Jenny > Recent Status Updates

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“The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure. It is a tragedy that happens to be one of the greatest true stories ever told.”

“I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster”

Melville, you give yourself too much credit

Ofc Melville read that while at sea himself 🙄

Now, how would you track that one specific whale down? … 🙄🐳

Damn now we’re dragging Pollard’s name through the mud?! I think it unkind to speak ill of the dead but… well. I don’t think very well of him either

I was about to say NOT AGAIN but it’s fortunately they were sailing with another ship… I would too

oh hell 😅😭😭

unfathomable to me that Ramsdell would choose to ship out with Pollard again but no one asked me (and also this happened two hundred years ago)

how are you going to look that boy’s mother in the face with both of y’all knowing that you ATE him in the Pacific… your cousin…

yikes

this really is horrendous. idk why i told myself i had to read this before going to the New Bedford Whaling Museum 😭 it’s only tangentially related

“Two months after deciding to spurn the Society Islands because, in Pollard’s words, ‘we feared we should be devoured by cannibals,’ they were about to eat one of their own shipmates.”

and btw the Society Islands were safe and much easier for them to reach…

so one of the most documented cases of cannibalism occurred on Boon Island, ME. That’s 40 miles from me and no one talks about that… can’t imagine why 😭

captain pollard. NO NO NO do NOT listen to them. 🥲😭😭

they’re going to die!!!!!!

that really is utterly disastrous. and it only gets worse i know it

am feeling their panic myself

I suspect some serious stuff is about to go down

i am enraged by Chappel’s stupidity

“In their dedication to killing sperm whales thr Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.”

damn

I’ve never read Moby Dick (which is supposedly inspired by this tragedy) so I don’t really know what happened to the Essex but from all this foreshadowing I know one thing: these lads are absolutely cooked

“A Nantucketer didn’t just go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, he went on a ‘rantum scoot,’ which meant an excursion with no definite destination”

not the rantum scoot 💀

the secret code for whittling/ job seeking is very interesting

the baby tried to harpoon that poor cat? 😭

“No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride…”

savile row mentioned in a fantasy novel :o

running away? no! tactical retreatment…