![]() This mishap was caused in part by miscalculations on the part of Pollard and his officers, and in part by the inexperience of the crew. Two of the ship’s whaleboats were lost and another was damaged. To fill in the crew, others had to be recruited from Cape Cod and Boston these were inexperienced seamen and were known as " green hands" by the Nantucketers.įour days after leaving Nantucket the ship was struck by a sudden storm and suffered a knockdown, having been rolled almost ninety degrees onto her side. Those included Pollard's seventeen-year-old cousin Owen Coffin with whose care and protection Pollard had been entrusted by his aunt, Nancy Bunker Coffin. ![]() Other members of the 21-man crew included Owen Chase as first mate, Matthew Joy as second mate, and six other Nantucket men. In 1819, Pollard was appointed captain of Essex by the owners, Gideon Folger and Sons, and prepared to set sail for the Pacific Ocean in August. By the time he was 23 he had served on the Essex for four years in the capacities of second mate and first mate from 1815–1819. George Pollard was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the son of Tamar (Bunker) and George Pollard, a ship's captain, at a time when the principal industry there was hunting sperm whales to harvest the oil contained in their blubber and spermaceti. Never he smiled Call him, and he would come not sourIn spirit, but meek and reconciled:Patient he was, he none withstood Oft on some secret thing would brood.Plaque on the Capt George Pollard house in Nantucket Melville marveled at the tormented man, saying of his encounter: “To the islanders he was a nobody-to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming, even humble-that I ever encountered.” In fact, Melville mentioned Pollard in his epic Clarel, the longest poem in American literature. ![]() "While Melville was inspired by Pollard's adventures," the BBC says, "the unlucky seafarer's character is not thought to have been the basis for the novel's obsessive Capt Ahab.") (We should caution that Melville did not base the monomaniacal character of Ahab on Pollard himself. But Melville harbored a secret: The sinking of the Essex had inspired his novel. Pollard didn’t know about the book, and the two didn’t exchange many words. Three decades later, when Pollard was 60, Herman Melville-fresh from finishing Moby-Dick-paid the aging skipper a visit. After surviving a second shipwreck, the captain took a job on sturdy land as Nantucket's night watchman, where he looked over the streets and wharves. Before the voyage, he had promised Coffin’s mother that the boy would return home safely, and his failure to keep Coffin alive plagued Pollard's conscience. By that point, the two surviving men-Pollard and sailor Charles Ramsdell-had resorted to drinking their own urine and were found gnawing on the bones of their deceased mates. “He was soon dispatched,” Pollard grimly recalled, “and nothing of him left.” About two weeks later, Pollard's boat was discovered. When Pollard insisted that he take the young man's place, Coffin refused-and was summarily shot in the head. That decision, however, had made cannibals of the men on board.Īs for the drawing of lots, Pollard’s 18-year-old cousin, Owen Coffin, was the unlucky loser. Pollard agreed to follow a longer route, hoping to drift south and then east in hopes of reaching Chile. When the Essex sank, the men had been relatively close to the Marquesas Islands, but Pollard's men were afraid of landing there-the islands were rumored to be full of cannibals. So they agreed to draw lots: Whoever pulled the short stick would volunteer to be shot and eaten. After two and a half months at sea, the days began to blur and the stockpile of food dwindled, and the four men remaining on Pollard’s boat realized they were all going to starve if food didn’t soon become available. The 20 survivors scrambled into three small whaleboats, which eventually became separated during a storm. Weeks earlier, in November 1820, Pollard's crew had been pursuing (and harpooning) a pod of sperm whales when an angry 85-foot-long whale barreled head-on into the captain's ship, The Essex of Nantucket, sending it to the ocean's bottom. Saltwater had leached into the men’s stash of bread, and one by one, Pollard’s men died of starvation-and were promptly devoured by the hungry survivors. The sun was relentless, their thirst was unquenchable, and the hull was leaking. Crammed aboard a small whaleboat with some of his crew, the captain had been drifting aimlessly in the South Pacific for more than two months.
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