The Wreck of the Essex

On 20 November 1820 the Nantucket whaleship Essex was rammed twice by a sperm whale some 2,000 miles off the coast of South America and went down. Twenty men took to three open whaleboats. Owen Chase, the first mate, was picked up with two others by the brig Indian on 18 February 1821, ninety days later. Captain Pollard's boat was found five days after that. Eight of the twenty came home, and Chase's account of how they managed it was published within the year.

Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa in 1818 and 1819, after a French frigate ran aground off West Africa and 147 people were cast adrift on a raft; fifteen were alive when it was found. The painting hangs in the Louvre. Its lasting idea is the pyramid: bodies heaped at the base, the living climbing over them, and one man at the apex signaling a ship almost too small to see.

The raft becomes a whaleboat, its sail in rags on a leaning mast at the left. A dead man lies across the bow in a shipmate's arms. The pyramid rises from there: a man in a dark coat pointing, a knot of bare shoulders in the middle, and at the top a figure balanced on the backs of the others, waving a shirt at a three-masted ship standing in under a break of yellow light. A quadrant and a barrel roll in the bilge. Everything in the boat leans toward that sail.

Melville read Chase's narrative at sea in 1841 and cited it by name in Moby-Dick. That book ends the way this painting begins: a sail coming up over the water toward whoever is left.