Stove by a Whale. Thomas Farel Heffernan

      I don’t know when I was first in that kitchen—it was more than forty years ago—and I must have seen the maple chest then, but children don’t pay attention to things like that. Children want to go out into the fields and find hedgerow blackberries and snakes. But my wife saw it the first time she was in the kitchen. “Oh,” Irene Chase said, “that was Howard’s great-grandfather’s sea chest.” “Sea chest?” I said, “—not Owen Chase’s?” “No, it was Owen’s brother’s.” But that was enough; the vessel had been rubbed and the genie came out, hardly waiting to be asked to tell the following story, which therefore demands to be dedicated to the people of the chest—to Carol and to Howard and Irene Chase and to Isabell Chase Burnett.

      CONTENTS

       Preface

       Chapter One: Owen Chase

       Chapter Two: Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex, of Nantucket, by Owen Chase

       Chapter Three: Ne Cede Malis

       Chapter Four: Next Lowering

       Owen Chase after the Essex

       George Pollard, Jr.

       The Other Survivors

       Chapter Five: Telling the Story

       The Authorship and Publication of Owen Chase’s Narrative

       Herman Melville

       Accounts and Borrowings

       Appendices

       A: Herman Melville’s Annotations and Markings in His Copy of Owen Chase’s Narrative

       B: The Story of the Essex Shipwreck Presented in Captain Pollard’s Interview with George Bennet

       C: Thomas Chapple’s Account of the Loss of the Essex

       D: March 7, 1821, Letter of Commodore Ridgely to the Secretary of the Navy

       E: The “Paddack Letter” on the Rescue of Captain Pollard and Charles Ramsdell

       F: Report of the Essex Shipwreck and Rescue in the Sydney Gazette, June 9, 1821

       G: Table of Islands from Bowditch’s Navigator

       H: Chase Genealogy

       Notes

       Index

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      Owen Chase

      By permission of Isabelle and Margaret Tice; reproduced by the Peter Foulger Museum from a photograph in its collection frontispiece

      Title page of the first edition of Owen Chase’s Narrative

      By permission of the Princeton University Library

      Map of the Essex adventure

      Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely

      By permission of Mary Kent Norton; photographed courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library

      U.S.S. Constellation around the time of Owen Chase’s rescue

      Courtesy of the Naval Photographic Center, Naval District, Washington, D.C.

      Capt. Thomas Raine

      By permission of Maxwell Raine

      Lydia Chase Tice, daughter of Owen Chase, and her husband,

      Capt. William Harvey Tice

      By permission of Isabelle and Margaret Tice

      Capt. Joseph Chase

      By permission of Isabelle Chase Burnett

      Herman Melville’s annotations of Owen Chase’s Narrative

      By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

      Owen Chase’s descent from William Chase

      Owen Chase’s marriages and children