Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex

3. Ne Cede Malis

Chapter Three NE CEDE MALIS CoU L D I T have been otherwise? Is there any way that the survivors , who stayed alive for a month, could have stayed alive to the end? Yes, if they had had better luck or if they had known what we know today about the Pacific. Chance could have brought them into contact with any of a number of ships in the area, the names of some of which are known. Three Nantucket ships were not far away-the Governor Strong, the Thomas, and the Globe, the same Globe which three years later was to be the stage of the bloodiest mutiny in the history of the American whaling industry. Also in the area were the Balaena, the Persia, and the Golconda of New Bedford and the English ship Coquette of London.1 Some of these ships may even have been spoken by the Essex shortly before the whale's attack. But luck of this kind was long in abeyance. If we spread our modern maps of the Pacific before us and call upon a century and a half of information gained by Pacific island explorers, we will have no end of good suggestions for the Essex survivors. But the Essex is not sinking today, and what was known of the Pacific in 1820 is considerably less than what is knownoften even by the layman-today. We see at a glance that the nearest land to the site of the Essex disaster was Clipperton Island (10° Njl09° W), but winds and currents would have been against the Essex boats if they had tried to reach it; moreover, that obscure guano island was probably unknown to the people of the Essex. The Marquesas were the next nearest bits of land, and after them some islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago like Puka-Puka, Fakaina, and Tatakoto. These were 78 STOVE BY A WHALE ominous names to seamen in 1820, however, and even today we cannot say that their fears were altogether unjustified. The Marquesas have been especially well studied, for it was in the harbor of Nukahiva of the Marquesas that Herman Melville, twenty-two years after the sinking of the Essex, jumped ship and set out to live among the natives. Melville had been out a year and a half on his first whaling voyage when he deserted; his sojourn among the Marquesans gave him the material for his first novel, Typee. The climactic action of the novel is that of the narrator's escape from the clutches of the natives after he discovered that his friendly hosts had been cherishing him not out of hospitality but out of animal husbandry and that he was destined to become a succulent bit of "long pig." Naturally the Melville scholar wants to know how autobiographical this part of the story is. Charles Roberts Anderson, who has collected important sources on the question of Marquesan cannibalism, says after an extensive survey of the evidence , "There is no authenticated instance on recQrd of human flesh being eaten as a delicacy, according to my discoveries, nor any reliable record of a white man being eaten by Polynesians for any reason whatever; finally, I have not been able to find a single unequivocal eyewitness account of a Marquesan eating the flesh of even a native enemy slain in battle, though in all likelihood this custom did exist at one time."2 The threat of just plain murder is another matter, of course, and this was real enough in the islands.3 Still, the odds were against meeting a violent death at anyone's hands in the Marquesas , the Tuamotus, or the Society Islands; the fears of the men of the Essex were exaggerated but not really irrational. After these islands the nearest land would have been the coast of Mexico near Manzanillo, and then the Galapagos, but here, too, winds and currents would have been unfavorable, at least for a direct course. The survivors actually did consider the Sandwich Islands but were put off, Owen Chase tells us, by the thought of hurricanes. That is probably true, but, one may add, Hawaii and the other islands in the group were great unknowns to Nantucketers . At the time the Essex left its home port no American whaler had ever visited the Sandwich Islands; the Equator and the Balaena, the first two to touch at Hawaii, arrived there September NE CEDE...