A Brill Calendar: November 20

The Sinking of the Good Ship Essex

Few dramas on the high seas were ever transmitted back in proper detail to merchant-owners and governments.

Mutual insurance and partaking in both profit and loss of expeditions saw to it that investing in risky activities could be lucrative in the long-term; a significant portion of wealth in Holland and Zeeland depended on it. Ships and crews never returning often meant a disappearance without any trace or reason.

Naturally total absence of information was exceptional, since long sea-journeys were mostly undertaken in convoy, whilst the chances that an entire fleet vanished off the face of the earth forever, without any surviving soul, were relatively small. Even then, the sheer horror of the catastrophe could often only be told by illiterate mariners, unaware of the price and value of their story.

Still, it is seldom that destruction and sinking of one ship by a superior adversaries caused such timeless consequences as when the ‘Essex’ went to the bottom of the sea on November 20, 1820. Its mighty enemy was a whale; and she a whaler, with Nantucket for port. And it was this cataclysmic overthrow, making for a tall & memorable story, which is said to be the source of inspiration for Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) to write his novel ‘The Whale’ (1851), soon thereafter to be renamed as ‘Moby Dick’.

In the chronicles of the whaling industry – an important and substantial one for all seafaring nations on the northern hemisphere since the European Middle Ages, when ships could be at last designed and built to the face an awesome prey with some confidence – the fate of the ‘Essex’ is not unique. In the year of Melville’s new literary masterpiece, 1851; another whaler, the ‘Ann Alexander’ went down in a similar fashion.