‘Look, look, what ails the ship, she is upsetting’ 
Peter Nichols
- The Loss of the Ship 'Essex', Sunk by a Whale by Thomas Nickerson and Owen Chase, edited by Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick et al
On 7 May 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few hours while their masters visited each other, and the 22-year-old Melville caught sight of the Wirt’s captain. He was impressed: ‘He was a large, powerful, well-made man; rather tall; to all appearances something past forty-five or so; with a handsome face for a Yankee, & expressive of great uprightness & calm unostentatious courage. His whole appearance impressed me . . . He was the most prepossessing-looking whale-hunter I think I ever saw.’
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Peter Nichols has sailed most of the way across the Atlantic in a wooden boat and recorded his journey in Sea Change.
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