The most dreadful display of the Whale’s strength and prowess yet authentically recorded, was that made on the American Whale ship Essex, Captain Pollard, which sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean, in August 1849 [sic – it was 1819]. Late in the fall of the same year, when in the latitude forty of the South Pacific, a school of sperm Whales were discovered, and three boats were manned and sent in pursuit. The mate’s boat was struck by one of them, and he was obliged to return to the ship in order to repair the damage.
While he was engaged in that work, a sperm Whale, judged to be eighty three feet long broke water twenty rods from the ship on her weather bow. He was going at the rate of about three knots an hour, and the ship at nearly the same rate, when he struck the bow of the vessel just forward of her chains.
At the shock produced by the collision of two such mighty masses of matter in motion, the ship shook like a leaf. The seemingly malicious Whale dived and passed under the ship, grazing her keel, and then appeared at about the distance of a ship’s length, lashing the sea with fins and tail, as if suffering the most horrible agony. He was evidently hurt by the collision, and blindly frantic with instinctive rage.
In a few minutes he seemed to recover himself, and started with great speed across the vessel’s course to the windward. Meanwhile the hands on deck discovered the ship to be gradually settling down at the bows, and the pumps were to be rigged. While the crew were working at them, one of the men cried out “God have mercy he comes again.”
The Whale had turned at about forty rods from the ship, and was making for her with double its former speed, his pathway white with foam. Rushing ahead, he struck her again at the bow, and the tremendous blow stove her in. The Whale dived under again and disappeared, and the ship foundred in five minutes from the first collision. But five souls out of twenty were saved.
Sunbury American, Sunbury, PA, September 21, 1850