Owen Chase

Owen Chase was a Nantucket whaleman, born in 1797, who became first mate of the whaleship Essex. On 20 November 1820, far out in the Pacific, a large sperm whale rammed the vessel twice and sank it, leaving the crew in three small whaleboats with limited provisions. Chase commanded one of the boats during the survivors’ attempt to reach South America, a decision that exposed them to months of hunger, thirst, storms and extreme physical collapse.

Chase survived the ordeal, during which starvation drove members of the scattered crews to consume the bodies of dead companions. Back on Nantucket he published Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex in 1821, one of the principal first-hand accounts of the disaster and an important source later encountered by Herman Melville. Chase returned to whaling and eventually commanded ships himself. He died in 1869 after a long life permanently marked by the Essex catastrophe.

In Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, in 1819, the Nantucket whaleship Essex sails for the Pacific under Captain George Pollard Jr., with Owen Chase as first mate and fourteen-year-old Thomas Nickerson among the crew.