Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex

Preface

PREFACE In 1819 a Nantucket whaleship put to sea for a voyage from which it never returned. Almost two years later a handful of its officers and crew set foot again on Nantucket with a story that would distinguish their Essex from the countless other whaling ships that had gone to the bottom of the world's wide oceans. For something had happened to the Essex that had never happened to any ship before: it had been attacked and sunk by a whale. The story of the Essex belongs especially to its first mate, Owen Chase, who became the historian of the disaster. Within a few months of the Essex survivors' return to Nantucket, a New York publisher brought out a thin volume under Owen Chase's name that told the story of the Essex and its crew. Herman Melville tells us how he came to read the book. The Acushnet, on which Melville had sailed from Fairhaven on his first whaling voyage, had gammed an unidentified Nantucket ship: In the forecastle I made the acquaintance of a fine lad of sixteen or thereabouts, a son of Owen Chace. I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; and when I left his ship to return again the next morning (for the two vessels were to sail in company for a few days) he went to his chest & handed me a complete copy ... of the Narrative. This was the first printed account of it I had ever seen, ... The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me.l When Melville turned to the writing of Moby-Dick, the little book that William Henry Chase had lent him at sea was to provide the ending of the novel. In chapter 45 of Moby-Dick Melville again spoke of Owen Chase and quoted from Owen's book some passages that are awesome enough in themselves but become more awesome in Melville's eerily reverential reference to them. xu PREFACE Other authors learned the story and borrowed it. McGuffey's readers made the tale familiar to generations of school children, and popular writers on the sea have continued to recount accurate and inaccurate versions of the story.2 From some familiar and many new sources the story of Owen Chase and the Essex has been collected in the book that follows. At the appropriate point in the book the teller will become Owen Chase himself: his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex is a vivid and compelling account into which not a touch of quaintness has crept in a century and a half. It is the indispensable document on the Essex. This study is indebted to so many people that I could not dedicate a page apiece to them. My very first thanks go to Owen Chase's collateral descendants, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Chase, Aurora, New York, and Mrs. Isabell Chase Burnett, Ithaca, New York. I would not even have started on this book without the documents, information , and encouragement they lent to the undertaking. Owen Chase's great-great-granddaughters, Isabelle and Margaret Tice, were also most kind and helpful. Then come the Nantucketers: my debt to Edouard Stackpole, Louise Hussey, Helen Winslow, and Andre Aubuchon, accumulated over many long weeks spent in the Peter Foulger Museum, is massive. From the descendants of the English captain who rescued three of the Essex survivors from Henderson Island I have received the most generous and painstaking attention to all inquiries: the Honourable E. P. T. Raine, C. B. E., E.D., his aunt Margaret Fane De Salis, and his brother Maxwell Raine. At the National Archives I have had the help of many of the staff, of whom I must mention Kenneth Hall, Gibson Smith, William F. Sherman, James Harwood, and Terry Matchette; at the Library of Congress I am indebted to John McDonough, Manuscript Historian , and to the staff of the Manuscript Division. I also thank Wilson Heflin; Louise Coulson; Charles Paddack, M.D.; Charlotte Giffin King; Douglass Fonda; Eugenio Pereira Salas; Patricia Reynolds, La Trobe Librarian, the State Library of Victoria; Suzanne Mourot, Mitchell Librarian, the State Library of New South Wales; D. Troy, Acting Senior Archivist of the Archives PREFACE xiii Authority of New South Wales; Robert Langdon of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau; Irene Moran, University of California...