The Essex
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| The Essex of Nantucket |
Last week was the 161st anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville‘s The Whale, or, Moby Dick. The novel was a critical and commercial failure at first. It essentially ended Melville’s career as a novelist, but it grew later into one of the better known (if not entirely widely read) classics of American literature. Melville drew the story from his experience in the whaling industry, and the impetus for writing Moby Dick appears to have come specifically from Melville’s learning the story of the whale ship Essex. It’s that story we’re going to hear today. In some ways, it’s an obscure story, and is understandably hidden away if only because of the element of taboo it contains. But it is also one drawn from the very heart of American culture, through its connection with U.S. economic and maritime history and its close connection with Melville’s famous and monumental allegory.
Twelve years ago, a friend of mine gave me Nathaniel Philbrick‘s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. It’s one of the few books of substance I’ve read in almost one sitting, and a compelling tale that I hadn’t heard. The Essex was a Nantucket whaling boat, with a mostly Quaker crew, that was rammed by a whale in the “Off-Shore Ground” of the Pacific Ocean in 1820. The ship was sunk, and the story of its crew turned in a moment from one of adventure and industry to one of hardship, and eventually to one of unbearable suffering and the rawest forms of survival imaginable. The sailors, alone in the middle of the Pacific in their much smaller whale boats, set out for South America, which was several times more distant than the nearest land, the Marquesas in the South Pacific. They feared cannibals, though, in those South Sea islands, a factor in their decision-making that would ultimately add a cruel bit of irony to their terrible plight. Philbrick’s tale reads like a 19th century Maritime version of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or Norman MacLean’s Young Men and Fire. He does a magnificent job of telling the story.
A few years ago, I was listening to one of the compilation CDs that Sing Out! magazine distributes with every issue, and began to hear the details of this event come back incrementally in the verses of a sea song sung by Michael Lewis. Lewis is one half of the Indiana-based folk duo Traveler’s Dream, and the song on the Sing Out! compilation comes from their album Home Comes the Rover. The song called out to me, particularly through Lewis’s striking musical evocation of some of the story’s most gripping moments.
This week at Murder Ballad Monday, we’re going to explore this song, in conversation with Lewis himself. In today’s post, I want to let the song speak for itself, and give you some resources for learning a little bit more about what’s behind it. In our next post or two, we’ll talk with Lewis about the song, the circumstances of its creation, and how it “functions” in the space that we’ve identified thus far with the murder ballad, broadly construed.
Here is a performance of the song, created specifically for our blog discussion by Michael Lewis. Special thanks to Lewis and to his wife and musical partner, Denise Wilson, for providing this clip, as well as our appreciation in advance for the interview to come.
The Rest of the Story
In addition to Philbrick’s terrific history, there are a number of on-line sources available for learning more about this episode. In addition to the Wikipedia entry, you can find information on web sites here, here, and here. You can also download a copy of a direct survivor’s account, that of Owen Chase, here.
The Essex story is also integral to this excellent 2010 installment of PBS’s The American Experience, entitled Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World.
Next Up
We’ll talk with Michael Lewis and, we hope, discover a few things together about this remarkable story and this remarkable song.