The Man Who Was Left Behind

When the crew of the whaleship Dauphin hauled George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell from their boat on February 23, 1821, they believed they had found the last living fragments of the Essex. The two men sat in their own filth, unable to speak, their hands no longer steering because there was nothing left to steer toward. Captain Zimri Coffin of the Dauphin recorded their rescue in his log. What he did not record, what no one yet knew, was that three days earlier, on February 18, another whaleship had already pulled three other survivors from a different boat, hundreds of miles to the east. The Indian, Captain Crozier master, had found them first. The Indian was British. Her crew spoke a different whaling dialect. The ocean kept its secrets in compartments. The men of the Dauphin would spend days believing that Pollard and Ramsdell were alone.

History arrives this way: not as a single witness but as scattered testimony, cross-cutting, delayed. The story of Matthew Joy’s boat exists in the gap between these two rescues. It is a story largely absent from Owen Chase’s 1821 account and only pieced together from the later testimony of the three survivors rescued by the Indian and from Thomas Nickerson’s recollections. Where Chase, writing for publication and for Nantucket’s judgment, constructed a coherent narrative of leadership and ordeal, Joy’s boat left no such document. Its survivors were too few, too broken, and too quickly dispersed into other ships and other oceans. What remains is inference and fragment: a death at sea that may have happened on January 20 or January 21, a command passed from a dying officer to a boatsteerer, a series of deaths that followed a different rhythm than those on Pollard’s boat or Chase’s.

The last certain sighting came in late December, near Henderson Island. The three boats had made landfall there on December 20, 1820, after twelve days of sailing from the wreck. They found water—barely, a brackish spring exposed at half tide—and they found food: fish, birds, eggs, crabs, peppergrass. But the island was small, and within a week they had largely exhausted the readily available resources. On December 26 or December 27—the sources disagree on the date, and the disagreement matters because it suggests how quickly memory degraded even in the first retelling—the majority voted to leave. Three men chose to stay: William Wright, Seth Weeks, and Thomas Chapple. They would survive, rescued months later by a passing ship, their story a footnote to the main catastrophe.

The remaining seventeen divided into the three boats. Pollard took six men in his. Chase took six in his. Joy took five in his: himself, the boatsteerer Obed Hendricks, and three sailors whose names appear differently in different records—Joseph West, a man identified as Bond, and either David or Thomas Reed, the uncertainty itself a measure of how thoroughly the boat’s company had been erased from official memory.

They separated near the island. Chase’s boat would lose sight of the others in a squall on January 10. Pollard’s boat would drift westward toward its own extremity. Joy’s boat would sail south and east, toward a different fate.

What happened next must be reconstructed from what the Indian’s crew later reported and from Nickerson’s later recollections, written decades after the fact. Nickerson was not on Joy’s boat; he was on Chase’s. But he heard things, or remembered things he heard, or reconstructed them from the fragments that reached him when the survivors finally converged. The record is pieced together. The gaps are as significant as the facts.

Matthew Joy was already ill when they left Henderson Island. Here is the first divergence from the pattern of the other boats. On Pollard’s boat, the captain remained functional until the final days, his authority intact even as his body failed. On Chase’s boat, Chase himself led with a furious, calculating energy, rationing, navigating, forcing the men to keep rowing toward salvation. But Joy—second mate, thirty years old, brother of a Nantucket captain who would later search for him—Joy was dying from the start.

The boatsteerer Obed Hendricks assumed command. Here is the second divergence: not a drawn lot, not a vote, but a simple transfer from an officer who could no longer lead to the next man in the hierarchy of a whaleship’s deck. Hendricks was twenty-four, Nantucket-born, experienced in the hunt but not in command. The boat carried five men when it left Henderson Island. By the time the Indian found them, there would be three.

Joy died on January 20 or 21. The survivors told the Indian’s crew that he had been buried at sea. This detail—burial at sea, rather than consumption—marks a crucial distinction from the other boats. On Pollard’s boat, Owen Coffin’s body had been kept, drawn by lot, eaten. On Chase’s boat, Richard Peterson had died and been committed to the ocean, but later, when the lots were drawn, the bodies were retained. Joy’s burial at sea suggests either that the men still held to some ceremony of respect, or that Joy died before the extremity of hunger had fully converted the dead into resource, or that Hendricks, new to command, chose to mark his authority by preserving a distinction between officer and man even in death.

The boat continued south. The survivors reported that West died next, then the man called Bond, then Reed—or perhaps Reed, then Bond, then West; the testimony recorded by the Indian’s crew does not preserve the order, and Nickerson’s later account compresses the sequence into general horror. What is clear is that the deaths came singly, spread across days or weeks, rather than in the clustered catastrophes of the other boats. On Pollard’s boat, three men died between February 6 and February 10, the final collapse compressed into a single desperate interval. On Joy’s boat, the dissolution was slower, more grinding, perhaps more cruel for its very slowness.

The survivors resorted to cannibalism. Here the testimony converges with the other boats; here the particular horror of the Essex disaster reveals its structural inevitability. Three boats, three leadership styles, three rhythms of death: all arrived at the same consumption of the dead. The ledger mentality—Nantucket’s conversion of all value to quantifiable, tradeable entries—found its ultimate expression not in the whale oil that had sent them to sea but in the calculation of survival against the stored protein of human flesh.

But the pattern differed. On Pollard’s boat, the cannibalism followed the drawing of lots, a procedural formalism that preserved, however grotesquely, the social contract of the ship. On Chase’s boat, the first deaths were natural, the later ones by lot, the distinction marking Chase’s own evolution from navigator to executioner. On Joy’s boat, there was no lot. The record suggests a simpler, perhaps more brutal arithmetic: those who died were eaten, and the living continued until rescue or their own death.

Hendricks survived. So did two others. When the Indian spotted them on February 18, 1821—eighty-nine days after the whale had sunk the Essex, the same day that Lawrence, steering Chase’s boat, would spot the same ship from a different angle—the three men were too weak to climb aboard. The Indian’s crew had to haul them up. They had been at sea for fifty-three days since leaving Henderson Island, longer than any of the other boats’ direct passages, their southward track carrying them into waters less traveled by the whaling fleet.

The Indian was British, out of London, Captain Crozier master. She was not a Nantucket ship. Her crew spoke a different whaling dialect, measured oil in different units, observed different customs of the sea. This foreignness mattered. The survivors of Joy’s boat found themselves not among neighbors who might understand the particular shame of Nantucket’s disaster but among strangers who could only record the facts as they appeared: three men, reduced, eating their dead, unable to explain themselves.

The Indian was also, in the winter of 1820-1821, caught in the larger politics of the Pacific. The Chilean squadron had detained British and American vessels at Callao in December 1820; Spanish authorities had seized ships; the war of independence simmered along the coast. The Indian herself may have been operating under some restriction, her movements watched, her master cautious. The rescue of three starving Americans was an incident in a larger confusion, recorded in her log but not, apparently, reported with the urgency that would have connected it immediately to the Dauphin’s later discovery.

For a time, the crews of the Dauphin, the Two Brothers, the Hero, and the Diana—all involved in the rescue of Pollard and Ramsdell—thought that Pollard and Ramsdell were the only survivors of the Essex crew. They were eventually moved to the whaleship Two Brothers, still believing themselves the sole remnants. The news of Joy’s boat’s rescue arrived separately, through different channels, the information traveling at the speed of sail and rumor.

This separation—temporal, geographical, institutional—shaped what was remembered. Chase, writing his narrative in 1821, had access to Pollard’s testimony, to the fragments that reached Nantucket from the Dauphin and the Two Brothers. He did not have access to the Indian’s crew, or to Hendricks’s account, or to the particular details of Joy’s boat’s ordeal. His narrative, which became the authoritative version, the source that Melville would read and annotate, was built on a partial record. The man who was left behind—Matthew Joy, buried at sea, his boat’s story scattered—was doubly erased: first by death, then by the absence of a witness who could speak his name in the right room.

Nickerson, writing much later, tried to correct this. His account, composed in retirement, draws on memory and hearsay, on the conversations of survivors who had scattered across the world’s oceans and reconvened in Nantucket’s taverns. He gives us Joy’s illness, Hendricks’s assumption of command, the burial at sea. But Nickerson was not there. His testimony is reconstruction, not observation, valuable precisely because it preserves what would otherwise be lost but requiring the same critical reading as any belated memory.

The comparative method reveals the pattern. Three boats, identical circumstances, three outcomes. Pollard’s boat: formal lots, public execution, the captain’s authority preserved to the last. Chase’s boat: calculated leadership, the officer as survival machine, the social contract modified but maintained. Joy’s boat: illness, informal transfer of command, slower death, no lots, burial at sea. The variables—leadership style, physical condition, chance of wind and current—produced different paths to the same destination. The catastrophe was not monolithic but fractal, repeating its basic structure at different scales, each iteration shaped by the particular humans who enacted it.

Hendricks, West, Bond, Reed, and Joy himself: five men in a boat twenty-three feet long. Joy died and was buried. West, Bond, and Reed died and were eaten. Hendricks and two others survived. The arithmetic is brutal in its simplicity. The Indian’s crew recorded no names in their initial report, only numbers: three survivors, two of whom could not immediately speak, all of whom required days of care before they could tell their story.

Joy disappeared into the open ocean, his grave unmarked by any land, his name preserved only in the memories of three survivors who would scatter to other ships and other fates. No island bears his name. No log records his last words.

His brother, Reuben Joy, captain of the Hero, would search for him in the whaling grounds, meeting Charles Carrol of the Essex relief expedition, exchanging news that was already too late. The Hero and another vessel remained together for a time, their captains sharing what they knew, but what they knew was incomplete. The system that sent men to hunt whales in the Pacific had no mechanism for finding them when they failed to return.

Insurance would be paid, eventually, on the Essex’s value. The owners would calculate their loss. The men who did not come back would be entered in the ledgers as debits, their names preserved in family memory but not in the official record of the trade.

The rescue of Joy’s boat’s survivors by the Indian establishes a second, corroborating witness group, handing off the pressure of integrating these parallel horrors into a coherent account. What the Dauphin’s crew would find in Pollard’s boat—two men who had eaten their cousin, who could not meet their rescuers’ eyes, who had passed beyond the social world into some private hell—had already been found, differently, by the Indian’s crew. Three men, not two. Hendricks, not Pollard. A boatsteerer who had assumed command, not a captain who had failed to keep it. The same devouring, the same survival, the same impossibility of return to ordinary life.

When the news finally converged, when the owners of the Essex learned that eight men had survived instead of five, that three boats had been found instead of two, that the disaster had been even more extensive than they had calculated, the additional information changed nothing. The insurance would not be adjusted. The narrative would not be rewritten. Chase’s account, already in press, would become the official version, its omissions shaping what Nantucket and, later, what Melville would understand about the fate of the Essex. The man who was left behind stayed left behind, his boat’s particular horror a footnote to a footnote, visible only to those who read the records against the grain, who noted what was not said as carefully as what was.

The Indian sailed on. Her crew would tell the story in London, perhaps, in the docks at Wapping, where British and American sailors exchanged news in the pidgin of the trade. The survivors would be transferred, eventually, to other ships, other voyages. Hendricks would return to sea, though the record does not follow him far. The blank page does not record his later life, his death, his burial. He exists in the interval between the wreck and the rescue, a man who commanded because the officer died, who ate because the alternative was death, who survived because a British whaleship happened to cross his path on February 18, 1821.

The ocean keeps its own ledger. It does not distinguish between Nantucket and London, between officer and man, between the drawn lot and the simple death. What it records is position and date, wind and current, the material facts that determine whether a boat twenty-three feet long will reach a ship on the horizon or drift beyond the tracks of rescue. Joy’s boat sailed south, into waters less traveled, and the ocean accepted its offering without leaving a trace. The survivors who remained were carried east, toward Chile, toward the converging moment when the Dauphin would find Pollard and the full accounting would begin. But that accounting would always be partial, always shaped by who could speak and who could not, by which ship found which boat, by the accident of national origin and log-keeping habit that made one rescue visible and another, temporarily, invisible.

The pressure of these parallel stories—Chase’s boat, Pollard’s boat, Joy’s boat—converges on the reader now, as it converged on Nantucket then, demanding integration, demanding that the fragments be assembled into a single coherent catastrophe. The demand cannot be fully met. The sources contradict. The memories degrade. The ocean absorbs what the documents do not preserve. What remains is the structure of the disaster: three boats, three leadership styles, three rhythms of death, all arriving at the same consumption, the same impossibility of return. The man who was left behind is not an exception to this pattern but its completion, the third term that makes the comparison possible, that shows how variable the human response to identical pressure can be, and how invariant the ultimate collapse.