Our view: Tales of the sea yet to be told

Salem News - 

There are no stages in the world that set a more dramatic tone than the sea.

Beautiful, calm, dangerous, exotic, mysterious — it can be all these things. And for maritime communities like Salem, Beverly and Marblehead, the stage of the sea is one that has told thousands of stories.

Recently it was revealed there may be a connection between a noteworthy shipwreck just discovered in the Pacific Ocean, and shipbuilders from the Merrimack Valley community of Amesbury. The ship, the Two Brothers, was found several hundred miles north of Hawaii. It wrecked off remote islands in 1823, but it's the tale of its captain that catches the imagination.

His name was George Pollard Jr. of Nantucket, and before he lost the Two Brothers he had already become a celebrity of sorts in the maritime world. He had captained the Essex, a whaling ship that was attacked and sunk by a whale in the south Pacific. Never before had an attack like that been recorded.

Pollard and his men took to the small lifeboats carried on the ship, and set off on a harrowing journey that led to misery, cannabalism and death for much of the crew. But Pollard returned to the sea once he was rescued. The voyage of the Essex inspired Herman Melville to write his classic novel, "Moby Dick."

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