NOTES
Prologue
1. Thomas Farel Heffernan, Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the “Essex” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: Penguin, 2000); Edward Leslie and Sterling Seagrave, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988); Obed Macy, The History of Nantucket (Boston: Hilliard, Ray, and Co., 1835); Owen Chase, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: W. B. Gilley, 1821).
2. “The Essex Whale-Ship,” New Hampshire Observer, March 18, 1822, 2.
3. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale: First Person Accounts, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), 73; hereafter Loss.
4. The constructed nature of nautical narratives is discussed in Greg Denning, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), and Jason Berger, Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). For more on how mariners transformed their experience at sea into literature, see C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), Wilson Heflin, Herman Melville’s Whaling Years, ed. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan (Nashville: University of Vanderbilt Press, 2004), Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of Sea Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), and Haskell Springer, America and the Sea: A Literary History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
5. Nickerson, Chase, and Others, x.
6. For more on how mariners conceived of their narratives at sea and were “mindful of the demands of contemporary publication,” see Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: The Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 115.
7. Retired sailors, many of whom were “desperate for money,” “peddled their yarns about adventure on the high seas,” receiving some editorial assistance, often from “impecunious hawkers” like Lewis who “catered to the public’s appetite for adventure and entertainment.” Myra C. Glenn, Jack Tar’s Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), 4: 265.
9. Foundational studies of maritime themes and texts in the broader culture are Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Chapter 1 Who Shot Owen Coffin?
1. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), hereafter Loss.
2. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: Penguin, 2000), 179.
3. Homer, The Odyssey, ed. Thomas R. Walsh and Rodney Merrill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
4. Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 92–103.
5. Ibid., 36, 102, 175. Coffin was six months from his nineteenth birthday when he died.
6. Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, ed. Edith Hall et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
7. Loss, 71–72.
8. For a historical novel that reconstructs scenes with embellished dialogue and actions based on documentary evidence, see Anne E. Beidler, Eating Owen: The Imagined True Story of Four Coffins from Nantucket, An Old Nantucket Mystery (Seattle: Coffeetown Press, 2009).
9. A. W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law: A Victorian Yachting Tragedy (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 317. Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 276.
10. Loss, 77.
11. Melville “finds in the Essex story more than the basic plot elements of his novel,” as Hester Blum astutely observes, particularly “the sailor’s impulse to catalogue and contain in the face of oceanic loss,” a gesture we see repeatedly in Moby-Dick, from Queequeg’s preparation of his own coffin to Tashtego’s poignant, yet tragically vain, attempt to save the Pequod’s flag while the ship sinks: see Hester Blum, “Melville and Oceanic Studies,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29.
12. Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 151.
13. Loss, 71.
14. Ibid., 181.
15. Cyrus Townsend Brady, “The Yarn of the Essex Whaler,” Cosmopolitan, November 1904, 72.
16. For more on the transmission of oral storytelling to print culture in Melville, see Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Works (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), and Kevin J. Hayes, who notes that “the legends of Mocha Dick [a sperm whale infamous for repeated clashes with whalers off the shore of southern Chile near the island of Mocha] and the sinking of the Essex provided partial inspiration, yet Melville would synthesize many legends before he finished his new book,” some of them overheard at the countless gams in which he participated at sea, Melville’s Folk Roots (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), 78. Such encounters enabled him to “borrow multiple elements he had heard from other whalemen,” Hayes, 79.
17. For more on the social psychology of scapegoating, see Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Ron Eyerman et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 31–59
18. Loss, 181.
19. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 26.
20. Melville, 316.
21. Ibid., 206.
22. Loss, 208.
23. Ibid., 209.
24. Thomas Heffernan, Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the “Essex” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 209.
25. Although Pollard himself was not a practicing Quaker, he likely would have been familiar with and even followed the principles of the faith, since he had been exposed to it through his devout grandparents. The family’s Quakerism can be traced to Pollard’s great-grandmother, Mehitable Pollard, a Quaker minister. Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 175.
26. Loss, 181. Note that Coffin’s mother was actually Pollard’s aunt, not his sister, as Nickerson erroneously writes.
27. Ibid., 170–71.
28. Ibid., 69.
29. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1096.
30. Poe, 1099. For more on black sailors and the fear of violent revolution in Poe, see Kevin J. Hayes, A History of Virginia Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 187.
31. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 5.
32. Ibid., 5.
33. Philbrick notes that “certainly the statistic raises suspicion—of the first four sailors to be eaten, all were black. Short of murdering the black crew members, the Nantucketers could have refused to share meat with them,” In the Heart of the Sea, 173. Such refusal to share may have actually happened more militantly than one might suspect, especially given Chase’s description of how “when one of the white men awoke me, and informed me that one of the blacks had taken some bread…I immediately took my pistol in my hand, and charged him if he had taken any, to give it up without the least hesitation, or I should instantly shoot him!” Loss, 62.
34. No Author, Six Species of Men; With Cuts Representing the Types of Caucasian, Mongol, Malay, Indian, Esquimaux and Negro with Their General Physical and Mental Qualities, Laws of Organization, Relations to Civilization, &c. (New York: Van Evrie, Horton, and Company, 1866). As the title illustrates, such racial typologies were still espoused even after the Civil War. In the 1820s the ideology was even more regressive and divisive. For more on the vocational opportunity whaling represented to prewar blacks given legal slavery in the South and their exclusion from the professions in the North, see Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 25–27.
35. Quoted in Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 257; Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (New York: Stern and Day, 1975); Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea Hunters: The Great Age of Whaling (Philadelphia: Lippincott: 1953).
36. Olson, Call Me Ishmael.
37. Ibid., 21.
38. For an excellent study of “the social and symbolic practices through which eating and food cultures inform the production of racial difference” as it relates to cannibalism in antebellum literature, see Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1, 94–96, 112.
39. Henry Carlisle, The Jonah Man (New York: Knopf, 1984), 166.
Chapter 2 Damage Control
1. Henry Carlisle, The Jonah Man (New York: Knopf, 1984), 166.
2. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Whaleship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), 199; hereafter Loss.
3. Loss, 8.
4. Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Hershel Parker (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 117.
5. Loss, 79, italics mine.
6. Thomas Heffernan, Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 156.
7. As cited in Nathaniel Philbrick, Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890 (Nantucket, MA: Mill Hill Press, 1993).
8. See Cree LeFavour, “‘Jane Eyre Fever’: Deciphering the Astonishing Popular Success of Charlotte Brontë in Antebellum America,” Book History 7 (2004): 113–41.
9. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1008.
10. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1986), 300.
11. Poe, 1069.
12. Loss, 14.
13. For an excellent discussion of the relative veracity of “logbook truths,” naval memoirs, and the literary marketplace, particularly James Fenimore Cooper’s “ambivalence about his choice to use American materials” in light of his refusal “to ‘prostitute’ himself to the market for British sea tales,” see Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: The Maritime Imagination and Antebellum Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 71–108.
14. Ibid.
15. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
16. Loss, 14.
17. Lance E. Davis et al., In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816–1906 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 390.
18. Davis et al., 389; Charles Nordhoff, Whaling and Fishing (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1895), 2.
19. Although very real differences in this case separate the authorial circumstances of mariners and indentured servants, the maritime narratives themselves habitually play on the trope of slavery. For a powerful discussion of the analogy between sailor and slave, see Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Particularly useful is Otter’s observation of “the collapsing of distance between sailor and slave” in Melville’s White Jacket, a development that “threatens the narrator himself…and provokes a fantastic attempt at self-preservation.” This pattern easily extends to Billy Budd as well as Chase’s Narrative, 77.
20. Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 74.
21. Leo Braudy, “Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies,” Publication of the Modern Language Association 126, no. 4 (October 2011): 1071.
22. Heffernan, 158. And see Heffernan, 159, for an excellent survey of the data regarding the various courses the publication of the Narrative may have taken.
23. For details on Mathew Carey and his distribution network, see Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 37–54.
24. Braudy, 1072.
25. Ibid., 1074.
26. Loss, 15.
27. Ibid.
28. Poe, 1070–71.
29. For more on the publishing history of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, see Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64–73.
30. Loss, 16.
31. Elmo Paul Hohman, “Wages, Risk, and Profits in the Whaling Industry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 40 (August 1926): 230; see also Davis’s discussion of “The Whaleman’s Lay,” 154–68.
32. Orestes Brownson, The Laboring Classes: An Article from the “Boston Quarterly Review” (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1840), 13.
33. Davis, 186.
34. Blum, 213.
35. Davis, 387.
36. Ibid., 424.
37. Ibid.
38. National Maritime Digital Library, retrieved April 19, 2012, nmdl.org/aowv/whvoyage.cfm?VesselNumber=676 and nmdl.org/aowv/whvoyage.cfm?VesselNumber=1077.
39. Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1969), 157; Martyn Smith, “Between Book and Reality: The Guidebook in Redburn and Clarel,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 13, no. 3 (2011): 30–40.
40. Melville, Redburn, 193.
41. Loss, 19.
42. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 116.
43. Loss, xii.
44. Ibid., 34.
45. Ibid., 40.
46. Ibid., 42.
47. Ibid., 56.
48. Ibid., 62.
49. Ibid., 167.
50. Heffernan, 11, 156.
51. Heffernan, 85; Captain Joseph Mitchell II, quoted in Heffernan, 86.
52. Loss, 21.
53. Ibid., 86.
Chapter 3 Nickerson and Lewis
Portions of this chapter were previously published as “The Nineteenth-Century Weekly Press and the Tumultuous Career of Journalist Leon Lewis,” Journalism History 39, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 156–67.
1. Bonner sought a broad audience. In addition to serial fiction with weekly installments, the Ledger’s content included breaking news, political analysis, regular columns by popular writers such as Fanny Fern, biography, popular history, and guest commentary from statesmen such as U.S. congressman and secretary of state Edward Everett. The nineteenth century’s most influential newspaper editor, Horace Greeley, chose Bonner’s Ledger as the platform for his autobiography, published in weekly installments less than one year prior to his death. New York’s most celebrated clergyman of the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, appeared prominently in the Ledger, enjoying a lucrative contract for his serial novel Norwood; or, Village Life in New England (1868). Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr and Company, 1868), 604–21; David Dowling, Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2012), 89–115.
2. Thomas Nickerson, The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats, ed. Helen Winslow Chase and Edouard A. Stackpole (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Association), 1984, 8; hereafter Nickerson Stackpole.
3. “As the facts concerning the passage of the open boats proceeds [sic] there are enough differences with the Chase story to intrigue the reader, as there are, naturally enough, similarities to Chase’s accounts,” Stackpole in Nickerson, 9.
4. For more on the broader cultural context of the nineteenth-century weekly press, see Barbara Hochman, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011); Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 2, 1850–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Patricia Okker, Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); John C. Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
5. Nickerson Stackpole, 10.
6. Mary Noel, Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 76.
7. Stanwood Cobb, The Magnificent Partnership (New York: Vantage, 1954), 28–29.
8. Nickerson Stackpole, 8.
9. Leon Lewis, Andrée at the Pole: With Details of His Fate (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1898), 10.
10. New York Weekly, March 17, 1864, 4.
11. New York Weekly, October 6, 1864, 3.
12. Noel, 71.
13. “Hon. Edward Everett and the New York Ledger,” Daily Cleveland Herald, December 13, 1858, col. C.
14. Loss, 180.
15. Loss, 181.
16. Ibid.
17. Loss, 182–83.
18. Nickerson Stackpole, 9.
19. Jan Cohn, Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass Market Fiction for Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 70–71.
20. Leon Lewis to Robert Bonner, September 26, 1878, “Bonner Papers,” NYPL.
21. Harriet Lewis to Robert Bonner, May 1, 1878, “Bonner Papers,” NYPL.
22. Leon Lewis to Robert Bonner, n.d., n.m., 1898, “Bonner Papers, NYPL.
23. Patricia Cline Cohen et al., The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1.
24. Hartford Weekly Times, April 23, 1853.
25. This also attests to Lewis’s predilection for consorting in the world of the flash press, as seen in the lurid content of his 1879 Penn Yan Mystery. The Whip, the Flash, the Rake, and the Libertine all exposed scandals as a means of extorting and blackmailing and vowed to “keep a watchful eye on all brothels and their frail inmates”: quoted in Cline Cohen et. al., 176. For more on the rampant corruption and organized crime in flash paper culture, See Leon Jackson, “Exposing Periodicals: Moral Failure, Knowledge Networks, and Serial Culture in Antebellum America,” keynote address, Knowledge Networks Conference, University of Nottingham, UK, May 27, 2011.
26. Quoted in Noel, 193.
27. Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1950), 2: 183–86.
28. Quoted in Yesterday’s Papers, “‘Leon Lewis’ (1833–1920),” http://john-adcock.blogspot.ca/2011/08/leon-lewis-1833-1920.html.
29. Toni Johnson-Woods, “The Virtual Reading Communities of the London Journal, the New York Ledger, and the Australian Journal,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 359.
30. “Being the Story of the Coming of a Deluge,” New York Times, October 6, 1907.
31. Ibid.
32. Noel, 193.
Chapter 4 Lightning Strikes Twice
1. Jason T. Raupp and Kelly Gleason, “Submerged Whaling Heritage in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument,” AIMA Bulletin 34 (2010): 66–74.
2. Thomas Nickerson, “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket,” Nantucket Historical Association Collection 106, Folder 3.5.
3. Stewart Gordon, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2015), 211–22.
4. “Traces of Cocaine Found on Hair Sample from Costa Concordia Captain,” Herald Sun, February 20, 2012. “Cocaine Found on the Hair of Cruise Captain Francesco Schettino, Whose Ship Aground in Italy,” New York Daily News, February 18, 2012.
5. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: Penguin, 2000), 211.
6. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), 180–81, hereafter Loss.
7. Obed Macy, The History of Nantucket (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1835), 249.
8. Thomas Nickerson, “Loss of the Ship Two Brothers of Nantucket,” Nantucket Historical Association Research Library, MS 106—Thomas Nickerson Collection, 1819–1876, Folder 3.5, 1a; hereafter Nickerson, Two Brothers.
9. Ben Simons, “Thomas Nickerson’s Account of the Wreck of the Two Brothers,” Historic Nantucket: A Publication of the Nantucket Historical Association 60, no. 3 (Fall 2010), 12.
10. Loss, 199.
11. Nickerson, Two Brothers, 1d.
12. Quoted in Evan Thomas, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 9.
13. Nickerson, Two Brothers, 1e.
14. Ibid., 1f.
15. Eben Gardner (MS copy by William Randall), “Sea Account,” Nantucket Historical Association Research Library, MS 15—Ships’ Papers Collection, Folder 192.5, 1–2.
16. Nickerson, Two Brothers, 1f.
17. Gardner, 3.
18. Loss, 181.
19. Nickerson, Two Brothers, 1i.
20. Gardner, 1–2.
21. Heffernan only accounts for the fact that the captain of the Martha was John H. Pease, a relative of Captain Valentine Pease of the Acushnet, on which Melville journeyed in 1841: 150–51. Heffernan also transcribes the Gardner account strictly according to the original holograph, disregarding an earlier typed manuscript copy made in 1967, which takes liberties with the grammar, syntax, and diction of the original (150–51). Heffernan interestingly yields to Gardner rather than Nickerson as the authority on the event, reprinting the first mate’s account in its entirety.
22. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 90.
23. Ibid., 110. Captain James Cook was a British explorer famous for three voyages covering vast expanses of uncharted waters. He undertook the first of these missions to map unknown lands and oceans in 1766 and died in Hawaii on his third and final voyage in 1799. In 1803 Adam Johann von Krusenstern led a Russian two-ship expedition around the world, whose main objective was to establish the fur trade with Russian America, which is now Alaska, as well as to develop trade relations with China, Japan, and nations in South America. He returned safely in 1806 bearing maps and detailed records of his journey. The most popular source on the topic available to Melville, one that went through multiple editions from the 1840s to the 1860s, was Anonymous, Voyages Round the World: From the Death of Captain Cook to the Present Time (New York: Harper Brothers, 1844).
24. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 214.
25. Nickerson, Two Brothers 3–2a. Both prose narrative and poem are coupled in the NHA archive as parts of the same document, in keeping with what I argue were Nickerson’s intentions for publication.
26. Ibid.
27. Loss, 193.
28. Ibid.
29. Review of Leisure Hours at Sea, by William Leggett, North American Review 5, no. 342 (1825): 454–55.
30. Loss, 181.
31. Nickerson, Two Brothers 3–2a.
32. Ibid.
33. Nickerson, Two Brothers 3–2b.
34. Ibid., 3–2d.
35. Ibid., 3–2e.
36. Loss, 17–18.
37. Nickerson, Two Brothers 3–2f.
38. Melville, Moby-Dick, 6.
39. Nickerson, Two Brothers 3–2f.
40. Melville, Moby-Dick, 163.
41. Nickerson, Two Brothers 3–2g.
42. Ibid., 3–2h.
43. Ibid., 3–2j.
44. Ibid., 3–2k.
45. Ibid., 3–21.
Chapter 5 Night Watchman
1. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), 78, hereafter Loss.
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, Second Series, vol. 3, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 49.
3. Edward Byers, The Nation of Nantucket: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660–1820 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 117. Excellent histories of Nantucket include Nathaniel Philbrick, Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890 (Nantucket, MA: Mill Hill Press, 1993); Edouard Stackpole and Melvin B. Summerfield, Nantucket Doorways (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1992); Edouard A. Stackpole, Nantucket in the American Revolution (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Association, 1976); Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea Hunters: New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953); Alexander Starbuck, Nantucket Genealogies (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2009); Robert J. Leach and Peter Gow, Quaker Nantucket: The Religious Community behind the Whaling Empire (Nantucket, MA: Mill Hill Press, 1997); Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Nathaniel Philbrick, “‘Every Wave Is a Fortune’: Nantucket Island and the Making of an American Icon,” New England Quarterly (1993): 443–47.
4. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2007), 204.
5. Quoted in Byers, 300.
6. Melville, Moby-Dick, 64.
7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et. al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 63.
8. For more on the managerial function of Nantucket’s success in the whaling industry, see Robert C. Ellickson, “A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry,” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 5, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 83–97.
9. Byers, 175.
10. Crèvecœur, 203.
11. Many citizens may have stopped calling themselves Quakers, or ceased attending regular meetings, which were and still are held in plain buildings bearing no religious iconography and no pulpit from which an intermediary authority might hold forth over a rapt congregation. But Quaker culture still operated according to its blend of close-knit community and profound respect for personal individuality. To witness Quakers at worship is to see a group more intimately connected through the close physical space they share than through any organized ritual bonding them. No perfunctory words burden these meetings, and statements are uttered entirely on the volition of those present, in any order and on any subject deemed worthy.
12. Loss, 222.
13. Ibid., 78–79.
14. Harrison Hayford and Lynn Horth, “Melville’s Memoranda in Chase’s Narrative of the Essex,” in Melville, Moby-Dick, 991.
15. Quoted in Olson, 109.
16. Quoted in Heffernan, 169.
17. After Moby-Dick was dismissed by critics, Melville pursued the mixed-genre form modeled after the French novel, according to Sheila Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
18. For more on Clarel see Hershel Parker, Melville: The Making of a Poet (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); and William Potter, “Clarel” and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004).
19. Quoted in Heffernan, 169.
20. Heffernan, 122–26.
21. Quoted in Heffernan, 180.
22. Ibid, 181.
23. A. B. C. Whipple, “Three-Month Ordeal in Open Boats,” Life, November 10, 1952, 144–56.
24. Richard A. Friedman, “Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis,” New York Times, July 17, 2015.
25. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: Penguin, 2000), 212.
26. Ibid., 228.
27. Loss, 223.
28. John Leach and Jo Campling, Survival Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 177.
29. For more on new findings suggesting growth rather than disorder after trauma, and detailing the corrective and restorative emotional responses that can result from violent experiences, see Stephen Joseph, What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth (New York: Basic Books, 2011); and Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013).
30. Loss, 221–22.
31. Jonathan Miles, The Wreck of the “Medusa”: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove, 2007).
32. Quoted in Daniel Diehl and Mark P. Donnelly, Eat Thy Neighbor: A History of Cannibalism (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2008), 45.
33. Edouard A. Stackpole, Life Saving Nantucket (Nantucket Island, MA: Nantucket Life Saving Museum, 1972), 13.
34. “Whalemen’s Shipping List,” Nantucket Historical Association, Research Library and Archives.
35. Loss, 223.
36. Shiguro Takada, Contingency Cannibalism: Superhardcore Survivalism’s Dirty Little Secret (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1999), 17.
37. Melville, Moby-Dick, 206.
38. Takada, 17.
39. Roland Leslie Warren, Mary Coffin Starbuck and the Early History of Nantucket (Pingry Press, 1987); Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 8–9; Byers.
40. Quoted in Heffernan, 169.
41. Henry Carlisle, The Jonah Man (New York: Knopf, 1984), 221.
42. Ibid., 228.
43. Quoted in Carlisle, 259.
1. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, bloggers doubled down on their justifications for Pollard as Melville’s model for Ahab. Online commentator Daniel Kuehn, for example, represented the legions who insisted that “captain Ahab was real,” although “the real captain Ahab was more pathetic than the one in Melville’s book,” Daniel Kuehn, “Moby Dick Discovery,” Facts and Other Stubborn Things, February 19, 2011, factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot; “‘Moby Dick’ Captain’s Ship Found,” BBC Mobile News U.S. & Canada, February 12, 2011; “The Real Captain Ahab’s Ship: Found,” Flavorwire, February 12, 2011.
2. Justin Ellis, “Alan Rusbridger on the Guardian’s Open Journalism, Paywalls and Why They’re Preplanning More of the Newspaper,” Nieman Journalism Lab, May 29, 2012. On the merits and defects of citizen journalism, see Melissa Wall, Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless, or Dangerous? (International Debate Education Association and iDebate Press, 2012).
3. Archaeologists had been collecting artifacts of the Two Brothers wreckage site since 2008. The first scientific article appeared two years later, by Jason T. Raupp and Kelly Gleason, “Submerged Whaling Heritage in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument,” AIMA Bulletin 34 (2010): 66–74. A 2011 press release inspired major newspapers and magazines to cover the story, with the more reputable ones relying on lead archaeologist Kelly Gleason and the Nantucket Historical Association for their sources. National Geographic News, for example, stopped short of proclaiming Pollard “the real Captain Ahab,” and instead cited the wreck and captain’s more precise influences on Melville: Ker Than, “Rare 1823 Wreck Found—Capt. Linked to Moby-Dick, Cannibalism,” National Geographic, February 11, 2011.
4. As a subset of fan communities and fandom, the aca-fan is discussed in Henry Jenkins et al., Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
5. Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, ed., Mashup Cultures (New York: Springer, 2010), 18.
6. Ibid., 20.
7. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), 140; hereafter Loss.
8. Owen Chase et al., Narratives of the Wreck of the Whaleship “Essex,” ed. Robert Gibbings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1989), 77.
9. Quoted in Thomas Nickerson, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, eds. Helen Winslow Chase and Edouard A. Stackpole (Nantucket, MA: Nantucket Historical Association, 1984), 81, hereafter Nickerson Stackpole.
10. Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea Hunters: New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), 81.
11. Obed Macy, The History of Nantucket (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1835), 242.
12. Henry Carlisle, The Jonah Man (New York: Knopf, 1984), 106.
13. Ibid., 106.
14. Ibid., 107.
15. Chase judged “the speed of the whale [to be] about six” knots, Loss, 26.
16. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: Penguin, 2000), 178.
17. Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 205–6.
18. Quoted in Thomas Heffernan, Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the “Essex” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 168.
19. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 206.
20. Notably the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) should not be confused with the Marquesas Islands, a desired destination for Pollard and one not plagued by hurricanes.
21. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988).
22. Loss, 167.
23. Ibid., 78.
24. Heffernan, 171.
25. “Preface,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 7 (August 1835): iii.
26. “The Whale,” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 7, no. 75 (November 1834): 72.
27. The current Wikipedia page on the Essex relies primarily on Chase’s Narrative, testifying to the enduring dominance of his testimony over Nickerson’s.
28. Edward Byers, Nantucket Nation: Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660–1820 (Boston: Northeastern University Press), 296–98.
29. Maryland Gazette and Political Intelligencer, June 21, 1821, 25D.
30. Heffernan, 166.
31. Third Annual Report of the American Seamen’s Friend Society (Boston: J. Seymour, 1831), 6.
32. “Give the Sailor Good Books,” Sheet Anchor, September 20, 1845, 140.
33. Heffernan, 8.
34. Loss, 72.
35. Melville, Moby-Dick, 74.
36. Ibid.
37. Heffernan, 144.
38. Ibid., 7–8.
39. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 109–10.
40. Clifford Ashley, The Yankee Whaler (Boston: Houghton, 1926), 6.
41. Edward S. Davoll, “The Captain’s Specific Orders on the Commencement of a Whale Voyage to His Officers and Crew,” Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches 81 (June 5, 1981), 11.
Coda
Portions of this chapter were previously published as “Media, Myth, and the ‘Fighting Whale’ in Maritime Narratives,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 47 no. 3 (Fall 2014): 255–83.
1. Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (London: John van Voorst, 1839), 46.
2. Ibid., 48.
3. The only major natural enemy of the sperm whale is the killer whale, according to marine biologist Hal Whitehead in Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). He notes, however, that “although they rarely kill sperms, the threat of killer whale predation, especially on the young, may have been an important factor in sperm whale evolution” (77). Their primary means of defense is by clustering in a formation, yet not always with heads out, as one might suppose, to use their prominent shield-like brows for protection. Just as frequently they adopt the “‘Marguerite formation,’ with their tails outward, their heads together, and their bodies radiating outward like the spokes of a wheel” (194). In conflicts the sperm whale is more inclined toward group defense than solitary attack.
4. Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York: Norton, 2007), 78.
5. A similar function has been found in a pocket of fat located near a whale’s eyes. Just as spermaceti displaces pressure on the brain, “the only means available to aid the eye in the deep-diving mammal that is not available to its terrestrial counterparts is…intraocular fat,” which also aids in thermal control by providing insulation from cold temperatures that would threaten the neural function of the eyes and brain, both extremely sensitive organs. William W. Dawson, “The Cetacean Eye,” Cetacean Behavior: Mechanisms and Functions, ed. Louis M. Herman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), 90.
6. Adam Summers, “Fat Heads Sink Ships,” Natural History (September 2002): 40–41.
7. Melville, Moby-Dick, 327.
8. Ibid., 438.
9. Ibid., 184.
10. David K. Caldwell et al., “Behavior of the Sperm Whale, Physeter Catodon L.,” Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises, ed. Kenneth S. Norris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 690.
11. Melville, Moby-Dick, 179.
12. Ibid., 179–80.
13. Ibid., 183, 64.
14. A passage from Milton’s work appeared as an epigraph to Frankenstein.
15. Bertram F. Mallee, Louis J. Moses, and Dare A. Baldwin, Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition (Boston: MIT Press, 2001), 1.
16. Glover M. Allen, Monographs on the Natural History of New England: The Whalebone Whales of New England (Boston: Boston Society for Natural History, 1916), 198.
17. Amy R. Knowlton and Scott D. Kraus, “Mortality and Serious Injury of Northern Right Whales (Eubalaena Glacialis) in the Western North Atlantic Ocean,” Journal of Cetacean Restoration Management 2 (2001): 193. The frequency of collisions increased from 1950 to 1970 along with the number and speed of ships at sea, according to David W. Laist et al., “Collisions between Ships and Whales,” Marine Mammal Science 17, no. 1 (January 2001): 35–75. The incidence of collisions between boats has also been a major concern ever since the highly visible sinking of the HMS Victoria at the end of the nineteenth century, an event discussed in the epilogue. Also, as recently as April 2012, debris was discovered south of San Diego from a state-of-the-art yacht pulverized into pieces only two to three inches long, presumably by a larger craft. The incident certainly speaks to the helpless situation of sea creatures enduring a similar blow, with the yacht described as “looking like it had gone through a blender.” “Three Dead, One Missing in Yacht Race Accident,” New York Times, April 29, 2012.
18. Glover M. Allen, Monographs on the Natural History of New England: The Whalebone Whales of New England (Boston: Boston Society for Natural History, 1916), 198.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2008), 106.
22. Allen, 198–99.
23. Caldwell, 707.
24. The Armstrong claim I contest here is that “the shock attending this incident results largely from the challenge the whale’s apparent agency poses to the complacent pursuit of profits via the labor of industrial capitalism” (118). He appears to be doing what the antebellum readers were doing, only in the inverse, by casting the whale here as heroically retaliating against the forces of capitalism bent on killing and commodifying him. However irresistible the argument both ethically and theoretically, it breaks down under the hard glare of nature science, the research from which is conspicuously absent in Armstrong’s work. Such science, as shown, indicates the real likelihood that the whale was not inclined by behavior or anatomy to attack ships, but that Chase and the larger romantic culture were eager to make him appear so in his original casting in that role.
25. “In the metropolitan centers, away from the realities of the industry, such accounts were received with skepticism and mockery,” Armstrong notes (119). There were indeed skeptics of Chase, whom I treat later, but they were hardly so influential as to stop the tide of popular demand for stories of whales capable of sinking ships, rather than mere boats, at will. Nor did any widespread skepticism against such agency gain traction to the extent that it could have ruined the popular reception of Moby-Dick, despite Melville’s anticipation of backlash in “The Affidavit” chapter, which vehemently argues, based on Chase, for the plausibility of whales being able to destroy ships.
26. Thomas Nickerson, Owen Chase, and Others, The Loss of the Ship “Essex,” Sunk by a Whale, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin, 2000), 30, hereafter Loss.
27. Loss, 26.
28. Obed Macy, The History of Nantucket (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1835), 242.
29. Loss, 24.
30. Armstrong, 102.
31. Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of “Moby-Dick” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 266.
32. Caldwell, 690.
33. Louie Psihoyos, discussion with author, December 2011, Boulder, CO.
34. Jay Parini, The Passages of H. M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 2010), 90.
35. D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 317.
36. Loss, 30.
37. Ibid., 29–30.
38. Olmsted, 145.
39. “Decidedly Incredulous,” The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript 9, no. 38 (November 18, 1851): 2.
40. Thomas Heffernan, Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the “Essex” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 112.
41. Quoted in Heffernan, 111.
42. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship “Essex” (New York: Penguin, 2000), 255.
43. Caldwell, 692.
44. Henry T. Cheever, The Whale and His Captors (New York: Harper Brothers, 1850), 216. Hester Blum also uses the qualifier seemingly to project skepticism regarding Chase’s account; she calls it a “seemingly premeditated attack by a sperm whale.” “Melville and Oceanic Studies,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 28–29.
45. Chase’s influence is visible in such powerful cultural histories as George Cotkin’s Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), particularly in how the creature’s malicious intent is presumed in the claim that “never before had it been reported that a whale had purposefully rammed a ship” (87).
46. Dolin appears to be following Philbrick’s assertion that after the collision “the creature’s tail continued to work up and down, pushing the 238-ton ship backward.” Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 83.
47. Loss, 26.
48. Melville, Moby-Dick, 316.
49. Clement Cleveland Sawtell, The Ship “Ann Alexander” of New Bedford, 1805–1851 (New Bedford, MA: Marine Historical Association, 1962), 70–79.
50. Quoted in Sawtell, 9.
51. Davis Wasgatt Clark, Travel and Adventure: Comprising Some of the Most Striking Narratives on Record (Cincinnati: Swormstedt and Poe, 1856), 263–64.
52. Willis Abbot, American Merchant Ships and Sailors (New Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2009), 130.
53. Sawtell, 79.
54. Ibid., 82.
55. Caldwell, 691. While flight is the whale’s usual reaction to danger, when the whale does resort to fighting, usually only under extreme circumstances, it will use its teeth as weapons far more frequently than its head as a battering ram. For more on the teeth as the whale’s primary means of assault, see Frederick Debell Bennett, Narrative of a Whaling Voyage around the Globe from the Year 1833 to 1836 (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), 176, 217; Charles Melville Scammon, The Marine Animals of the Northwestern Coast of North America (San Francisco: John H. Carmany, 1874), 82; James Temple Brown, The Whale Fishery: Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus and Methods (New York: U.S. Commercial Fish and Fisheries, 1887), 261; Joshua Fillebrown Beane, From the Forecastle to Cabin (New York: Editor Publishing Company, 1905), 338; William John Hopkins, She Blows! And Sparm at That! (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 338; Robert Ferguson, Harpooner: A Four-Year Voyage on the Barque “Kathleen,” 1880–1884, ed. L. D. Stair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), 41, 79; John Atkins Cook, Pursuing the Whale (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 9; and Clifford Warren Ashley, The Yankee Whaler (Garden City, NY: Halcyon House, 1942), 82.
56. Beale, 183.
57. Bennett, 220.
58. Melville, Moby-Dick, 163–64.
59. Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Animal Cure,” Harper’s, June 2012, 14.
60. Loss, 193–94.
61. The lack of an accurate historical record on the Essex is due in large part to the penetration of misinformation, beginning with Chase’s Narrative, into academic research. For example, Chase is the single source behind Hester Blum’s assertion that “the ship’s captain shot his own cabin boy” in “Melville and Oceanic Studies,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29.
62. David Dowling, “How the Creator of Jaws Became the Shark’s Greatest Defender,” Narratively, August 2014.