![]() ![]() This was an immense distance from known shores for the whalers, and the crew had heard rumors that cannibals populated the many islands of the South Pacific Their spirits were temporarily lifted when Essex began the long spring and summer hunt in the warm waters of the South Pacific Ocean, traveling north along the western coast of South America up to the Spanish-ruled Royal Audience of Quito (present-day Ecuador).Īfter finding the area's population of whales exhausted, the crew encountered other whalers who told them of a vast newly discovered hunting ground, known as the "offshore ground", located between 5 and 10 degrees south latitude and between 105 and 125 degrees west longitude, about 2,500 nautical miles (4,600 km) to the south and west. Combined with the unsettling earlier incident, the crew began to talk of ill omens. Despite this, Captain Pollard elected to continue the voyage without replacing the two boats or repairing the damage.Įssex rounded Cape Horn in January 1820 after a five-week transit, which was extremely slow. She lost her topgallant sail and two whaleboats were destroyed, with an additional whaleboat damaged. Two days after leaving Nantucket, a sudden squall hit Essex in the Gulf Stream and knocked her on her beam-ends, nearly sinking her. Essex was equipped with four whaleboats, each about 28 ft in length.Įssex departed from Nantucket on August 12, 1819, on what was expected to be a roughly two-and-a-half-year voyage to the bountiful whaling grounds off the west coast of South America. Essex had recently been totally refitted, but at only 88 feet in length, and measuring about 239 tons burthen, she was small for a whale ship. Stranded thousands of miles from the coast of South America with little food and water, the 21-man crew were forced to make for land in the ship's surviving whaleboats.īy the time of her fateful voyage, Essex was already an old ship, but because so many of her previous voyages had been profitable. ![]() In 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard, she was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. Essex was an American whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799. ![]()
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