Last Year's Lesson: A Whale Sank the Essex - Nov. 20, 1820

A whale sank the Essex on this day in 1820. There's more in the Sep. 27, 2010 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, here's a rerun for today, brought to
you by Tracy V. Wilson. Welcome to this day in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com and from
the desk of Stuff you missed in History Class. It's
the show where we explore the past one day at
a time with a quick look at what happened today
in history. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,

(00:25):
and it's November. A whale sank the whaling ship Essex
on the day in eighteen twenty. The story starts on
the island of Nantucket off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which
was the heart of the whaling industry in the early
nineteenth century. This industry had started out with people butchering
dead whales that had washed up on shore, and then

(00:46):
that progressed to people hunting whales relatively close to the
shore from boats, and then to hunting whales farther and
farther out to see and much larger and more sophisticated ships.
As people were whaling far and farther out from the shore,
these ships started to have equipment on board to process
what was harvested from the whales, because that was a

(01:07):
lot easier than trying to haul an entire whale back
to the shore, sometimes from thousands of miles away. A
lot of what they were really after was the sperma
cite also people call that spermaceti from the heads of
sperm whales. They were also harvesting blubber. It wasn't as
much about the meat, it was about the blubber and
the oil, and also ambergris, which you had to be

(01:31):
really lucky to get. That was a lot more rare.
So whaling ships had this series of pots and fires
on board called a try works that was used to
render the blubber while they were still at sea, and
the whale ship also carried a few smaller whaling boats
because the main ship itself was not all that maneuverable.
You needed something much smaller and faster to be able

(01:52):
to actually hunt a whale. Voyages were also meant to
last a really long time. It was not uncommon for
a ship to set out with three year four years
of supplies, and two and a half year voyages were
really typical. This is also incredibly dangerous work. A lot
of people died. In August of eighteen nineteen, the Essex

(02:13):
set sail from Nantucket and nearly sank in a squall
just two days later. They eventually made their way to
the Galapagos Islands, though, and they resupplied with turtle meat
while they were there. But while they were there, they
also set a fire on Charles Island that was massively
destructive and probably led to the extinction of at least
two animal species. More than a year after they had

(02:37):
left Nantucket, they spotted a pod of whales and they
deployed two boats to go hunt them. But then the
people that were still on the main whaling ship noticed
another whale that was behaving oddly. It seemed to be
watching them. They estimated that this whale was about eighty
five ft or twenty six meters long, which was extremely

(02:58):
large for a spur whale, and then it headed straight
for them. It struck the ship, turned around, came back
and struck them again. So, with the ship seriously damaged,
it started to sink. Fortunately for the crew, those boats
that were used to hunt the whales were still in order,

(03:19):
and the men, all of them survived the sinking, divided
up and got into them. They were also able to
salvage about sixty days worth of supplies, including a hundred
and nine gallons of water. At first, they talked about
heading for the Marquesas or the Society Islands. Both of
those were more than a thousand miles away, and the

(03:40):
prevailing current would help get them there, but they were
afraid of cannibals on these islands, which is going to
turn out to be ironic. Instead of going that way,
they headed for Peru or Chili, both of which required
them to go against the current and against the wind,

(04:00):
but they were so afraid of the cannibal threat that
that seemed like the best option. When they got to
the Pitcairn Islands, three of the men decided to stay behind,
but the rest of them decided to continue on because
there wasn't really a lot there for them to sustain themselves.
But these men and the whaling boats did not have
enough provisions to get to land, and after a while,

(04:21):
survivors turned to cannibalism when their crewmates died. It got
to a point though, where no one had died, so
they had to draw lots to decide who would be
murdered and then eaten. They were finally spotted off the
coast of Chile on February one after more than three months.

(04:43):
In the end, there were eight survivors out of the
twenty or twenty one who set sail. Initially, that included
those three men that had stayed behind when the rest
back in the boats. Captain George Pollard Jr. Survived. His
next ship, though, was the Two Brothers, and it also
sank after it struck Coral Reef. At that point no

(05:04):
one would hire him to captain a ship anymore, and
then this whole story became the inspiration for the classic
novel Moby Dick. The first mate, who was named Owen Chase,
also wrote a book about this whole experience, which was
called Narrative of the most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of
the Whale ship Essex of Nantucket, which was attacked and

(05:25):
finally destroyed by a large Sperma city whale in the
Pacific Ocean, with an account of the unparalleled sufferings of
the captain and crew during a space of ninety three
days at sea in open boats in the years eighteen
nineteen and eighteen twenty. You can learn more about this
in the September episode of Stephie Miss in History Class.

(05:45):
Thanks to K. C. P. Graham and Chandler Mays for
their audio work on the show, and you can subscribe
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