Writings
Owen Chace & Moby Dick
by Jeffrey Chace
In 1819, the Whaling Ship Essex set sail from Nantucket Island for what was expected to be a two and a half year journey to the whaling areas of the south Pacific where an abundance of the most prized prey, the sperm whale, could be found. It is difficult for us to imagine today just how far this journey really was at that time in history when there were no automobiles, no airplanes, no motor driven ships and just the wind to carry you along. From the Atlantic Coast of New England, the Essex sailed south along the coastline of North America, continued through the Caribbean to the coast of South America along Venezuela, Suriname, Guiana, Brazil, Uruguay, reached Argentina and then finally Cape Horn, one of the most notoriously treacherous stretches of water in the world. Then, the ship had to round the Horn, and sail up along the coast of Chile, stopping one last time for supplies and to send letters home, and then out into the open ocean for up to two years or until the ship was full of whale oil and blubber.
The Essex was captained by George Pollard and the First Mate was Owen Chase. Pollard had just been made captain and this journey was his first in command of a ship. Owen was a Quaker by birth and was about 23 years old when the Essex set sail, and was a far more experienced whaler than Pollard. Owen was born in December of 1797 on Nantucket Island and was the son of Judah Chase and Phoebe Meader. Judah was the great-great-great-great Grandson of William Chase, the immigrant from England to America in 1630, the first of the family in the New World. Owen's family had a long seafaring history and the number of Chases associated with whaling was immense. All four of Owen's brothers who survived to adulthood, and Owen himself, would eventually become Whaling Captains.
In November of 1819, while hunting in the Pacific, the Essex came upon a pod of sperm whales and began preparations for acquiring them. They ended up angering a enormous male who proceeded to attack the Essex by swimming full-speed toward it and striking the ship with his head. The whale did this twice and the Essex was mortally wounded and began to sink. Twenty men including Chase and Pollard scrambled to grab what little provisions they could, and escaped the sinking craft in three of the small hunting boats. One of these was under the command of Owen Chase, another was led by Pollard. As the Essex submerged and plunged into the depths, the men were lost in the open ocean over 2000 miles from the coast of Chile, and about as far away from land as it is possible to be.
So began their harrowing journey of survival. With only jury-rigged sails on boats that were intended to be paddled out to harpoon whales, when the wind flagged, the boats merely drifted along at the mercy of the currents. Perhaps inevitably as the men weakened from the pittance of food they consumed as the provisions were severely rationed, the boats got separated. In his boat, Owen Chase did his best to manage their supplies, making their food last longer through discipline, and his men fared a bit better than in the other two boats. However, they eventually ran out of food and water entirely, and men in all of the boats began to die of hunger. At first the sailors buried their dead at sea. But, as the situation became even more desperate after they ran out of food, the inevitable occurred as they began to eat the bodies of their dead shipmates.
In Captain Pollard's boat, the situation deteriorated to where they didn't even wait for men to die. At one point, they drew straws to determine who would be killed and eaten so that the others could survive. The first unlucky lot fell to Pollard's young cousin, the perhaps appropriately named seventeen-year-old Owen Coffin. Pollard had promised his aunt he would look after her son during the voyage. Seeing his young cousin draw the short straw, Pollard was horrified and vowed that he would shoot every man on the boat rather than allow them to kill young Coffin and eat him. Yet his cousin replied that there was not much chance he was going to survive anyway and that this fate seemed just as good as another, so, with Coffin's permission, they shot him and then proceeded to consume his flesh.
By the time that the 95th day adrift at sea had arrived on 5 April 1821, only 8 men from the 20 crewmembers were still alive to be rescued. They were found that day by the whaling ship Dauphin and most of the survivors were nearly dead. Owen Chase was still alive, and eventually made it back to Nantucket. He wrote and published an account of his harrowing adventure that same year, entitled Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Poor Captain Pollard arrived back in Nantucket with the unsavory duty of revealing to his Aunt that they had killed and eaten her son.
Well, Owen lived to sail another day, and became a whaling captain in his own right, sailing back out to the Pacific which had been the vast scene of his terrible ordeal. He married four times and had children by three of his wives. Peggy Gardner, his first wife, gave birth to three children, the youngest of which was William Henry Chase, born 14 September 1824. William, like his father, grew up to work the whaling ships of Nantucket and, like his father, found himself hunting for whales in the Pacific as a young man.
On 23 July 1841, two whaling ships, the Lima and the Acushnet, met up with each other not far from where the Essex had sunk nearly 21 years before. Because of the length of time that ships during this era would be at sea hunting whales, when ships would sight each other they would approach to engage in what was called a "gam" or essentially a social engagement that involved eating, drinking, swapping stories and perhaps, because so many of the ships were from the two small communities of Nantucket Island and New Bedford, Massachusetts, there might be letters to or from back home which could be exchanged.
Onboard the Lima was Owen Chase's son, William Henry Chase. Onboard the Acushnet was Herman Melville, aspiring writer who would soon author the greatest American novel, Moby Dick. Herman relates in his notes from the writing of Moby Dick how he met William, the son of Owen Chase during this gam, and that William leant him a copy of his father's Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Melville said of his opportunity to read the Narrative, "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me." It was upon this, Owen Chase's own real life story, that Melville based his epic masterpiece, Moby Dick, ten years later.
As homage to this inspiration, in the first part of Moby Dick, entitled "Extracts (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)," Melville relates various historical references to whales including Genesis, Job, the story of Jonah, Hamlet, Pilgrims Progress, and the following:
"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been stove by a whale."
"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821.
Interestingly, Melville always referred to Owen Chase with the spelling Chace for some reason. And, indeed, nearly every person in America who spells their last name Chace is a descendant of the original immigrant of 1630, William Chase.
One side note: Without the story of Owen Chase and the ill-fated Essex there would be no Starbucks Coffee Company flung far and wide around the world as we know it today. It would probably exist, but would instead be named "Joe's" or "Larry's" or something else less iconic. Why? Because Starbucks is named after the character "Starbuck" in Moby Dick who was the first mate of the Pequod, a fictionalization of Owen Chase and the Essex. So, actually, you could make the case that Starbucks is indirectly named after Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex! As Starbucks own website puts it, the name was "inspired by Moby Dick."
https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information
If you want to read a fascinating, fantastic account of Owen Chase and the Essex, pick up In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. Outstanding reading and well worth your time. And, Ron Howard's Hollywoodization of the book isn't half-bad either.