Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex

Dedication

I don't know when I was first in that kitchen-it was more than forty years ago-and I must have seen the maple chest then, but children don 't pay attention to things like that. Children want to go out into the fields and find hedgerow blackberries and snakes. But my wife saw it the first time she was in the kitchen. "Oh," Irene Chase said, "that was Howard's great-grandfather's sea chest." "Sea chest?" I said, "-not Owen Chase's?" "No, it was Owen's brother's. " But that was enough; the vessel had been rubbed and the genie came out, hardly waiting to be asked to tell the following story, which therefore demands to be dedicated to the people of the chest-to Carol and to Howard and Irene Chase and to Isabell Chase Burnett. ...