November 20, 1820, was a bright morning in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, 1,500 nautical miles west of the Galápagos Islands. For the crew of the Essex, it was a day flecked with hope: The lookouts atop the whale-ship saw spouts, telltale signs of nearby sperm whales. But within hours, tragedy, rather than bounty, befell the ship’s crew—events that went on to inspire Herman Melville’s great American novel, Moby-Dick.
The Essex began its final journey in August 1819, departing its home island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, for the sperm-whale-rich Pacific Ocean. The 238-ton ship, built in 1799, was around 100 tons smaller and two decades older than the sleekest ships coming out of Nantucket. But based on the financial success of its previous voyages in search of sperm oil—a high-quality lighting oil derived from the spermaceti organ in the head of the sperm whale—it was considered a desirable, even lucky, ship by local whalers.
But the Essex’s luck didn’t last. From the outset of its 1819 voyage, its crew faced difficulties—or, to a superstitious 19th-century sailor, bad omens. On the second day at sea, a squall knocked the ship completely on its side. “The whole ship’s crew were, for a short time, thrown into the utmost consternation and confusion,” first mate Owen Chase wrote in his account of the voyage, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. They lost two whaling boats—smaller vessels used to approach and kill whales—but kept moving ahead.
The ship’s success in whale hunting was just as mercurial, with dry spells followed by successful sprees. But after rounding Cape Horn and quietly tracing the Chilean coast to little avail, its sailors found overwhelming success off of Peru in the new year, filling 450 barrels with oil from 11 whales in just two months.
The pace exhausted the crew, but when a lookout spotted a shoal of sperm whales on the morning of November 20, the sailors lowered and manned the whale boats in pursuit nonetheless. Chase’s team harpooned a whale early on, but it thrashed its tail against the boat, and the men retreated to the Essex.
There, Chase observed a “very large spermaceti whale” rapidly approaching—and then ramming into—the ship. After an “appalling and tremendous jar,” the Essex “brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock, and trembled for a few seconds like a leaf.”
