44 pages • 1 hour read
Nathaniel PhilbrickIn the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Homecoming”
The crew of Chase’s boat, which included just three men, arrived in Chile on February 25, 1821. Due to local unrest, their story did not make a large stir. Fortunately for the men, there was a US ship in port, the Constellation, that agree to take them on board. After three months of starvation, the men found that they recovered very slowly and with great pain.
A little over a week after their own rescue and to their great delight, the men received word that their shipmates had been discovered as well—another whaleship, the Hero, brought news that the Dauphin had recovered Pollard and Ramsdell. They were found barely clinging to life and delirious, but they survived. On March 23, the captain of the Nantucket whaleship Eagle offered the men passage home; all but Pollard, who was judged to be too unwell, made the journey. Additionally, a rescue mission departed for the island the men had stopped at in search of Chappel, Weeks, and Wright. They had survived and were rescued on April 9. The members of the crew who remained unaccounted for were those in the third boat: Hendricks, West, and Bond. The boat had vanished, and they were presumed dead.
Back in Nantucket, the community had no reason for concern for quite some time, having heard no news of the demise of the Essex. They ultimately heard the tale in a letter that was sent to town after the men themselves had told their tale while convalescing in South America. Unfortunately, “the letter contained an incomplete account of the disaster” (198), so the town assumed all but Pollard and Ramsdell had died. The arrival of the others shocked them: “[S]tanding alongside Ramsdell was not George Pollard; instead, there were three ghosts—Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson. Tears of sorrow were soon succeeded by amazement and then tears of joy” (198).
Two months passed, and Pollard arrived in Nantucket as well. While the community accepted him back with open arms, Nancy Coffin—the mother of young Owen Coffin—refused to be in his presence. For his part, Pollard continued to recover and was soon offered the captaincy of the ship that had born him home. Chase began to write a book recounting their disaster, working with William Coffin, Jr., a local man who had been educated at Harvard.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Consequences”
Pollard accepted the captaincy of the ship Two Brothers but ended up grounding the ship on a coral reef off the coast of Hawaii. Fortunately, the crew was able to board the nearby ship Martha and was evacuated to the island of Oahu. As Pollard predicted, his whaling career came to an end: “He had become a Jonah—a twice-doomed captain whom no one dared give a third chance” (210). Pollard became the Nantucket night watchman, living out the rest of his days in peace. Chase would continue to sail on whaling ships, getting rich as both first mate and eventually captain, but he suffered terrible personal hardships over the next two decades, losing two wives to illness and divorcing his third wife for infidelity.
The other survivors of the Essex returned to sea as well, serving on ships in various capacities. Eventually, however, Nantucket ceased to be as key to the whaling industry as it had been, eclipsed by the nearby town of New Bedford, whose larger port allowed easier access for the much larger new ships. In 1846, a large fire broke out in the middle of town, burning down close to a third of the buildings; this fire proved one of the final nails in the coffin, and 40 years after the Essex disaster, Nantucket would see its last whaling ship leave port.
In the end, Nantucket was likely responsible for the capture and extraction of close to a quarter of a million sperm whales between the years of 1804 and 1876. As the years went on, the sperm whale population seemed to many to become more aggressive: “Like the whale that had attacked the Essex, an increasing number of sperm whales were fighting back” (224). Chase grew old, experiencing debilitating headaches, and was eventually seen as ill-advised. Benjamin Lawrence died in 1879, donating a piece of string that he had salvaged from the Essex to the local museum.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
The eventual rescue of the survivors of the Essex was a true testament to The Endurance of the Human Spirit. Chase and the remains of his crew had managed to navigate thousands of miles of open ocean, nearly reaching their intended destination. Pollard and Ramsdell had also been recovered, though they came “the closest to complete psychic disintegration” (193). What drove Pollard to the brink seems to have been the loss of Owen Coffin, his younger cousin, over whose execution he had presided and whose body he had participated in consuming. While he would recover physically, he would never be able to be in the presence of his aunt again, as she (understandably) could not bear to see him. Though Chase apparently recovered at the time, going on to have a successful whaling career, the events of his old age suggest that the ordeal never fully left him; in his final years, he began hiding food in his attic. Nevertheless, the men were generally welcomed back into society; both Pollard and Chase would eventually receive captaincies.
Numerous literary works would eventually draw on the sensational and horrific details of the Essex and the fate of its crew. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, would make use of “the more ghoulish aspects of Chase’s account in his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (219). Most famous, of course, is the tale of Moby-Dick, written by former sailor Herman Melville, who made “the most enduring use of the whaleship’s story” (219). There are indications that those closer to home narrativized the events of the wreck in their own way; for some whalers, Philbrick notes, it was “tempting to read into Chase’s post-Essex career an Ahab-like quest for revenge” (214). The need to make sense of the tragedy was one the men themselves shared, with Chase almost immediately writing his account of what had occurred during the fateful voyage. The nature of 19th-century communication likely made the events all the more mysterious (and therefore all the more susceptible to embellishment). The people of Nantucket only discovered what had happened once the surviving crewmembers were already en route back home. What’s more, their initial information had been wrong, telling of how the only men to survive had been Pollard and Ramsdell. Thus, the others arrived in Nantucket as “three ghosts” come back from the dead (198).
Philbrick concludes his own account of the Essex where it began: with a consideration of The Dependence of Nantucket on the Whaling Industry. The framing suggests a parallel between the fate of the Essex and that of Nantucket, which was likewise dependent on the vagaries of nature in a way it did not fully appreciate. Nantucket whalers continued to travel to the waters that they themselves had “depleted” after other whaling grounds opened up. Philbrick even notes that the fire that leveled so much of the town must have burned faster and more devastatingly due to the immense quantities of sperm oil warehoused in Nantucket. Like the Essex, Philbrick implies, Nantucket was destroyed by what it hunted.
Related Titles
By Nathaniel Philbrick
