![]() ![]() Once again, Captain Pollard faced the ordeal of an open-boat voyage, but this time he and his men were rescued by the companion Nantucket whaler Martha. In February of 1823, the ship under Captain Pollard’s command would become a total loss. They sailed together for the Japan Whaling Grounds, just beyond the farthest reaches of the Hawaiian Island Archipelago. Pollard set off in command of the whaleship Two Brothers on November 12, 1821, and met up with another Nantucket whaleship, the Martha, off the coast of Peru. The captain of the Two Brothers, George Worth, entrusted the ship to Pollard’s command, and he learned new skills as a navigator during the two-and-half-month voyage from Valparaiso to Nantucket, including the ability to take a lunar reading, a skill he tragically lacked on his previous voyage in the Pacific. Having made his way back to Nantucket on the whaleship Two Brothers, it seems that Pollard may have gained more than just renewed optimism on his journey home. The stove ship reflected tragic misfortune, rather than any fault of Pollard’s or his lack of skill as a mariner. It seems that Pollard’s reputation as a fine seaman was not tarnished by his first epic disaster. Their optimism and resilience cannot be overlooked either. One of the more fascinating details of Pollard’s next attempt at sailing to the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean is that along with him were two men who had survived the Essex tragedy as well: Thomas Nickerson and Charles Ramsdell. How any man could survive such a tragedy at sea and wish to ever sail again is a mystery, but Pollard waited barely a month before taking command of the Two Brothers, the same vessel that had given him safe passage back to Nantucket. Pollard and five others made it back to Nantucket alive, and the Essex episode remains as perhaps the most dramatic tale of a disaster the island has ever known. It was not necessarily unusual for a captain to be unable to take a lunar, but under the circumstances, Pollard must have wished he possessed that challenging navigational skill. Pollard was unable to take a lunar observation (reading the angle between the moon and another celestial body), and with nothing to sight from, dead reckoning did little to aid their attempts at navigation. However, toward the end of the small-boat voyage, the men were virtually sailing blind, without glass or log-line there was no way for them to estimate longitude. According to Captain Pollard, once stove, the crew was able to escape with meager rations, two sextants, a quadrant, and three compasses, which were divided among the three small boats. When the Essex was stove by a whale in 1820, she was by all accounts being navigated by observations with sextants and quadrants. Had he been more aware of the challenges that lay ahead, he may have attempted to acquire more diverse navigational skills. ![]() He had possessed the necessary skills to sail the route from New England to whaling grounds in the Pacific. Imagine the horror he must have felt upon realizing that a second voyage was going to end in disaster. It was the Two Brothers that brought the men back to Nantucket, and it was only shortly after returning to Nantucket that Pollard was given command of it. Five survivors were rescued off the coast of South America after a harrowing open-boat voyage of three thousand miles in ninety-four days. The master of the Two Brothers, George Pollard Jr., in his first trial as a whaling captain, had survived the wreck of the Essex, stove by a whale in the South Pacific. ![]() Resting near harpoon tips, ceramic sherds, and an intact ginger jar is a sounding lead, sturdily concreted into the reef. Long gone are the wooden hull, the sails, and fathoms of line that took the ship to such a faraway shoal. The site is a scrambled mess of tools of the whaling trade scattered among standard shipboard features like anchors and rigging. Imagine the panic ensuing on a vessel that winds up in the shallow waters of a distant coral reef at French Frigate Shoals in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, the shipwreck site of the Nantucket whaleship Two Brothers. One of the more ironic and emotionally charged artifacts to be discovered at a shipwreck site is a sounding lead, a navigational tool that is lowered on a line over the side of the ship to establish the depth of the water. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship Private Events Make your Event Historic!. ![]()
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