On November 20, 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., the ship was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale.

About 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 km) from the coast of South America, the 20-man crew was forced to make for land in three whaleboats with what food and water they could salvage from the wreck.

When Essex departed from Nantucket, Massachusetts, on her fateful voyage in August 1819, she was considered to be a lucky vessel, as her previous six whaling expeditions had brought in good profits.

[3] Essex departed from Nantucket on August 12, 1819, on what was expected to be a roughly two-and-a-half-year voyage to the whaling grounds off the west coast of South America.

Pollard's initial thought was to return to Nantucket for repairs, but he accepted the arguments of Chase and Joy, the first and second mates, who wished to continue to the Azores.

[9] In the face of strong winds from the west, Essex took over a month to round Cape Horn into the whaling grounds of the South Pacific.

It was the height of the dry season, and the fire quickly burned out of control, surrounding the hunters and forcing them to run through the flames to escape.

[16] Many years later, Nickerson returned to Charles Island and found a blackened wasteland; he observed "neither trees, shrubbery, nor grass have since appeared".

[19] Chase was repairing the damaged whaleboat on board Essex when the crew sighted an unusually large sperm whale bull (reportedly around 85 feet (26 m) in length) acting strangely.

Chase prepared to harpoon it from the deck when he realized that its tail was only inches from the rudder, which the whale could easily destroy if provoked by an attempt to kill it.

[20] I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods [500 m or 550 yards] directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of around 24 knots (44 km/h), and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect.

Chase and the remaining sailors retrieved the spare whaleboat while the steward, William Bond, ran below to gather the captain's sea chest and whatever navigational aids he could find.

In In the Heart of the Sea, author Nathaniel Philbrick speculated that it may have first struck the boat accidentally or have had its curiosity aroused by the sound of a hammer as the damaged whaleboat was being repaired.

Three whaleboats were rigged with makeshift masts and sails were taken from Essex, and boards were added to heighten the gunwales and prevent large waves from spilling over the sides.

[25] Inside Pollard's sea chest, which Bond's quick thinking had managed to save, were two sets of navigational equipment and two copies of maritime charts.

Chase and Joy disagreed, fearing that the Society islanders might be cannibals, and suggested sailing south for about 1,500 miles (2,400 km) and then picking up a band of variable winds to take them to the coast of Chile or Peru, all the time hoping to come across another whaleship.

In fact, both the Marquesas and Society Islands would have been safe destinations, as the inhabitants were at that time friendly towards mariners, but Pollard accepted the suggestion of Chase and Joy.

[27] Herman Melville later speculated that the crew would all have survived had they followed Pollard's recommendation and sailed to the Society Islands, writing: "All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might, in all human probability, have been avoided had they immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti, from which they were not very distant at the time.

Storms and rough seas frequently plagued the tiny whaleboats, and the men who were not occupied with steering and trimming the sails spent most of their time bailing water from the bilge.

After ten days of eating only meagre rations of bread, they slaughtered the first of the giant tortoises that had been salvaged from the wreck and achieved a small respite from hunger.

Had they landed on Pitcairn Island itself, 120 miles (190 km) to the southwest, they might have received help; the descendants of the survivors of HMS Bounty, who had famously mutinied in 1789, still lived there.

[32] On Henderson Island, Essex's crew found food in the form of birds, eggs, crabs, fish and peppergrass but water proved more difficult to find, although they eventually came across a freshwater spring below the tideline.

[34] The remaining Essex crewmen, now numbering seventeen in three boats, resumed their journey on December 27 with the intention of reaching Easter Island.

On the same day they exhausted their supply of fish and birds from Henderson Island and were back on daily rations of a cup of water and three ounces of bread.

On March 17 they reached the port and were reunited with Chase, Lawrence and Nickerson, who had been recovering on the frigate USS Constellation under the care of the ship's surgeon.

He asked the captain of an Australian trading vessel Surry, which was returning to Australia, to stop at Ducie Island and pick up the survivors.

This wreck was to end Pollard's whaling career; he was considered a doomed captain, or "Jonah", whom no whaleship owner would trust with a vessel.

Four months later he had completed an account of the disaster, the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex; Herman Melville used it as one of the inspirations for his 1851 novel Moby-Dick.

[54] Late in his life he returned to Nantucket, where he ran a boarding house for summer visitors and wrote an account of the sinking, titled The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats.

[54][59] As well as inspiring much of American author Herman Melville's classic 1851 novel Moby-Dick, the story of the Essex tragedy has been dramatized in film, television, and music: