Owen Chase
Who was Owen Chase?
American sailor (1797-1869)
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Owen Chase (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Owen Chase was born on October 7, 1797, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, into a farming family on an island heavily influenced by the whaling industry. Like many Nantucket men of his time, he went to sea young and quickly advanced in the whaling trade. By 1819, in his early twenties, he became the first mate on the Essex, a whaling ship from Nantucket commanded by Captain George Pollard Jr.
The Essex left Nantucket in August 1819 on what was supposed to be a routine trip to the Pacific Ocean to hunt sperm whales. On November 20, 1820, about 2,000 miles west of South America, the ship was hit twice by a furious sperm whale about eighty-five feet long, causing it to sink. Chase and the twenty-man crew were left adrift in three small boats with limited supplies. They faced one of the direst survival stories at sea, enduring starvation, dehydration, and losing many crew members. Chase and a few others were eventually forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. He was among the few rescued after about ninety days at sea.
After returning to Nantucket, Chase quickly wrote about the disaster. In 1821, he published Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, a firsthand account of the sinking and the desperate weeks that followed. The book was straightforward and detailed, capturing the events with the practical tone of a seaman rather than the dramatic style popular at the time. It was widely read and drew significant attention when it came out.
Chase went back to sea after publishing his account, continuing as a whaling captain for several years. He commanded multiple ships in the 1820s and 1830s, showing that the Essex catastrophe hadn't ended his whaling career. However, his later years were marked by declining mental health, with severe anxiety and hoarding in old age, believed by some to be trauma from his ordeal. He died in Nantucket on March 7, 1869, at seventy-one.
Chase's published narrative had a lasting impact beyond his lifetime. As a young sailor in the 1840s, Herman Melville met Chase's son and borrowed a copy of the 1821 narrative. Melville later said reading it was a key moment, and he used the whale attack account directly when writing Moby-Dick, published in 1851. Chase’s detailed, firsthand story of a whale attacking a ship gave Melville the critical dramatic premise for his novel.
Before Fame
Owen Chase grew up on Nantucket when it was the top hub of the American whaling industry. For young men like him, going to sea was a practical decision rather than a romantic one, as whaling provided income and a career path in a community where the industry involved almost every family. Chase probably began his seafaring career as an ordinary sailor in his teens, learning the tough and detailed work of whale hunting on ships that spent years away in far-off oceans.
By his early twenties, Chase had shown enough skill and reliability to be promoted to first mate, a role with a lot of responsibility, making him second in command of a whole ship and its crew. This quick rise suggests he was seen as capable and reliable in the tough hierarchy of the Nantucket whaling world. His appointment to the Essex in 1819 was the peak of his early career, although the voyage would turn him from a promising young officer into one of the most famous survivors in American maritime history.
Key Achievements
- Served as first mate of the whaling ship Essex and survived its sinking by a sperm whale in 1820
- Authored Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, published in 1821
- His published account directly inspired Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick
- Commanded multiple whaling vessels as captain throughout the 1820s and 1830s
- Provided one of the earliest and most detailed firsthand accounts of a whale attacking and destroying a ship
Did You Know?
- 01.The sperm whale that sank the Essex was estimated to be around eighty-five feet long, far larger than average, and struck the ship on two separate occasions before the vessel went down.
- 02.Chase was only twenty-two years old when he survived the Essex disaster and published his account of it the following year.
- 03.Herman Melville encountered Chase's narrative through Chase's own son, who lent Melville a copy of the book while both were at sea in the South Pacific in the early 1840s.
- 04.In his old age, Chase reportedly hoarded large quantities of food in his attic, a behavior his neighbors attributed to his lingering terror of starvation from his months adrift after the Essex sinking.
- 05.The survivors of the Essex were rescued in February 1821 after drifting for approximately ninety days; only eight of the original twenty crew members survived.