Essex (whaleship)
American whaleship from Nantucket, Massachusetts
Essex was an American whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799. 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.
After a month at sea, the crew landed on the uninhabited Henderson Island. Three men elected to stay on the island, from which they were rescued in April 1821, while the remaining seventeen set off again for the coast of South America. The men suffered severe dehydration, starvation and exposure on the open ocean, and the survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism. By the time they were rescued in February 1821, three months after the sinking of Essex, only five of the seventeen were alive.
First mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson later wrote accounts of the ordeal. The tragedy attracted international attention, and inspired Herman Melville to write his 1851 novel, Moby-Dick.
Ship and crew
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.
“Essex (whaleship)” enters the record as american whaleship from Nantucket, Massachusetts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Essex, whaleship and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1368833. VIAF identifies the subject as 170504680. The Library of Congress control number is n80108840. Authority coordinates are -0.683, -118.000. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1799, 1820, 1821 and 1851.
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This entry incorporates text from “Essex (whaleship)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.