Essex (ship)

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Essex
Sketch by Thomas Nickerson of a sperm whale attack on Essex on November 20, 1820
Sketch by Thomas Nickerson of a sperm whale attack on Essex on November 20, 1820
Ship data
flag United States 23United States United States
Ship type whaler
Whereabouts Sunk in 1820
Ship dimensions and crew
length
28 m ( Lüa )
width 8 m
 
crew 21 men
Rigging and rigging
Rigging Barque
Number of masts 3

The Essex was an American whaling ship sailing of the 19th century with home port Nantucket , Massachusetts . She was a small, sturdy ship with 19 successful years on whaling trips.

It was built from wood in Nantucket around 1800 as a whaling ship. The Essex was 238 tonnes (according to the then US standard Builder's Old Measurement surveyed), 28 m long, 8 m wide and 5 m deep space and first as Bark , later as a full-rigged ship rigged . Three row boats for whaling were on board. When sailing in August 1819, there was a crew of 21 on board under the command of the 28-year-old Captain George Pollard Jr., including himself.

The Essex became the most famous case of a ship attacked and sunk by a whale . Other cases were the Pusie Hall (1835), the Two Generals (1838), the Pocahontas (1850) and the Ann Alexander (1851), whose crew was recovered two days after the sinking.

Reports of the accident were mainly provided by the diaries and subsequent transcripts of the then First Mate (US "First Mate") Owen Chase and the then cabin boy Thomas Nickerson . This incident was the historical template for the main plot of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick .

Itinerary

The Essex started on August 12, 1819 from Nantucket on a fishing trip to the Pacific . As was customary at the time, the African coast was first approached in order to move faster from there to the southern tip of South America with favorable winds. With some in the meantime in the Atlantic hunted whales were several barrels of whale oil to be filled. After circumnavigating Cape Horn , the sperm whales should be hunted and shot in the mating areas in the Pacific.

Essex travel dates

Date / period place event
August 12, 1819 Nantucket Departure
August 15, 1819 Ship capsizes in a side gust and is raised again
September 2, 1819 Flores (Azores) Try to get an extra whale boat
September 19, 1819 Boa Vista (Cape Verde) Procurement of an additional whale boat
November 1819 Falkland Islands Drive by
Dec 1819 - January 1820 Cape Horn Circumnavigation
January 1820 Arauco , Chile Stop
Talcahuano , Chile Provisioning
June 1820 Arica , Chile Provisioning
June to August 1820 Coast of Peru around 11 whales are shot and 450 barrels are filled with oil
September 1820 Atacames , Ecuador Provisioning, sailor Dewitt sits down
October 8, 1820 Galapagos Islands Provisioning
November 20, 1820 Pacific / Equator
0 ° 41 'South, 119 ° West		 Sperm whale hunting, sperm whale attack, sinking of the Essex

Sinking of the ship

Sketch of the capsized whaling ship Essex by Thomas Nickerson

On the morning of November 20, 1820, the crew had discovered a school of whales in the Pacific, about 3,700 kilometers from South America, at position 0 ° 41 ′ 0 ″  S , 118 ° 0 ′ 0 ″  W , and launched the fishing boats. One of the boats was attacked by a whale while harpooning, forcing the crew to cut the line. Then Captain Pollard called the boats back on board. As it approaches the Essex approached, they saw that the ship with no wind and calm sea for no apparent reason as strong list was that the subsoil was seen. The boats went alongside, and the crew tried to straighten the full ship by cutting the masts and ropes . At that moment a giant sperm whale appeared and rammed the Essex . After lying stunned next to the ship for a few moments, the whale attacked the bow . Then he dived under the ship and started another attack from the bow from a few hundred meters away. The collision was so violent that several planks burst. A great deal of water seeped into the holds, but the ship was still afloat and was not expected to sink for the next two days.

The crew got everything useful out of the sinking Essex and tried by all means to make the light whaling boats, which were built more for high speeds and not for long journeys with heavy loads, suitable for the high seas. From the starting position on the equator you should sail south to the 25th or 26th parallel in order to reach the Chilean coast with favorable winds . Among other things, 195 gallons (780 liters) of fresh water and 600 pounds (about 280 kilograms) of ship's biscuits were brought into the boats from the wreck . On November 22nd at 12:30 p.m. the sinking Essex was left.

The trip in the fishing boats

The then first mate Owen Chase, in old age
The then cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, in old age

After a month of privation, the castaways reached the uninhabited Pitcairn Island of Henderson . On Henderson there is only one sparse running fresh water source on the north beach, which is also below the water level at high tide . They therefore did not find a longer stay on the inhospitable island sensible. To avoid death from hunger and thirst, they set out east after a week and hoped to reach Easter Island. Three crew members remained on Henderson.

On January 12th, the boat, which was under the command of Owen Chase, lost contact with the other two boats. Soon the food ran out on this boat and the first men died. Since the hunger was now very high, Owen Chase and the other men started to eat the dead . It was supposed to save their lives because it kept Chase, Benjamin Lawrence (helmsman of one of the fishing boats) and Thomas Nickerson (cabin boy) alive long enough to be off the ship Brigg Indian on February 18 near the Juan Fernández Islands to be saved.

On January 28th, Captain Pollard's boat lost contact with the third boat, from which they never heard from again. When the food in Pollard's boat ran out in February, the first men died. They buried the first two dead according to the tradition of sailors. When hunger finally got out of hand, a draw was drawn to determine which crew member should be shot and eaten. Through this draw and the death of other men remained the captain and the sailor Charles Ramsdell alive long enough to February 23 off the Chilean coast from the whaler Dauphin to be saved, "the skin with ulcers littered the shipwrecked gnawed with hollow-cheeked faces on the bones of their dead comrades. Even when the rescuers rushed up, they didn't want to give up their gruesome meal. "

Of the 21 crew members, eight survived: Captain George Pollard, Chief Petty Officer Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Chapple (helmsmen of the fishing boats), sailors Charles Ramsdell, Seth Weeks, William Wright and the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson. The three men left on Henderson (Seth Weeks, William Wright and Thomas Chapple) were rescued by the Surrey on April 5th . Three people who died on board the boats were buried at sea, seven were eaten, and two of the seafarers remained missing. The seaman Henry Dewitt had already left during the stopover in Ecuador.

During their entire journey in the small whaling boats , the crew covered a distance of 3,500 nautical miles (6,483 km).

Literary afterlife

The ship's chief mate Owen Chase wrote and published a book on the incidents as early as late autumn 1821 ( Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, of Nantucket ).

The whaler Acushnet , on which the author Herman Melville hired in 1841, met the whaling ship Lima just south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean after a ten-month voyage . On board the Lima was William Chase, the then sixteen-year-old son of Owen Chase. He told Melville about the fall of the Essex and loaned him his father's book. The fall of the Essex became the model for Melville's novel Moby Dick .

In 1876, at the suggestion of the journalist Leon Lewis, Thomas Nickerson put his memories of the sinking of the Essex and the subsequent voyage across the Pacific in the unprotected boats on paper. This remained unnoticed until 1960 and was only published in 1984 with the title The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats .

literature

  • Owen Chase : Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, of Nantucket; Which Was Attacked and Finally Destroyed by a Large Spermaceti-Whale, in the Pacific Ocean; with an Account of the Unparalleled Sufferings of the Captain and Crew during a Space of Ninety-Three Days at Sea, in Open Boats; in the Years 1819 & 1820 . New York 1824; Reprint: Harcourt Brace & Co., San Diego 1999, ISBN 0-15-600689-8 .
  • Owen Chase: The Fall of the Essex . Piper, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-492-23514-X .
  • Thomas Nickerson : The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats . The Nantucket (Massachusetts) Historical Society, Penguin Books, New York 1984, ISBN 0-14-043796-7 .
  • James Erskine Calder (1808–1882): contemporary article in the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury, June 7, 1873, Hobart , Tasmania .
  • Owen Chase: Days of horror and despair. Edited, translated and with an afterword by Michael Klein, Morio Verlag, Heidelberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-945424-71-1 .

Secondary literature

Movies

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ after Nathaniel Philbrick: In the heart of the sea. The Whaler's Last Voyage Essex . Karl Blessing Verlag , Munich 2000, ISBN 3-89667-093-X .
  2. ↑ Philip Bethge: Tears of Blood . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 2000, pp. 234-236 ( online ).
  3. ↑ arte to the film: The 300-year history of American whaling from its beginnings in the 17th century off the coasts of New England and Cape Cod through the golden age of deep-sea fishing to its decline in the decades after the Civil War is closely linked to the History of American Capitalism. The documentary illustrates this connection using the example of the story of the legendary whaling sailing ship “Essex”, which set sail in Nantucket in the summer of 1819. The fate of the "Essex" inspired the young Herman Melville to write a masterpiece of world literature: "Moby Dick".
  4. ↑ In the heart of the lake in the Internet Movie Database (English)