The Loss of The Ship "Essex" Sunk By A Whale and The Ordeal of The Crew in Open Boats - Overview

Overview

Born on the island of Nantucket of the Massachusetts coast, Nickerson made his first sea voyage in 1819, at the age of fourteen, on the ill-fated whaler Essex. When the ship was struck by a whale on November 20, 1820, he joined the boat of the first mate, Owen Chase, who later wrote about the incident in the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, the book that would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.

Nickerson returned to sea after his rescue, serving on other whale ships and eventually working his way up to captain of a merchant vessel. Upon retiring he ran a boarding house in Nantucket, which was visited by the writer Leon Lewis, who encouraged him to write down his story of the three months he was lost at sea with the Essex survivors. Nickerson did this, and in 1876, he sent the manuscript, as well as accounts of other adventures he had later in life, to Lewis for editing. Lewis, however, was having a personal crisis, and the manuscript was abandoned. When Lewis journeyed to England, he left the manuscript with friends in Connecticut, where it was forgotten.

Nickerson died in 1883, but it was only in 1960 that his unedited manuscript The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats was discovered. It took another twenty years before it was authenticated by Edouard A. Stackpole; an abridged version was published by the Nantucket Historical Association in 1984, a century after Nickerson's death.

Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 non-fiction work In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is partly based on Nickerson's account.