![]() ![]() ![]() Thomas Nickerson worked as a mate aboard whalers into the 1830s, when he switched to cargo ships. It is said that near the end of his life Chase began hoarding food in the attic of his Orange Street house. He married four times his second wife was Nancy Slade, widow of Matthew Joy. Owen Chase enjoyed two more decades of successful whaling in the Pacific, eventually becoming part owner and master of the Nantucket ship Charles Carroll. Married for more than 50 years, he died in 1870. A good-natured man, he fasted privately every year on the anniversary of the loss of the Essex. Later he served 13 years as one of the town constables. After one voyage in the merchant service, he quit the sea and worked as a grocer on Nantucket for a few years. The wreck of the Two Brothers ended Pollard’s whaling days. Providentially, they were rescued the next day. The men found themselves again cast into small open boats in the middle of the ocean. Fifteen months later, the Two Brothers struck a coral reef in a storm northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. In a true show of confidence, Thomas Nickerson and Charles Ramsdell shipped with him. The owners of the Essex entrusted Captain Pollard with another ship, and he sailed for the Pacific as master of the Two Brothers mere months after returning home. He then signed himself aboard a New Bedford ship and headed back to the Pacific. Chase, working with a ghostwriter, turned his log from the ordeal into a book published in New York before the end of the year. Pollard, Nickerson, and Ramsdell shipped out for the Pacific again within a few months. ![]() The men were welcomed back into the community, which stoically accepted the chance perils of whaling. Two months later, Captain Pollard arrived on the Two Brothers, and 1,500 islanders met him on the wharf in profound, awe-struck silence. Incomplete news of the Essex disaster reached Nantucket before Owen Chase, Thomas Nickerson, Benjamin Lawrence, and Charles Ramsdell arrived home on the whaleship Eagle in June 1821. Illustration by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick The Fate of the Crew ![]()
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