that is the story of the national building museum, how it came to be an installed in the pension building. its purpose is to celebrate the built world, and how that built world started out as a government office building has come to represent the inaugural events of each president for the last 40 years. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2021] >> you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> and author talks about his book in the heart of the sea: the tragedy of the whaleship essex following a destructive attack by sperm whale.

see also relates the fate of the crew. the nantucket historical association hosted this event and provided the video. >> good evening. welcome to the nantucket whaling museum. we are very pleased to renew our commemoration of the 200 anniversary of the whaleship essex. i am the research chair. we are pleased to leave this evening in conversation with an author. he arrived in nantucket in 1986. he has lived here ever since. he is a historian and has written numerous books about the island.

in 2000, he published "in the heart of the sea," a book about the nantucket tragedy. since then, he has gone on to write a number of books. one about exploring, the mayflower, a variety of other topics. branching off from nantucket. we are thrilled that everyone can join us. this story of the essex tragedy is near and dear to nantucket. to the identity of a historic whaling port. this museums is a unique place to be able to tell the story. we preserve the history of nantucket. we have lots of collections.

it is in our bones. we are really thrilled to be able to have all of you join us this evening for our conversation about the essex. mr. philbrick: i second that. it is really good to be in conversation with you. nobody knows nantucket history like you do. mike: we are here to talk about the essex. the question we should start with is, what are the basic things everyone should know about the tragedy? mr. philbrick: the essex left nantucket in the summer of 1819. just a year after the national bank was built. she was a typical whaleship, about 20 years old, not in great repair. she had a first time captain. 21 men.

the cabin boy was thomas nickerson. they were headed for the pacific. it was a normal whaling voyage. they made their way around cape horn and up the west coast of south america. they decided to venture out farther into the pacific than the essex had ever been before. they wanted to stop at the galapagos. they were 3000 miles from the coast of south america when they cited a huge sperm whale. 85 feet long. this is a huge whale. the jaw at this museum apparently came from an 85 foot whale. one of the whale boats was

damaged. the first mate dragged that boat up onto the deck of the essex and was carrying it while the other two boats were off pursuing whales. the cabin boy with steering when this huge 85 foot sperm whale appeared on their star board -- portside. never before the history of american whaling had a whale attack to ship. this whale had a different intention. he picked up speed and slammed to the set of the ship, knocked them into their side. he drove the ship backwards. he crushed the bow like an eggshell. the ship filled up with water. captain pollard arrived.

they were over the horizon. they had not seen what had happened. he asked, what is the matter? these are men of few words. he simply said, we have been hit by a whale. many of us do not know about the essex. but you are probably familiar with "moby-dick." this would inspire this great american novel. it turned into a survival tale like no other. there were cannibals in the islands to the west. basis cited to go for south america, 3000 miles away. an impossible voyage. they would be forced to survive

by cannibalism. only two of the three whale boats would be cited by rescue craft. five people would get out alive. three others were left on an island. when news came to nantucket and the rest of the country, this was big news. this was before the american west has become the predominant wilderness of the american imagination. the sea was the wilderness. this was the donner party before that all unfolded. an account of it would become renowned around the country. this was big news. this was a tale that people in nantucket were not particularly proud of. it was a story for all sorts of

fascination. for those outside nantucket. this was a story i realized i had to write. mike: there interesting things in this disaster that come to mind as you are retelling it. the part of the pacific they were whaling in had only been discovered a couple of years before. as being a place rich in sperm whales. many of their brethren had been to it. they knew it very well. they were more comfortable off the coast of south america. there was money to be made. they ventured out. on the one hand, they were kind of in the unknown, taking a risk. but here they are in their boats with their ship rushed --

wrecked. imagine us being cast into a boat in the middle of the pacific area you are a reputable sailor. you might be able to do that. these are professional sailors who are able to salvage things from the wreck, rigged their rowing boats to sail. all these professional skills. to actually save themselves. the great irony or tragedy of this is that they are outmatched by the circumstances. they make a decision not to go to the nearest island because they have heard there are cannibals. a reflection of maybe something slightly provincial about nantucket. they know south america. that is where they go. against the prevailing winds for

3000 miles. it does not work very well. mr. philbrick: i tried to examine it in my research. how did they do this? what were they thinking? this is a story of survival. it is your fear. it is very hard to think rationally. the fears they all had were the unknown pacific. this is very early in pacific whaling. the only thing they knew about these islands was that there were cannibals. they were very adventuresome. they had gone farther than everyone else when it came to the exploration of the world. but they were also very conservative. they build their knowledge incrementally. if they couldn't procure it from someone they knew, they did not trust that information.

the one thing they knew is the sea, whale boats, and whaleship's. this boat is from a later era. it is much larger than the essex whale boats. only 25 feet long. a large wave would not necessarily flooded. these boats were not equipped for sale. they turned them into schooners. and off they went. finally falling into the only thing they knew, get back to the civilized coast. for me, the story of essex is a tale of human survival. these guys had tremendous skill. haltingly, it would be nature

that call the shots. in the weeks and months ahead. mike: the irony that we see in the story now as modern observers, they don't was to go to the islands because they are afraid of cannibals. but then they have to resort to cannibalism. three months in an open boat. that is an entire summer. mr. philbrick: at that point in the history of whaling they were rounding up galapagos tortoises. huge creatures like to be over 100 pounds. and store them like would in the hull. these tortoises could live for months, even as long as a year, without any food or water. and they provided wonderful

meat. when the whale attacked the ship, they had all these galapagos tortoises. they put two in each whaleboat. they had some bread and water. they did not have a lot of water. off they went. for me, the closest i can get to getting my head around what they were going through was to think in terms of science fiction. this is like a spaceship that has blown up. you are in your escape pod in the middle of the universe. that was space for them, really. here they are out there doing their best to try to get back home. mike: and hoping, they know there are other ships out there. british ships. they are hoping maybe they will pass one. but imagine sailing through an area the size of texas hoping

you are going to past one of the 70 other ships that are out there. they did not. mr. philbrick: they felt that if everything went right, if the winds worked perfectly, they might be able to get to the coast of south america in a month and a half. and their provisions would last. but of course everything would go wrong. they were always hopeful that someone would discover them. they began to run out of water. they were dying of dehydration. when they site an island they were not aware of. it was henderson island. you cannot make this stuff up. just as on -- they are on the verge of death, they cite this island.

there is no water. they cannot find any water. at low tide, bubbling from a rock that is usually submerged, is freshwater. this is positively biblical. they were safer now. they would realize that this was almost a metaphor for the human race on this planet. within a couple of days, they realized they are killing off all the wildlife they can sustain themselves. if they stayed for any amount of time, they would ultimately starve. they had to push on. it is then that three men, a couple of them from cape cod, one in englishman, realized this was an inground -- ingrown group

of nantucketers. so they stayed. a very emotional parting. ultimately they would be rescued because the survivors would send a rescue ship there. it turns out that that rock from which water would bubble up, as the tide moved on, it would never again come above the tide line. they begin to die of the hydration. they would barely make it. it is a story of incredible human endurance. a story that really captures the imagination. mike: i was asked once, they go

through this horrible ordeal, they come home, what is the lasting impact of their tragedy? we think now of airplane disasters or any variety of modern calamity that brings about changes in legislation and safety. a very famous example of changing all kinds of rules and regulations. what did this do for whaling? mr. philbrick: not much. nantucketers, this had never happened before. it seemed like a random act. captain pollard would say he would be given a ship and depart within months. no one faulted him for anyone

else in the group. -- crew. he would say to a young naval officer who had just read the story of the essex. he said, you are not captain pollard of the essex. he said, yes i am. he said, how could you ever go out there again? pollard would say, on nantucket, we have a saying, lightning never strikes twice. for pollard, it would not. this shift would be key facet on the quarrel. -- coral. nicker was with himso when this happenedn. they had to grab him off. he did not want to get back into a whaleboat in the circumstances.

they would be rescued the next day. as pollard would say to a missionary who he would meet on his return to nantucket, from the pacific islands, tahiti, one of the -- places they had decided not to go to, he said, i will be judged as a lucky man. he would never go to see again -- sea again. mike: you alluded to a couple of the written sources for this story. as a historian wanted to tell these compelling stories, we rely on the evidence. it is interesting in this case that there are two very compelling first-hand accounts from survivors. and then there are the secondhand accounts like from

the missionary who met captain pollard and wrote down what he remembered pollard saying. i would love to hear a little bit about your encounter when you are on nantucket before you wrote the book. looking more closely at this. mr. philbrick: when i look back, i did not know how lucky i was. you had not only this wonderful museum and research center, which has thomas nickerson's accounts that he wrote laden light, which had been newly discovered since i took up the story. it is the kind of book you would get at a stationery store today. where he had written out his

account and on these wonderful drawings. to hold that in your hand is extraordinary. there is also the athenaeum, which has its own great archive. the newspapers had just been recently microfilmed. there is the town building. one of the resources that you guys had was that genealogy had just gone online. it was possible for the first time to take two people and figure out how closely they were related. i was very curious how closely related were the nantucketers. i did that with each one. they were all related. over and over again.

in a survival situation, it is groups of people who have a pre-existing bond, whether it is spiritual, cultural, that tend to make it out at a higher rate than those who do not have those kinds of bonds. that probably helped the fact that they were only five nantucket survivors from the whaleboat at the end. i went to mystic seaport and spent time at the last remaining wooden whaleship. channeling what it would've been like when a whale attacked. and went to another whaling museum that had its own wonderful collection. it is now part of the bedford whaling museum. all of these provided -- history is not what happened in the past

, it is what we tell using the evidence of what came from the past. you don't know everything about what happened. you just have the artifacts from the past, a journal, a letter, a newspaper account. all of these kinds of things. there was even crew lists. you take this altogether. it is a historian's job to try to tell the story as best you can of being truthful to what historical accounts you have. inevitably, they disagree in some instances. between chase and nickerson. you have to make a judgment call of who to believe. mike: the nantucket historical collection holds a few of these things that you worked from.

in 2015, a film version of your book came out. big hollywood treatment inspired by your book. we took that opportunity to reassess the essex tragedy and do an exhibit about it. to look anew at these artifacts and put them on display. it was one of the first projects i worked on here at the association. we will do a show about the essex with all of our stuff. let's see what we have. as i am fond of saying, we hold all of the surviving artifacts. both of them. mr. philbrick: things that are actually from the ship, there is basically one.

it is this piece of twine. it is the most heartbreaking artifact. it is this little framed piece of twine. one of the crewmembers in the whaleboat would take the fibers from his clothing and weave a piece of twine out of it. you often see this behavior in survival situations. so much time has passed. you are terrified all the time. what do you do in the circumstances to stay sane? do take up the equivalent of a hobby. this teenager was creating this piece of twine. he still had it with him.

clearly it was important enough to him and his family that it eventually ended up here. mike: it became part of the collection in 1914. he kept it and gave it to alexander starbuck, a local historian of nantucket whaling. i do not know all of when it was gifted. he gave it to us in 1914. it is just as you describe. it is in this little ivory frame with a card that says he was in a boat 93 days. it is very powerful. all that is left is this piece of twine. you have already alluded to manuscripts from previous voyages of the essex.

wharf books from other journeys of the ship. we have a silver ladle that was given to the previous captain of the essex at the end of the previous voyage, which had been very successful. he was given command of a new ship. pollard stepped up. we have artifacts that reflect that. another thing the association holds that reflects the power of this kind of event in the imagination is a small travel trunk. it was fetched out of the sea. from near where the essex racked. -- wrecked.

a man on one ship sold it to another ship. the man bought it and took it and held it dear. he lived in ohio. after this organization was founded, his family gave the trunk to us, knowing its importance. it has always been displayed as a trunk from the essex. it does not have a single water stain on it. they were in the boats for three months. how are you know you would near the spot where it sank? nevertheless, it is one of those oral traditions. it is an artifact. mr. philbrick: that is the ultimate thing about writing history.

i will always have huge respect for the tenuous evidence and our ability to really understand what actually happened. you can -- it is said that those who do not know history will live to repeat it. unfortunately, we will all repeat history no matter how well you know it. it is terrifying. we do not know where we are going. that is exactly the way it was for the crew of the essex. history is great. you can look back and say this is where it was going. -- in the new they were doing. no. we just have the luxury of looking back. we don't know. so when things like a trunk

floated into the collection, who knows how? they almost become an artifact cultural memory of the essex even though it may not have actually been pollard's trunk or whomever, and that is where this institution is so, so important. not only do you have the stuff that connects with laser directness to what happened, you have evidence of how a culture responded to something like this , so it is something that the longer i am in this business, the more i begin i realize how lucky i was to live on nantucket and stumbled onto this story and decide to tell it and have all of this incredible organization.

mike: well, thank you. we are happy to have such great people, with the resources and do good storytelling out of it. this is the 200th anniversary of this disaster. it is the 20th anniversary of your book about the disaster, and i know you have been speaking in a number of forums about the book. are there any more stories about the process of writing the book? mr. philbrick: well, you know, this is before the internet really kicked in, so now you google something, and you are sort of led to it, but i was using a lot of library loans to get not only books but articles, academic articles, and so i was working with our local library,

working very closely with sharon, our reference librarian, and she would -- i was requesting a lot of things, and at one point, she called to say that some articles had come in, and it was a saturday, and my wife melissa said she was going to be in town. she would pick them up. she went up to the great hall, the reference desk. sharon looked worriedly into melissa's eyes, and said, "is net --nat all right," and opened up the package to see what was in it, and the first article was the core value of a cannibal, so analyzing calories and nutrition. and so, hence, sharon's concern.

this was a research that took in the whole island. i mean, there were interesting -- one of the traditions i had heard when i was beginning work on it, everyone was, have you heard the tradition about what happened to captain pollard when he came back to nantucket? and the story was pollard was with some friends on the steps of the pacific national bank when someone from off island who had recently arrived on the ferry came up and said, "i am looking for someone named owen coffin. do you know where i can find him?" and owen coffin was one on the essay, and public said, "no, and i ate him," and how is that

about tradition coming from nantucketers? i have always had interest in the dark side of history. i am not much interested in the great triumphs that inspire inspiration. i am interested in the scary stuff, what happens to people, so the darkness of the essex story had an immediate appeal, and i am a big stephen king fan and all of that kind of thing, but what i really do not anticipate was how much i would identify with the crewmembers during the writing of "in the heart of the sea," and what was amazing for me is that once they got into the whale boats, as i was writing it, they were in the whale boats, during the winter,

january and february, and that was the actual time of year i was writing the book, and i had sort of a fantasy that i would write, finish that wednesday, on the day that they survived, but what i did not anticipate was how hard it was going to be to write about the situation, where pollard, there is a four of them were, with a teenaged nantucketer. they have all grown up together, and pollard is actually related to own coffin, -- owen coffin, and they could probably all die, but in the custom of the sea, if they drew lots and executed the first person who drew the straw and consumed their body, the rest would have a chance to live. can you imagine to be in that situation?

and when pollard was rescued, it would be pollard and a kid by the name of ramsdell that were found in the will book, they were clutching the dead, and pollard would come onto the deck of the whale whip that rescue them, and that night, i do not know how he did it, he would tell the story of what happened, and it was reported by a captain who listen to this. can you just imagine the trauma this man has been in for months, with a skeleton, reciting how they drew lots, and his much younger cousin drew the short lots. pollard repeatedly said, my boy, no one is going to touch you if you do not want to do this, and the boy, who was raised a quaker, said, "i -- no, i like

my lot as much as any other," and they would execute the boy, and he would be dispatched, and, ultimately, it would be the one thing to allow pollard and ramsdell to survive, and was a tough process, and one i will -- i feel such a tremendous debt to the people who lived it, and i just hope that the book in some way does a proper tribute. mike: it is interesting. we mention spending time at the charles morgan with that atmosphere, and there is nothing like being on nantucket in winter to inspire lots of thoughts. in some ways, it is easy to see how melville grasped on this.

goes wailing, and he reads chase's account. mr. philbrick: by chase's son. channeling the gods here. and melville reads this, and in his -- through the nantucket network, he got a copy of owen chase's work, which was very rare at that point, and in the back, he would write, on the same latitude as with essex went down, i read this and it had a remarkable effect on me. that is one of the biggest understatements in literary history, but that was not his only connection. mike: he had gone wailing.

melville was a collector, a collector of information, a collector of ideas, filtering it through and bringing it out in his work, and as a young man to read this provocative account, you know, given the family connections, and to let that percolate during the intervening years -- mr. philbrick: yes, it is just remarkable, and then he writes "moby dick" which is one of the greats. reading from the strange book, it marked the end, in a way, of his literary career, although he would keep writing. when i first moved to nantucket, i was really excited, and it was kind of a letdown when i learned that melville had never been in

nantucket before writing "moby dick," but he would visit nantucket the summer after writing "moby dick." melville publishes his masterpiece, and nantucket, traveling with his father-in-law -- i let my father-in-law but not necessarily most auspicious way to go on vacation, and his father was the judge, and they stayed at what is now the gerrit coffin house, living kitty corner across the street was none other than captain pollard, and as melville would write, also right in the back of chase's narrative, he would write in green crayon, and his eyesight had begun to go, a product of all of those years out on the sea, and his eyesight would go, and he would write in

the back pages of his copy of chase's narrative, sometime in the 1850's, visited nantucket and saw captain pollard. to the islanders, he was a nobody but to me the most remarkable man i have ever met. if that is not a character reference, i do not know what is. and melville, there at the tailspin of his career saw pollard, someone who had experienced the worst possible fate for a nantucket whaleman, not once but twice, i think he saw in pollard a real kind of source of inspiration on how you survive when the worst happens. melville would return to that meeting with pollard in a long poem he would write about it

that would recount a trip to the holy man -- holy land, a man who had a ship that had been rammed by a whale and meeting the fog, the tendrils of the fog wrapping around him. it has got to be based on the circumstance that he saw pollard, and so i think what is fascinating for me is, yes, "moby dick" was inspired by the story of the essex, in particular the sinking of the ship, but it was the captain of the essex who would really become a lifelong source of inspiration for melville in the years after he wrote "moby dick." mike: i think that is very powerful, and we here at the nha , doing the history of the island, we talk about technology, but we are really about people. we are about telling stories about real people and making

their stories and their experiences come alive to the extent that we can. that is a great reminder of the effort we put into doing that, and with pollard, it reminds me of the story you were telling about the book tour in 2000. mr. philbrick: right. "in the heart of the sea" came out in may 2000. i cannot believe it was 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago. and i went on a book tour, my first book tour. it was a strange experience, and it was a wonderful experience but terrifying at the same time, and i was in st. louis at the west bank, still there, a wonderful bookstore, and as i came into the bookstore, there was a gentleman with a grocery bag clutching it, and he looked at me as i walked by, and i gave my talk, and then he came up to be afterwards and said, "i have

got something i want to show you," and before he opened up the bag, he explained he had been on nantucket several years before and had come across a yard sale, where there were books for sale, and there was this old bible for sale, and he bought it for a couple of bucks, and he brought it back to st. louis, and then he was reading my book about the essex and captain pollard, and he said, wait. what was the name inside that bible? he opened it up, and it was a pollard family bible, george pollard's family, and he said, you know? should i have this? shouldn't this be somewhere else? i think the nantucket historical association would love to have it, and sure enough, this wonderful gentleman sent this.

at that point, there was an essex exhibit, and within a week, the pollard family bible was on exhibit at that exhibit, so for me, that was like the power of history, and once the book came out, i got something from the ramsdell to come and a group in pittsburgh, the center of the universe, and they were descendents from the ramsdell on the essex, and they had a tradition in the family, that when it came to grandpa ramsde ll, whenever it was time for dinner, they all sat down right away and began eating, because they all knew what happened when grandpa ramsdell got hungry, so

another tradition that came down through the family. so it was fun when the book came out. the story just kept on happening , and it was really wonderful. mike: we have the bible in our collection, and we had it in our 2015 show. either way, your exhibit was terrific. mr. philbrick: you had a game, basically. you could be one of the crewmembers, right? and then you would find out what happened to you. at that point, sitting with a couple of four-year-olds twins, and one got one character, and the other got the other character, and one of the twins had died, and the other survived . it was a huge hit. mike: thank you. for those in the audience who

may not have had a chance to see it, when we re-presented the story of essex in 2015, we looked at what are the core ideas of this story we really want our visitors to come away with, and the story involves a journey which was a key part of what we wanted to communicate, and the people, getting back to that connection to real people in the past, so we built a reproduction boat of the right scale that you could sit in and read projection quotes as the disaster gets worse and worse, and there was a big mural of the ocean, and we had a path on the floor to follow the journey to the whale and passed the whale, and then these cards, and each survivor -- look, i drew a card of charles ramsdell. did he stay on henderson island?

oh, no, he was not one of those men. exactly what happened. he was the visitor, and of course, many visitors, tournament, 20 cards, and people were looking for owen chase, charles pollard. those went fast. that sort of moral journey, getting your mind around what that might have looked like, and then these are real people, and the survivors came back and had lives at sea, actually, and we have artifacts from that, and some of the great artifacts are the houses in which these people lived, were living in a museum, in many ways. orange street, and the owen chase house is still there. the house that thomas nickerson was in, then a guest.

nantucketers no longer fish for whales. they did for tourists. and then north water street has this part of the harbor house complex. there is the pollard house there on center street. it is just amazing. you can go to the cemetery. owen chase's grave is there. and i had a remarkable opportunity to take two of owen chase's descendents, a brother and sister, to the grave before the book came out. and, you know, it's sort of brought home to me this is a local story. you know, this is local history

in one sense, for me, but one of the ideas i had in "in the heart of the sea" was to try to make it more universal and to focus on this as an endurance situation as to what happens to people in the worst situations. i wanted to not make it just another whaling story but something if you grew up in topeka, kansas, and had never seen the sea, you might be drawn into the human element, and it is really the human element. if we do not engage with history emotionally, it really ultimately means nothing to us. mike: yes. absolutely. so we have been talking now for about 50 minutes. questions people have been submitting. i will segue into that. and so, the first question we have is actually somebody who noticed that you mentioned in

your book that male's perm whales are sometimes referred to as carpenter fish, and the loud clangs that they make to announce themselves to a potential mate, and there is the story of hammering and repairing the damaged whaleboat, it may have attracted the whale that attacked the essex, so the first question, has there been any research that it may have been the repair work that led to the attack? mr. philbrick: yes, when i was researching the book, i reached out to one of the foremost's perm whale experts on earth. he and his wife and small children took a sailboat and basically sailed very close to where the essex went down with very high-tech listening devices underwater, listening to the -- they are really the first ones to develop a good sense of house perm whales communicate -- how

sperm whales communicates. females have clicks. males have more like a clang. they have a real language, almost morse code like, and so i asked. i.e. mailed him and said -- explained to him as best i could from the evidence what happened. what did he think with the whale happened, and he says who knows? he was very familiar, obviously. he tended to think that maybe the whale sort of blundered into the ship by accident and then got angry and came after it. sperm whales, male sperm whales,

are very territorial. they will attack each other over a pod of females. whether it was, who knows? ultimately, i have not heard a definitive, you know, explanation for what happened. unless we can find a descendent of that sperm whale with a granddad to tell, i do not think we will know that. that is one of the great things about the story. at the center of this is this question. what was the whale thinking? looking at the whale attacking, chase felt in his account there is something going on. there is some kind of malevolence. what is going on there? it made its way into "moby dick."

you can only imagine. will never know, and i think that is what gives history -- where something of huge importance happens, but ultimately, we won't never really, really know exactly what happened. mike: that somewhat segues into one of the other questions, which is about -- so, we have these accounts that say what happened. they drew straws in pollard's boat. as some died, they resorted to cannibalism. how do we know they are telling us the truth? mr. philbrick: that is a question when it comes to all evidence in history. the one thing when it comes to narratives, people's accounts. when it comes to letters, they are biased. it is a person telling their side of the story, so when it comes to chase's account, it is

the narrative of an officer putting a voyage that was really, really bad in the best possible light. what is interesting about -- and usually you want stuff that is as close to the event as possible, you know, when things are still hot. when people have a chance to think too much about it, particularly when they are thinking about their own reputation, and that is what is really interesting about that letter describing pollard's first account. this disinterested person recording this, coming right out of his mouth right after, as soon as possible. nickerson's account was recorded late in life when a writer asked him to recorded, so that is suspect. but on the others, he had had a chance to talk to other survivors, get information that

chase may not have had, and coming from a different perspective. he was 15. he was a cabin boy. he had no great, professional steak and what happened. and so, when he reveals our details about what happened during the initial collision that chase told -- chose not to include, that the whale after it first collided into the side of the ship ended up on the side, floating, stunned, knocked out on the side of the ship, its tal e very close to the rudder, and chase had the ability to pick up this 18-foot spear to try to kill this whale that attacked the ship, but then he realized the tale was so close to the rudder that if provoked, it could take out the steering

device, which would be disastrous. as nickerson said he knew what would happen, he would risk losing the rudder, but chase makes no mention of this. so in that, i tend to believe nickerson on this. i do not think he is making it up, and he had great respect for chase. on the other site, nickerson claimed they never had to eat anybody out right, that it was bread that kept them through, when chase provided clear evidence that they were reduced to survival cannibalism. nickerson was an old man. he did not want to be remembered as a cannibal. so what you do is look at the various sources, think about, you know, how their point of view would have bent what they said, and ultimately do your

best to figure out what happened on your own judgment. that is why people need to return to these stories over and over again. there is no such thing as a definitive account of any historical event, particularly as we move through time, and people are interested in those kinds of things. we look back. people are interested in telling the story a different way. mike: yes. in fact, one of the questions here is asking about the differences in nickerson and chase's narrative. it is so fascinating to read nickerson's account, and he clearly has chase's account on his desk, and he is reading it, and then he fills in other details, or he chooses not to engage. mr. philbrick: again, with the bread versus resorting to

cannibalism, but what nickerson is to fill in all of the detail from the 15-year-old boy perspective as opposed to the perspective of the 25-year-old, and they make a really interesting study that way. anybody can read these. the nickerson is available in our collection and is available on our website. mr. philbrick: it is a nice script. and the images are just amazing. and just think. that must've been eight pretty traumatic process for nickerson, to relive it and record it and write it all out, which makes it interesting process in any event. mike: yes. another question we have had is asking about the island that

they stopped at on their voyage. you know, if they did not know the name of the island, how did the rescuers know where to get them? do you want me to answer that, or do you want to talk to that? mr. philbrick: yes. take it away. mike: because they get to this island, and they use what equipment they have two figure out where they are, and they open their copy the bible for navigators. they look up and it says the name of the island. and that's where they think they are. so the three men stay behind and when pollard and everyone else are picked up, they hire a british vessel headed across the pacific. they pay them a fee to stop at this island and pick up the men.

i can find that, i know where it is. he sails out and there's no one there. there's no evidence anyone has been there. but he knows this area of the pacific enough to know there's another island across the horizon and that is henderson and that's where the men were. mr. philbrick: what is interesting is henderson island has since become a kind of a vortex for plastic, floating plastic. i think it has to do with why the essex guys ended up there. the current converged on this island and that's why those three whaleboat ended up there. the beach where they landed is just full of plastic garbage. this once version island, and it was a version island -- not a virgin island, but it was

absolutely pristine back when i was writing, had the great fortune to run across a scientific study of the ecology of henderson island. a group of scientists had lived there -- all sorts of photographs, hugely helpful to me. then to see know in the last two decades what has happened to that place is just heartbreaking. mike: i think we have time for just maybe one more. our there any other examples of whales attacking whaling ships? mr. philbrick: good question. yes, there are. the question is what was happening here. were the whales getting more aggressive as they figured this out? there's the possibility there were plenty of whale ships that

never made it back. had they been destroyed by a whale beforehand? it did not happen a lot, but it did happen. while melville was writing mobile did, revising it in the summer of 1851, word came to him of a whale ship that had been attacked and he would write, i think to hawthorne -- has my people art raised this monster? talk about man -- when i was researching "in the heart of the sea" i explored every incident where we had reports of whales attacking a ship. there are even accounts during world war ii of spur whales attacking metal naval ships.

who knows what behavior inspired that? it didn't happen a lot, but it was a whale men's worst nightmare. it would make it very hard for someone in a wooden ship. mike: we've reached the end of our time. thank you everyone for joining us. we are delighted to have been able to have you on the 200th anniversary of the event itself. mr. philbrick: thanks again to the nha. without this organization, i couldn't have written the book. i/o everyone