other in competition for females.4 Needless to say, such ramming no longer takes place. The spermaceti case, meanwhile, also helps the whale dive to astonishing depths, a feat that awed Melville, where it hunts for food, mainly octopus on the ocean floor. Given its ability to displace water pressure at extreme depths for up to several hours, the waxy, gelatinous case serves the primary function of protecting the whale’s brain from the debilitating condition known as the bends.5 Female whales have the same anatomical feature, suggesting its subordinate rather than primary use prehistorically as a weapon for male competition. This situation may be contrasted with that of most ram species, which have horns for engaging in the head-butting mating ritual, whereas ewes lack them. The sperm whale’s brow is further used for fleeing the rare assault from a killer whale.
The evolutionary biologist Adam Summers, along with other natural historians, has nonetheless extended into the realm of science a fringe perspective that vilifies the whale, consonant with Owen Chase’s 1821 Narrative of the Essex shipwreck. Despite evidence to the contrary, Summers extrapolates from the spermaceti case an essentially belligerent nature for the whale, with the forehead its preferred weapon. Summers argues that the storied sinking of antebellum whaleships—the most visible of which were the Essex and the Ann Alexander, in 1851—occurred because the bulky hovering vessels were easy targets for the aggressive creature. He paints the whale as a pugilist, and whaleships as “punch drunk opponents just begging to be blind-sided—dream targets for an angry sperm whale.”6
Melville himself seems to refute such a claim in Moby-Dick. In “The Battering-Ram” chapter Ishmael regards the “dead blind wall” of the brow less as an offensive weapon than a shield against threats in nature as well as “the severest pointed harpoon,” which when stuck with “the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm impotently rebounds from it.”7 And even as the whale might be provoked to use its “battering ram” for defense, it is more likely to use its teeth, yet again only in self-defense, as Melville himself knew well and thus depicted in the Samuel Enderby chapter of Moby-Dick (chapter 100). Using its teeth—a last line of defense after herding and flight, and as seen “in biting that line”—Moby Dick shreds Boomer’s arm from shoulder to wrist and dispatches Ahab in the novel’s final debacle.8 Even then, Ahab’s drowning upon being jerked underwater points more to his own careless mismanagement of the line, combined with ill timing, than it does to a willful tactic deployed by the whale. Melville immortalizes the whale’s use of its teeth in describing how, “suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.” Here the whale has simply responded with justifiable aggression to Ahab, who, seizing “his line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.”9
Notwithstanding such encounters, in only a tiny fraction of collisions did whales successfully sink ships using their heads as battering rams. More often the ships emerged unharmed from such crashes, whereas the whales were left lacerated, mangled, and dismembered. If “flight is the usual reaction of sperm whales to danger,” then why would so many assume them truculent by nature?10 Even Ishmael—who, under the influence of Ahab’s quarterdeck speech, argues for Moby Dick’s status as a “murderous monster” with an “uncommon magnitude and malignity”—cannot ignore the species’ blissfully serene and peaceful nature, as poetically recorded in the herding and socialization passage in “The Grand Armada.” Even as Ishmael admits to hating the whale, at least temporarily, given that his “shouts had gone up with the rest” in the crew’s ritual vow to destroy Moby Dick, the whale’s hunters are still typically acknowledged as the cause of the beast’s most fearsome behavior.11 In an example of the whale being cast as acting defensively, he, “after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them [emphasis mine].” Ishmael takes this to represent “the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large,” which had been “marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning and malice in the monster attacked [emphasis mine].”12 Despite the portrayal of the whale’s villainy, Melville’s prose carefully casts its viciousness only in conjunction with its assailants; attack thus heightens the power of its wild reactions. “More than all,” Ishmael notes, “his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else.” In Ishmael’s perhaps most explicit acknowledgment that the murderous whale is not lying in wait for whalers, he muses that the “unconscious power” of the whale’s “very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults.”13 Such emphasis on alarm, panic, and flight, therefore, rather than predilection for conflict, begins to paint the whale not only as a victim but as a master of transoceanic migration for survival—on this, Ishmael speculates that whales will elude their captors by gravitating to the distant and icy poles. Such hues become more pronounced in later chapters, such as the meditation on extinction in chapter 105, “Does the Whale Diminish?”
Given the rapid increase in whale hunting throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, it stands to reason that instances of whale retaliation were also sharply on the rise. In most accounts the whale typically plays the role of savage brute, if only because brutes with lances and harpoons had savagely attacked it in the first place. Given the industry’s desire to maintain its aggressive capitalist pursuit, its practitioners were predisposed to vilify the creature rather than appreciate its poised tranquility. Chase’s Narrative follows this tendency not only to glorify the courage demanded of the profession but also, as noted, to release himself from responsibility for the sinking of the Essex. Laying blame on an enraged whale, wholly unaccountable and impossible to interrogate, is a convenient slip, a crafty exit from the spotlight regarding his own mismanagement of the crisis. Thus we turn to the precise circumstances that led to the sperm whale’s fatal collision with the Essex.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
The history of whaleships’ encounters with cetaceans is strewn with fatalities both human and animal, and these fatalities rose only with the industry’s pre–Civil War boom. Along with the uptick in human fatalities, unsurprisingly, the creature’s reputation worsened. The whale had anyway been cast as the natural enemy of righteous seafarers seeking profits through whale oil. Chase likewise routinely aligns his work with God’s will, thus casting the whale as the embodiment of satanic evil. In the context of literary Romanticism, similar scenes of dramatic moral conflict would play out in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (her work, along with that of other Romantics, was heavily influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost14). Likewise, the contemporary Hudson River School of landscape painters commonly evoked moral conflict in scenes of apocalyptic clashes between sunlit Edenic verdure and gloomy rock formations and ominous rolling clouds. Chase was thus working within a Romantic context flush with hyperbolic moral allegory, wherein natural figures such as the whale would be recognizable through biblical, literary, and mythical representation. This was decades before an indifferent natural world would emerge from the pen of naturalists such as Stephen Crane (1871–1900), especially in “The Open Boat.”
In reality, however, those human deaths were often the consequence of whales’ simply fleeing for their lives. For Chase and others who have experienced a trauma, though, psychologists and legal experts alike describe a reflexive need to impute intentionality by various agents involved. According to a recent scholarly work on the subject, “the concept of intentionality brings order to the perception of behavior in that it allows the perceiver to detect structure—intentions and actions—in humans’ complex stream of movement.” Introducing an animal’s stream of movement only complicates matters. Imputing intentionality, furthermore, “supports coordinated social interaction by helping people”—especially captains of sunken whaleships like Chase—“explain their own and others’ behavior,” such as that of nonhuman participants, “in terms of…underlying mental causes.” Most important, “intentionality plays a normative role in the social evaluation of behavior,” especially in the case of deviant behavior that inflicts harm “through its impact on assessments of responsibility and blame.”15 This was precisely the psychosocial mechanism, coupled with moralistic dualities central to prewar Romanticism, through which the whale was vilified and the whaleman valorized in the early nineteenth century.
As whaling extended past the Civil War years, a different picture began to emerge, with natural historians no longer able to ignore that “a great number of cases are on record in which vessels have been in collision with whales, usually to the greater damage of the latter.” By then anecdotes of malicious whales bursting hulls were vastly outnumbered by instances of ships blasting into the creatures. The resultant carnage occurred, on one occasion, “when two days out from New York, bound for the West Indies, a whale was struck with such terrific force as to cut the animal into two parts.” Sadly “the captain had altered his course to avoid the collision,” precisely as Chase might have done when he spotted the whale approaching the Essex, “but was too late.”16 In the case of the Essex, the ship had crossed the path of what was likely a fleeing whale from the group of four that Pollard had been pursuing. The whaleship was not traveling at nearly the speed necessary to kill the creature outright, yet the greater velocity and sturdier bow of a postwar ship may have dealt it a fatal blow.
Today we understand whale collisions as an active crisis for marine conservation. As of April 2012, collisions with whales had reached such troubling levels that a new iOS app, Whale Alert, was introduced to help North Atlantic mariners avoid striking endangered right whales. The product comes as a response to the sharp rise in unreported accidents, adding to the confirmed incidents. New data on the northern right whale show that “mortality and serious injury due to commercial fishing and shipping [collisions] are significant factors limiting their recovery,” thus explaining why their population mysteriously stagnated around a mere three hundred for decades. The findings show that “ship strikes are more immediately lethal” than entanglement and account for precisely 44.6 percent of all documented deaths from 1970 to 1999.17 These are the oceanic equivalent of roadkill, animals dying in droves not owing to hunting but to high-volume transportation through their natural habitats. A similar cause was cited a century ago, when in a sampling of six different collisions with whaleships, all were all found to be due to incidental contact. “In all cases,” involving the Alexander M. Lawrence No. 4, Adelia E. Carleton, Admiral Sampson, Grecian, Wladimir Reitz, and Puma, “it seems that the collision was quite by accident.”18
Whereas a whale is much more likely to be struck and killed by a vessel than it is to attack one head-on, the creatures that do strike are usually hounded, harassed, and antagonized into doing so, such as the whale that sank the Ann Alexander. (The pugilist in that case was clearly not the whale but Captain John DeBlois, whose own truculent disposition will be discussed later.) Moreover, in 1842, during a decade when allegations of the creature’s violent nature had reached a fever pitch, two dead whales with broken jaws discovered off Plymouth, Massachusetts, were immediately assumed to have sustained their injuries while fighting. But even the cultural mood could not prevent whalemen and scientists from rejecting, upon further investigation, the initial assumption that they had “fatally injured each other” since “the usual peaceable nature of this species is rather against such a supposition.”19 They could only conclude that collisions with whaleships had caused the fatal injuries.
Crew members’ implication in a whale’s fight for survival often proved harrowing. For example, whales were not uncommonly caught on anchors, stirring panic on deck equal to that of the submerged animal, which would usually die in the process. The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror reported just such an incident in 1855 involving the schooner Valentine Doane: “So violent were the whale’s struggles to free itself that it broke the anchor, but received such injuries from its frenzy that it shortly died and was later found floating on the surface.” As a testament to the whale’s power to destroy the strongest nautical equipment—the steely root grounding any seafaring vessel—“the broken anchor was on exhibition for some while at Harwich,” the Valentine Doane’s home port.20 The concern here—as demonstrated in the celebration of imperial power through big-game hunting, a concept that gained considerable traction during the early nineteenth century—was not the suffering of the animal but “romanticized admiration for the dangers faced by whalemen, as heroic crusaders in an industry crucial to national and global prosperity,” as ecocritic Philip Armstrong explains.21 Such exalting of the human over the natural world takes on connotations not only of nationalism and geopolitical domination but also of the heroism of commercial enterprise, a point Chase emphasizes in his Narrative.
Amid innumerable instances of whales fleeing while caught in lines or tethered to anchors, one in particular reflects the appalling violation of the animal. In the 1720s, in a harbor near Cape Cod, an anchor roughly the size and shape of a whale’s phallus apparently became lodged in a female whale’s uterus. Thus tethered “by the orifice of the Uterus, and finding herself caught, [she] tore away with such violence, that she towed the ship out of the harbor as fast as if she had been under sail with a good gale of wind to the astonishment of the people on shore for there was nobody on board.” Once out on open water, the whale dived deep and the cable gave way. Whereas the sloop was recovered, “this whale was found dead some days after on shore with the anchor sticking in her belly.”22 Thus we have a figurative rape and murder of the species, made especially grotesque by the anchor’s industrial provenance. This is a long way from the anchor suggesting a warrior’s broken lance—a token of bravery demanded in facing such a formidable foe.
As such incidents illustrate, whaleships and their equipment effectively represent traps rather than targets for cetaceans. Compounding their vulnerability is sperm whales’ peculiar blind spot, given the placement of their eyes on either side of their head, which impairs their ability to avoid a ship or other foreign objects, such as lines and nets. The whale is thus sometimes a risk in being liable to inadvertently ram ships while fleeing from attacking whaleboats—and to collide with whaleboats while fleeing ships. Its blind spot extends from the snout’s midpoint straight ahead, precisely the point of contact before its giant brow; the fields of vision on each side of its head do not converge at this center point, making the animal oblivious to objects immediately ahead as it swims. A frantic whale in full flight from flying harpoons, then, is not likely to be fastidious about avoiding natural obstacles, let alone those alien to its natural habitat like a whaleship. Meanwhile, an extraordinary lateral range of vision enables the whale to scan almost the entirety of its perimeter. More precisely, the whale’s “blind sector has been estimated as extending through about 10 degrees in front.” Thus, “in order to take advantage of these blind spots, early whalemen approached either directly from the front or rear, keeping spout and hump in a single line of sight.”23 Whales have been known to swim alongside a ship or among human swimmers, sometimes even rising up out of the water. But in the process of eluding hunters, the whale would not be at its leisure to survey the territory. Accelerating just below the surface near a whaleship cruising in a high wind at full sail, the whale typically was blind to the submerged hull, often totally unaware of it until stunned by contact.
In light of this context on the whale, the Essex was unique in that it was the first whaleship on record to have sunk after colliding with a whale. This was the case even though countless tales of whales destroying chase boats had been in circulation for nearly a century. Significantly, virtually every whaling narrative after 1820 not only showed an awareness of the incident but retold the story with the sort of Romantic tropes and fervor then prevalent in literature, art, and drama. Chase had finally provided the whaling industry with a defining narrative and villain—the whale—playing on the increasingly outlandish, yet wildly popular, travel and adventure genre then driving the literary market. The evil whale, through Chase’s Narrative, thus became a product for and by commercial whaling—not Jonah’s whale, cast in the Bible as an agent of God, but a vicious force of nature unambiguously opposed to the pursuit of profit. Here, then, was the profit that could lead to national economic dominance and thus imperial geopolitical prominence. This narrative, which Chase advanced tentatively for fear he would encounter skepticism over his claims about the whale’s intentionality, ran starkly counter to any notion that the collision had actually occurred as an accident due to the whale’s natural instinct to flee. Not only Moby-Dick but scores of other popular narratives rushed into print with tales of vindictive nonhuman agents, monsters in every sense of the word, from Cornelius Mathews’s Behemoth to Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Only a handful of skeptics rebelled against the handy notion of a calculating whale as the enemy of the world’s most lucrative trade, alleging that these yarns represented the very sort of sea story satirized by Jonathan Swift. More recently Philip Armstrong has argued that Moby-Dick’s commercial failure came about because readers resisted, rather than embraced, the notion of animal agency out of a desire to defend capitalist agency and thus supremacy over the natural world.24 But readers and reviewers indeed praised the inclusion of a malevolent whale in Melville’s magnum opus. What they disapproved of was the whale’s inability to fit into a clear moral allegory, uncomplicated and told with narrative linearity. Melville instead offers multiple sources of agency—whale, lines, Ahab—in a nonlinear way that favors complex ambiguity over crisp good-evil dualism, thus forcing the reader to face constant inversions of the hunting narrative. Who is chasing whom?, Melville seems to ask at so many junctures, such as when Ahab suddenly finds himself the helpless rodent, shrieking and waterlogged, to Moby Dick’s playful and cruel aquatic feline.25
The dualism, however, is amply present in Chase’s Narrative, which relies on multiple baseless assumptions about the animal’s intentions to build its one-dimensional, sinister portrait. One key assumption is that because the whale “came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions,” he was therefore “fired with revenge for their sufferings.”26 Even if the whale had come from Pollard’s boats, the animal is unlikely to have been able to seek out and find the Essex so quickly, as if it possessed some extraordinary power (yet one essential to its mystification by Chase) to identify and then hunt down the whalemen’s mother ship. More probable is that the whale was fleeing the attack, swimming at full speed toward the whaleship, and collided with it accidentally, with the strike owing in part to the whale’s speed, in part to its blind spot. I would further suggest that the whale collided with the Essex not because it randomly crossed its path but because fleeing whales tend to swim windward (or upwind), the direct trajectory from Pollard’s boats toward the ship. This theory actually comports with Chase’s description. “He struck her to windward,” Chase reports, “directly under the cat head.”27
THE ESSEX WHALE
On November 20, 1820, three boats departed from the Essex in pursuit of whales, commanded respectively by Pollard, Chase, and second mate Matthew Joy. Chase’s boat was damaged in the fracas and returned to the Essex. “The captain and second mate were left with their boats pursuing the whales,” as Macy reports in his 1835 History of Nantucket.28 Chase had been bested in the hunt, interestingly, because of his proximity to a whale, which had thrashed about after Chase had sunk the harpoon into its flesh. Yet Chase’s own description does not ascribe malicious intent to the whale in this instance: “Presently one rose and spouted a short distance ahead of my boat; I made all speed towards it, came up with, and struck it; feeling the harpoon in him,” instinctively contorting in pain, “he threw himself, in an agony, over towards the boat (which at the time was up alongside him).” This mention of the whale’s position “alongside” the boat is crucial because it indicates the creature had not purposefully lunged a great distance but instead had incidentally whipped the boat with its tail. Chase clearly should have left more space—at least enough to allow for the animal’s dangerous frenzy—between his boat and the whale before launching the harpoon. Yet even as Chase should have anticipated the whale’s likely response and the risk to the boat, he nonetheless blamed the creature for willfully “giving a severe blow with his tail [that] struck the boat near the edge of the water, amidships, and stove a hole in her.”29
The next event proves further that this whale was in full flight mode, terrified and bent on escaping the area. With his boat damaged, Chase cut the line “to disengage the boat from the whale, which by this time was running off with great velocity.” Chase himself had recognized the grave danger a stricken whale represented and thus “succeeded in getting clear of him” to evade the animal’s path to escape. This whale is not Ahab’s “calculating, deliberative, rational and malign agent”; nor is it, as Robert Zoellner claims, operating randomly, without direction, focus, or purpose.30 Yes, the whale is acting in alarm, but it is certainly doing so with more intent, specifically to escape, than Zoellner’s depiction of a nonconscious creature that “does not choose…does not decide…does not follow any apparent plan of action.”31 In its way, the panicked creature is aware of executing a series of deft maneuvers to achieve liberation from its captors. Chase, while acknowledging the whale’s behavior as a direct response to pain, still feels outdone by a beast he thought he had captured. For any fisherman, cutting the line on a significant catch is a galling admission of defeat. To emerge from that surrender with a damaged boat—for which Chase blames the creature that “struck” and “stove a hole in her”—would add insult to injury.
After he tried to patch the whaleboat’s hole, Chase mobilized the Essex as if it were a chase boat and “put the ship off toward” Pollard and the second mate, a function for which it was never designed, given its bulk, lack of maneuverability, and limited peripheral visibility. Unlike light craft designed for pursuit, ships were more effective in spotting whales at a great distance from masthead lookouts and for processing and storing whale oil, making them something like floating factories. Thus moving a ship toward whales under attack would have been dangerous and speaks to Chase’s haste in this situation. When Chase returned to the ship to find the whale—presumably the one he had harpooned—ramming it, he chose not to rejoin the hunt by boarding the other boat attached to the ship but instead to frantically patch his damaged boat with canvas at the same time that he pursued the whale. The more prudent course would have been to keep the ship moored, rather than sailing into harm’s way, and eventually launch a new boat. Additionally Chase would have been better served by leaving the patching job for the long, monotonous periods attendant on such voyages. But his wounded pride and bruised ego seem to have fixed him on vengeance directed at the whale, whether achieved from the ship’s deck or from his leaky canvas-patched boat.
While Chase was fumbling with the canvas patch, one of the fleeing whales had swum upwind toward the ship, in exactly the opposite direction from the one in which the whaleboats had just been rowed, downwind, toward the shoal in search of whales. The animal now appeared to Chase some “twenty rods off our weather-bow…with his head in a direction for the ship.” The whale was clearly moving in a way that suggested flight, whatever its trajectory, characterized by equal parts speed and endurance, rather than racing to deliver a blow. Then “in less than two or three seconds he came up again, about the length of the ship off.” Only as the whale closed in did Chase register alarm and thus claim that the creature approached with “great celerity.” This was perhaps only because a whale in the distance appears to be moving much more slowly than one “but a ship’s length off.”
Chase’s whale was likely following the tendency according to which “sperm whales, when running, flee to windward.” The whale’s instinct to swim windward is so strong, as frequently noted by natural scientists, “that the whales, if the air is calm, usually turn to the direction from which the wind blew last, and never deviate by a compass point from their flight in this direction.”32 This whale’s flight from the shoal, then, which was also against the current, would have been the strong-swimming creature’s seemingly best tactic to lose its pursuers. It was with head turned windward, tail pumping, and momentum blistering that the whale had the misfortune to run directly into the Essex’s hull.
Louie Psihoyos, a filmmaker and National Geographic photographer who recently earned an Academy Award for the documentary The Cove, about the destruction of the world’s dolphin population, explains that a whale which had been attacked out of sight of the mother ship would not likely seek out the ship and assault it.33 This corroborates my claim that the whale was not attacking, so much as fleeing according to its natural pattern of windward escape when, hindered by its blind spot, it struck the vessel. Only after this impact did the stunned whale turn back on the boat with its teeth and, in attempting to bite the hull, inadvertently ram its long, well-padded snout through it. So startling and unexpected was the first contact that the whale probably returned for a second blow as an act of self-defense against the boat, which it perceived to be a predator. Recent dramatic renderings of the incident, such as in Jay Parini’s Passages of H. M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (2010), do not measure up to what whale behaviorists and natural scientists describe. Parini’s fiction draws out precisely the vilification of the whale established in Chase’s Narrative, enhancing the animal’s savagery and the whalemen’s victimization, while muting Chase’s qualifications. Note the strategic use of the passive verb amid this melodramatic portrayal. The Essex “had been hit broadside by a ferocious, self-destructive, monomaniacal whale,” he writes, while failing to mention, as do other accounts, that the whale died in the process. Thus superimposing Ahab’s kamikaze vengeance on the whale, he renders an animal delirious in its rage, delivering a crazed beating, hungry for death and destruction. A whale, however, is not a shark, which Parini’s beast curiously begins to resemble here: “It punctured a deep, fatal hole in the ship’s hull. Bizarrely, the whale refused to desist, attacking again and again.” Now “the frantic crew” all become victims—including Chase himself, who had just returned to patch his whaleboat—with none of them bearing any causal connection to the whale’s behavior. This ruined crew, purportedly holding no responsibility for the whale’s attack, is reduced to “murder and cannibalism” for survival.34 Even though this description comes in undisguised novel form, it is nonetheless striking for being both the most recent retelling of the Essex story and the most widely circulated novel on the subject explicitly intended for a wide audience.
Parini’s portrait indicates that the malevolent Essex whale is alive and well in today’s culture and producing a steady stream of profit. Witness, for example, the low-budget film Moby-Dick 2010, which reimagines the whale as a satanic, three-hundred-foot sea monster that gleefully swallows entire whale-watching ships, gorging without discrimination on peaceful “save the whales” ecotourists as well as his hunters. Yet the conservation movement has gained traction, one not to be confused with today’s passive, dilettantish, and sentimental whale watchers.
Psihoyos, who collected visual evidence of dolphin massacres to marshal support for their protection, deploys a no-holds-barred activism in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson and warrants more attention here. In Racing Extinction, which debuted in January 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival, Psihoyos addresses the situation of the North American right whale, following in the bold footsteps of Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale (2012). Burnett describes how “a history of whale science can shed considerable light on the changing understanding of nature in the 20th century.” Essential to that history is Burnett’s chapter “The Prince of Whales,” on A. Remington Kellogg, who lobbied to alter the public’s view of the whale as a malicious creature. Along with creating the Council for the Conservation of Whales, now the International Whaling Commission, Kellogg published an influential article in the January 1940 issue of National Geographic on whales and their intelligence, battling editors who instead wanted him to emphasize their viciousness and even suggested he title the piece “Whales: Lions of the Sea.” He stood his ground. “Left and right he fought off editors’ desires to sensationalize cetacean ‘monstrosity’ and at one point wrote to a colleague, ‘The publisher has the idea that all the pictures should be exciting, such as a whale running its head through a steamer,’ ” a not unfamiliar image for Essex aficionados, “‘and then winking its eye at the astonished crew,’ ” malice aforethought intact, as in Chase’s Narrative. As for depicting whales as lions, Kellogg retorted, “‘Whales are very distantly, if at all, related to the cat tribe…. Except when mortally wounded, they are inoffensive and noted for their timidity.’ ”35 Chase’s rendition of the event, according to Kellogg’s paradigm-shifting understanding of whale behavior, is a product not only of his desire to preserve his own reputation as a whaleman and future as a captain but also of nineteenth-century public perceptions of whales as the vicious beasts so often portrayed in the popular press. Inherently timid animals, of course, do not make formidable foes in romantic hunting narratives, whether at sea or on land. Kellogg’s science thus undermined the basis of the romantic sea narrative by robbing it of its villain, and perhaps its most charismatic character—a situation well understood by Melville, who dedicates so much of Moby-Dick to detailing the legend, lore, and manner of the white whale.
The image of Moby Dick as ubiquitous, brooding, battle-scarred, and above all solitary is a romantic conceit designed to serve as Ahab’s foil. Likewise similar portraits of the Essex whale grossly misrepresent this inherently social animal. According to Chase, the whale came from a shoal where the sailors had just “struck three of his companions.”36 The image of the whale as exhibiting sharklike behavior, stalking the seas alone, waiting to wreak havoc on humans, is the most crucial ingredient of this foundational nineteenth-century fish story. It is not surprising that the beast’s malice aforethought amounts to greater liability, increases the stakes of the crime committed, and thus makes the whale an unpardonable sinner. If the whale were a criminal in court, it would be charged not with involuntary manslaughter but indeed with premeditated murder, a felony according to both earthly and higher law.
Chase himself knew his attempts to prove malicious intent by the whale went against the grain of two basic understandings already well established by 1820: “The mode of fighting which they always adopt is either with repeated strokes of their tales, or snapping of their jaws together; and that a case, precisely similar to this one, has never been heard of amongst the oldest and most experienced whalers.” Only after Chase’s inaugural account of such an attack was published, and here he acknowledges his is the first, did tales of whales similarly ramming ships proliferate. Not only does Chase admit the whale had never before been known to attack by deliberately colliding with a whaleship, but instead was understood to retaliate with its jaws and tail—he also confesses that it could only be by “destiny of design” that “a sudden and most deadly attack had been made upon us, by an animal too, never before suspected of premeditated violence, and proverbial for its insensibility and inoffensiveness.” He concludes, “Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations.” He pins agency on the whale, deeming it driven by resentment, fury, and calculating mischief, despite it being a “hitherto unheard of circumstance, and constitutes, perhaps, the most extraordinary one in the annals of fishery” for a whale to execute such a plotted attack.37
The plot, according to Chase, was conceived out of revenge for the assault on the whale’s “three companions.” But for a whale to seek out a ship that far away—far enough out of sight and earshot that Pollard and his mates were unaware the Essex had been fatally damaged—and for the whale to have presumably identified the mother ship is, as the Psihoyos discussion shows, utterly implausible. As mentioned before, after the first blow, the stunned whale likely shifted into fighting mode, sought to engage its jaws, and in the process punctured the ship’s bottom just below the bow. The two blows, therefore, constitute an accidental collision followed by a defensive retaliation, the latter a reflexive instinctual response. A fleeing animal under attack should not be confused with one hunting down its attackers’ base of operations and destroying it, however stirring and irresistible the latter scenario appears.
Chase’s occasional critics included Francis Allen Olmsted, who in his 1840 retelling of the Essex ordeal appended an excerpt from a highly skeptical commentator that appeared in the North American Review. “No other instance is known,” this virtual imitation of a fiction writer’s release of liability notes, “in which the mischief is supposed to have been malignantly designed by the assailant, and the most experienced whalers believe that even in this case, the attack was not intentional.” The comment then raises the obstinate character of “Mr. Chase,” who “could not be persuaded to think so.” As an eyewitness, according to this commentator, Chase cannot be trusted: “He says all he saw, produced on his mind the impression of decided and calculating mischief on the part of the maddened leviathan.”38 In an 1851 issue of the Whalemen’s Shipping List, a similar, scathingly sarcastic view was aired. Although “the case of the Essex” showcases the “great power of the whale,” the author points out that Chase had lied. “Cases, it is true, of the destruction of ships by the attack of whales have not been of frequent occurrence,” he concludes. That the Essex, like the Ann Alexander, on which his piece was focused, has “been sent to the bottom of the sea by the attack of a whale is just as sure as anything can be in this world,” he quips, “and we pray that we may never be called upon to chronicle the similar destruction of a canal boat by the ferocious attack of a horse.” This skeptic’s comments coalesce nicely with Melville’s spectrum between “Monstrous Pictures of Whales” and “Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales,” as chapters 55 and 56 of Moby-Dick are known. Ishmael observes, “There are some indigestible facts that lead us to think that the writer has taken in more than his whale could.”39
If the attacking whale is as plausible as a predatory horse, then the question of the whale’s second strike at the Essex nonetheless bears further consideration, given its peculiar circumstances. The second strike, it must be accepted, was no accident but, as Thomas Heffernan points out, was “the whale’s trying to bite the ship.”40 Dr. David Ramsay’s log of the Surry, the ship that rescued the stranded Essex sailors on Ducie Island, describes how after the initial collision, the whale “lay along side the ship and tried to bite some part of it, but could get no hold, she then took a sweep round…and came dead on to the ship which was going about 6 knots…drove her head into the bow and then left the ship.”41 However hostile the whale may have been on this second strike, it was only, as we have seen, responding to the first accidental collision. Hal Whitehead supports the theory of the whale’s self-defensive instinct in his correspondence with Nathaniel Philbrick, which dispels Henry Carlisle’s fictional portrayal, whereby the sound of Chase’s hammering attracted the whale. He reasons that since the animal hears sounds primarily through the water, the chaos of Pollard’s attack would have created a cacophony of aquatic vibration overwhelming any hint of Chase’s boat repair. Further, even if the whale had detected the distant muffled sounds of his patching work, the creature is highly unlikely to have sought out and attacked the source of those noises, instead associating them with danger and fleeing. Carlisle’s whale, in this sense, is simply an elaboration, bearing signs of 1980s-era scientific discoveries in echolocation, of Chase’s vindictive beast. Whitehead also discredits the idea that the bull whale would be protecting the females under attack, a scenario reprising normative human gender roles played out in the melodramatic key of the chivalrous defense of damsels in distress. Instead, contact between the sexes within the species is “brief and impermanent.” He concludes that the whale struck the Essex accidentally and that “this contact greatly disturbed the animal, resulting in the second event, which does read like an ‘attack.’ ”42
The first strike, however, is the one that has almost uniformly gone down in history as a predatory attack. Intentionality is taken for granted in comments such as, “The bull sperm whale that made the unprovoked attack upon the Essex also rammed with its head.”43 Henry T. Cheever’s Whale and His Captors (1850) sensationalizes the second strike, noting that the whale “started with great speed directly across the vessel’s course to the windward.” The windward direction, as we saw, is the whale’s instinctive direction of flight, opening up the alternative interpretation that the second collision was also accidental. Interestingly, Cheever’s account is not so strident as others in attributing malicious intent to the animal, referring to it as the “seemingly malicious whale [emphasis mine].”44 The hundred-plus years between Cheever’s account and those of Parini and Carlisle generally tend to play down these matters of instinct to darken the whale’s intent in our time. Carlisle is right about Pollard, but not about whale science, an area that also evades Eric Jay Dolin’s otherwise powerful history.45 Dolin’s recent comprehensive history of whaling indulges in pure fabrication to enhance his narrative effect. To preface his embellished rendition of the Essex tale, he provides what is a fully accurate illustration of the 1807 Union disaster, reversing the usual scenario in which the animal strikes the ship: “It was cruising at a good clip off Patagonia when it plowed into a large sperm whale, a collision that left a gaping hole in the hull. Capt. Edward Gardner, realizing that the pumps were no match for the torrent of sea water rushing into the hold, called for the men to abandon ship.” To their good fortune, or “Divine Providence to bear us and protect us from harm,” the crew of sixteen was well enough supplied with provisions and navigational instruments to survive eight days at sea covering a total of six hundred miles until landing on Flores Island, where they were finally rescued. But then Dolin proceeds to use the whale that sank the Essex to overstate the opposite case, going so far as to suggest that the whale not only rammed the port side of the bow intentionally but drove the ship backward by propelling itself through the water. Interestingly, Chase tells of the second strike with relative understatement, with no mention of a ship-stopping blast followed by a tail-pumping boot of the massive vessel previously carrying three knots, presumably with the whale’s head buried in the hull, the cetacean equivalent of a torpedo.46 Of the whale’s behavior during the second collision, Chase merely writes, “We took the second shock,” and then watched as the whale “went off to leeward, and we saw no more of him.”47
All these liberties taken with the incident speak to how fertile the original details were for sensationalization. The more human the whale can seem—especially imbued with raging emotion harnessed into a tactical scheme—the more dramatic the spectacle of its attack. The details related to the whale attack are pivotal beyond the intrigue they generate, with the details certainly capturing Melville’s imagination, given his personal experience with various whale assaults. Though none of the whale attacks in Moby-Dick perforate ship hulls in the manner of the Essex, they achieve a much more diverse repertoire of moves than Chase’s whale. Melville turns the creature into something of a martial artist with pinpoint precision: the whale smites Macey from a boatload of men “bodily into the air,” sending him falling “into the sea at a distance of about fifty yards” in the Jeroboam’s story; punts a chase boat skyward, cartwheeling end over end like a football; deftly uses its line to collar Ahab into the depths; employs its considerable jaws to snap off the arm of Captain Boomer, of the Samuel Enderby; and in perhaps its most spectacular feat, remarkable for its perfectly timed poetic justice and sheer lyrical violence, soars above the Town Ho’s rails to pluck the vile and vicious Radney from the deck just as the sadistic captain is about to unleash his wrath on the recalcitrant Steelkilt.48 Melville alternately turns the whale into a ballerina, an outsized kitten toying with the chase boats, and an agent of a righteous Calvinist God that can at other moments appear aligned with Satan, closer to Chase’s creature. Beyond mere theatrics, the whale’s feats dramatize a morality play in these works as well as in the lesser-known nineteenth-century tale of a whale destroying the Ann Alexander.
Although he was not the first to assign malice aforethought to the whale, Chase had rendered the most visible and celebrated account in nautical history of a ship being sunk by a whale. Then, on November 4, 1851, John DeBlois, captain of the Ann Alexander, characterized the whale that had destroyed his vessel on August 20 of that year in similar terms in the Whalemen’s Shipping List. Like Chase, DeBlois maligned the whale in order to conceal his professional deficiencies and ultimately deflect responsibility for the wreck. DeBlois’s key indiscretion prompting the debacle was his naïve playing into the hands of another ship’s commander, who would fleece him of a pod of whales. After a congenial gam, Captain Jared Jernegan of New Bedford had convinced DeBlois to partner with him by holding similar “tacks during the night so that we could keep together,” under the promise that they would consolidate their oil cargo in the morning. Upon awakening, DeBlois noticed Jernegan “was 12 miles off on my lee quarter” seeking the main share of whales for himself, with all hands under strict orders “not to put up sail unless they saw me coming towards him.” Thus humiliated before his crew, DeBlois furiously raced toward Jernegan. After hours of pursuit, he finally reached him at midday. “I was pretty mad over his trickery,” he admitted, “and sung out on coming within hailing distance, ‘Have you left any whales?’ ” Like Melville’s Stubb, who fools the French whalemen into giving up their precious and highly valued ambergris, Jernegan gloated in his triumph, “taking a dead whale aside.” Then pitying his dupe, he replied, “‘Oh yes, one has started west northwest.’ ”
Armed with this information and refusing to play the fool, DeBlois struck out for the animal to rescue his wounded pride. “I didn’t want anything besides the whale,” he confessed, motivating his men with the reward of an early return to port, a kind of equivalent of Ahab’s doubloon, should they raise this creature from the deep. DeBlois cried out, “Get that whale and your voyage will be five months shorter!” The men promptly responded by closing in on the creature and landing a harpoon in its back. The whale, however, shattered the boat, then doubled back and made a failed run at the other chase boat. This “fighting whale” then approached, and “turning on his side, looked at us, apparently filled with rage at having missed his prey,” the captain recalled. Undaunted, DeBlois returned to the ship to continue the chase, each time losing the whale the moment he and his crew approached it. Upon ordering the men to lower a new boat, the captain was stung by the crew’s refusal. “I don’t care a d-n! Go ahead!” he brayed. But the crew would be neither forced nor cajoled. Just then, the whale swam off, seemingly for good, diving down into the deep. Tallying his losses with resignation, DeBlois withdrew from the rail, but just then the whale “hurled himself against the bow four feet from the keel and just abreast of the foreswifter,” jolting the men, who had been lulled into believing they had lost the whale and thus taken to the perfunctory task of bracing up the mizzen and main topsails. Water rushed into the hold, the ship keeled over, and the crew dived into the remaining boats, where they bobbed about on the rolling sea for forty-eight hours until rescued.
In covering for his own indiscretions, DeBlois made certain to avert two errors commonly associated with the Essex disaster. First, he refused the crew’s request to sail south from their location in the heart of the South Pacific two to three thousand miles west of the Peruvian coast, and instead insisted that they head for the equator, where they could rely on rainwater to quench their thirst. (Chase, of course, had demanded with support from the crew that Pollard sail southeast for the west coast of South America.) His other directive was to keep the boats together on the same trajectory, and to let the faster of the two move ahead, so that if the first boat were to encounter a ship, “the rescuers [could] bear down to the other boat. In this way we were increasing our small chance of being saved.” These implicit references to the Essex become explicit two paragraphs later, when he describes how his entire crew could not help comparing their situation to “the fearful suffering of the crew of the Essex directly.”49 Chase’s Narrative indeed drove the mounting fear that, after two days without sustenance, cannibalism would be their only recourse. Not only did the Essex disaster shape DeBlois’s account of the sinking, with the captain spinning his decisions as prudent correctives to Pollard’s oversights, it menaced the hearts and minds of the crew as they awaited rescue.
The Ann Alexander would famously inspire a toast to the attacking whale from Melville, who proclaimed the ship’s fate a “Crash!” from “Moby Dick himself.” “What a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale,” he mused. “I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”50 Five years later Davis W. Clark’s retelling of the Ann Alexander wreck in a compendium titled The Most Striking Narratives on Record describes the whale “seemingly animated with the prospect of speedy revenge” as it attempts to destroy two whaleboats. The captain resolves to chase the whale with the ship, a foolhardy decision indeed, given the loss of the two boats. At dusk the whale drops with the setting sun and seemingly disappears, leading the men to believe it has fled. “Subsequent events proved, however,” in Clark’s words, “that the whale had formed a deadly resolution to destroy the ship which had given him so much annoyance.”51 Plotting, scheming, and lying in wait, this creature, like the Essex whale, thus energizes the tale with its premeditated malice, blasting a hole in the ship two inches from the keel.
By the turn of the twentieth century, a new narrative of the event by Willis Abbot placed even greater emphasis on the whale’s “mere lust for combat,” effectively transforming the whalemen into so many lambs to be “sacrificed to the whale’s rage.”52 In fact the Ann Alexander whale, like the animal that sank the Essex, was not the one with the lust for combat. DeBlois, more accurately, was that creature. According to his own admission, his “blood was up and [he] was fully determined to have that whale, cost what it might,” a token of his fury and willingness to sacrifice the crew’s safety for the catch, which would help the captain maintain his self-described prowess and reputation for “killing every whale he had ever fastened to.” As we saw, though, his impetuosity alarmed the crew members, who protested, “O captain, you ran too much risk of our lives!” But all hands, the captain feebly retorted, “were as anxious as I to catch that whale, and I hadn’t the least idea that anything like this would happen.” His self-justifying rhetoric bears the unmistakable influence of years of second-guessing and skepticism of Pollard’s command. Whereas DeBlois allows, “I was burdened with the responsibility of having these precious lives on my hands,” he disowns any wrongdoing. By appealing to the group’s collective consent, he contends that “to be blamed for what we were all eager to try”—even as his testimony clearly indicates the crew’s resistance to his commands at several key points—“was a little too much.”53
But Captain DeBlois was notoriously dogged in his pursuit of whales, exhibiting a “stubbornness, and ambition to succeed and excel.” The whale that retaliated against him had endured uncommon harassment and abuse from a tenacious assailant, who was “completely fearless of life, limb and equipment,” regarding each whale as if it were a “personal antagonist, to be killed, no matter what the cost,” a gamble for which he and his crew paid dearly with the loss of their ship.54 Fiercely competitive and inflexible, DeBlois wrote his narrative with an equally steely resolve to capture the elusive white whale of fame. His narrative is obviously in dialogue with that of the Essex, not only for its overt reference to the Ann Alexander crew suffering forty-eight hours of starvation at sea, but also for affirming, through repeated extracts of dialogue, that his men did actually believe he should be the one to advise them at key moments in the crisis. This narrative approach is bluntly self-serving. Unlike Pollard, this technique seems to say, DeBlois had the faith of his crew.
Another similarity between Chase’s Narrative and the DeBlois disaster involves the use of the whale’s teeth. Just as the Essex whale attacked the hull with its teeth after being struck by the ship, evidence of the Ann Alexander whale’s strike can be found in tooth marks in the copper near the ship’s keel, noted by the men when they returned to the capsized ship, a detail indicating that the whale had attacked with its teeth rather than its spermaceti case. A sperm whale has teeth only on its lower jaw, which itself is set back from its toothless upper jaw. Given this anatomical configuration, one can assume that the whale had lunged at the Ann Alexander’s keel, with the forehead necessarily leading the charge, since it juts out so much further than the low, recessed jaw. Thus the whale’s unusually long snout slammed into the target, perforating the copper and wood several feet before the teeth, the true assault weapon, could make their impression.
Given the aforementioned instances in which sperm whales bit through lines, shattered whaleboats, and dismembered whalemen like Captain Ahab and Captain Boomer in Moby-Dick, there is good reason to believe sperm whales used their teeth offensively as well as in self-defense. The use of the teeth rather than the brow for such purposes is, as noted, well documented by marine biologists. “The sperm whale’s usually reported method of attack on a small boat is to turn over on its back or side and approach belly up, with the jaw agape,” explains David Caldwell. Clearly “the jaw is powerful, and whaleboats have been bitten cleanly in two by sperm whales.”55 Cases of the head being used in ramming are supported by scantier, and far fishier, anecdotal evidence, most of which points toward an unsuccessful attempt by the whale at biting, due to angle and momentum toward the target (usually a ship’s hull rather than a chase boat). Nineteenth-century scientists like Thomas Beale were fully aware of the habit among seamen to create legends about whales with aliases such as Timor Jack and New Zealand Tom for their supposed outlaw behavior, transforming such animals into “the hero of many strange stories…much exaggerated accounts of real occurrences.”56
One of Melville’s favorite sources for Moby-Dick, Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling Voyage around the Globe (1840), perhaps best sums up the era’s understanding of the whale. Bennett’s explanation of the whale’s tendency to make “willful, deliberate, and even judicious attempts against human pursuers,” like in Chase’s Narrative, reviles the creature for its wickedness. Chase acknowledges that the creature was “never before suspected of premeditated violence,” but then, like Bennett, presents the Essex whale as his personal discovery, suggesting that the creature might not actually be so docile and peaceable, and pointing, like the day’s phrenologists, to the shape of the whale’s skull to explain its inherent truculence. Only in Bennett’s and Melville’s later descriptions does Chase’s new aggressive whale become understood in more sophisticated terms, incorporating its will to survive as the main driver behind the dangers it posed to whalemen. “Actuated by a feeling of revenge,” Bennett explains, crucially noting the whale’s defensive position as the cause for its wild, unpredictable rushes, “by anxiety to escape its pursuers, or goaded by desperation by the weapons rankling in its body”—and only under such mortal threat—does the animal “act with deliberate design to do mischief.”57
The impulse to impose agency “on a dumb brute…that simply smote thee from blindest instinct” and to be “enraged with a dumb thing,” as Starbuck rightly asserts to Ahab on the quarterdeck, is alarmingly perverse and “seems blasphemous” according to his Quaker ethos.58 Ahab’s urge, as with Chase and DeBlois, was as old as the sea itself—drenched in thousands of years of myth sprung from what cognitive scientists call a “hyperactive agency detection device.” Mariners have forever seen harbingers of death in nature, malevolent whales lurking beneath the ripples on the ocean, just as humans have forever attached exaggerated significance to their sensory worlds, whether in search of the divine or of the satanic. “We see faces in clouds, hear denunciations in thunder,” as the writer Barbara Ehrenreich explains, “and sense transcendent beings all around us because we evolved on a planet densely occupied by other ‘agents’—animals that could destroy us with the slash of a claw, arbitrarily and in seconds.”59
However ancient and timeless this agency detection device, the whale’s agency became both more sensationalized and more complicated as midcentury approached. New understandings of human culpability emerged, as Ahab’s scruples would come under Melville’s scrutiny. As we have seen, however, Chase’s own intentions behind his depiction of the Essex whale would remain virtually unquestioned for centuries, and his maligned creature would haunt nautical lore over the same years. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, that “fighting whale” is Chase’s own hideous offspring, born docile yet made wicked through human depravity. Born free and embodying vigor and physical beauty, like Melville’s Billy Budd, the whale would find itself ensnared in a narrative trap devised by the fallen Chases and Claggarts, bent on concocting tales of evil where only innocence seemed to lie, all for the desire—boiling to bloodlust—to protect and promote their professional careers.
Owen Chase, aided by his skillful ghostwriter, cornered the book publishing market with his Narrative, forever shaping the tenor, plot, and sequence of the Essex whale chase in the popular imagination. When word spread of the wreck some two centuries ago, periodicals—from newspapers to popular story paper weeklies to highbrow magazines to the penny press—were there to publish their versions of the story. The book publishing industry would also seize on the tale’s popularity, prominently marketing adaptations of it, along with other similar stories, in everything from natural history texts to whalemen’s accounts to boys’ adventure stories. Long after Melville reshaped the Essex tale for Moby-Dick, the weekly press, by way of the predatory Leon Lewis, pursued the elderly Thomas Nickerson’s written record of his voyage aboard the Two Brothers as well as the Essex.
The real Pollard behind these tales—the humble night watchman referenced by Emerson and Melville—lay buried under all the media manipulation, the fanfare, and the angling for America’s most coveted sea story. Given the media’s power to enforce cultural understandings of captaincy, responsibility, and self-sacrifice, it would seem virtually impossible for a captain to survive his ship’s loss, especially with fatalities among the crew, and still enjoy public respect. Yet despite attempts to malign him as a cracked and haunted seaman, Pollard enjoyed precisely this respect. As Nantucket’s night watchman, his goodwill demonstrated on each of his voyages continued throughout his life on shore. Chase, for his part, lived out the experience so many ironically had presumed Pollard to have suffered, enduring the guilt of his errors and headstrong miscalculations that sealed the fate of the Essex. Chase’s heroism could never be measured in the barrels of oil he brought to shore from decades of relentless whaling after the Essex tragedy. The quiet dignity, instead, of the conscientious yet star-crossed Captain Pollard should finally resonate with us in the twenty-first century, just as it resonated in the nineteenth century with Melville and Emerson—the two most significant voices of their generation to recognize the singularity of Pollard’s forbearance, given his two wrecks. Guided by Emerson and Melville’s compassionate apprehension of the twice-failed captain, this book has sought to redeem Pollard’s memory from a teeming and furious sweep of print and now digital mythmaking. This “real captain Ahab” was no Ahab.
Thus Pollard deserves to be resurrected as a significant figure in cultural history shaping nautical lore—and not only isolated to America’s major antebellum whaling ports. His redemption speaks to broader human themes of ambition and carrying scars with dignity, while humbly serving one’s loyal community. Indeed, roughly two months after the Essex tragedy stunned Nantucket—the tiny island with a mighty hold on world commerce whose seamen’s geographical reach rivaled those of the era’s empires—Pollard again shipped out, with two Essex veterans and his community’s support.
This book has attempted to place this tale of two captains in its proper perspective, not only to show the wide incongruence in various narratives of the same event, but to show precisely how each narrator’s predicament and motives directed these divergent retellings. Pollard, interestingly, never engaged the storytelling industry spawned by the sinking of the Essex, an event that would shape the development of print and later digital culture. While he never put pen to paper to record his experience, defend his name, or set the record straight, he was, however, remarkably candid and transparent about reporting his experience to inquiring strangers. This was the Pollard Melville so admired—the captain free of pretense or affectation who refused to mask his scars and pain, instead bearing them with almost Whitmanian American dignity. This was the captain who also deeply impressed the most accomplished and celebrated ship commander of the era, Charles Wilkes.
Wilkes, famous for winning U.S. congressional support to lead the nation’s last naval circumnavigation of the globe from 1838 to 1842, aimed at exploring uncharted waters from the Antarctic to the Bering Strait, met Pollard in August 1822 in a gam with the Two Brothers. Pollard was off the coast of Ecuador when he encountered the precocious twenty-four-year-old midshipman aboard the U.S. Navy schooner Waterwitch. Hauntingly, Wilkes, eager to hear Pollard’s story, had asked the captain why he would venture out to sea so soon after enduring such a devastating loss. Wilkes recalled that despite sailing “for the same area of the ocean where he had encountered so much,” where “it was to be expected that some effect of his former cruise would have been visible in his manner or conversation,” Pollard instead “was cheerful and very modest in his account, and very desirous to afford us all the aid we might want,” especially food, which one might have imagined such a captain to hold tightly, given his past experience. Little did Wilkes or Pollard’s supportive Nantucket islanders know then, but the Two Brothers, too, would sink. Wilkes, meanwhile, left the encounter duly impressed that he “had by accident become acquainted with a hero, who did not even consider that he had overcome obstacles which would have crushed 99 out of a hundred.” Given Pollard’s “vividness about his descriptions of the scenes” and such poise and composure, his listener could barely “believe that the actor could have been the narrator so modest and unassuming was his account,” and crucially, “most truthful.”60
Narrator and participant during the Two Brothers journey, and even after its failure, were roles Pollard played at a distance indeed, as attested by his ability to discuss the event with a perfect stranger. Even among Nantucketers who had been close to those lost on the Essex, establishing such separation between their roles as “participants” and as narrators proved too difficult, and they struggled to tell the tale with composure. Although some islanders profaned the event with tasteless jokes, others found its mere mention sacrilege, with word circulating on the street that “the Essex” should not be uttered on Nantucket. Pollard appeared to be sufficiently in touch with the experience to avoid burying it; he could, and always did, answer anyone who asked of it, even after the loss of the Two Brothers. Chase, however, literally told a different tale, one that would suggest that in seeking to cope psychologically, he established a vast distance between himself and the event, between his roles as narrator and participant. Chase suffered more, yet enjoyed greater monetary success, in the wake of the tragedy. His decision to capitalize on the narrative, to eschew Pollard’s unfiltered use of his own voice and instead assemble a tale calculated for profit, is articulated in his Narrative’s note to readers. The polished ghostwritten yarn designed to build up his image and defend his reputation may have become the period’s best-selling account of the event, but it seems to have kept Chase further from coming to terms with his own fatal actions on the voyage. Only the former cabin boy Thomas Nickerson would similarly succumb, later in life, to the temptation to profit from the tale—even though this effort would never come to fruition—with his careful omissions and sensationalistic twists designed simultaneously to dignify his image and to sell the story. Although Chase earned vast wealth in the whaling industry, in his retirement he descended into madness, surely induced in part by his failure to face his actions on board the Essex.
Most likely a fleeing whale—hardly a vengeful one—collided with the Essex; Chase, not Pollard, was guilty of the faulty seamanship that precipitated the tragedy; and Owen Coffin drew the short straw that prompted his execution, which Charles Ramsdell carried out as dictated by a second lottery. The captain most certainly did not shoot Owen Coffin; nor did he shoot the cabin boy, Nickerson.61 These are neither incidental nor trivial facts, but truths suppressed from the memory of the event that would have otherwise profoundly altered it to the benefit of both Pollard’s and the whale’s more deserving reputations. Chase’s Essex story was a sort of Jaws of the nineteenth century, maligning whales and accelerating mass hunting on par with what Peter Benchley’s character assassination would do to the great white shark, a role he later recanted to become the creature’s greatest advocate.62 As for Pollard, he was a survivor in the most dignified sense of the word, a man who may have momentarily preferred to remain on the sinking deck of the Two Brothers and let the sea roll over him as it has rolled for near eternity, but who returned to service, humanity, and the Nantucket Island that loved him.