Stove by a Whale by Thomas Farel Heffernan

Author:Thomas Farel Heffernan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Melville was wrong about which wife had been unfaithful—the story could hardly be told many times over without some error creeping in—but he may have been right about the rest. Just how Owen was told the upsetting news we will consider shortly.

Of all of Owen’s voyages this one on the Charles Carroll, his last, is the one we know most about, for it is the only one the log of which is extant. The log, which is today in the Peter Foulger Museum in Nantucket, was kept by the captain, Owen himself, not by the first mate. This we know from Owen’s first-person references (“This is my Birth day”). It is as businesslike an account as the average whaling log, but curiosities and suggestive details surface throughout it. And the eye is caught by a graphic detail in the notation of whales taken: Owen, like most log keepers, used marginal drawings of whales to record his kills, but he added the refinement of making the drawings specific so that finbacks, sperm whales, and so on, were distinguishable.

The voyage started with a good omen, a sixty-barrel whale taken just a few days out of Nantucket, and a bad omen, Seaman Benjamin Hayney falling from under the main top and breaking his left arm and right thigh. Owen took him below and set the bones. Hayney, who was fortunate not to have been killed in that all-too-familiar shipboard accident, was never able to return to duty without difficulty. Twenty months later, on May 18, 1838, Hayney was put ashore in the Sandwich Islands “in care of the Consul on account of lameness.” Owen replaced Hayney with Emery Goodrich, a young sailor he found in Hilo who may have been there in consequence of desertion or discharge from the Ansell Gibbs, Capt. Tristram D. Pease, of New Bedford.11

The Charles Carroll moved quickly to the Pacific and spent most of its time on the off-shore ground. On August 9, 1837, the Charles Carroll spoke the Nantucket whaler, Charles and Henry, Capt.

George Joy, a meeting which is of interest because the Charles and Henry on its next voyage out was to have for six months a boatsteerer whom it shipped in Eimeo named Herman Melville. This detail can be added to other pieces in the puzzle of Melville’s claimed glimpse of Owen Chase at sea discussed in the next chapter.

On March 14, 1838, off the coast of Ecuador Owen spoke the famous Hero, the ship pillaged by the pirate Benavides and whose survivors had reached Valparaiso at the same time as the Essex’s seventeen years before. Now the captain of the Hero was Reuben Joy, second cousin of the owner of the Charles Carroll and, more important, brother of Matthew Joy of the Essex, Nancy Chase’s first husband.

The contact between these two ships is more protracted than any other in the course of this whole voyage of the Charles Carroll. From March 14 to May 19 the two ships sailed in company. The practice of

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