of each president for the last 40 years. if i'm >> american history tv is on social media. follow a set c-span history -- follow us at c-span history. "in the heart of the sea: the tragedy of whaleship essex." following a destructive attack by a spurned well. the crew spent three months to reach mainland south america before being rescued. the nantucket historical association hosted this event and provided the video. >> good evening and welcome to the nantucket museum.

the nantucket historical association is very pleased to bring you our socially distance commemoration. the 200s anniversary of the whaleship essex tragedy. my name is michael harrison. i am the research chair at the nantucket historical association will stop we are thrilled to be this evening in conversation with nathaniel filbrick, longtime islander here. nat and his wife arrived in 1986 and have lived here ever since. he is a historian and has written numerous books about the island in the year 2000. published "in the heart of the sea: about the essex tragedy which the national book award one for nonfiction. since then, he is going on to write a number of books, a very good book about the u.s. exploring expedition. looking at mayflower.

a whole variety of other interesting topics, branching off from nantucket. this is a base for all of this. we are thrilled that everybody can join us this evening. this story of the essex tragedy is a near and dear story to nantucket and to nantucket's identity as a historic whaling port. this organization, the nantucket whaling museum is a unique place to tell the story. we preserve the history of nantucket for the people of nantucket and we have a lot of collections related to the story. it is in our bones so we are really thrilled to be able to have all of you join us this evening for our conversation about the essex. >> here here. >> it is great to be in conversation with you.

there is no one that knows nantucket like you did. >> the basic thing, we are here to talk about the essex the question of the evening. in case anyone is joining us may not know what are the basic , things everyone should know about the essex tragedy? nathaniel: the essex left in 1819, the year after the pacific national bank was built. she was a typical whaling ship, about 20 years old. not a great repair. she had a first-time captain first mate owen chase. ,21 men. the cabin boy was thomas nickerson. they departed and headed for the pacific. it was a normal whaling voyage, not a very successful one. they made their way around cape horn up to the west coast of , south america and they decided to venture out farther.

further than they had ever been before to the offshore grounds. after a stop at the galapagos, they were 3000 miles from the coast of south america where they cited a huge sperm whale, 85 feet long. 85 feet long. the jaw at the museum came from an 85-foot-long whale. when you realize the ship was 85 feet long. one of the whale boats was damaged and first mate owen chase dragged that boat onto the deck and was repairing it while the other boats were pursuing the whale. cabin boy thomas nickerson all , of 15 years old, was at the

helm steering when this 85 foot spurned whale appeared on the port side. they did not think much of it because never before in the history of american whaling had a whale attacked a boat. it had a different intention. it slammed into the side of the ship. it drove the ship backwards and crush the bow into an eggshell. the ship would not sink but it was filled up with water. the men took to their whale boats and they all gathered. pollard would eventually arrive. they were over the horizon and had not seen what had happened. mr. chase what is the matter? , these were men of few words. chase said we have been stole by a whale.

many of us -- if you do not know about the essex, you are probably familiar with moby dick. this would inspire the climax of that great american novel. but where moby dick ends is just the beginning of the essex. it would turn into a survival tale like none other. rumors of cannibals in the islands to the west in the pacific. they decided to go for south america 3000 miles away. , an impossible voyage and the great irony. they would be forced to survive by cannibalism. eventually only a two of the boats would be cited by rescue craft. five nantucketers would get out of this boat to live. three others were left on henderson island and when news came to nantucket and the rest of the country, this was big

news. this was before the american west had become the wilderness. the sea was the wilderness. this was the donner party before that unfolded. owen chase would write an account of it, probably ghostwritten, that would become renowned around the country and in the world. this was big news. this was a tale that nantucketers were not particularly proud of it because it was a voyage that went bad, but it was was a story of all sort of fascination for those outside of nantucket. this was a story i realized i needed to write about. host: there are some interesting things in this disaster that come to mind as you are retelling it.

on the one hand, this part of the pacific had only been discovered by american whalers a year or two before. this was not really part of the ocean that the crew or many of the brethren had been to. they were more comfortable on the coast of south america but there was money to be made and they ventured out. they were sort of in the unknown, taking a risk but here they are cast into their boats with their ship wrecked. imagine us, being cast into a boat in the middle of the pacific. you are a reputable sailor while you might be able to do some great stuff. i would be at my wits end. here are professional sailors are able to salvage things from

the wreck, rig the rowing boats to sail, professional skills they bring to actually save themselves. the great irony or tragedy of this either way is they are unmatched by the circumstances. they make a decision not to go to the nearest islands because they have heard there are cannibals there. again a reflection of new something slowly provincial about nantucket or a limitation in their knowledge. but they know south america. and that is where they go. at happens to be sealing against prevailing winds for 3000 miles but not enough water and food doesn't work very well. guest: what i thought long and hard and tried to examine it in my research. how did they do this? what were they thinking? this is a story of survival.

when you're in a survival situation is your fears that drive you. it is very hard to think rationally. the fears they all had was the unknown pacific. this was very early in pacific whaling. the only thing they heard about these islands were rumors of cannibals. they were very adventuresome and taken it farther than anyone else when it came to the exploration of the world, but they were also very conservative. they build their knowledge incrementally. unless they could hear it from someone they knew, they did not trust that information. one thing they did know was that the sea, whale boats and whale ships. just as you described here is a , whaleboat right here. this boat is from a later era. it is much larger than the essex was. on 25 feet long.

they built up their size so a large wave would not flood it. these books were not equipped sails and off they went, finally falling into the only thing they knew, back to the civilized coast. for me, the story of the essex is a tale of human survival and as you alluded to, these guys had tremendous skills but ultimately, it was nature who would call the shots and what they would endure in the weeks and months ahead. host: the irony that we see in the story now as modern observers because they do not want to go to certain islands because they are afraid of cannibalism and they resort to cannibalism themselves. they are in a boat for three months.

three months. in an open boat. that is an entire summer. you are at sea, in the galapagos islands, at that point, rounding up galapagos turtles. 100 pounds. they could store them like sex of w -- stacks of wood. these tortoises deliver months, as long as a year without any food and water and provide the crew with wonderful meat. when this whale attacked the ship, they had all these galapagos tortoises. they put two of those in each whaleboat, they had some bread, some water. they did not have a lot of water. off they went. the closest i could get to

getting my head imaginatively around what they were going through, was to think in terms of science fiction. this is like a spaceship. the pacific was space for them. here they are, out there, doing their best. trying to get back home. host: they know that there are other ships out there. they are hoping maybe they will pass imagine sailing through an one. area the size of texas, hoping you are going to pass one of the 60 or 70 ships out there. luck or not look, they didn't. guest: they felt that if everything went right, if the winds worked perfectly, they

might be able to get to the coast of south america and a month and a half. the provisions would last. everything would go wrong. like you said they were always , hopeful that someone would discover them and that did not happen and they began to run out of water. they were dying of dehydration. when they cite an island, an island they were not aware of. they misnamed it. it was actually henderson island. you cannot make this stuff up. just as they are on the verge of death they sail up to this , island and there is no water until a spring high and low tide and at low tide bubbling from a rock that is usually submerged, is freshwater. it's positively biblical. that saves them for now but they

would realize -- this is almost a metaphor for the human race on this planet. within a couple of days, a couple of weeks they realize they are killing off of the wildlife that they could sustain themselves with. the birds. if they stayed for any length of time, they would ultimately starve so they decide we have to push on and it is then when three men, a couple of them from cape cod and one was an englishman, this was an ingrown group of nantucketers. good luck to you. we will stay on dry land. they would stay, and very emotional parting, and ultimately they would be rescued because the survivors would send a rescue ship there. in another great irony, it turned out that that rock, as

the tide moved on, would never again come above the tide line so they began to die from dehydration. they would barely make it when they were on the verge of death when they were rescued. once again it is a story of , incredible human endurance, of ins and outs, it is a story that really captures the imagination. host: i was asked once by somebody, a few of these people survived and go through this horrible ordeal. they come home. what is the importance in this? what is the lasting impact of their tragedy? we think now of airplane disasters and other modern calamities that bring about

changes in legislation and safety. the titanic disaster is a famous example of changing rules and regulations. what did this do for whaling? guest: not much. nantucketers -- this had never happened before. it seemed to them like a random act. as captain pollard would say, he would be given a ship and depart within months of his return to nantucket. clearly no one faulted him. as he would say to the young naval officer of the west coast of south america, the naval officer said he just read the story of the essex. he said, you are not captain pollard of the essex?

yes, i how could you ever go out am. there again? pollard would say, on and talk and we have a saying lightning , -- on nantucket we have a saying lightning never strikes , twice. for captain pollard, and it would. in hawaii, the ship would be beaten to death on the coral. they would take to the whale boats. thomas nickerson, the cabin boy, was with him. he would leave in a counterfeit that they had the drag pollard off the deck. he did not want to get back into a whaleboat under the circumstances. luckily, they would be rescued that next day. but as pollard would say to a missionary he would be on his return to nantucket, of all places the pacific islands, a place he decided not to go to because of a fear cannibals, he

will say back, will be judged as a lucky man. that was right. he would never go to the sea again and live out his life as a night watchman. host: you alluded to a couple of written sources. as a historian wanting to tell these compelling stories from the past, we rely on the evidence that exist for it. i think it is really interesting in this case that there are two really compelling accounts from the survivors and then secondhand accounts from the missionary who met captain pollard and then wrote down what he remembered the captain saying. naval officers doing the same thing. i would love to hear about your encounter when you are on nantucket before you brought the -- wrote the book with the sources that inspired looking

more closely at this and writing about it. guest: when i look back, i did not know how lucky i was living for on nantucket that not only had this whaling museum and research center which has thomas nickerson's account. which he wrote late in life, which was newly discovered when i took up this story. it is just an extraordinary document. it is the kind of book you get at a stationery store today, where he had written out his account of it and had done wonderful drawings. to hold that in your hand is extraordinary, but there is also a museum that has its own great archive. the newspapers have just been

recently microwaved -- microfilmed. that is the town building. but i have to say, one of the resources you guys had was that genealogy. it had just been 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 tried to figure out and they were all related. over and over again. in survival situations, it is groups of people who have a pre-existing bond, whether it is spiritual or 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 there were only five

nantucket survivors from the whale boats in the end. i spent time in the last remaining american wooden whaling ship, channeling what would it have been like when a whale attacked and went to the kendal 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 do not know everything about what happened, you just have these artifacts from the past. whether it is a journal, letter, newspaper account. all of these kinds of things and you take that altogether.

there were even crew lists. all sorts of this stuff and take this altogether and it is the historian's job to try to tell the story as best as you can, being truthful to what historical accounts you have, and inevitably, they disagree in some instances. between chase and nickerson. you have to make the judgment call on who to believe. host: it is interesting because the nantucket historical association holds quite a few of these things. in 2015, a film version of your book came out, the big hollywood treatment, inspired by your book. here at the nha, we re-examine -- reassess the essex tragedy

and do an exhibit about it and look at new at some of these artifacts and some of these things. it was one of the first project s i worked on. we are going to do to a show about the essex. let's see what we have in terms of artifacts. as i'm fond of saying, the nantucket historical association holds all the surviving artifacts from the essex disaster, both of them. one way of looking at it, there is basically one. it is this piece of twine. it is the most heartbreaking artifact. guest: this is a crewmember and just this little and piece of twine. one of the crew members in the whaleboats would take the fibers

from the sails and his clothing we've a piece of twine out of it. -- weave a piece of twine out of it. you often see this behavior in survival situations, where so much time is passing. what you do under the circumstances to stay sane and take up the equivalent of a hobby. in this instance, this young teenager was creating this piece of twine. when he was pulled out of the whaleboat he had it with him, was clearly was important enough to him and his family that eventually it ended up here. your member when it came a part of the collection? host: it became a part in 1914 . benjamin lawrence made it and kept it and he gave it to alexander starbuck. a local historian of nantucket

and nantucket whaling. i do not know exactly when it was gifted and it was given to the nha in 1914. it is in this little ivory frame with a card that says he was in the boat for 93 days. he made this piece of twine. it was very powerful artifact . all that is left is this piece of twine. very powerful. you alluded to manuscripts and crew lists from previous voyages of the essex. there are books from other voyages of the ship and they have all the crew signatures. we own a silver ladle that was given to daniel russell, the previous captain of the essex on

the previous voyage that was successful. the ship was regarded as having greasy luck. a good one to be aboard. we have artifacts that reflect that. the other thing that reflects the power of this event in the imagination is a trunk of the period. it was fetched out of the sea. the story is it was fetched out of the sea from near the essex wreck. a man on one ship who had it sold it to a man on another ship. this is from the essex. the man bought it and took it and held it dear. he lived in ohio and retired there. in the 1890's after this organization was founded, his

family gave the trunk to the nha knowing the importance of the essex. this is from the essex. it's always been displayed as a trunk from the essex. there isn't a single water stain on it. and they were in the boats for three months. how would you know you are near the spot where the essex sank? nevertheless, it is one of those oral traditions. hey, it is an artifact. that's the ultimate thing about writing history. you begin to -- i will always have huge respect for the tenuous nests of the evidence and our ability to really understand what actually happened. you can only -- it is said those who don't know history will live

to repeat it. unfortunately we are all going to be history, no matter how will you know it. you are in the midst of your own time. we are all living in the fog of reality. it is terrifying that we don't know where we are going. that is the way it was for the crew of the essex. the history is great. look back and say this is where it was going. you think it was a simpler time and they knew what they were doing. no. we have the luxury of looking back. in the middle you don't know. when things like a trunk float into the collection, who knows how, they almost become an artifact of the cultural memory of the essex as much -- even if it may not have been pollard's trunk or whomever.

that is where this institution is so important. not only do you have the stuff that connects with laser directness to what happened, you have evidence of how an island 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 -- are there any favorite 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 interlibrary 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 nat all right," and opened up -- and she said he is working hard and he is ok. melissa went back to the car and out of curiosity opened up the package to see what was in it, and the first article was the caloric value of a cannibal, so -- of cannibalism. [laughter] you know, so that was analyzing calories and nutrition. and so, hence, sharon's concern. for me 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 essex who didn't make it, and pollard allegedly said, "know -- reputedly said, "know him? i et him," and how is that about -- an oral 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,

-- that is an index to what happens to people in the toughest times. 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 didn't anticipate was how much i would identify with the crewmembers during the writing of "in the heart of the sea." what was amazing for me is that once they got into the whaleboats, as i was writing it, they were in the whaleboats, 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 part 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 on

pollard's boat, four of them left, and three of them teenaged nantucketer. they have all grown up together, and pollard is actually related to owen coffin, and they could -- and they have come to the point where they know that that -- if they do nothing that they will probably all die of starvation, but in the custom of the sea, if they drew lots and execute 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? when pollard was rescued, it would be pollard and a kid by the name of ramsdell that were found in the whaleboat, they were clutching the dead bones of their messmates, that's how it was described. pollard would come onto the deck of the whale ship that rescued

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 listened to this. can you just imagine the trauma -- the drama. this man has been in for months, with a skeleton, reciting how they drew lots and how his much younger cousin drew the short lot? pollard repeatedly said, "my -- reputedly 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, "no, i like my lot as well 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. this is tough stuff and it was a hard process, and one i will --

-- but one that 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 to them. mike: it is interesting. you mentioned spending time at the charles w. morgan seaport -- charles w morgan and the mystic seaport 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 onto this. melville, as a young man, goes whaling, and he reads chase's account. mr. philbrick: given the book by chase's son. he's channeling the gods here. and melville reads this, and in

his -- through the nantucket network, he got a copy of owen chase's narrative when he was working on "moby dick," which was very rare at that point, and in the back, he would write, on -- and in his own copy, in the back of it would write on the same latitude as where the 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 whaling. melville was a collector, a collector of information, a collector of literature, 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" to my mind the greatest american novel ever written. unfortunately, it was panned by the critics. readers fled screaming from the strange book. and 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 -- because i was going to the land of the peqout, 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, but it's completely neglected. visits nantucket, traveling with his father-in-law -- i like my -- i love my father-in-law, but not necessarily the most auspicious way to go on vacation, and his father was the

judge, and they stayed at what is now the jared 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 his copy of chase's narrative. he would write in green crayon because late in life, 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, i think, 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 could survive when the worst happens. melville would return to that meeting with pollard in a long poem he would write about it called "clarel," that would recount a trip to the holy land. he recounts meeting a man who had a ship that had been rammed -- who had lost 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, particularly 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, in that we here at the nha, in doing the history of the island, we talk about technology, but we are really all about the people. we are about telling stories from 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. with pollard, it reminds me of the story you were telling about on your 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 -- west bank books. still there, a wonderful bookstore. 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 afterward and said, "i have got something i want to show you." 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 a captain pollard, and he said, wait. what was the name inside that bible? he opened it up, and it was the pollard family bible, george pollard's family, and he said, you know? should i have this? shouldn't this be somewhere else? i said i think the nantucket , historical association would love to have it, and sure enough, this wonderful gentleman sent it. it was in the mail by that week. 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 family in

-- i got a card from the ramsdell family in pittsburgh. i grew up in pittsburgh, the maritime center of the universe, and they were descendants from the ramsdells on the essex. they had a tradition in the family, that when it came to grandpa ramsdell, 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. it was fun when the book came out. it was like something where you -- where 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. mr. philbrick: by the way, your exhibit was terrific.

it was so fun. you had a game, basically. you could be one of the crewmembers, right? you would find out what happened to you. i was talking to someone who was, at that point, sitting with a couple of four-year-old 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? that the story involves a journey which was a key part of what we wanted to communicate,

and, that it real 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 of 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 past the whale, and then these cards at each five or six paces, then each survivor -- -- and each of five or six places your card would say -- "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. you, as the visitor, and of course, many visitors. 20 men, 20 cards, and people were looking for owen chase, charles pollard. -- george pollard. those went fast. you could randomly get any of them.

very much forgrounding that horrible journey, getting your mind around what that might have been like. and then these are real people, and the survivors came back and had lives at sea. and, we have artifacts from that. mr. philbrick: actually, and we -- some of the great artifacts are the houses in which these people lived, were living in a museum, in many ways. i live of orange street, and the owen chase house is still there. the house that thomas nickerson was in, then a guest house. nantucketers no longer fish for whales. -- no longer hunted whales, they fished for tourists. thomas nickerson had a guesthouse that is on 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. i had a remarkable opportunity to take two of owen chase's descendants, a sister and brother, to owen chase's grave before the book came out. and, you know, it's sort of -- and they have his portrait which is well known here. 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 aims i had in "in the heart of the sea" was to try to make -- was to take what i learned about local history and try to make it more universal and to focus on this as an endurance situation. as what happens to people in the worst situations. i wanted to not make it just

another whaling story but something where 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. we have been talking now for about 50 minutes. we have questions people have been submitting. if you are ok with that, we will segue into that. and so, the first question we have is actually somebody who noticed that you mentioned in your book that male sperm whales are sometimes referred to as carpenter fish, and from loud clangs that they make to announce themselves to potential mates, and there is the story of the hammering and repairing the damaged whaleboat 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 sperm -- to hal whitehead, one of the foremost sperm 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 were really the first ones to develop a good sense of how sperm whales communicate. through this process of clicks. females have clicks. males have more like a clang. like a boom sound. clearly they have a real , language, almost a morse code-like sequence of clicks. i emailed him and 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're like elephants. male sperm whales will attack each other in a fight over a pod -- and fight over the females in a pod of whales. who knows? ultimately, i have not heard a definitive explanation for what happened. unless we can find a descendent of that sperm whale with an oral tradition that granddad used 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, coming at them, chase felt in his account like there is something going on. melville channels that is. there is some kind of malevolent deity. what is going on there? it made its way into "moby dick." you can only imagine. we'll never know, and i think that is what gives history real legs. 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 certain men died, they resorted to cannibalism. the question is, 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. they are the 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 went really, really bad in the best possible light. particularly when it comes to his involvement. what is interesting -- and usually as an historian, 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 -- before 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. it's a 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 record his account, so that is suspect. but on the other side, he had had the 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 stake in what happened. and so, what he reveals are details about what happened during the initial collision that chase 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 beside the ship, its tale very with its tail close to the rudder. chase had the opportunity to pick up this 18-foot spear to try to kill this whale that had dared to attack the ship, but but, then he realized that the tail was so close to the rudder that if provoked, it could take out the steering device, which would be disastrous. as nickerson said, if he knew what would happen, he would risk ed losing the rudder, but chase makes no mention of this. it is interesting. so in that instance, i tend to believe nickerson on this. i do not think he is making it up, and he had great respect for chase. he was in chase's whaleboat when they were rescued.

on the other side, nickerson claimed they never had to eat anybody, 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. -- different 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. they had written it at different times. i will sort of address that. 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 -- and it is a problem -- prompt to memory. and then he fills in details, or he chooses not to engage. 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.

they are widely available. anybody can read these. the nickerson is available in our collection and is available on our website. for anybody who wants to read it. mr. philbrick: it is a nice script. and the images are just amazing. in just the testing. that must have been a 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

navigational equipment they have to figure out where they are, and they open their copy of the new american practical navigator. 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. the captain of the vessel was like yes 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 -- that is not in the book. 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 virgin island, but it -- and it was virgin 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 for a good amount of time. 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. are 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 "moby dick," 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? -- evil art raised this monster? talk about, oh 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 -- spur them whales -- sperm wha les 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. if able --a bull sperm whale

decided eight -- decided to attack a ship 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 owe everyone a that of -- debt of gratitude. mike: thank you for joining us. we appreciate it. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2021] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> you are watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span3 explore our nation's past. american history tv on c-span three. today we are brought to you by

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