The Sinking of the Whaleship Essex

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🗓️ 20 November 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Essex was an American whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799. On November 20, 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., the ship was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. About 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 km) from the coast of South America, the 20-man crew was forced to make for land in three whaleboats with what food and water they could salvage from the wreck.

After a month at sea the crew landed on the uninhabited Henderson Island. Three men elected to stay on the island, from which they were rescued in April 1821, while the remaining seventeen set off again for the coast of South America. The men suffered severe dehydration, starvation and exposure on the open ocean, and the survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism. By the time they were rescued in February 1821, three months after the sinking of Essex, only five of the seventeen were alive.

First mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson later wrote accounts of the ordeal. The tragedy attracted international attention, and inspired Herman Melville to write his 1851 novel, Moby-Dick.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Cetation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts.
0:28.8	Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Noah and I'm going to be leading this flotilla, but serving under me today.
0:35.4	Eliente will be the guy who only volunteered to be navigator because he thought it was a kind of crocodile,
0:40.7	a dude who's at least one 16th short of a quartermaster and the rearest of rear admirals,
0:45.7	Tom, Cecil, and Eli.
0:48.0	Yeah, when they handed me maps instead of just throwing chicken into my mouth,
0:52.3	as a sad day of realization.
0:54.8	We do both.
0:56.1	Well, you didn't.
0:57.6	No, we didn't.
0:58.9	No, we didn't. No, that's fair.
0:59.8	I am a rear admiral of admiring rears.
1:02.7	Yeah.
1:02.9	Oh, yeah.
1:05.1	And Eli's here.
1:06.6	And also Eli's here.
1:09.0	We said we didn't know I have to do it.
1:10.6	You guys keep lying.
1:13.6	He said that.
1:14.8	I get to be quiet when the jokes are good.
1:19.5	Keep waiting for you guys to do this with the multiple choice questions at the end.
1:25.1	And of course, since Heath isn't here to stop us,
	...

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