“But I can tell you no more-my head is on fire at the recollection,” Pollard told the missionary. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin. To Bennet, the tale was like a confession. Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. “To the islanders he was a nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble-that I ever encountered.” During his visit, Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories that the captain surely carried with him. Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea-a “Jonah”-and no owner would trust a ship to him again. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.Īnd on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod.
In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales.
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