Whaleship Essex

The whaling ship Essex left Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1819 on a two-and-a-half-year voyage in the whaling grounds of the South Pacific to hunt sperm whales. She was 87 feet long, and measured 238 tons. She was captained by a 28 year old man named George Pollard Jr.. On November 20 1820, the Essex was struck and pushed multiple times by a sperm whale. The ship sank 2,000 miles (3,700 km) off South America. The twenty sailors set out in three small whaleboats, with wholly inadequate supplies of food and water, and landed on uninhabited  Henderson Island, within the modern-day British territory of the Pitcairn Islands.
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