George Pollard Jr.
Pollard's life, including his encounter with the sperm whale that sank Essex, likely served as inspiration for Captain Ahab, the whale-obsessed character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
Emeritus president of the Melville Society Thomas Farel Heffernan explains that Pollard would have been around sixteen years old at the time and would not have been an officer.
[16] To fill in the crew, others had to be recruited from Cape Cod and New England cities; these were inexperienced seamen and were known as "green hands" by the Nantucketers.
[20] In his personal account of the event Nickerson wrote that, once the ship was upright, "the cool and undismayed countenance of the captain soon brought all to their sober senses.
"[21] Pollard declared the damage was so extensive that they should sail back to Nantucket for repairs, but Chase and Joy persuaded him to go forward to the Azores and replace the whaleboats there.
[23] On November 20, 1820, in a remote area of the ocean, some 1,500 nautical miles (2,800 km) west of the Galapagos Islands, Essex was struck twice by a huge sperm whale, estimated to be 85 feet (26 m) in length.
[24] With only three ship-keepers and the crew of Chase's whaleboat on board to repair their damaged vessel, Essex began taking on water following the second collision with the whale.
[29] They also hastened to retrieve what provisions they could and divided them equally so that each whaleboat had 200 pounds of hardtack,[30] 65 gallons of freshwater, and some Galapagos tortoises.
[31] The crew was divided into three whaleboats commanded by Pollard, Chase, and Joy and set sail with provisions estimated to last them 60 days.
The closest landfall was the Marquesas Islands, about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) west of their position, but the crew decided against this option due to the inhabitants' practice of cannibalism at the time.
[54] There, on March 17, they were reunited with Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson, the cabin boy of Essex, all of whom had been rescued by the British merchant ship Indian.
[58] According to his nephew Joseph Warren Phinney, every year Pollard spent the anniversary of the Essex disaster fasting in solitude.
[61][62] In November 1821, about two months after his return to Nantucket,[63] Pollard left port as the captain of Two Brothers in hopes of finding success.
[67] This voyage also ended in disaster in February 1823[68] when, during a storm, Pollard had difficulty determining the ship's precise latitude while searching for Martha, which had disappeared from view.
"[74] Writer David O. Dowling suggests that, based on narratives by Eben Gardner—one of the mates of Two Brothers—and Nickerson, Pollard felt that he lacked the skills to be a whaling captain.
[75] This second disaster ended Pollard's whaling career, and he later served as captain for a merchant ship[75] before spending the rest of his life as a night watchman on Nantucket.
[77] First mate Chase and a ghostwriter wrote an account of the ordeal entitled Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.
[78] Much later, Cabin boy Nickerson wrote his own account of the voyage: The Loss of the Ship Essex Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats.
[79] Nickerson also wrote a poem entitled "The Ship Two Brothers", hoping to establish Pollard as a hero figure for returning to sea after the Essex disaster.
[84] The source material for Moby Dick found itself an inspiration for movie adaptations in the mid-2010s as two of them were released in quick succession, and in which George Pollard himself was a character.
On December 22, 2013, the television movie The Whale was broadcast on BBC One,[85] wherein an elderly Thomas Nickerson recounted the events of Essex.
In 2015, a film, In The Heart of the Sea, directed by Academy Award Winner Ron Howard, was released on December 11, and in which Pollard was portrayed by Benjamin Walker.
