February 9, 2023 • 45 mins
Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when his whaling vessel, the Essex, met with disaster. As the hapless crew struggled (and largely failed) to survive their horrific time at sea, they encountered starvation, madness, exposure and some fates arguably worse than death. In the second part of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max explore the harrowing, doomed journey of the Essex -- and how the tale later inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece, Moby Dick.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Yah.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. Let's give it up
for the Man, the myth Legend our super producer, Mr
Max Williams. I'm Ben Noel. We uh we had a
reference in part one of our series on the inspiration
behind Moby Dick to whaling songs, and I was thinking,
(00:50):
I listened to one We're on a quick break here,
and uh, I gotta say, man, I just love him.
I love a good chanty. Well it's like, oh, you
mean way saling songs or whale songs? Whaling songs and
whale songs, some good shanty. Remember that moment cea shanties
was big. I missed it entirely. I only heard about
(01:12):
it like second hand. I did not participate in that
internet moment one iota. Do you guys know the story
of Stan Hugill regaleless. It's been one I've been wanted
to tell. I want to do an ephemeral episode about him,
but the problem is it's so hard to find enough
information about it. But he was known by a lot
of people. It's like the last shanty man. He lived too,
(01:33):
like the ninety nineties, but he had served on like
long see expeditions look at the nineteen thirties and what
he kind of like the force I to do is
sit down, right down all the shanties that were singing,
because a lot of that was his oral history. So
a lot of the shanties we have today are attributed
to him. Interesting. Yeah, I'm just I'm I'm looking in
(01:54):
a cursory biography right now. Wow, the twentieth century guardian
of the shanty tradition. Yeah, maybe we should, maybe we
should look into stand and scratch our shanty itch. I'm
actually working on a tune with a friend of the show,
Rowan Newby Um working on the record with him, and
it's a very c shanty escue's done cool, and it's
(02:19):
one that makes you want to take your elbow and
fist and just wiggle it back with like a mug
of some sort. I guess that's what that represents it. Yeah, Yeah,
and we are going to talk. Uh, We're gonna talk
about the other side of the equation in the world
changing novel Moby Dick and Moby Dick. If you've ever
(02:42):
been forced to read into high school, or if you
ever took a class on Melville, you'll know that he
wrote plenty of other stuff. But Moby Dick is far
and away his his magnum opus, and it is about
so many things as symbol as on so many levels
with Captain ahabs monomaniacal search for the white Whale. In
(03:07):
part one, we learned that Moby Dick is based on
the tragic story of a real life well named Mocha Dick.
But as we're gonna learn today, the story of the
crew is also very much inspired by the real life
or deals of cruise on whaling ships, especially one in particular,
(03:32):
the Essex and uh, the the the the Essex did
not have a good time. So and you know, and
these were this is a hard life in generals. I
mean a lot of these folks didn't have a good time. There.
There were diseases, There were you know, squalls and all
(03:53):
of that stuff, and horrible conditions that would lead to
a very tenuous existence, not to mention giant creatures that
you were trying to kill that would also maybe try
to kill you back. And Moby Dick, the novel by Melville,
definitely took that tack in terms of Captain Ahab, who
had had his I believe leg amputated because of an
(04:16):
encounter with moby Dick, And so it was a Hab
seeking revenge on the whale, so almost like justified. But
then also, I haven't read the book in a long time,
and Ben, I believe you read it recently. The mania
that accompanies the search for revenge is also a big
part of the story, so it's not like a Hab
is justified per se in his quest to kill the whale. Yeah, exactly.
(04:40):
So whaling ships are working ships at this time, meaning
that you know, they only really make money if they
successfully kill and process a whale. And you're absolutely right
about Ahab's leg. So moby Dick, on a previous voice,
has bitten off one of Ahab's legs and now he
(05:03):
wears a prosthetic leg made out of whalebone. And the
the hapless crew of the pick Quad the ship ends
up not just going on a whaling mission, but going
like being led by this madman to hunt suicide mission
this yeah, this specific whale and they and it takes
(05:27):
a long time to get there. But when Ahab finally
cites moby Dick again, he goes absolutely crazy and suicide
mission is an appropriate way to say it. It's Shakespearean
in the level of of drama here, and the members
of the crew gradually kind of realized that that's part
(05:48):
of it too. You know, call me Ishmael, the perspective character,
you know, who's like narrating the book. You start to
realize there's something off with this Ahab fellow, that we're
not actually on our run of the mill whaling expedition.
We're on a potential encounter with death. I mean the
white whale. You know. People use that as a metaphor
(06:09):
all the time for the thing that you can never
attain or the thing that you're like chasing after. But
in the book, I think it kind of represents death.
It represents death, it represents God, represents nature, it's it
represents almost every important, implacable thing. And there's there's really
now my college professor's dam is coming back. Uh, there's
(06:33):
a really there's an interesting thing that's almost a I
think a blink in you miss it kind of aspect
of Ahab's life for a lot of first time readers,
which is Ahab has insanity in his family. It runs
through his family. His mother has intense mental issues and
she's widowed. H and she names she names her Sunday
(06:58):
have she dies when he's well. And the name Ahab
means uh father's brother. It comes from Hebrew anyway, So
Ahab as this Chab was a king of Israel, if
I'm not mistaken, right, Yeah, he has this um he
he has this whole wild backstory that involves uh cannibalism
(07:23):
and involves strange almost love crafty and adventures in the
deep before Lovecraft is really you know, on the scene.
So where does this all come from? Does it come
all come from the brilliant mind of Herman Melville? Yes,
but he didn't he didn't make all these details up
(07:45):
the Essex as far as Melville knows, Uh. Their trouble
on this this real life ship begins in mid August,
August fourteenth of eighteen nineteen, just two days after they
leave Nantucket. There. Now, when you go out on a
whaling voyage, you're looking at a long term commitment. This
this stretch, this mission is supposed to last two and
(08:09):
a half years, right, I mean it was the equivalent
of space travel back then. Yeah, Yeah, that's a perfect comparison.
And the ship is pretty big, it's eighty seven ft long.
But just two days after they leave, they get hit
by a squall that destroys one of their sales. The
(08:30):
top gallant sail nearly sinks the boat, which is a
lot like um, it's similar to like, uh, spraining your
ankle when you're about six yards into the marathon. They
have so much a move, not a good move at all,
but they have so much money invested in this stuff
(08:50):
that they soldier on and they continue. They make it
to Cape Horn about five weeks later. There's a crew
of one tea men and when they get to South America,
they find the waters around the area are nearly fished out, depleted.
So they say, okay, we're going to sail out to
(09:13):
the middle of nowhere. We're going to sail all the
way to the South Pacific, very far from any terrestrial shores.
We're gonna anchor at Charles Island in the Galapagos. And
when they anchor there, this is gonna be very unpleasant
for a lot of fellow animal lovers in the crowd. Today.
(09:34):
They you know, they weren't concerned about biodiversity or anything
like that at this time, so they collect sixty one
pound tortoises, and uh, these guys are still you know,
any time you're hanging out with a bunch of dudes,
doesn't matter the age, you get up to hijinks. Because
we're we we were fooling right, right, were prankish sort
(09:59):
And as prank one of the crew members sets a
fire on the island, even though it's a the dry season.
The fire spreads all these men who are under the
command of one Captain Pollard. All of them escape, but
just barely. They have to literally run through flames, and
a day after, after a full day of sailing, they
(10:22):
can still see smoke from this burning island on the horizon.
So they absolutely wrecked the place. This also, by the way,
wasn't that far removed from Charles Darwin's expedition to the
Galapagos on the Beagle, I think is what it was called,
(10:44):
the little ship that he used. That was in eighteen
thirty six. So like we were gonna we were about
to get an explosion of knowledge about these types of
creatures and their origins, you know, But but this wasn't
This was pre Darwin, so there definitely wasn't the same. Again,
I just I mentioned that in the last episode, the
(11:05):
same level of understanding of these types of creatures. Yeah, yeah,
well said not at all, Like these are not scientists,
these are working mariners. And the captain is a smart guy.
He is furious. He's saying, oh, you think you're you're funny,
you set fire to an entire island. In the picture
(11:27):
Captain Pollard strolling back and forth, marching on the deck
of the ship, and he's saying, I swear vengeance if
I find out which one of you started that fire.
And then it seems like a pretty bone headed move,
even just you know, minus any scientific understanding of like
(11:48):
ecosystems and all that just kind of stupid in terms
of like, these are your potential resources that you could
used for survival and you're just gonna like set it
all on fire. What a dumb dumb That sounds like
someone trying to sabotage the mission. Frankly, Yeah, you know what,
it's it's so incompetent that you have to wonder whether
(12:08):
there was malice involved. If you fast forward, just as
a side note, years and years later, you'll see that
Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland and to this
very day. That fire, that prank is believed to have
been the primary cause of the extinction of two different
(12:29):
types of animal, the Floriana tortoise and the florian a
mocking bird, all because some guy thought he was funny
and isn't that interesting? Um. Charles Darwin, we also talked
about on Ridiculous History, was a big fan of eating
all of the animals that he cataloged, So it's almost
like he didn't fully understand the concept of extinction either,
(12:51):
even though he was doing things that would lead to
help us understand that. He was kind of blissfully ignorant
of it at the time when he did his like
big work. Yeah, yeah, and this is you know, if
you talked to the average I guess European um, European
American back in that day, they biodiversity would have been
(13:12):
somewhat of a foreign concept to them. They would say,
what do you mean, look around, there are animals everywhere.
You're being weird. You're a weird dude. Over on stuff
to blow your mind. They just did a series on
the galopicos reptiles, and they talk about the turtles, of course,
and part of Darwin's writing he talks about trying to
ride the turtles. So I just want to throw that
(13:34):
in here to point out yeah that yeah exactly, and
this is um So people are still learning a lot,
but they're coming into these new for them environments with
very specific sets of aims. They're not here to learn
about the world. They're here to make a buck, right
(13:56):
and to find a precious resource in their respective economies. Still,
they sold drawn. It's November of eighty They've had a
pretty prosperous voyage. There are thousands of miles from land.
They're sending out whale boats that have successfully harpooned whales
(14:18):
and uh, they're being dragged along in what the what
was popularly called a Nantucket sleigh ride. Because you're you're dragged,
you're literally dragging the corpse of the whale behind you.
This is where we introduce a kid named owen Chase.
Owen Chase is the first mate. He's twenty three years old.
(14:38):
He stayed about aboard the mothership, the Essex to make
repairs while Captain Pollard goes whaling. And this kid, owen Chase,
is the first to spot a huge whale. He thinks
it's eighty five ft in length. And again for comparison,
the Essex is what seven feet or so? Right, Yeah,
(15:02):
there evenly matched if if if not in favor of
the whale in terms of size. So then he sees
this whale in the distance, being chill, just doing its thing.
Its head is facing in the direction of the ship.
It spouts out of its blowhole, you know, around three times,
and then starts making a B line or a W
(15:24):
line you know, for the ship. Yeah, and the phrase
they use is uh coming for us with great celerity.
Celerity is just a fancy word for speed. So it's
going from zero to a hundred real quick and smashes
head on into the ship. It gives them like a
moment in the Star trek Bridge where all the actors
(15:48):
throw themselves around, but this is real life. There's not
a sound stage. Then the whale passes beneath the Essex
and starts thrashing in the water. And oh, and Chase
recalls and again this is something he's talking about later,
so we don't know how much he's embellishing this, but
(16:08):
he says, I could distinctly see the whale smite his
jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury and
then the whale guys are so say style disappears, which
somehow is even scarier. It's super scary. And I think
I've mentioned, maybe not on this show, but on stuff
that I want you to know that I often have
(16:29):
nightmares where I'm floating in a vast sea and there
is some unseen, massive creature, you know, beneath the waters.
And I know that that whales are gentle and that
they wouldn't typically like come for me if I wasn't,
you know, poking at them or something. But with the scale,
there was nothing that nothing, no poke that I could
possibly poke that would you know, exacerbate something of that magnitude.
(16:53):
But the massiveness, the unseen nous of a huge thing
freaks me out. And um, the Jordan Peel film Nope
does a really good job of flipping that from like
the Jaws underwater fear to like the sky and you
have this creature and the Nope that hides kind of
(17:14):
in plain sight but also in the sky. And I
thought that was a really brilliant touch to that film.
Is so great. Yeah, such a fan boy for Jordan
Peel in my head. He can do no wrong. Yes,
so this this thing is crazy right, They've got this
crazy situation out of nowhere in their minds. They get blasted,
But keep in mind, whales are very intelligent, and this
(17:36):
whale has sat there and watched them do those nantucket
sleigh rides across the open ocean. So sleigh l a
y just so yeah and so so oh n. Chase
Uh is with the rest of the crew trying to
fix the hole in the ship that's left over. They're
(17:58):
trying to pump out the water, and then one guy,
one guy says, oh, here he is. He's making for
us again. And then Chase turns and he sees the
whale who's going so fast that his head is half
out of the water. He's coming even faster with greater celerity.
He hits the bow of the ship directly and then
(18:18):
disappears for good. And the water is filling filling the
ship so quickly that the crew makes the decision game time.
They call the audible and say, oh, this is this
is beyond our means to fix. Maybe, so they get
all their boats that they would use for whaling turn
into lifeboats. They fill them with navigational instruments, get as
(18:40):
much bread and most importantly water as they can aboard
before the Essex turns on its side. Meanwhile, our boy,
Captain Pollard is off on a whaling ship and he
sees this in a distance. He comes back and the
Essex is ruined. So he asked this twenty three year old.
(19:01):
He goes, my god, Mr Chase, what is the matter,
to which Mr Chase answered, we have been stove by
a whale. Oh stove. I don't know that one, y'all. Yeah,
stove as a in this sense means like smashed through,
(19:24):
like like smashed inward. God, I just I just don't.
I can't think of any analog to that word that use. Yeah,
it's it's it's kind of specific. It's like um, in
a really in a really violent action film, if someone
punches somebody in the stern um enough that you hear
the crack and it goes in, then they have stove
(19:47):
their chest caved in their chest. There, we have been
stove by a whale. Uh and at this point's they well?
Have they? So? Are they already on their lifeboats at
this point? And they haven't count turn the captain or yes? Yes,
because because the ship is wrecked, like they're yeah, and
and we you mentioned those provisions they brought along and
(20:08):
at this point there they've also been wrecked because they've
been soaked with salt water. And I can't remember who
said this, it was some great poet I thing. But
the idea of water, water everywhere, and not a drop
to drink because you're in this you know, vast body
of water, it's such cruel irony. Um. But it's water
that you can't drink. It's not potable water, yeah, exactly,
(20:32):
And that's maddening. And as you know, if you're in
a survival situation, you can go much longer without food
than you can't without water. You will die within days. Uh.
So this is a terrible, terrible situation. It's like in
a sitcom where the parents leave and they come back
and the house is burning down. But again it's real life.
(20:53):
Uh and borderline trigger warning here. We're about to get
into some think about the worst possible way this story
could go, and it's probably gonna go there, and we've
teased it a little bit. But if you don't want
to hear about humanity and its absolute Nader, maybe skip
ahead five minutes. And that's Nader in a d I R.
(21:15):
The opposite of Apex the lowest possible point. Not Ralph Nader,
but it would be funny to see what he said here. Anyway,
Ralph is not in the game yet. Uh this there's
another boat, another whaling boat that comes pie as well.
They come back to their ship that like no longer exists,
and they have no and Chase, the first mate, is thinking,
(21:38):
these guys have no idea how bad things are and
how much worse they're about to get. The crew, which
again is only twenty men, is at first unwilling to
leave the Essex. They just can't process that the ship
is on the way out. Paulard does what captains are
supposed to do, maintain calm, make decisions, maintain command, and
(22:03):
he tries to come up with a plan. So he
does some quick, very desperate math. He's thinking, all right,
we got three boats. Yeah, we've got three boats left.
We've got twenty people. The closest land is gonna be
the Society Islands and the Marquesas Islands, so let's set
off for them. But this is where things start to
(22:26):
go even further off the rails. The first mate, oh,
and Chase and the crew say, Captain, we can't go there.
We've all heard the stories. Those islands are full of cannibals.
They'll eat us. Our best chance to survive is gonna
be to sail south. Now, look, it will take us
a lot longer to get to land, we understand that.
(22:48):
But we might catch the trade winds, or maybe another
whaling ship will catch us. According to Nathaniel Philbrick in
his book Heart of the Sea, the Tragedy of the
well Ship Essex spoiler, we're not to the tragedy yet.
There was a film based on that book because it
was called in the Heart of the Sea, and it
was it looked it had a Chris Hemsworth in it,
(23:12):
played thour. I think it's not it's a Moby dick
esque story, but it's not Moby Dick. But it's called
I believe in the Heart of the Sea. I have
to assume that it's based on this this work here,
and you must be right. And I you know, I
eat these stories up, I love them, but I would
never want to experience what we're about to get into.
Please do take that earlier disclaimers seriously. Only Captain Pollard
(23:36):
seems to understand the danger of not trying to get
to the closest land mass, and he still, I guess,
in a moment of weakness a sense, and says, all right, okay,
we'll try to go south. Then I see, you guys
are scared of cannibals. And he probably did some even
more desperate math if we're being honest, and he said,
(23:57):
look in times like this, and I still really a captain,
only nominally, I'm one man among twenty. And this is
how mutinies go down, right, No doubt things could turn
against him real quick if he doesn't play his cards right,
you know. Yeah, And so here's the other thing that
the author of In the Heart of the Sea noted
(24:17):
noted here, uh, rumors of cannibalism about those islands were
all over the place. But the truth is people have
been visiting them all the time without incident, not even
being attacked, much less eaten. Anyway, they don't know this,
they don't have access to this information. So they leave
the Essex behind. And the three boats they have are
(24:40):
twenty ft long each, So that's still pretty crowded if
you think of twenty men and all the supplies twenty
men would need. It's terrible, Like you said, Nold, salt
Water has saturated the bread, and so as these guys
are eating the bread, they're getting increasingly dehydrated. There's no shade,
there's an nothing to protect them from the sun. Pollard's boat,
(25:03):
in particular, is attacked by a killer whale, and again
not not like a killer whale like moby Dick, an
actual species called the smaller, sleeker black ones. Yeah, cooler
looking to their like the anime looking hesitations. Yeah. Orcas
they get they get attacked by an orca, and it's
(25:24):
very much not the situation you see at Sea World. Uh,
Sea World is also bad. Check out that documentary. Yeah, Blackfish.
So they do eventually spot land about two weeks later,
and again they're very desperate there to hydrated. There they
have the worst sun burns you could imagine heat stroke.
You name it. It's called Henderson Island. But Henderson Island
(25:48):
is like a pile of rocks, and so that it
doesn't really help them. I mean it's like a rest stop.
I guess it's a it's a place to stand while
you p But after but after another week, they start
to run out of supplies. As they're sailing on, three
of the crew say, look, we know this is not
(26:09):
the best land, but we would rather take our chances
on land than climb back into a boat. Ever again,
we're done sailing this is bs. Boats are dead to me.
And we start getting into the territory of like some
Looney Tunes cartoons where like I think, bugs Bunny gets
marooned on a desert island and there I think, I
(26:29):
can't remember who it is, but somebody starts hallucinating and
seeing the other person as like a roasted chicken or like,
you know, it's it's a it's a trope. It's been
done a million times, but it's based on real stuff.
And if you go back and watch a lot of
those early Looney Tunes cartoons, there's some gnarly stuff in
those that are kind of based on more like literary
sources of the time, for sure. And we mentioned earlier
(26:53):
that they were steering clear of these islands for fear
of cannibals, but oh, irony, sweet irony, they ended up
becoming cannibals themselves. By around mid December, they've been at
sea for weeks, more water being taken on by the boats,
(27:15):
more creepy ocean predators menacing them in the night, and
by January, their their supplies had completely run out. One
person went mad, and this is what I was kind
of describing with the Looney tunes. They stood up and
he said, I demand a dinner, napkin and water, like
(27:35):
as though he was, you know, not restaurants right exactly,
and then apparently started convulsing and passed away. The next morning,
Chase wrote, of this humanity must shudder at the dreadful
recital of what was next to come, because they used
(27:56):
this fallen comrade as means of sustinance. Yeah, they tried.
They took apart his body, and they tried their best
to be respectful. They were not completely heartless. Yet they
took out his organs and they sewed up. They sewed
(28:20):
up his remains as best they could, and then they
gave him a burial at sea, and they ate this
unfortunate sailors organs over the neck. Just the next week,
three more people died and were eaten. In turn. One
boat disappeared of the three, and then the other two
boats lost sight of each other. On both of the
(28:43):
boats that we still know about, the men became too weak,
not just to move, but too weak to talk to
each other, and the folks on Captain Pollard's boat. There
were four of them left. They said, look, if we
don't have more food, then we're going to die. And
so on February six, eight twenty one, one of the
(29:06):
four people on the boat, a teenager named Charles Ramstall,
brought forth the the terrible suggestion that has become a
trope in literature. He said, let's draw straws to determine
who we have to eat next. Gets the short straw
that's rough stuff, and the crew agreed. I mean, it's really,
(29:29):
at this point the most civilized thing to do alrights
nominative determinism, because the short straws drawn by a guy
named Owen Coffin, who is the first cousin of the captain,
and Pollard has specifically promised the boy's mom that he
would look out for him, and he said he says
(29:52):
to him, look, if you don't like your lot, I
will shoot the first man that touches you. And then,
according to the story, well again we don't know how
much this true. Pollard even offers to step in and
volunteers tribute to take owen Coffin's place jus and Owen
Coffin refuses he says, well, you know, essentially says fair
(30:15):
is fair, and they have a second lottery. This lottery
is for the is to determine who has to shoot
the teenager Owen Coffin, and then Ramsdall, the kid who
proposed a lot shoot, He draws the short straw this
time and he shoots Owen Coffin and they consume him.
(30:39):
This is very very dark stuff. And they're at sea
for almost three months exactly for eighty nine days, and
the last three men on the other boat, on Chase's boat,
the first mate's boat, they see a sail in the
distance and they managed to make contact with an English
ship called the Indian. They are rescued. Things are not
(31:04):
going so well on Pollard's boat. There are three hundred
miles away just drifting at this point, and there are
only two men left, Charles Ramstall, who is now a murderer,
and Captain Pollard, who is now accountable. There's a really
great um entry into the Love, Death and Robots series,
but I think was directed by David Fincher. It's it's
(31:25):
all you know, c g I, and it's beautifully done,
but it's like a maritime kind of horror show. Where uh, I,
I don't want to give anything away. You should definitely
watch it. It'since the second season, but there's a drawing
of lots kind of situation and where we're like people
have to essentially there's like this creature that they have
in the hold of the ship and they have to
start like sacrificing crew members to the creature. And there's
(31:49):
it's very I mean, obviously all of this stuff is
you know, inspiration for any number of maritime tropes that
we you know, know about in literature, in fiction. And
we're going to skip some of the uh, we're gonna
skip over some of the grizzlier details. What happens on
Pollard's boat at this point, ridiculous historians, you might be thinking,
(32:11):
what could be grizzlier? Trust us, it gets worse. Uh
So you're on homework if you wish. But we're gonna
just we're gonna move to the rescue. Yeah, this is
this is the line for us. Uh. Eventually, about a
week after Chase and the folks on his boat have
been rescued, crew member aboard an American ship, the Dolphin
(32:35):
spots Pollard's boat and these guys are so out of
it actively hallucinating on the edge of death. They don't celebrate.
What they do is try to hide the evidence of
their cannibalism. And like you would, you know, reasonably uh.
And then so out of this crew of twenty, there
(32:56):
are five men who survive, if you can call the
depravity they had to experience being something that makes you
a survivor. They get reunited and Valpariso, and eventually they
sell back to Nantucket. Pollard has recovered enough to meet
(33:16):
other whaling captains for dinner. He tells them the entire story.
One of the captains goes back to his room after
dinner writes everything down, and years years later, the third
boat is discovered at a place called Doocey Island or
d u c i e. There are three skeletons aboard
(33:40):
um and what happened to the three men on Henderson Island.
Weirdly enough, they survived. They didn't have an easy time,
but they didn't have to eat each other. After four
months of living on shellfish and bird eggs, an Australian
ship happened by and rescued them. And the weird thing
is people didn't really judge them too harshly. For cannibalism.
(34:06):
They called it a custom of the sea. Yeah, for sure.
And I mean that's, I think, honestly, the about the
most empathetic way to proceed. I can't imagine judging someone
for just wanting to survive and accusing them of being
some sort of inhuman monster, you know, when they just
did whatever they could to survive. I forget the name
(34:28):
of the story, Ben, you might remember as a Stephen
King short story about a doctor who's like marooned on
a like a like a raft and he um, he
cuts his own flesh and eats himself yea, simply, you know,
I mean, you gotta do what you're gonna do, or
you're gonna lay down and die. And you know, typically
(34:48):
when faced with these kinds of adversities, humans don't really
do that. They persevere and figure out a way, a
path forward. Yeah, yeah, I do remember that. That's a
terrifying story about auto cannibalism. There. Auto cannibalism, the lightest
version of it would be like kids who eat their
boogers or people who chew their fingernails. But really, yeah, yeah,
(35:10):
but nowhere near on the level of this. So most
of these guys are kind of forgiven, people are exercising
empathy and saying, who are we to judge? What would
we do if we were in that situation and we
knew we wanted to survive all of them except for
Captain Pollard, because Captain Pollard committed the ancient sin of
(35:36):
consuming a family member. He had eaten his own cousin.
One one scholar and this is a ghoulish term. Uh.
One scholar called this gastronomic incest. I know, right, gross,
and we're already talking about gross stuff. But dang, I
had to talking about adding insult to injury, right I know.
And you know the scholar must have been so please
(35:59):
proud of that. I am so clever. Yeah, no, man,
that was a bridge too far, dude, No thumbs down
from the ridiculous History crew. But of course Owen Coffin's
mother cannot stand to be around her her relative, because again,
back then, they would have had other superstitions about did
(36:21):
you like absorb his soul? You know that it would
have been things like that at play and and thinking
about this, you know, I mean, it's a since so
deep that there's not really a specific word for it,
you know, And this a nomination would be the closest or,
like you know, harresy. Yeah, and so h how does
(36:41):
Melville come into this? Uh? The Pollard spends the rest
of his life in Nantucket. He dies, Uh, he dies there,
and according to the story, once a year on the
anniversary of the Essex wreck, he would lock himself in
a room and apparently fast in honor of his lost crewmen.
Which is that's it is tragic? Well, I mean it's
(37:02):
it's it's it's sad because this would have haunted this
person for the rest of their life. Oh yeah, how
do you forgive yourself again? In these times where religion
and all of these things run so deep, how could
you forgive yourself for doing that? And how could you
even call it living? You know what I mean? Right
(37:23):
like you said earlier, you know, at a certain point,
you're gonna do what you're gonna do, because that's why
the human animal is sort of designed, but then separated
from that and put back into you know, gen pop.
That stuff's gonna follow you, you know, and your your
days and your nights. But Melville did briefly encounter Pollard, yes,
(37:45):
but but not like in any kind of serious way.
It was more like in passing, right, Yeah. Yeah, And
so in July eighteen fifty two, Melville travels via steamship
steamer to Nantucket and he's kind of a tourist. He
meets local dignitaries, he gets a look at the actual,
(38:09):
you know, this place that he's been writing about, because
remember this is the year after Movie Dick publishes. Uh,
and he only I thought this was research initially, so
he'd only imagined this stuff. But he was aware of
these stories and on his various famous before he wrote
Movie Dick. He wrote things before Moby Dick like TYPEE
(38:31):
or type which I had read. It's a it's a
story about getting stranded on an island. I think he
wrote some some poems as well. He wrote some romance adventures.
He was dappling in Various Dick was his big break. Essentially,
he made him a household name, right. Yeah, but well
after his death, people, that's how it usually goes in there. Yeah,
(38:54):
people weren't people weren't impressed. And so, yeah, Melville wrote
a little bit about Pollard in Moby Deck or like
you know, specifically with regard to the event of the
whale seeking his ship. So he had a little bit
of historical you know, realism built in there as sort
of like to set the tone right in the context, Yeah, exactly,
(39:15):
to ground it in real events and make the story
of Ahabs seem more real and on the on his
very last day in this visit to Nantucket, he meets
Captain George Pollard, and Pollard now is a is a broken,
wretched shell of a sixty year old man. He was
only twenty nine years old when the Essex went down.
(39:37):
He actually after after the Essex briefly he captained a
second whaling ship, was called the Two Brothers, and two
years into his career on that ship it wrecked on
a coral reef. And now he was called a jonah,
meaning he was unlucky to see no owner ever would
let him aboard one of their ships and not be
(40:00):
as of incompetence because of his superstition. Right, well no,
but literally they were like, no, you're you're you're bad news.
Your vibes are gonna throw our whole because, I mean,
we know that that maritime history revolves so much around
a superstition and uh, making sure that you've got the
right socks on and things. I mean, I'm sort of
(40:20):
joking but like it was a big thing, you know,
because you were venturing into the unknown. So there were
these kind of like talisman's or you know, like ideals
that would would hopefully protect you, and you wouldn't want
to be around anyone that was seen as like bad luck.
Right when faced with forces beyond your understanding or control,
you want to do everything you can to tilt the
(40:42):
odds in your favor. So that's why those maritime superstitions
continue today. If you've got any friends in uh, in
a navy anywhere in the world, or in the merchant marines,
they'll tell you the same people take that stuff seriously.
And uh, like you said, he didn't. Melville didn't have
an in depth soul searching hang out with Pollard. He said,
(41:04):
we just exchanged some words. That's literally how he refers
to it. And to Melville, we know that he saw
Pollard as a tragic hero. Dare I say somewhat like
Captain Ahab. He wasn't gonna he wasn't gonna push him,
you know, And that's honestly you got to respect that
because today in the age of true crime and like
(41:28):
getting you know, like plumbing the depths of people's misery.
You would have journalists like knocking down this guy's door
to get him to relive those horrors. And uh, Melville,
who you know was a successful author, you'd think might
be one of those people. But no, he said to
the islanders, he was a nobody. To me, the most
(41:49):
impressive man though, holy, unassuming, even humble that I ever encountered.
And maybe that's where we leave the story today. Thank
you so much for venturing with us on this tale
of tragedy on the high seas. Uh. This is history
that may sound ridiculous and larger than life here in three,
(42:12):
but we have to remember again these were sort of
the astronauts of their time. And with that we want
to think, Uh, our fearless navigator, Mr Max Williams, Uh
I was on the runner at all times, our research associate,
doctor Zach, and oh so many other people that we
(42:34):
we promised to do our best. Never to eat exactly, Ben,
I pledge right now that don't say some some sort
of maroon. I keep saying maroon because I think it's
fun to say. Situation. Um, y'all can eat me first. No, no,
y'all eating me first. I'm not eating y'all. Well, what
you guys me first. You know what, what you guys
(42:57):
are forgetting is rabbit starvation. This is where the honor
party messed up by the check out this stuff they want,
you know, episode and cannibalism. Most times, when people do
decide to break that taboo, they've already been starving for
so long that there's very little nutritional content in the beating.
So we need to make the decision early early. I
(43:18):
got it, I got it. Ben eat both of us
so you can go on and tell our tale. Oh well,
you're the best writer. It's terrible though. We're we are
a package deal, gentleman. Uh, we're gonna figure something each other.
Then at the same time, well, we could just take
(43:38):
turns cutting little pieces. Oh god, this has gotten really
it's time to cut. If we're not dead, we we
have to just take turns. You know. You get a
little flank from me, Yeah, yeah, jeez, Okay, well how
about this. Let's just let's keep this these lessons in mind,
(44:00):
and let's make sure that wherever we go there's plenty
of food, you know. I yeah, oh yeah, wait, no
problem solved. Yeah. Thanks to Jonathan for volunteering his tribute.
Thanks Alex Williams, thanks us, Jeff Toe, what a ride,
and and of course Noel, thank you so much. Man.
(44:21):
I know that we're like behind the behind the scenes folks. Um,
we've all had really busy weeks. I am kind of
off off the grid a bit, but we are. We're
making uh, we're making these shows happen because we love it.
We couldn't do it without you, fellow ridiculous historians and Noel,
I certainly couldn't do anything like this show without you,
(44:44):
my friend, Same me, hearty, same. Let's see you next time, folks.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Yah.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. Let's give it up
for the Man, the myth Legend our super producer, Mr
Max Williams. I'm Ben Noel. We uh we had a
reference in part one of our series on the inspiration
behind Moby Dick to whaling songs, and I was thinking,
(00:50):
I listened to one We're on a quick break here,
and uh, I gotta say, man, I just love him.
I love a good chanty. Well it's like, oh, you
mean way saling songs or whale songs? Whaling songs and
whale songs, some good shanty. Remember that moment cea shanties
was big. I missed it entirely. I only heard about
(01:12):
it like second hand. I did not participate in that
internet moment one iota. Do you guys know the story
of Stan Hugill regaleless. It's been one I've been wanted
to tell. I want to do an ephemeral episode about him,
but the problem is it's so hard to find enough
information about it. But he was known by a lot
of people. It's like the last shanty man. He lived too,
(01:33):
like the ninety nineties, but he had served on like
long see expeditions look at the nineteen thirties and what
he kind of like the force I to do is
sit down, right down all the shanties that were singing,
because a lot of that was his oral history. So
a lot of the shanties we have today are attributed
to him. Interesting. Yeah, I'm just I'm I'm looking in
(01:54):
a cursory biography right now. Wow, the twentieth century guardian
of the shanty tradition. Yeah, maybe we should, maybe we
should look into stand and scratch our shanty itch. I'm
actually working on a tune with a friend of the show,
Rowan Newby Um working on the record with him, and
it's a very c shanty escue's done cool, and it's
(02:19):
one that makes you want to take your elbow and
fist and just wiggle it back with like a mug
of some sort. I guess that's what that represents it. Yeah, Yeah,
and we are going to talk. Uh, We're gonna talk
about the other side of the equation in the world
changing novel Moby Dick and Moby Dick. If you've ever
(02:42):
been forced to read into high school, or if you
ever took a class on Melville, you'll know that he
wrote plenty of other stuff. But Moby Dick is far
and away his his magnum opus, and it is about
so many things as symbol as on so many levels
with Captain ahabs monomaniacal search for the white Whale. In
(03:07):
part one, we learned that Moby Dick is based on
the tragic story of a real life well named Mocha Dick.
But as we're gonna learn today, the story of the
crew is also very much inspired by the real life
or deals of cruise on whaling ships, especially one in particular,
(03:32):
the Essex and uh, the the the the Essex did
not have a good time. So and you know, and
these were this is a hard life in generals. I
mean a lot of these folks didn't have a good time. There.
There were diseases, There were you know, squalls and all
(03:53):
of that stuff, and horrible conditions that would lead to
a very tenuous existence, not to mention giant creatures that
you were trying to kill that would also maybe try
to kill you back. And Moby Dick, the novel by Melville,
definitely took that tack in terms of Captain Ahab, who
had had his I believe leg amputated because of an
(04:16):
encounter with moby Dick, And so it was a Hab
seeking revenge on the whale, so almost like justified. But
then also, I haven't read the book in a long time,
and Ben, I believe you read it recently. The mania
that accompanies the search for revenge is also a big
part of the story, so it's not like a Hab
is justified per se in his quest to kill the whale. Yeah, exactly.
(04:40):
So whaling ships are working ships at this time, meaning
that you know, they only really make money if they
successfully kill and process a whale. And you're absolutely right
about Ahab's leg. So moby Dick, on a previous voice,
has bitten off one of Ahab's legs and now he
(05:03):
wears a prosthetic leg made out of whalebone. And the
the hapless crew of the pick Quad the ship ends
up not just going on a whaling mission, but going
like being led by this madman to hunt suicide mission
this yeah, this specific whale and they and it takes
(05:27):
a long time to get there. But when Ahab finally
cites moby Dick again, he goes absolutely crazy and suicide
mission is an appropriate way to say it. It's Shakespearean
in the level of of drama here, and the members
of the crew gradually kind of realized that that's part
(05:48):
of it too. You know, call me Ishmael, the perspective character,
you know, who's like narrating the book. You start to
realize there's something off with this Ahab fellow, that we're
not actually on our run of the mill whaling expedition.
We're on a potential encounter with death. I mean the
white whale. You know. People use that as a metaphor
(06:09):
all the time for the thing that you can never
attain or the thing that you're like chasing after. But
in the book, I think it kind of represents death.
It represents death, it represents God, represents nature, it's it
represents almost every important, implacable thing. And there's there's really
now my college professor's dam is coming back. Uh, there's
(06:33):
a really there's an interesting thing that's almost a I
think a blink in you miss it kind of aspect
of Ahab's life for a lot of first time readers,
which is Ahab has insanity in his family. It runs
through his family. His mother has intense mental issues and
she's widowed. H and she names she names her Sunday
(06:58):
have she dies when he's well. And the name Ahab
means uh father's brother. It comes from Hebrew anyway, So
Ahab as this Chab was a king of Israel, if
I'm not mistaken, right, Yeah, he has this um he
he has this whole wild backstory that involves uh cannibalism
(07:23):
and involves strange almost love crafty and adventures in the
deep before Lovecraft is really you know, on the scene.
So where does this all come from? Does it come
all come from the brilliant mind of Herman Melville? Yes,
but he didn't he didn't make all these details up
(07:45):
the Essex as far as Melville knows, Uh. Their trouble
on this this real life ship begins in mid August,
August fourteenth of eighteen nineteen, just two days after they
leave Nantucket. There. Now, when you go out on a
whaling voyage, you're looking at a long term commitment. This
this stretch, this mission is supposed to last two and
(08:09):
a half years, right, I mean it was the equivalent
of space travel back then. Yeah, Yeah, that's a perfect comparison.
And the ship is pretty big, it's eighty seven ft long.
But just two days after they leave, they get hit
by a squall that destroys one of their sales. The
(08:30):
top gallant sail nearly sinks the boat, which is a
lot like um, it's similar to like, uh, spraining your
ankle when you're about six yards into the marathon. They
have so much a move, not a good move at all,
but they have so much money invested in this stuff
(08:50):
that they soldier on and they continue. They make it
to Cape Horn about five weeks later. There's a crew
of one tea men and when they get to South America,
they find the waters around the area are nearly fished out, depleted.
So they say, okay, we're going to sail out to
(09:13):
the middle of nowhere. We're going to sail all the
way to the South Pacific, very far from any terrestrial shores.
We're gonna anchor at Charles Island in the Galapagos. And
when they anchor there, this is gonna be very unpleasant
for a lot of fellow animal lovers in the crowd. Today.
(09:34):
They you know, they weren't concerned about biodiversity or anything
like that at this time, so they collect sixty one
pound tortoises, and uh, these guys are still you know,
any time you're hanging out with a bunch of dudes,
doesn't matter the age, you get up to hijinks. Because
we're we we were fooling right, right, were prankish sort
(09:59):
And as prank one of the crew members sets a
fire on the island, even though it's a the dry season.
The fire spreads all these men who are under the
command of one Captain Pollard. All of them escape, but
just barely. They have to literally run through flames, and
a day after, after a full day of sailing, they
(10:22):
can still see smoke from this burning island on the horizon.
So they absolutely wrecked the place. This also, by the way,
wasn't that far removed from Charles Darwin's expedition to the
Galapagos on the Beagle, I think is what it was called,
(10:44):
the little ship that he used. That was in eighteen
thirty six. So like we were gonna we were about
to get an explosion of knowledge about these types of
creatures and their origins, you know, But but this wasn't
This was pre Darwin, so there definitely wasn't the same. Again,
I just I mentioned that in the last episode, the
(11:05):
same level of understanding of these types of creatures. Yeah, yeah,
well said not at all, Like these are not scientists,
these are working mariners. And the captain is a smart guy.
He is furious. He's saying, oh, you think you're you're funny,
you set fire to an entire island. In the picture
(11:27):
Captain Pollard strolling back and forth, marching on the deck
of the ship, and he's saying, I swear vengeance if
I find out which one of you started that fire.
And then it seems like a pretty bone headed move,
even just you know, minus any scientific understanding of like
(11:48):
ecosystems and all that just kind of stupid in terms
of like, these are your potential resources that you could
used for survival and you're just gonna like set it
all on fire. What a dumb dumb That sounds like
someone trying to sabotage the mission. Frankly, Yeah, you know what,
it's it's so incompetent that you have to wonder whether
(12:08):
there was malice involved. If you fast forward, just as
a side note, years and years later, you'll see that
Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland and to this
very day. That fire, that prank is believed to have
been the primary cause of the extinction of two different
(12:29):
types of animal, the Floriana tortoise and the florian a
mocking bird, all because some guy thought he was funny
and isn't that interesting? Um. Charles Darwin, we also talked
about on Ridiculous History, was a big fan of eating
all of the animals that he cataloged, So it's almost
like he didn't fully understand the concept of extinction either,
(12:51):
even though he was doing things that would lead to
help us understand that. He was kind of blissfully ignorant
of it at the time when he did his like
big work. Yeah, yeah, and this is you know, if
you talked to the average I guess European um, European
American back in that day, they biodiversity would have been
(13:12):
somewhat of a foreign concept to them. They would say,
what do you mean, look around, there are animals everywhere.
You're being weird. You're a weird dude. Over on stuff
to blow your mind. They just did a series on
the galopicos reptiles, and they talk about the turtles, of course,
and part of Darwin's writing he talks about trying to
ride the turtles. So I just want to throw that
(13:34):
in here to point out yeah that yeah exactly, and
this is um So people are still learning a lot,
but they're coming into these new for them environments with
very specific sets of aims. They're not here to learn
about the world. They're here to make a buck, right
(13:56):
and to find a precious resource in their respective economies. Still,
they sold drawn. It's November of eighty They've had a
pretty prosperous voyage. There are thousands of miles from land.
They're sending out whale boats that have successfully harpooned whales
(14:18):
and uh, they're being dragged along in what the what
was popularly called a Nantucket sleigh ride. Because you're you're dragged,
you're literally dragging the corpse of the whale behind you.
This is where we introduce a kid named owen Chase.
Owen Chase is the first mate. He's twenty three years old.
(14:38):
He stayed about aboard the mothership, the Essex to make
repairs while Captain Pollard goes whaling. And this kid, owen Chase,
is the first to spot a huge whale. He thinks
it's eighty five ft in length. And again for comparison,
the Essex is what seven feet or so? Right, Yeah,
(15:02):
there evenly matched if if if not in favor of
the whale in terms of size. So then he sees
this whale in the distance, being chill, just doing its thing.
Its head is facing in the direction of the ship.
It spouts out of its blowhole, you know, around three times,
and then starts making a B line or a W
(15:24):
line you know, for the ship. Yeah, and the phrase
they use is uh coming for us with great celerity.
Celerity is just a fancy word for speed. So it's
going from zero to a hundred real quick and smashes
head on into the ship. It gives them like a
moment in the Star trek Bridge where all the actors
(15:48):
throw themselves around, but this is real life. There's not
a sound stage. Then the whale passes beneath the Essex
and starts thrashing in the water. And oh, and Chase
recalls and again this is something he's talking about later,
so we don't know how much he's embellishing this, but
(16:08):
he says, I could distinctly see the whale smite his
jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury and
then the whale guys are so say style disappears, which
somehow is even scarier. It's super scary. And I think
I've mentioned, maybe not on this show, but on stuff
that I want you to know that I often have
(16:29):
nightmares where I'm floating in a vast sea and there
is some unseen, massive creature, you know, beneath the waters.
And I know that that whales are gentle and that
they wouldn't typically like come for me if I wasn't,
you know, poking at them or something. But with the scale,
there was nothing that nothing, no poke that I could
possibly poke that would you know, exacerbate something of that magnitude.
(16:53):
But the massiveness, the unseen nous of a huge thing
freaks me out. And um, the Jordan Peel film Nope
does a really good job of flipping that from like
the Jaws underwater fear to like the sky and you
have this creature and the Nope that hides kind of
(17:14):
in plain sight but also in the sky. And I
thought that was a really brilliant touch to that film.
Is so great. Yeah, such a fan boy for Jordan
Peel in my head. He can do no wrong. Yes,
so this this thing is crazy right, They've got this
crazy situation out of nowhere in their minds. They get blasted,
But keep in mind, whales are very intelligent, and this
(17:36):
whale has sat there and watched them do those nantucket
sleigh rides across the open ocean. So sleigh l a
y just so yeah and so so oh n. Chase
Uh is with the rest of the crew trying to
fix the hole in the ship that's left over. They're
(17:58):
trying to pump out the water, and then one guy,
one guy says, oh, here he is. He's making for
us again. And then Chase turns and he sees the
whale who's going so fast that his head is half
out of the water. He's coming even faster with greater celerity.
He hits the bow of the ship directly and then
(18:18):
disappears for good. And the water is filling filling the
ship so quickly that the crew makes the decision game time.
They call the audible and say, oh, this is this
is beyond our means to fix. Maybe, so they get
all their boats that they would use for whaling turn
into lifeboats. They fill them with navigational instruments, get as
(18:40):
much bread and most importantly water as they can aboard
before the Essex turns on its side. Meanwhile, our boy,
Captain Pollard is off on a whaling ship and he
sees this in a distance. He comes back and the
Essex is ruined. So he asked this twenty three year old.
(19:01):
He goes, my god, Mr Chase, what is the matter,
to which Mr Chase answered, we have been stove by
a whale. Oh stove. I don't know that one, y'all. Yeah,
stove as a in this sense means like smashed through,
(19:24):
like like smashed inward. God, I just I just don't.
I can't think of any analog to that word that use. Yeah,
it's it's it's kind of specific. It's like um, in
a really in a really violent action film, if someone
punches somebody in the stern um enough that you hear
the crack and it goes in, then they have stove
(19:47):
their chest caved in their chest. There, we have been
stove by a whale. Uh and at this point's they well?
Have they? So? Are they already on their lifeboats at
this point? And they haven't count turn the captain or yes? Yes,
because because the ship is wrecked, like they're yeah, and
and we you mentioned those provisions they brought along and
(20:08):
at this point there they've also been wrecked because they've
been soaked with salt water. And I can't remember who
said this, it was some great poet I thing. But
the idea of water, water everywhere, and not a drop
to drink because you're in this you know, vast body
of water, it's such cruel irony. Um. But it's water
that you can't drink. It's not potable water, yeah, exactly,
(20:32):
And that's maddening. And as you know, if you're in
a survival situation, you can go much longer without food
than you can't without water. You will die within days. Uh.
So this is a terrible, terrible situation. It's like in
a sitcom where the parents leave and they come back
and the house is burning down. But again it's real life.
(20:53):
Uh and borderline trigger warning here. We're about to get
into some think about the worst possible way this story
could go, and it's probably gonna go there, and we've
teased it a little bit. But if you don't want
to hear about humanity and its absolute Nader, maybe skip
ahead five minutes. And that's Nader in a d I R.
(21:15):
The opposite of Apex the lowest possible point. Not Ralph Nader,
but it would be funny to see what he said here. Anyway,
Ralph is not in the game yet. Uh this there's
another boat, another whaling boat that comes pie as well.
They come back to their ship that like no longer exists,
and they have no and Chase, the first mate, is thinking,
(21:38):
these guys have no idea how bad things are and
how much worse they're about to get. The crew, which
again is only twenty men, is at first unwilling to
leave the Essex. They just can't process that the ship
is on the way out. Paulard does what captains are
supposed to do, maintain calm, make decisions, maintain command, and
(22:03):
he tries to come up with a plan. So he
does some quick, very desperate math. He's thinking, all right,
we got three boats. Yeah, we've got three boats left.
We've got twenty people. The closest land is gonna be
the Society Islands and the Marquesas Islands, so let's set
off for them. But this is where things start to
(22:26):
go even further off the rails. The first mate, oh,
and Chase and the crew say, Captain, we can't go there.
We've all heard the stories. Those islands are full of cannibals.
They'll eat us. Our best chance to survive is gonna
be to sail south. Now, look, it will take us
a lot longer to get to land, we understand that.
(22:48):
But we might catch the trade winds, or maybe another
whaling ship will catch us. According to Nathaniel Philbrick in
his book Heart of the Sea, the Tragedy of the
well Ship Essex spoiler, we're not to the tragedy yet.
There was a film based on that book because it
was called in the Heart of the Sea, and it
was it looked it had a Chris Hemsworth in it,
(23:12):
played thour. I think it's not it's a Moby dick
esque story, but it's not Moby Dick. But it's called
I believe in the Heart of the Sea. I have
to assume that it's based on this this work here,
and you must be right. And I you know, I
eat these stories up, I love them, but I would
never want to experience what we're about to get into.
Please do take that earlier disclaimers seriously. Only Captain Pollard
(23:36):
seems to understand the danger of not trying to get
to the closest land mass, and he still, I guess,
in a moment of weakness a sense, and says, all right, okay,
we'll try to go south. Then I see, you guys
are scared of cannibals. And he probably did some even
more desperate math if we're being honest, and he said,
(23:57):
look in times like this, and I still really a captain,
only nominally, I'm one man among twenty. And this is
how mutinies go down, right, No doubt things could turn
against him real quick if he doesn't play his cards right,
you know. Yeah, And so here's the other thing that
the author of In the Heart of the Sea noted
(24:17):
noted here, uh, rumors of cannibalism about those islands were
all over the place. But the truth is people have
been visiting them all the time without incident, not even
being attacked, much less eaten. Anyway, they don't know this,
they don't have access to this information. So they leave
the Essex behind. And the three boats they have are
(24:40):
twenty ft long each, So that's still pretty crowded if
you think of twenty men and all the supplies twenty
men would need. It's terrible, Like you said, Nold, salt
Water has saturated the bread, and so as these guys
are eating the bread, they're getting increasingly dehydrated. There's no shade,
there's an nothing to protect them from the sun. Pollard's boat,
(25:03):
in particular, is attacked by a killer whale, and again
not not like a killer whale like moby Dick, an
actual species called the smaller, sleeker black ones. Yeah, cooler
looking to their like the anime looking hesitations. Yeah. Orcas
they get they get attacked by an orca, and it's
(25:24):
very much not the situation you see at Sea World. Uh,
Sea World is also bad. Check out that documentary. Yeah, Blackfish.
So they do eventually spot land about two weeks later,
and again they're very desperate there to hydrated. There they
have the worst sun burns you could imagine heat stroke.
You name it. It's called Henderson Island. But Henderson Island
(25:48):
is like a pile of rocks, and so that it
doesn't really help them. I mean it's like a rest stop.
I guess it's a it's a place to stand while
you p But after but after another week, they start
to run out of supplies. As they're sailing on, three
of the crew say, look, we know this is not
(26:09):
the best land, but we would rather take our chances
on land than climb back into a boat. Ever again,
we're done sailing this is bs. Boats are dead to me.
And we start getting into the territory of like some
Looney Tunes cartoons where like I think, bugs Bunny gets
marooned on a desert island and there I think, I
(26:29):
can't remember who it is, but somebody starts hallucinating and
seeing the other person as like a roasted chicken or like,
you know, it's it's a it's a trope. It's been
done a million times, but it's based on real stuff.
And if you go back and watch a lot of
those early Looney Tunes cartoons, there's some gnarly stuff in
those that are kind of based on more like literary
sources of the time, for sure. And we mentioned earlier
(26:53):
that they were steering clear of these islands for fear
of cannibals, but oh, irony, sweet irony, they ended up
becoming cannibals themselves. By around mid December, they've been at
sea for weeks, more water being taken on by the boats,
(27:15):
more creepy ocean predators menacing them in the night, and
by January, their their supplies had completely run out. One
person went mad, and this is what I was kind
of describing with the Looney tunes. They stood up and
he said, I demand a dinner, napkin and water, like
(27:35):
as though he was, you know, not restaurants right exactly,
and then apparently started convulsing and passed away. The next morning,
Chase wrote, of this humanity must shudder at the dreadful
recital of what was next to come, because they used
(27:56):
this fallen comrade as means of sustinance. Yeah, they tried.
They took apart his body, and they tried their best
to be respectful. They were not completely heartless. Yet they
took out his organs and they sewed up. They sewed
(28:20):
up his remains as best they could, and then they
gave him a burial at sea, and they ate this
unfortunate sailors organs over the neck. Just the next week,
three more people died and were eaten. In turn. One
boat disappeared of the three, and then the other two
boats lost sight of each other. On both of the
(28:43):
boats that we still know about, the men became too weak,
not just to move, but too weak to talk to
each other, and the folks on Captain Pollard's boat. There
were four of them left. They said, look, if we
don't have more food, then we're going to die. And
so on February six, eight twenty one, one of the
(29:06):
four people on the boat, a teenager named Charles Ramstall,
brought forth the the terrible suggestion that has become a
trope in literature. He said, let's draw straws to determine
who we have to eat next. Gets the short straw
that's rough stuff, and the crew agreed. I mean, it's really,
(29:29):
at this point the most civilized thing to do alrights
nominative determinism, because the short straws drawn by a guy
named Owen Coffin, who is the first cousin of the captain,
and Pollard has specifically promised the boy's mom that he
would look out for him, and he said he says
(29:52):
to him, look, if you don't like your lot, I
will shoot the first man that touches you. And then,
according to the story, well again we don't know how
much this true. Pollard even offers to step in and
volunteers tribute to take owen Coffin's place jus and Owen
Coffin refuses he says, well, you know, essentially says fair
(30:15):
is fair, and they have a second lottery. This lottery
is for the is to determine who has to shoot
the teenager Owen Coffin, and then Ramsdall, the kid who
proposed a lot shoot, He draws the short straw this
time and he shoots Owen Coffin and they consume him.
(30:39):
This is very very dark stuff. And they're at sea
for almost three months exactly for eighty nine days, and
the last three men on the other boat, on Chase's boat,
the first mate's boat, they see a sail in the
distance and they managed to make contact with an English
ship called the Indian. They are rescued. Things are not
(31:04):
going so well on Pollard's boat. There are three hundred
miles away just drifting at this point, and there are
only two men left, Charles Ramstall, who is now a murderer,
and Captain Pollard, who is now accountable. There's a really
great um entry into the Love, Death and Robots series,
but I think was directed by David Fincher. It's it's
(31:25):
all you know, c g I, and it's beautifully done,
but it's like a maritime kind of horror show. Where uh, I,
I don't want to give anything away. You should definitely
watch it. It'since the second season, but there's a drawing
of lots kind of situation and where we're like people
have to essentially there's like this creature that they have
in the hold of the ship and they have to
start like sacrificing crew members to the creature. And there's
(31:49):
it's very I mean, obviously all of this stuff is
you know, inspiration for any number of maritime tropes that
we you know, know about in literature, in fiction. And
we're going to skip some of the uh, we're gonna
skip over some of the grizzlier details. What happens on
Pollard's boat at this point, ridiculous historians, you might be thinking,
(32:11):
what could be grizzlier? Trust us, it gets worse. Uh
So you're on homework if you wish. But we're gonna
just we're gonna move to the rescue. Yeah, this is
this is the line for us. Uh. Eventually, about a
week after Chase and the folks on his boat have
been rescued, crew member aboard an American ship, the Dolphin
(32:35):
spots Pollard's boat and these guys are so out of
it actively hallucinating on the edge of death. They don't celebrate.
What they do is try to hide the evidence of
their cannibalism. And like you would, you know, reasonably uh.
And then so out of this crew of twenty, there
(32:56):
are five men who survive, if you can call the
depravity they had to experience being something that makes you
a survivor. They get reunited and Valpariso, and eventually they
sell back to Nantucket. Pollard has recovered enough to meet
(33:16):
other whaling captains for dinner. He tells them the entire story.
One of the captains goes back to his room after
dinner writes everything down, and years years later, the third
boat is discovered at a place called Doocey Island or
d u c i e. There are three skeletons aboard
(33:40):
um and what happened to the three men on Henderson Island.
Weirdly enough, they survived. They didn't have an easy time,
but they didn't have to eat each other. After four
months of living on shellfish and bird eggs, an Australian
ship happened by and rescued them. And the weird thing
is people didn't really judge them too harshly. For cannibalism.
(34:06):
They called it a custom of the sea. Yeah, for sure.
And I mean that's, I think, honestly, the about the
most empathetic way to proceed. I can't imagine judging someone
for just wanting to survive and accusing them of being
some sort of inhuman monster, you know, when they just
did whatever they could to survive. I forget the name
(34:28):
of the story, Ben, you might remember as a Stephen
King short story about a doctor who's like marooned on
a like a like a raft and he um, he
cuts his own flesh and eats himself yea, simply, you know,
I mean, you gotta do what you're gonna do, or
you're gonna lay down and die. And you know, typically
(34:48):
when faced with these kinds of adversities, humans don't really
do that. They persevere and figure out a way, a
path forward. Yeah, yeah, I do remember that. That's a
terrifying story about auto cannibalism. There. Auto cannibalism, the lightest
version of it would be like kids who eat their
boogers or people who chew their fingernails. But really, yeah, yeah,
(35:10):
but nowhere near on the level of this. So most
of these guys are kind of forgiven, people are exercising
empathy and saying, who are we to judge? What would
we do if we were in that situation and we
knew we wanted to survive all of them except for
Captain Pollard, because Captain Pollard committed the ancient sin of
(35:36):
consuming a family member. He had eaten his own cousin.
One one scholar and this is a ghoulish term. Uh.
One scholar called this gastronomic incest. I know, right, gross,
and we're already talking about gross stuff. But dang, I
had to talking about adding insult to injury, right I know.
And you know the scholar must have been so please
(35:59):
proud of that. I am so clever. Yeah, no, man,
that was a bridge too far, dude, No thumbs down
from the ridiculous History crew. But of course Owen Coffin's
mother cannot stand to be around her her relative, because again,
back then, they would have had other superstitions about did
(36:21):
you like absorb his soul? You know that it would
have been things like that at play and and thinking
about this, you know, I mean, it's a since so
deep that there's not really a specific word for it,
you know, And this a nomination would be the closest or,
like you know, harresy. Yeah, and so h how does
(36:41):
Melville come into this? Uh? The Pollard spends the rest
of his life in Nantucket. He dies, Uh, he dies there,
and according to the story, once a year on the
anniversary of the Essex wreck, he would lock himself in
a room and apparently fast in honor of his lost crewmen.
Which is that's it is tragic? Well, I mean it's
(37:02):
it's it's it's sad because this would have haunted this
person for the rest of their life. Oh yeah, how
do you forgive yourself again? In these times where religion
and all of these things run so deep, how could
you forgive yourself for doing that? And how could you
even call it living? You know what I mean? Right
(37:23):
like you said earlier, you know, at a certain point,
you're gonna do what you're gonna do, because that's why
the human animal is sort of designed, but then separated
from that and put back into you know, gen pop.
That stuff's gonna follow you, you know, and your your
days and your nights. But Melville did briefly encounter Pollard, yes,
(37:45):
but but not like in any kind of serious way.
It was more like in passing, right, Yeah. Yeah, And
so in July eighteen fifty two, Melville travels via steamship
steamer to Nantucket and he's kind of a tourist. He
meets local dignitaries, he gets a look at the actual,
(38:09):
you know, this place that he's been writing about, because
remember this is the year after Movie Dick publishes. Uh,
and he only I thought this was research initially, so
he'd only imagined this stuff. But he was aware of
these stories and on his various famous before he wrote
Movie Dick. He wrote things before Moby Dick like TYPEE
(38:31):
or type which I had read. It's a it's a
story about getting stranded on an island. I think he
wrote some some poems as well. He wrote some romance adventures.
He was dappling in Various Dick was his big break. Essentially,
he made him a household name, right. Yeah, but well
after his death, people, that's how it usually goes in there. Yeah,
(38:54):
people weren't people weren't impressed. And so, yeah, Melville wrote
a little bit about Pollard in Moby Deck or like
you know, specifically with regard to the event of the
whale seeking his ship. So he had a little bit
of historical you know, realism built in there as sort
of like to set the tone right in the context, Yeah, exactly,
(39:15):
to ground it in real events and make the story
of Ahabs seem more real and on the on his
very last day in this visit to Nantucket, he meets
Captain George Pollard, and Pollard now is a is a broken,
wretched shell of a sixty year old man. He was
only twenty nine years old when the Essex went down.
(39:37):
He actually after after the Essex briefly he captained a
second whaling ship, was called the Two Brothers, and two
years into his career on that ship it wrecked on
a coral reef. And now he was called a jonah,
meaning he was unlucky to see no owner ever would
let him aboard one of their ships and not be
(40:00):
as of incompetence because of his superstition. Right, well no,
but literally they were like, no, you're you're you're bad news.
Your vibes are gonna throw our whole because, I mean,
we know that that maritime history revolves so much around
a superstition and uh, making sure that you've got the
right socks on and things. I mean, I'm sort of
(40:20):
joking but like it was a big thing, you know,
because you were venturing into the unknown. So there were
these kind of like talisman's or you know, like ideals
that would would hopefully protect you, and you wouldn't want
to be around anyone that was seen as like bad luck.
Right when faced with forces beyond your understanding or control,
you want to do everything you can to tilt the
(40:42):
odds in your favor. So that's why those maritime superstitions
continue today. If you've got any friends in uh, in
a navy anywhere in the world, or in the merchant marines,
they'll tell you the same people take that stuff seriously.
And uh, like you said, he didn't. Melville didn't have
an in depth soul searching hang out with Pollard. He said,
(41:04):
we just exchanged some words. That's literally how he refers
to it. And to Melville, we know that he saw
Pollard as a tragic hero. Dare I say somewhat like
Captain Ahab. He wasn't gonna he wasn't gonna push him,
you know, And that's honestly you got to respect that
because today in the age of true crime and like
(41:28):
getting you know, like plumbing the depths of people's misery.
You would have journalists like knocking down this guy's door
to get him to relive those horrors. And uh, Melville,
who you know was a successful author, you'd think might
be one of those people. But no, he said to
the islanders, he was a nobody. To me, the most
(41:49):
impressive man though, holy, unassuming, even humble that I ever encountered.
And maybe that's where we leave the story today. Thank
you so much for venturing with us on this tale
of tragedy on the high seas. Uh. This is history
that may sound ridiculous and larger than life here in three,
(42:12):
but we have to remember again these were sort of
the astronauts of their time. And with that we want
to think, Uh, our fearless navigator, Mr Max Williams, Uh
I was on the runner at all times, our research associate,
doctor Zach, and oh so many other people that we
(42:34):
we promised to do our best. Never to eat exactly, Ben,
I pledge right now that don't say some some sort
of maroon. I keep saying maroon because I think it's
fun to say. Situation. Um, y'all can eat me first. No, no,
y'all eating me first. I'm not eating y'all. Well, what
you guys me first. You know what, what you guys
(42:57):
are forgetting is rabbit starvation. This is where the honor
party messed up by the check out this stuff they want,
you know, episode and cannibalism. Most times, when people do
decide to break that taboo, they've already been starving for
so long that there's very little nutritional content in the beating.
So we need to make the decision early early. I
(43:18):
got it, I got it. Ben eat both of us
so you can go on and tell our tale. Oh well,
you're the best writer. It's terrible though. We're we are
a package deal, gentleman. Uh, we're gonna figure something each other.
Then at the same time, well, we could just take
(43:38):
turns cutting little pieces. Oh god, this has gotten really
it's time to cut. If we're not dead, we we
have to just take turns. You know. You get a
little flank from me, Yeah, yeah, jeez, Okay, well how
about this. Let's just let's keep this these lessons in mind,
(44:00):
and let's make sure that wherever we go there's plenty
of food, you know. I yeah, oh yeah, wait, no
problem solved. Yeah. Thanks to Jonathan for volunteering his tribute.
Thanks Alex Williams, thanks us, Jeff Toe, what a ride,
and and of course Noel, thank you so much. Man.
(44:21):
I know that we're like behind the behind the scenes folks. Um,
we've all had really busy weeks. I am kind of
off off the grid a bit, but we are. We're
making uh, we're making these shows happen because we love it.
We couldn't do it without you, fellow ridiculous historians and Noel,
I certainly couldn't do anything like this show without you,
(44:44):
my friend, Same me, hearty, same. Let's see you next time, folks.
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