Owen Chase

author

Owen Chase

1797–1869

Best known as the first mate of the whaleship Essex, he wrote one of the most gripping firsthand survival accounts in American maritime history. His 1821 narrative of shipwreck, starvation, and endurance later helped inspire Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

1 Audiobook

Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex, of Nantucket; Which Was Attacked and Finally Destroyed by a Large Spermaceti-whale, in the Pacific Ocean; With an Account of the Unparalleled Sufferings of the Captain and Crew During a Space of Ninety-three Days at Sea, in Open Boats in the Years 1819 & 1820.

Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex, of Nantucket; Which Was Attacked and Finally Destroyed by a Large Spermaceti-whale, in the Pacific Ocean; With an Account of the Unparalleled Sufferings of the Captain and Crew During a Space of Ninety-three Days at Sea, in Open Boats in the Years 1819 & 1820.

by Owen Chase

About the author

Born in Nantucket in 1797, Owen Chase went to sea young and built his life in the whaling trade. He became first mate of the Essex, the Nantucket whaleship that was sunk in the Pacific in 1820 after being struck by a sperm whale.

After the disaster, Chase survived a harrowing open-boat journey and, soon after returning home, published Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. The book gave readers a vivid eyewitness account of the wreck and its terrible aftermath, and it remains the work for which he is most remembered.

Chase later continued his maritime career and was known in Nantucket as Captain Owen Chase. He died there in 1869, but his account of the Essex endured, both as a remarkable survival story and as part of the real-life background to one of literature's most famous sea novels.