Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex

5. Telling the Story: The Authorship and Publication of Owen Chase's Narrative Herman Melville Accounts and Borrowings

Chapter Five TELLING THE STORY THE AUTHORSHIP AND PUBLICATION OF OWEN CHASE'S NARRATIVE No ONE doubts that the Narrative is Owen's story, but most would agree with Herman Melville that There seems no reason to suppose that Owen himself wrote the Narrative . It bears obvious tokens of having been written for him; but at the same time, its whole air plainly evinces that it was carefully & conscientiously written to Owen's dictation of the facts.-It is almost as good as tho' Owen wrote it himself.1 If Melville had seen the log of the Charles Carroll, he would have been sure that Owen did not do the actual writing of the Narrative. One may add that it would be safe to assume that no Nantucket whaling captain would be up to writing such a book. The question arises, then: Who was the ghostwriter? It had to be someone who was in Nantucket during the summer of 1821 and free to give the composition of the book enough time to have the whole text ready for the printer in the fall. Owen may well have organized his story and had notes prepared before the writing started; the month in Valparaiso (February 25-March 22) or the two and a half months of the homeward voyage (March 22-June 11) would have given him some time to do that. The most popular speculation among Nantucket historians conversant with Owen's story is that the ghostwriter was Samuel Haynes Jenks. The speculation does not rest on any solid evidence, but it has a certain amount of logic to commend it. Jenks was a 156 STOVE BY A WHALE writer with a special interest in whaling; he was some years later reported to be in the process of writing a history of Nantucket's whaling industry.2 He was conspicuously involved in Nantucket public affairs, and, perhaps most important, he was a journalist: he was the editor of Nantucket's first enduring newspaper, the Inquirer. But there are two considerations that weigh against crediting Jenks with the writing of the Narrative. The first is that the Inquirer began publication a week and a half after Owen Chase arrived home on the Eagle; these were busy days for Jenks, and it is questionable whether he would have had enough time for the book. A more serious objection to Jenks's authorship of the book rests on internal evidence: the more one reads ofJenks's known writings, the more alien to him the style of Owen Chase's Narrative comes to seem. Jenks is tolerable when he has a short piece of journalism to compose but, if allowed to go on for long, slips into a self-important and inflated rhetoric. That may be saying no more than that he was a typical journalist of his day, but it would be enough to disqualify him as ghost of Owen's Chase's Narrative, for the Narrative is too sensitive, imaginative, and timelessly literary to come from such a hand. There was someone in Nantucket who would pass the stylistic test and who was also a logical writer for someone in Owen's position to turn to. That was Jenks's father-in-law, William Coffin. Coffin was a businessman, barber, wigmaker, and, for a long term, Nantucket's first postmaster. Like several other prominent Nantucketers, he became an object of suspicion and hostility in the wake of the Nantucket bank robbery of June 20, 1795. This remarkable crime and its aftermath had a disastrously divisive effect on the island. As time went by and the crime was not solved, at least not to the point of effective prosecution, suspicion arose that the robbery was an inside job, and the spotlight of accusation moved from one citizen to another, leaving the island in a state like the hysterica passio in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. More than twenty years after the crime William Coffin wrote a pamphlet about it with a view toward exonerating himself and others and suggesting how the police work in the case should have been pursued. TELLING THE STORY 157 The pamphlet is A Narrative of the Robbery of the Nantucket Bank. .Compiled from Original Documents Collected by William Coffin and Albert Gardner, Esq's. and was published in Nantucket by Henry Clapp in 1816. Although Albert Gardner's name appears as collaborator, references in the pamphlet and...