11. Herman Melville used the events of the Essex shipwreck in 1820 in the plot of Moby Dick
Born into a merchant family, Herman Melville became a sailor at nineteen years old. Although his career on the sea didn’t last long, he used his experiences as inspiration for several of his works. While serving on the whaling ship the Acushnet, he met the young sailor William Henry Chase. Melville’s new friend gave him a copy of a book that his father wrote twenty years before, entitled Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. In the memoir, First Mate Owen Chase described the terrifying ordeal he survived at sea.
In 1820, the Essex sank in the Pacific Ocean after a sperm whale attacked it. Twenty crewmen piled into small boats, saving only a little food and water. While drifting on the sea, trying to find land, members of the crew died of dehydration and exposure. As the food ran out, the survivors resorted to cannibalism, eating their dead crewmates. After three months, rescuers only recovered eight survivors. Melville used details from Chase’s account in his new novel, Moby Dick.
The fictional whale in Melville’s novel also existed: in the nineteenth century, a real albino sperm whale lived off the coast of Chile. For twenty-eight years, whalers attempted to hunt “Mocha Dick” without success. In his pamphlet “Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific,” published in 1839, sea explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds explained that the whale was not violent until provoked, but he was finally killed in 1838. When the hunters recovered Mocha, they counted almost 20 harpoons stuck in his body from past attacks. This pamphlet no doubt inspired the personification of the great white whale that became Captain Ahab’s obsession.