Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.
Today: The Essex Whaleship: the True Story Behind Moby Dick
Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re headed to the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the year 1820, where we’re about to meet the real-life Moby Dick.
Moby Dick is an 1851 novel by Herman Melville, a sailor-turned-author. The story of Captain Ahab battling a giant white whale who sinks a ship might seem unlikely—but surprisingly, Melville based his story on real events. Let’s set the scene:
Whalers in the 1800s sought out sperm whales partly because the whales’ heads contain mass quantities of oil (which resembles semen, hence the name) that was used as a pricey lamp fuel. However, the supply of sperm whales close to shore was soon exhausted, so whalers had to start taking years-long journeys to the middle of the Pacific to ply their trade. Sperm whaling was a cruel, bloody process in which men with harpoons were pitted against creatures with massive teeth (sperm whales are toothed whales, like orcas) and bodies nearly as big as a whaling ship itself. And the men didn’t even hunt whales from that ship, but small, open whaleboats.
At the close of Nov 20, 1820, those little boats were all the sailors of the Essex had left. A giant sperm whale—estimated at 85 feet—repeatedly rammed the ship Essex, opening a large gash in the bow while its sailors were pursuing other whales. No one knows why—the Essex wasn’t the only whaling ship sunk seemingly on purpose by a whale, but such occurrences were rare. It’s possible the whale acted in defense of its pod, which is only fair.
But imagine being in a tiny boat and turning around to see your ship mortally wounded, while between you and the nearest land is hundreds of miles of ocean, storms, sharks, and starvation.
Fortunately, we know exactly how the Essex crew felt at that moment, because some of her sailors survived.
Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:
Lost at sea. Ships sometimes vanish without a trace, even in this digital age. Chillingly, we don’t know how many sinking ships put out lifeboats of survivors, if those boats are never found. You could write a horror story about all the ghosts in doomed lifeboats that must sail the open ocean. Maybe a psychic can speak to them, or a necromancer raise them to tell the fate of their lost ships. Or you could have a sci-fi story about lost lifeboats ending up on another plane of existence. What would the sailors of different eras say to each other?
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