Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America's Most Storied Shipwreck
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Reviews for Surviving the Essex
17 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5So, one doesn't have to pay for an advanced reading copy, and with this book I came out ahead, but not that far. While it was on a topic that I've read several other booksabout, it didn't add much to my enjoyment or knowledge. There are parts that I felt were quite interesting, but overall the book wasn't written that well and the book's organization really started to annoy me by its conclusion.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book starts out with a general overview of the story of the Essex shipwreck (10 pages). I was expecting much more detail about the actual story behind the Essex shipwreck. As a result, I found this read to be rather uninteresting at the start. I decided to read Nathaniel Philbrick's book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (an excellent book!) to get the full story and added details. This helped immensely. While clearly being an analysis, and not the easy read of a novel, it was interesting to read about the stories of the men aboard the Essex and how they differed from each other. Also very interesting was how each dealt with the experience and memories of the hardship endured during their return to safety.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This happens to me often. I am about to go somewhere and a book lands in my lap for review, and it happens to be related to the trip. When I went to Turks and Caicos, I was reviewing Wolitzer's Farewell Fred Voodoo and Hoare's The Whale, and now, in Cape Cod, I read Surviving the Essex. What's more, right before this trip, the Essex film, based on Philbrick's The Heart of the Sea just came out. In Sandwich, Titcomb's was displaying Philbrick's book. In Nantucket, the Whaling Museum had a whole Essex exhibit, not only of the disaster, but even down to the movie props used in the film. Somewhere in the vicinity, Hoare was to give a talk and show his documentary about whales. And we were convinced the whale watching boat we were on off of Provincetown had Hoare on board (though we could not make out the name of the person that was announced, not did we try to confirm our belief that it was Hoare, and not someone else we had never heard of). So, among all that, I read Surviving the Essex in just a few sittings. Dowling's main argument is that Owen Chase is not the hero he publicized himself to be, and Captain Pollard was not a coward. Dowling arrives to these conclusions by close readings of Chase and Nickerson's accounts, a bolsters them with the opinion Melville and pretty much every other Nantucket person seems to have had of the captain. I have not read Philbrick's book yet, but someone told me that Owen Chase is the "hero" of the film based on the book, so I am not sure how much Dowling and Philbrick agree on these points. My two complaints about Surviving the Essex is that Dowling sounds more like a whining child, desperately trying to defend someone, so much so that one wonders what his ulterior motives are. It almost sounds like Dowling himself is guilty of some Essex-related crime. As a result, the book lacks humor and is dry in telling the story. For a short book, Dowling repeats some facts several times too many. Instead, perhaps he could have given a bigger picture of the cultural and historical changes that shaped the whaling industry in the wake of the Essex disaster. There are curious omissions in the book, too. For example, in the Whaling Museum, Pollard's sisters are discussed as community leaders, which one assumes had something to do with his eventual re-assimilation to the Nantucket society despite the Essex disaster, but Dowling does not mention the sisters in his book at all. Similarly, Pollard's wife is absent from the book, aside from a few mentions. The only woman that is discussed at length is the unforgiving mother of the cousin Pollard allows to be shot and eaten. There is, then, a lot of emphasis on how things would have been difficult for Pollard, and no mention of things that might have helped him survive the shame and stigma of the Essex incident. As a result, I felt like Dowling was doing exactly what he showed Chase and Nickerson to be doing in their narratives of the sinking of the Essex and its aftermath: he was omitting things to make the story tell his point of view. Granted, it is entirely possible that there are legitimate reasons for these omissions. Nantucketers are tight lipped about what went on in their society back in the whaling days, so perhaps there isn't much in the way of historical record of the relationship (good or bad) between Pollard and his sisters or Pollard and his wife, or how any of that helped or harmed his existence on the island after the Essex. Interestingly, Dowling spends a lot of time explaining what happened to Nickerson after the Essex and how he managed to trust his story to a scoundrel editor who never published it and how he spent his days in Nantucket telling his story in his guest house, but I do not remember him mentioning that Nickerson spent a good amount of years in Brooklyn, NY and much later returned to Nantucket... Even if this was mentioned, it seems like an important missing piece of the Nickerson side of events that needs more exploration, adding to the mystery of why so many years later and only after Pollard's death did Nickerson decide to publish his story (his manuscript was found in an attic in upstate NY and eventually published).Overall, Surviving the Essex is a detailed incision into the events and the aftermath of the Essex disaster from a fresh perspective. It could be expanded to include more in-depth research about Nickerson's Brooklyn years, which may shed some light into his return to Nantucket, and the role Pollard's family played in his survival of the notoriety of the Essex disaster. Many thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher for a free copy of the book in exchange of my honest review.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I became interested in reading this book after watching the movie based on Nathan Philabrick's The Heart of the Sea. Dowling's book discusses the awful fate of the Essex, but its' primary purpose is to bring to life the fact behind the fictions. I found this book very interesting as it discussed many aspects of the survivor's tales (and the many different versions of them!) and tried to piece together the facts from the embellishments. I liked discovering what really happened to all of the crew and people surrounding the ill-fated Essex and would love to see a documentary based upon Philabeck's book and Dowling's book...they compliment each other well.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Having read and enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick’s non-fiction work, In the Heart of the Sea, I applied for a complimentary copy of this book, ostensibly a follow up to Philbrick’s in exchange for an honest review.In 1819, the Nantucket based whale ship Essex set off on a two year journey, around Cape Horn and into the whale rich waters of the South Pacific. With a new captain, first mate and many green sailors, the trip suffered from several minor setbacks (not unusual in the trade), before the Essex was sunk in the first documented case of a ship being attacked by a sperm whale, estimated to be an 85 foot monster. Relegated to whale boats, not suited for long trips on the open ocean, and hampered by trade winds which prevented steering a direct course for South America, the survivors spent three months in their whale boats, suffering through unimaginable bouts with starvation, dehydration, weather and ultimately cannibalism.In the Heart of the Sea was a gripping account of this event and highly educational with respect to the culture of whaling in general and of the Nantucket trade in particular. Surviving the Essex not only follows the major actors in the drama as they continue with their lives and careers, but indulges in copious amounts of pop psychology and assumption with respect to the two major players, Captain George Pollard, Jr. and First Mate Owen Chase. Herman Melville also makes an appearance, as the Essex tragedy purportedly served as a template for Moby Dick.The author clearly has decided that Captain Pollard has been badly represented in relation to the tragedy and takes every opportunity to put him in a good light. In order to do so, he must necessarily assign blame elsewhere and Owen Chase is his scapegoat. Certainly, it may be true that Chase played a large role in the tragedy, but in my opinion, the author overplays his hand in this regard, resorting to an enormous amount of undocumented assumption and hindsight to not only place the blame on Chase for selecting the disastrous post-accident decision to steer for South America instead of the possibly cannibal infested islands of French Polynesia (didn’t the final decision rest with the Captain?), but also to blame him for the sinking itself. In doing so, the author resorts to all sorts of pop psychology mumbo jumbo.Putting aside the actual material content of the work, however, the biggest problem with the book is that it is simply not very interesting and reading it is something of a chore. It is written more in the style of a psychology textbook than the entertaining and educational experience that Philbrick’s book was.SPOILERS. To summarize, Captain Pollard turned out to be very comfortable in his own skin, despite the Essex disaster and another sinking that immediately followed, becoming a well-respected and productive member of the Nantucket community (though a night watchman and not a whaler). Chase, on the other hand, though becoming enormously successful and wealthy in his whaling career, led a tortured existence and ultimately went insane. Chase, the author argues, is the model for Melville’s Captain Ahab, and not Captain Pollard.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America’s Most Storied Shipwreck by David O. Dowling. This book deals mostly with things that happened after the Essex was infamously destroyed in an encounter with a whale. (The blurb on the back states that it “acts as a sequel to Nathaniel Philbrick’s In The Heart of the Sea...”) It touches briefly on events prior to the wreck - mostly in overall history of the whaling industry at the time - but mainly concerns itself with the three most famous survivors of the shipwreck: Captain George Pollard Jr., first mate Owen Chase, and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson. As the subtitle suggests, this book deals mainly with the lives these men led after their ship was destroyed. It attempts to assemble the “true story” from the often conflicting accounts told by each of them.Chase (with the help of a ghostwriter) almost immediately had a book published which more or less portrayed himself as the hero of the saga. Later in life Nickerson wrote an unpublished manuscript that contradicted much of Chase’s version of events. Pollard - who, rightly or wrongly, took the majority of the blame for what happened - simply went on with his life, most always answering questions asked by the curious with little embellishment. This is not an easy book to read. It is written in a very dry (dull) style, almost like a dissertation - lots of facts and suppositions presented in a no-frills package. I found the narrative to be repetitive, muddled and confusing. There are many references to books and poems that were inspired by these events (as well as some nonfiction materials). Some of them I was familiar with, some of them I was not, making for a confusing reading experience. Author David O. Dowling often uses the fictional narratives to support his arguments and further his own assumptions as to what happened. I had a hard time finishing this book My copy was 169-pages plus 19-pages of author’s notes (I skimmed those)… a relatively short book. Yet it took me a long time - about a month - to read it as I kept getting frustrated and putting it down before picking it back up and trying to finish. Bluntly stated: This is the kind of book that makes people hesitant to read nonfiction. Surviving the Essex might be suitable for research or reference purposes, but I do not recommend this book for recreational reading. **I got this book as a result of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is an odd book. I expected one of two things, either a detailed review of the historical record, or a smart and light pop history retelling. Instead, this book reads like a literary analysis. The author compare the contemporary narratives written by survivors to various other literature starting with Moby Dick and moving on to other less obvious ones (Frankenstein, etc.) The style is very dry and academic with copious annotations and quotations. It's also quite slow and repetitive with many points belabored and others made over and over again so that I wondered if I was going crazy. The author seemed equally interested in the historical event and contemporary fiction so that I would sometimes get lost in the midst of a dense paragraph and be unsure whether we were discussing actual happenings or one of numerous fictional narratives.I was excited to learn more about the wreck of the Essex which I had touched on briefly in college. But this book really isn't about that event but how it was perceived in the culture of the day. The author doesn't go into detail on the history and assumes the reader is already very familiar with the events in question. This left me sorely disappointed.
Book preview
Surviving the Essex - David O. Dowling
immeasurable.
PROLOGUE
Although she was an old ship, the Essex gleamed with opportunity in the July sun as she rested moored in the dock of Nantucket harbor. Her former captain, Daniel Russell, had commanded the vessel on four consecutive whaling voyages with great success, and now looked forward to manning the helm of the Aurora, a ship of more recent construction with a much larger hold. Russell’s former first mate, George Pollard Jr., would become the new captain of the Essex, and boatsteerer Owen Chase would assume the position of first mate for her next voyage, planned for summer of 1819. Chase knew this was a pivotal step in his career, an opportunity to prove his competence as an expert navigator and leader of the youthful whaling crew. Pollard had his sights on a propitious debut, stepping gingerly aboard the Essex with the spring of a man meeting his bright future. His great expectations for a long and successful career were buoyed by the ideal circumstances—a fortuitous privilege he would never forsake—of launching his career as a captain hailing from Nantucket, home of the world’s oldest and most lucrative whaling port.
With a full complement of men aboard, the Essex eased out of the harbor on August 5, 1819, beyond the shallow waters of the infamous Nantucket bar and dropped anchor. Here the crew and workers heaved the heaviest of the cargo onboard from light craft scurrying around the old ship’s periphery, displacing her bulk ever deeper beneath the water’s surface with each new load. The eagerly awaited departure for the South Pacific, home to the world’s richest whaling waters, was nearly upon them. The crew thirsted for the first hunt, with Pollard seeking to set the keynote for his career and Chase yearning to prove himself worthy of rising to the rank of captain for his next voyage. Young Thomas Nickerson, the ship’s cabin boy, would venture to sea for the first time. Amid the stowing down, the crisscrossing of decks, and the incessant comings and goings of boats delivering ever more provisions, the crew could hardly appreciate how precious their food stores would become. Instead, they could only recognize the growing tedium of a process heading into its sixth day. At last, their moment arrived and dawn liberated the Essex into the open ocean with the Nantucket shore receding behind her.
Captain Pollard’s speech to the crew on the first day at sea, like all such orations on whaling vessels, was met with great anticipation, for it would set the tone for the entire voyage. The crew was particularly attentive to the character expressed in the grain of his voice, from which they might measure the manner of his command. In inaugurating the voyage, Pollard’s bearing was not that of a spitfire or martinet; he would deliver no hortatory invective maligning the whale as a devilish species, nor would he condescend to the penniless common sailors as some captains with genteel pretentions could from above on the quarterdeck. Instead, Pollard was frank and direct, a seaman’s captain with no airs or ulterior motive, no revenge to exact from a former loss or injury. His message was clear: success depended on the cooperation of crew and officers, who in turn were expected to obey the word of their captain. If the address bore no note of originality—captains typically made such admonitions—its delivery distinguished Pollard as a democratic leader more interested in weaving a strong social bond among the crew than subduing them with fear, or worse, transfixing them with supernatural mortal terrors intrinsic to the perilous enterprise before them.
After just three days at sea, the Essex was on course for the Azores, cruising full sail for a gam, a meeting of captains and crew, with the whaleship Midas. Now Pollard brimmed with confidence, aggressively opening his studding sails, the canvas rectangles fitted to the far extremity of the fore-topsail yardarm. Pollard’s haste was not entirely unreasonable. The voyage had begun relatively late in the whaling season and there was no time to lose. After exchanging pleasantries with the Midas, the Essex now carried up to eight knots of careening momentum as the clouds darkened and thunder rolled. With the main topgallant and studding sails still flying into the approaching tempest, the Essex heaved as Pollard barked the command to come about and face the opposite direction of the incoming gale. During the maneuver, the uppermost sails violently yanked the ship over while the crew desperately clung to her decks. The old whaler keeled over in the gale, leaning almost forty-five degrees until her beam-ends were completely submerged. The storm soon abated, however, and like a phoenix from the ashes, the Essex rose again, her mainmast reaching heavenward in what to officers and crew was an unmistakable harbinger of good fortune for the duration of their journey.
Weeks later, darkness loomed over the Essex again as she emerged from the Gulf Stream to face the formidable obstacle of Cape Horn. The crew looked on in horror as yet another massive weather front spread across the horizon, making the already challenging passing appear nearly impossible. Sailing as close to shore as possible without running aground on the Horn’s jagged coastline, Pollard pressed on through the tempest for days. The days dragged on into weeks, draining the men’s endurance and morale until an entire month had passed under such profound strain. Ultimately, to the crew’s delight, the Essex emerged from the pounding passage without taking in so much as a gallon of water, incurring no damage on the treacherous shoals. But another force of nature awaited them, of which they were blissfully unaware during their cruise along the coast of Chile north to Peru. In these whale-rich seas they would reap the rewards of their herculean effort around the Horn, hauling in eleven whales for 450 barrels of precious oil, the gold of this watery Wild West.
Sailing westward into the Pacific after a brief stop on Charles Island for provisions on October 23, 1819, the Essex crew happily found itself surrounded by a shoal of whales. The men lowered their boats and waited with harpoons poised for what appeared to be an easy take of oil-rich sperm whales. First mate Owen Chase stood ready to hurl his lance when suddenly a whale swam directly under his boat, unleashing its formidable tail like a giant whip against the boat’s bottom with the force of a cannonball, catapulting its occupants skyward. The whalemen splashed about, scrambling to gain a handhold on the shattered wreckage and pull their heads above the rolling sea. Clinging to the sinking boat, they screamed to their mates in the other chase boat for aid. So another narrow escape and another fortuitous turn, this time with a rambunctious whale, left the whalemen once again unscathed.
One month after their violent introduction to the concussive force of the sperm whale’s tale, the Essex crew lowered its boats in pursuit of a pod of whales, this time swimming swiftly away from the ship. Captain Pollard was to lead the hunt with a team of harpooners, leaving first mate Chase in command of the crew left behind on the ship. Chase welcomed this relatively secure role away from the front lines. The trauma of his earlier clash that upended his boat was fresh in his mind, so the mother ship seemed a haven while Pollard marshaled his forces at a considerable distance. Any illusion of safety, however, was soon shattered when an eighty-five-foot bull seeking revenge for the attack on his predominantly female companions assumed the knightly role and bolted from the pod, whose members Pollard and company were butchering with their darts and lances. Flushed with fury, the leviathan rushed directly back at the ship, as the unsuspecting crew helplessly watched. Turning his full vengeance on the Essex, the bull accelerated to top speed, pumping its tail vigorously and ramming the hull with brute force as the men recoiled. But the creature was not through. Now circling back to gather momentum for the final blow while Chase stood frozen on deck, the whale blasted a fresh gaping hole in the ship’s hull. In minutes the old whaler keeled over, disappearing into the sea, with men scrambling onto open boats desperately salvaging provisions from her hold. His vengeance complete for the time being, the whale glided off into the vast Pacific in search of his next victims.¹
So reads the accepted story of events leading to the Essex wreck, primarily as handed down from first mate Owen Chase. Accounts of the crew’s struggle for survival in the aftermath also bear his stamp. After the Essex was lost on November 20, 1820, Captain Pollard suggested seeking the closest refuge available, on the Society Islands to the West. But Chase objected, along with Matthew Joy, who feared cannibals and instead insisted on rowing for South America—some three thousand miles away—despite the triple vulnerability of navigating tiny open boats in unfavorable winds with dangerously low provisions. After yielding to the headstrong first mate’s will, Pollard and the crew set off for the long journey, first landing on Henderson Island, where they stayed for a week before departing for the coast of Chile on December 27. The crew, desperate and now dying, launched themselves into the vast expanse of the sea, hopeful that the current and their strength would somehow bring them safely ashore. In the nearly two-month period after they left Henderson Island, they would experience horrors that forever changed their lives. In March of 1821, a month after their rescue, the press was still reporting on the harrowing ordeal, reprinting a letter Pollard had left in a tin box on the island. Not knowing if he would survive the journey to the mainland, Pollard accounted for the events on one page, and on another he poured out a wrenching farewell: I shall leave with this a letter for my wife, and whoever finds, and has the good will and has the goodness to forward it, will oblige an unfortunate man and receive his sincerest wishes.
²
As the most storied and horrifying shipwreck in whaling history, the Essex disaster is astonishing for both the way the ship was sunk—rammed by a massive sperm whale—and the grisly scenes of starvation and cannibalism that thinned the original crew of twenty men down to eight. Three of the survivors stayed behind on Henderson Island and were later rescued by the Surry, an English vessel. Of the three boats carrying the seventeen crewmen who attempted to row to Chile—while subsisting on the meager supply of bread, water, and Galápagos tortoises they salvaged from the sinking Essex—only two boats arrived, with five survivors.³ But more shocking in many ways was the ensuing struggle to survive the stigma of cannibalism, and the more improbable challenge for crew members of salvaging their professional reputations and careers at sea. At stake was the story of the wreck itself, as seen in the inconsistent and highly contested survivors’ accounts, and the race to print it.
News coverage of the ordeal inspired a flurry of sensationalized shipwreck narratives in the popular press, soon followed by the 1821 publication of Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.⁴ Chase’s narrative, which Nathaniel and Thomas Philbrick call an excellent work of self-promotion,
casts the writer as a hero who overturned the allegedly misguided and ill-conceived instincts of Captain Pollard, and calmed and encouraged his hysterical crew, particularly the young cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson.⁵ For Pollard’s part, rather than racing to print his account, the captain sought redemption in another whaling expedition, aboard the Two Brothers, buoyed by the confidence of his Nantucket community and the good faith of his cabin boy, Nickerson, who signed on for the venture. This time Nickerson elevated his practice of keeping a standard log by immortalizing in verse the propitious journey of the Two Brothers.⁶ Despite lofty expectations for Pollard’s return to whaling—one worthy of epic poetry—the journey proved disastrous, as the ship crashed on craggy shoals northwest of Hawaii. His spirit crushed, Pollard retreated into exile on Nantucket. Having saved his manuscript from the Essex voyage, Nickerson retrieved it from storage decades later to revise for publication with Leon Lewis, a staff writer for the New York Ledger, the widest circulating story paper of the nineteenth century.⁷ But, in a detail nearly lost to history, Lewis agreed to work on but eventually abandoned what was then the most coveted manuscript of America’s most notorious shipwreck.
This book unearths the stories behind the survivors’ accounts of the Essex voyage, the Nantucket whaler that captured Herman Melville’s imagination after colliding with a massive sperm whale in November 1820. The story lay with the few men who finally returned to Nantucket under the scrutiny of a clamoring public. Although Chase was the first to print his account, others would provide their own unique perspectives. Surviving the Essex
seeks to give a richer, more contextualized portrait than what is already available, looking closely at the survivors’ lives, ambitions, and motives, their pivotal actions during the wreck itself, and their will to reconcile themselves to those actions in both the short and the long term. This book also seeks to identify as-yet-identified villains and unsung heroes.
Penned by a ghostwriter, Chase’s account reflects his objective to preempt questions about his competence as a seaman by heaping the blame on the whale, as well as to question Captain Pollard’s leadership. For him, and each survivor who offered his particular story, the retelling uniquely shaped his public and private life, cementing his place in maritime Nantucket history as well as showing his particular form of psychological reconciliation. For Chase, the traumatic event became an opportunity to enter the ranks of the most successful captains in whaling history. After the Essex, Pollard’s loss of the Two Brothers meant a kind of personal exile and highly modest work as a night watchman. Then there was Nickerson, who years later attempted to publish his account. The whale itself, especially its behavior and purported motives, also factors into profiles of the event. As for the thumbnail portraits ultimately associated with these men (and the beast), they go roughly as follows: Chase brimmed with ambition but ultimately went mad in old age; Pollard, in Nantucket, came to embody suffering with dignity; Nickerson was cast as the aging seaman who tried but ultimately failed to communicate his story to a wider audience; and the whale, speechless and maligned, was the scapegoat for a civilization determined to justify a ruthless industry.
Tracking down lost clues not only helps expose the exaggerations and inaccuracies of Chase’s account, but also pieces the story back together for a richer, more detailed view of the event’s impact. In profiling Chase, Pollard, and Nickerson, this book explores how these survivors shaped their own respective versions of the tale in order to preserve their dignity and names for posterity, and to conceal their liability for the lost lives of the other crew members.
The most mythologized elements in the Essex narratives are the death of crewman Owen Coffin and the whale’s strike. This book begins with the former and ends with the latter. Chapter 1 thus takes up the question of who shot Coffin as a means of exploring the ambiguities regarding this messianic figure at the heart of the crew’s deadly survival ritual. What Coffin means—whether he died in vain, or gave his life meaningfully based on the fairest and most reasonable intentions and procedure, as directed by Pollard—was a crucial consideration for all the narratives. His life was framed as the most sacred and telling of those lost at sea. Many facts are unclear. Did Pollard refuse, in a fit of cowardice, to execute the youth himself for the crew’s sustenance? How does the ritual consumption of Coffin’s body compare to that of the black sailors, who all died unusually soon in the scope of the event?
Chapter 2 concerns Chase’s ghostwritten Narrative as an attempt to not only live down the event but also defend himself from allegations of negligence and incompetence. It details Chase’s efforts to rid himself of associations with savage cannibalism and cast himself as an icon of civility and productive industry. Why were other options for survival not mentioned or considered in his Narrative, especially the prospect of seeking aid from one of the many ships near Henderson Island, or the use of the first deceased crewman, Matthew Joy, as shark and porpoise bait?
Chapter 3 considers Nickerson’s use of his personal experience aboard the Essex as a source of fame and profit, as well as an opportunity to place himself more admirably in the tale for posterity. He attempted to publish his story immediately after Chase’s decline into madness and death, precisely when a power vacuum opened in the competition for the Essex’s master narrative.
Moving from Owen Coffin’s iconic death (chapter 1) and assessments of the respective motives behind Chase’s and Nickerson’s narratives (chapters 2 and 3), chapter 4 explores the conditions of Pollard’s return to sea. There I suggest an alternative to the commonly held view that the disaster was a consequence of his Ahab-like obsessive pursuit of whales, and that its demise, like that of the Pequod, in Moby-Dick, provides a cautionary tale stressing the need for personal restraint and humility. Such readings run counter not only to Pollard’s humble, self-effacing temperament but also to his optimistic attempt at seafaring redemption so soon after the Essex debacle. He was seemingly compelled not by a drive for vengeance but instead by a sincere desire to support his community and