Background
Nickerson was born in Harwich, Massachusetts, the son of Rebecca (Gibson) and Thomas Nickerson.
Nickerson was born in Harwich, Massachusetts, the son of Rebecca (Gibson) and Thomas Nickerson.
In 1819, the fourteen-year-old Nickerson served as cabin boy on the whaleship Essex. On this voyage, the ship was sunk by a whale it was pursuing, and the crew spent three months at sea before the survivors were rescued. In 1876 he wrote The Loss of the Ship "Essex", an account of the ordeal and of his subsequent experiences at sea.
The manuscript was lost until 1960, and was first published in 1984.
Nickerson made his first sea voyage in 1819, at the age of fourteen, on the ill-fated whaler Essex, which sailed from Nantucket Harbor. When a whale rammed and sank Essex on 20 November 1820, he joined the boat of the first mate, Owen Chase, who later wrote about the incident in the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, the book that would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.
Nickerson returned to sea after his rescue, serving on other whale ships and eventually working his way up to captain of a merchant vessel. Upon retiring he ran a boarding house in Nantucket, which was visited by the writer Leon Lewis, who encouraged him to write down his story of the three months he was lost at sea with the Essex survivors.
Nickerson did this, and in 1876, he sent the 80 page manuscript, as well as accounts of other adventures he had later in life, to Lewis for editing.
Lewis, however, was having a personal crisis, and the manuscript was abandoned. When Lewis journeyed to England, he left a trunk in the care of Rhea Ogden, a neighbor at his summer cottage on Lake Keuka, Penn Yan, New New York The trunk"s contents were finally inspected in 1980.
Finch"s wife, Ann, recognizing the manuscript"s importance contacted the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
Edouard Stackpole authenticated the manuscript and the Finches arranged to donate the manuscript to the Museum. Nickerson died in 1883, but it was only in 1960 that his unedited manuscript The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats was discovered.
lieutenant took another twenty years before it was authenticated by Edouard A. Stackpole. An abridged version was published by the Nantucket Historical Association in 1984, a century after Nickerson"s death.
