Captain george pollard jr.9/17/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() "In the Heart of the Sea"-and now, its epic adaptation for the screen-will forever place the Essex tragedy in the American historical canon. Nathaniel Philbrick reveal the chilling facts of this infamous maritime disaster. In 1820, an angry sperm whale sank the whaleship Essex, leaving its desperate crew to drift for more than ninety days in three tiny boats. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex Nantucket-“faraway land” in the language of the island’s native inhabitants, the Wampanoag-was a deposit of sand eroding into an inexorable ocean, and all its residents, even if they had never sailed away from the island, were keenly aware of the inhumanity of the sea. Interred across the island were the corpses of anonymous seamen who had washed onto its wave-pummeled shores. Especially in winter, when storms were the most deadly, wrecks occurred almost weekly. Nantucket was surrounded by a constantly shifting maze of shoals that made the simple act of approaching or departing the island an often harrowing and sometimes disastrous lesson in seamanship. Stacks of oil casks lined each wharf as two-wheeled, horse-drawn carts continually shuttled back and forth. Tied up to the wharves or anchored in the harbor were, typically, 15 to 20 whale ships, along with dozens of smaller vessels, mainly sloops and schooners that carried trade goods to and from the island. Along the waterfront, four solid-fill wharves extended more than 100 yards into the harbor. When the Essex departed from Nantucket for the last time in the summer of 1819, Nantucket had a population of about 7,000, most of whom lived on a gradually rising hill crowded with houses and punctuated by windmills and church towers. While what happened to the crew of that ill-fated ship is an epic unto itself-and the inspiration behind the climax of Moby-Dick-just as compelling in its own quintessentially American way is the island microcosm that the Nantucket whalemen called home. It’s a story that I hadn’t begun to fully appreciate until after more than a decade of living on the island when I started researching In the Heart of the Sea, a nonfictional account of the loss of the whaleship Essex, which I revisit here. And yet lurking beneath this almost ethereal surface is the story of a community that sustained one of the bloodiest businesses the world has ever known. The evidence of this bygone glory can still be seen along the upper reaches of the town’s Main Street, where the cobbles seem to dip and rise like an undulant sea and where the houses-no matter how grand and magisterial-still evoke the humble spirituality of the island’s Quaker past. For a relatively brief period during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this lonely crescent of sand at the edge of the Atlantic was the whaling capital of the world and one of the wealthiest communities in America. More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “away off shore.” But what makes Nantucket truly different is its past. Part of what makes the island unique is its place on the map. It’s also a place of picture-perfect beaches where even at the height of summer you can stake out a wide swath of sand to call your own. Archive Collection: T1204 Archive Roll Number: 23 Census Year: 1870 Census Location: Nantucket, Nantucket, Massachusetts Page: 365 Line: 26.Today Nantucket Island is a fashionable summer resort: a place of T-shirt shops and trendy boutiques. Nantucket, Nantucket, Massachusetts National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Washington, D.C. Mother Name: Samar Pollard Town and City Clerks of Massachusetts. The unlucky life of Captain George Pollard Jnr by James Bradley on February 13, 2011.27 March 1878) daughter of Henry Riddell and Hepsabeth Wyer No children. Certainly Melville, who visited him after the publication of Moby Dick, was impressed by him, declaring “o the islanders he was a nobody – to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly unassuming even humble – that I ever encountered”. These days Pollard is mostly remembered as the prototype for Ahab and for his part in the murder and consumption of his cousin Owen Coffin while he and his companions drifted hopelessly in a whaleboat, but in details like the image of him moving through the darkened streets of Nantucket, it’s possible to glimpse a rather different man. Pollard's life, including his encounter with the sperm whale that sank the Essex, served as inspiration for Captain Ahab, the whale-obsessed character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. (1791–1870) was the captain of the whaleships Essex and Two Brothers, both of which sank. ![]()
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