Good History Can Be Boring: Grexit, Or, The Too-Late Bronze Age

The Greek forest fires of 2007. Boring or not?

Lots of things happened this week that I'm tempted to write about. VE Day happened, but I'm going there anyway, next month.

 The "fight of the century" happened, 96 years after the fight of the last century.

Unfortunately, the wrong guy won, and it distinctly was not the fight of the century. That takes the pleasure of finding similarities between Jack Dempsey versus Jess Willard and Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquaio. so I won't be drilling down to bring in Dempsey's avatars and explaining why Dempsey beat Willard so savagely. Or why Warren G. Harding and Conan the Barbarian echo and mirror Dempsey, and why it call comes down to the 1934 California gubernatorial election.  I probably couldn't do the connections I see justice, anyway.

Finally, I had dinner at Double DD Pizza, absolutely the best Kitsilano pizza joint/sports bar/Greek restaurant that happens to be next door to the Comic Shop.

Postblogging Technology, March 1945, II: This Post Brought To You by Kleenex, Beauty Secret of the Stars!

Captain (E) J_. C_., R.N., D.S.O. (Bar), D.S.C., M.M.

HMAS Kuttabul,

New South Wales, Australia.

My Darling:

. . . After writing that first page, tears in my eyes, I put my brush down long enough to brew a pot of the tea my sister sent me. Now I have recovered myself enough to turn the page and put down something that you will not blush to show your father, and your uncle. Oh, do please do write me if you see Uncle George on his leave, short as it is! I worry about the stubborn old fool. He is far too old to be at war, even if all the young men have gone away, and soon he must go to that place of which I know nothing, since I do not own a map.

Your father will want to know that your little brother has his final orders for Michigan, where he will do carrier flight training on an aircraft carrier assigned to the Great Lakes. (Canada beware!) After that, he will go to the Pacific in July, to fly an anti-submarine modified Avenger, which is actually intended to be used as a radar "picket." We've no real word of Tommy Wong, although he writes his wife regularly. It's just that he hasn't very much to say except that Alaska is very cold in the winter and that he has read many books, about which I will not go on, having already had one breakdown on the page over a A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I know from speaking to him that Captain True really has asked for Tommy, so it looks as though the transfer hasn't gone through, and that Tommy will be with the Navy, and in Alaska, for another year. As hard as it is for Queenie, better that he miss the first year of his baby's life than one that the baby will remember! It will be a melancholy parting from Berkeley for Queenie as it is, as when she moves back to San Jose she will be in close reach of her mother-in-law. (Brr.)

Speaking of loves separated, Miss v. Q. understandably receives no letters from her beau. You may give your father a cold glare from all of us on that score, even if the decision to send him to Nagasaki was made by my Father (who is on his way to Manila to interview some former detainees) and the Earl. She has her contract to provide "translation services" to the FBI during the Conference in hand, a nice supplement to her income, and has even suggested that she might intervene for her cousin, who is being held by the OSS in Rome. This seems a bit bold --even given their developing obsession with Communism, I would prefer that the FBI think of her as East Indies Dutch for a little while longer. On the other hand, if anyone is likely to land on his feet in the midst of the fall of Nazi Germany, it is Herr S. v. B. , and Berlin will not go away for wishing it. . . 

You will be glad to hear that our Mexican friends are now confident that they can save Arcadia's roof, and that we can go ahead with putting not only the main hall back in operation, but the ball room as well. What would a Peace Conference be without dancing, after all? Or, perhaps, my enthusiasm for playing the hostess gets away with me. Do secret Reds and anthropologists even dance, in the first place? Surely they do!

Wong Lee has returned from the south, as it seems that Rose of Allandale is overdue in the South Pacific, either because it has been lost with all hands, or has been detained picking up deck cargo. I cannot believe that, between them, Du and the Soongs cannot find a way to remove their assassins from a merchant ship, anyway.

Speaking of odious men on the one hand, and of Wong Lee on the other, the Engineer's son has made it definitive, holding a lunch meeting between Wong Lee and a fellow who was introduced only as "Cy," but who turns out to be one Clarence Kelley, an expert on this kind of work. I might have been a little cross with the young man (you know that I dislike him, and I will not apologise for it, even if I am the only person on Earth who does) in my discussion of the matter later, but the point is that the Bureau is working with the Navy in this, which means keeping the Navy happy, and the OSS out (something that both can agree on), and so wants everything kept at arm's length. Uncle George's friend says that this is hardly the first time that the Bureau will have turned to "criminal elements" for this kind of assistance. 

On the matter of the business on the water, I asked Bill and David for a more candid account than you could get through Tony and Gene via official channels. They confirm what you suspected: the drift recurs in all installations, and is accompanied by overheating, but no-one will hear of replacing the amplidynes with British equipment, even if they could get magslips, which they can't, anyway. The device is going to the Pacific as is, though they are going to rework the amplidynes, which will put introduction back until at least the invasion of "Target K," as they put it. (No-one except someone who owns a map.... I just hope Fat Chow is out of there by that time!) It's the same drift as we're getting as the recordings run on, and no doubt for the same reason. As Bill and David say, there is no point in going elegant when the problem is overheating. You just have to accept that you're going to have to take the heat out, and if a powered fan is good enough for BMW, it is good enough for us.

So cold, so technical a way to end a letter that began so passionately. Now I am reliving that obnoxious young stage-Irishman calling me, once again, "more slide rule than woman." I told you that he has a vicious streak!  And now I have a most unwomanly desire to destroy him. Please, please come back to me soon, and remind me of my better nature, 

"Half-Pearl and Half Rose," 

Yr

"GRACE"

"Ryukyu seems far away" (Andrew Evans)

Fourteen Large: Grexiting the Late Bronze Age, 2

First, I've just read Oliver Dickinson's new attempt to synthesise the Greek Bronze Age--Iron Age transition.  Powerfully scholarly, Dickinson first sets the terms: whatever else we know or do not know about the "catastrophe" which ended the Late Bronze Age, there is an irreducible core of facts to consider. At the end of the Palatial Period, "Mycenaean Greek" civilisation was building monumental structures. At the dawning of the Classical Period, "Ancient Greeks" were again building monumental structures. Their nature had changed significantly over the course of 400 years, from spectacular tombs and not-quite-so-spectacular palace sites to temples, but from some kind of functional point of view, their absence in the intervening almost half-millennium constitutes definitive proof that some kind of social caesura had taken place. Call it a catastrophe, or a decomplexification, or a collapse of the Late Bronze Age state, but something.

However, Dickinson feels himself compelled to adopt the version of the thesis in which decomplexification leads to a significant local population decline. He wants to argue that whatever the problems so far invoked with using area surveys to measure populations, we are at the point where we can accept them as evidence. I am not convinced, so, all digressions aside, this post is mostly a disagreement with that. (Spoiler: I continue to be persuaded by the idea that they all went away to live in the hills. Still have to motivate the argument, though.)  

Second, since this is a blog about grass and technology, can a claim that technological exogeneity lies in back of the Late Bronze Age collapse be sustained? That is, for we moderns who worry that robots are about to take our jobs, is there a parallel example in iron axes, presumably taking the jobs, and perhaps lives, of the bronze merchants (bankers-in-bronze?) Or is technology endogenous, with Late Bronze Age society giving way to a new lifestyle which makes iron possible.

Or, even more radically, is technology an epiphenomena of economic growth, in which case the Late Bronze Age-Iron Age transition is an episode of economic-growth-with-political-catastrophe-characteristics? (That would be a contrarian interpretation, indeed.) 

Third, a little buried compared with the force of the anecdote: fourteen grand, in case you were wondering, is, I have just learned, what you pay in student loan-funded tuition to go to truck driver school in Vancouver right now.  All scholarly caution about overly dramatic intepretations of the end of the Late Bronze Age aside, I want there to have been an episode in which the peasants burned down the wanax's palace and went off to live in Arcadia. "By the time we're done, Linear B will be spoken only in Hell." 

There is evidence burning a hole in my pocket, and since this is a blog, and not a monograph, I can spend it. Right now. That evidence is locality. If you read about the Greek War of Independence, you are inspired by events in Bessarabia to land in called Messalonghi. You go on to see a war proclaimed at Arepoli and  Kalamata by the men of Monemvasia and "unconquered Mani" and bold klephts of Arcadia ("On horse they go to church/on horse they kiss the icons/on horse they receive communion/From the priest's hand"), who advance on Tripoli, Nafplio and Ypati.and fight at Navarino and Petra. 

Even granted that we don't know as much as we think we do about the geography of Classical Greece, a striking number of turn-of-modernity Greeks seem to have been living in the wrong place. The hellenophiles of the time seem to have taken it that their contemporary Greeks were a bit degenerate, but that it was something that could be fixed. Greece's new Bavarian monarch chose Athens as his capital in 1834, and promptly announced the restoration of Sparta --the episode out of which this story springs. The people of Laconia of circa 1834 didn't think that Sparta needed to be restored, because although they did not call their town "Sparta," they were pretty clear that  Mystras was the new town to Sparta's old. The ancient Spartans had built a city in a pretty dumb place; the new location was better. 

They lost that argument, as the Peloponnese has been losing arguments with Athens ever since. The question here, if it is not too anachronistic, is whether or not the Greeks of 1830 had a point. Always tiptoeing around accusations of anachronism, we are already in the habit of interpreting the archaeological record of the Greek countryside at the end of the Late Bronze Age in the light of other eras. Why not start at Mystras?

"Botzaris Suprises the Turkish Camp and Falls Mortally Wounded," Eugene Delacroix

(Or Tripoli.)

Postblogging Technology: March, 1945, I: Out Ride the Sons of Terra, Far Drives the Thundering Jet

Captain (E) J_. C_., R.N., D.S.O. (Bar), D.S.C., M.M.

HMAS Kuttabul,

New South Wales, Australia.

Davidcmc58

My Dearest:

You are probably wondering why this packet is so thick, and have clawed it open, your heart torn between hopes of photographs of our babies, and fears of some horrid legal entanglement.
At least, so I conceive the balance, so that I do not imagine you, my darling, being disappointed by the tedious details you will in fact encounter in the document this letter wraps. The future is no brighter for it, but it remains bright as ever, at least.

To explain: as you know, I have been carrying on Uncle George's regular "investing newsletter," to your father since he left for the war. Well, he's in Australia, as I am sure your throbbing head of a morning has told you on a few occasions since he arrived. (At least you wil get some practice in holding your liquor ahead of dealing with more sailors!) Well, here's the newsletter, so please pass it on. It's especially important, since Uncle George places infinite reliance on your father's charm and tact in carrying his case with the Earl, to whom these sentiments will eventually be forwarded.

But enough of that. You are sadly deprived: of Santa Cruz in the bright spring, of the excitement as we ready ourselves for the United Nations Conference, of your babies and even your half-brothers' entertaining enthusiasms, the bright youth of Miss V_C._,, the adventures of Miss Von Q. and Mrs. (I cannot write that without a smile) Wong in the city, of Fanny's courting by Jimmy Ho (of which I am supposed to know nothing), even the continuing saga of Arcadia's roof and the malign plotting of the Engineer and his lieutenant, the Lieutenant.

As to the latter, it's all very sad. The Engineer fancies a bracing confrontation with the Russians, since he conceives Communism to be all around him, and us. We silly ladies are more concerned with dances and balls and parties, for what is a Peace Conference without them? And one cannot have whirling and music and romance, and clever old diplomats showing us how to waltz (am I odd to wish that I had been there to dance with Metternich and Talleyrand, whatever their politics? I shan't mention dashing Uhlans, as I have a dashing engineer, instead) if there is to be a great battle of ideologies instead! Well, actually, Miss v. Q. and Mrs. Wong will be very much involved in all of this, unless the FBI finds better linguists somewhere, as plans to eavesdrop on unnamed foreign delegations go ahead. The Russians, I am told, quite sensibly conduct all of their correspondence in cypher, but that does not mean that it cannot be compromised. Lieutenant A_ is on about technical means of doing so. I wonder if he has ever heard of the concept of "burglary?"

Perhaps, I have had the strangest passing conversation with the Engineer's son on the subject of whether Wong Lee might be to hand. And, yes, this is work that Wong Lee could do. But surely the FBI has its men?

Even sadder, your worries about Aunt Bessie were all too justified. Her habits and her health have caught up with her, and I have been spending entirely too much time with her and with Uncle Henry of late. In fact, just the other day I was called out of the University Library, where I have been taking notes for these newsletters of late, with news of an emergency up in Oakland.

While the emergency on that occasion proved to be Uncle Henry calculating that I could be pressurised into coming over a few hours early, the need is real enough. I do not think Aunt Bessie has very much longer to live.

Though it's an ill wind that blows no-one any good, as the rearrangement meant that Fanny's weekly afternoon off was put over from Sunday to Friday, and she left with a song in her lip! 

 

The Great Siege: PLUNDER, VARSITY, Gotterdamerung

OPERATION PLUNDER; OPERATION VARSITY; The Twilight of the Gods. Three things, naturally linked.

Except that PLUNDER and VARSITY were real things that happened. The "Twilight of the Gods" turned out to be grandiose fantasy. 

We don't write much about the combined assault on the Rhine by 21st Army Group (including US 9th Army), which led to the greatest opposed river crossings in historys. (In the interests of accuracy i hyperbole, it should be noted that any given assault crossing the Yangzi was probably a bigger deal in terms of water work, but the Mandate of Heaven has not yet been transferred by a modern mechanised army.) That a vast army, supported by enormous logistical preparations, closed the world's eleventh-largest river and fought its way across against the resistance of the army of the world's second largest economy, should be a big deal.

The problem was that it was dead easy, so no-one cares about it, which is why this post is two weeks late. (Apart from yours truly having to deal with a congenital lack of labour in the Canadian economy that somehow does not show up as a "labour shortage.") This is because, as it turns out, "Gotterdamerung" springs from Snorri Sturlusson's head. Gods and heroes heroes may go down in glorious last stands, but the spear carriers have made a discrete departure. 

Germany, ever so quietly, was going from this to this. Germans, actual living Germans, had learned a lesson that the rest of us could stand to remember. "Blood and nation" are not things immanent in us, unalterable and compelling. Trapped by an idea? Defect in your head,  hollow out your will to be a German landser, drag your feet until the tail of the column turns the corner ahead, leave your rifle by the side of the road.

Congratulations: you're a "straggler." Keep it up for eight weeks more, and you'll be a live straggler. It's nothing to be proud of later. Lost causes flourish in romantic legend; not the men who kept their heads down and came home to their families --or made new ones. Spring is coming, the world needs to be renewed, and the glorious dead will make no babies. 

For those who cling to lost causes, the first week of April is bitter. One-hundred fifty years ago, the Confederate States of America collapsed; 75 years ago, the Wehrmacht was vanishing, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men simply not on the rolls.

That's  the German Fifteenth Army under watch below. 

On the other hand, OPERATION KIKUSUI was 75 years ago. Another of the horrifying moral aporia of the world war, the attack of the floating crysanthenums is not easy for me to parse. The young men who piloted the suicide bombers do not seem to have been particularly traditionalist, nationalist or right wing. It is certainly not very helpful to focus on the supposedly fixed essentials of Japanese character to explain them, and it certainly is possible to frame a narrative around inescapable social pressure to commit suicide, which is pretty horrible in its own right.

The kamikazes flew while the German and Confederate armies were disintegrating. I'm not going to present a half-baked explanation for this, only point to it as a problem. The "national character" thing usually invoked does not convince. I grew up on the Pacific shore, after all, surrounded by Japanese Canadians and German Canadians, and on and on, so I can claim some experiential credibility for my skepticism. So could Californians, which I think might explain why the actual response to the kamikazes proved so ambiguous in the end. 

 I would gesture out at the Pacific and conjure up Owen Chase's arrival in San Francisco on the whaleship Winslow sometime between 1825 and 1827, and notice that while whalers and sealers are already ranging from the Japan Grounds to Alaska and down past the Bass Strait, where "sea rats" and "pirates" took seals for the China trade in cockleshell boats ranging all the way to Middle Island off Western Australia. 

That is, twenty years before San Francisco became American, it looked out on a Pacific where there were already sealing plantations and offshore fisheries off multiple future Australian and American states, one Canadian province, New Zealand, various pelagic nations and "overseas territories," The Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Hawaii. The process by which the only autochhthonous state formation in a non-state ordered society became the American territory of Hawaii, while New Zealand became a resolutely British nation. How? It's all so slippery. But disintegrating armies have to fit in here somehow..

This is an introduction to a discussion of floating and other temporary bridges.

Postblogging Technology, February 1945, II: Queen of the Pacific

Group Captain R_. C_., RCAFVR, DSO, DFC (Bar)

Suez,

Egypt.

I imagine this letter will find you somewhat late, as, until we have set up a secure chain of transmission to Sydney, our courier must pursue you across the ends of the Earth to your new assignment.

Source

On this connection, I can now confirm that Rose of Allendale docked in Sydney last month with Du's men still on board. James has fellows looking for them in Australia, although this is a bit tricky. White Russians, especially ones with some English, will find it a great deal easier to blend into Australian society than Chinese, at least outside Chinatown. At the moment, though, it seems that they left with Rose, which left Sydney two weeks ago, in ballast for Tulagi, to take on copra and a deckload of steel scrap for San Diego. Wong Lee is preparing a welcoming party there, and there is a certain irony, in that all that U.S. government steel scrap is probably intended for Fontana, at least after the alloy is salvaged.

I am more than a little concerned that they did not head for India, although at least now my concerns for Father are at rest. You may have heard that he has departed Chungking with our distant cousins, now that Chou has offered sanctuary to his household. I just wish that I did not hear sardonic comments from Yenan to the effect that he who wants to know the Chairman of the Party should study the Hongwu Emperor.

One hazard at a time, though. If Du's men are not returning to Chungking, and they are not pursuing Father, amongst, of course, many other potential targets in India, what are they after?

So that is one concern, and one that you may well allay by finding these men!

You will find this letter (that is, the nespaper review part) a little truncated. I have had no chance to look at the recent numbers of Aero Digest.  You will notice that I am upset about some technical coverage in Time, and perhaps all my fulminations would be set aside after reading the latest numbers of the technical press. You may take both my anger and my shortness of time as showing just how blasted busy we are around here.

The reason for that is the bombshell announcement at Yalta that we are to have the conference that establishes the United Nations Secretariat here (or up the Bay, close enough) in April! It is hard to imagine how San Francisco can possibly be ready so soon! There does not seem to be enough room for everyone who wants to live here already, although as some relief, the universities will go into intersession and the dormitories will be available.

Many famous people will descend on the city. You will see below that the President has done his best to keep the American delegation diverse, but there is no such luck with the Chinese, which will inevitably all be Soongs and their hangers-on. No Communists, unless America provides, and there in hangs. . .

With their close connections, it is no wonder that I have heard from the Engineer, very obliquely. His youngest came to visit me the other day. He is as much a delight in person, and I must keep those letters he sends to the FBI in mind to not fall completely for his charms. Like Uncle George's friend (of whom more soon), he puts on the stage-Irishness he inherits from his foster-father with aplomb. Although, unlike our friend, he does not have to "sell" a Catholic faith, since he can take refuge in his mother's people, and their small-sect Midwesternism.

The issue here is that the Soongs are looking for . . .shall I say, intelligence. . . in San Francisco? I cannot imagine that the Engineer thinks that we will provide it, so I assume that we are the object. 

At once I hurried to Berkeley, to see our gay young wives. (I had a mission from from Mrs. Wong's mother-in-law, who is quite convinced that the young woman lacks the sense to come in out of the rain, but no fears there.) Has Mrs. Wong been contacted by her friends in the Navy? If so, can she carry off the guise of a Russian translator? Can she turn to Miss v. Q., without drawing unwelcome attention to her Dutch cover? Has Miss v. Q. progressed far enough in her language studies that we can use her against the Soongs? (Not surprisingly, no; but soon, probably.) What is it like to live in a former anthropology lab?

That last sounds frivolous, and it is, but I do have a point, which is that I met with Professor K., and, well, with housing at issue, and battlelines to be drawn, and no sign of, say, Chinese Communists at San Francisco, I was very pleased to discover that an eminent colleague of Professor K wishes to spend some time in San Francisco. He is an anthropologist, of the sort who studies Mongolia and even advises Chiang. And, like everyone who has seen both, puts more faith, however little, in Yenan than in Chungking.

We shall be putting this eminent gentleman up, and perhaps some of his friends, as much for a stick in the eye of the Soongs as anything. I have even decided to stir things up by hosting a dinner in the Main Hall at Arcadia. (Which means getting the roof patched up, but I think this is manageable.) I am very much loooking forward to Professor K. seeing the Whale Man. It is pretty much unrecognisable to someone versed in the later flourishing of Northwestern art, but perhaps his eye will pick up the ancestral traits?

And now I must end, as, somehow, I have found myself agreeing to take Miss K. out for a ride, although I do not think it will be a long one, in my condition.  She is amusing, and surprisingly at ease with my other regular companion, Miss V. C., and with your youngest, who shares her literary interests, as you know, and is currently idled for a day by a drastic revision of his classroom curriculum. These are based, I gather, on the success of Mitscher's attack on Tokyo. Radio in the darkness and all that, with the additional input of a most unpleasant (it is a theme, you will see) scientist from Bell Labs, who oversaw some aspects of the matter from Saipan, and is now on his way home to report.

Oh, my. I say that I must end, and still I go on, digressing all over the place. Well, it positively must end, because there is so much to be done ahead of April. But I haven't told you about the progress we have made in sound-recording, and the absurd infrared project underway at Stanford, and Lieutenant A_., even more ebullient than usual at the news that San Francisco will shortly be the epicentre of American "counterintelligence." (Which is to say, looking under beds for Communists. I'm going to be a better hostess than that, and put my Communists on them. They may even get clean sheets.)

"GRACE."

Source

Potlach the Sea: The Candlemaker's Version

On 12 August, 1819, the whaleship Essex (owner Gideon Folger, 1, 2) departed Nantucket Island for a two-and-a-half year cruise, 29 year-old Captain George Pollard commanding, with 21-year-old first mate, Owen Chase, another veteran of the ship's previous, very lucky voyage.

This one was not to be so lucky. Rounding Cape Horn after a disproportionate five weeks of trying,* Essex entered the Pacific whaling grounds in January of 1820, heading northwards first for the west coast of South America, and then for the "offshore ground," a newly-discovered whaling ground between 5 and 10 degrees South and 105 and 125 degrees West. Before cruising this vast area, Essex headed towards Floreana Island in the Galapagos to water and hunt tortoises. There, a crewman set a fire as a prank that turned into an island-devouring wildfire.  

Difficult whaling suggested that nature might be getting ready for a suitably ironic revenge, but since it was thirty years yet to the publication of Moby Dick, the whalers could have no clue about the Dramatic Literary Symbolism coming their way. (If they had, they might have done things differently, if only to spare generations of their descendants from the agony of writing essays on whether the Great White Whale is an allegory or a metaphor.) On 20 November, 1820, a bull sperm whale rammed Essex twice and left it in a sinking condition.

If my facetious tone suggests that I am taking this with a bit of a grain of salt, it is because I am. The accident, as described, is implausible. There is a raging debate over whether this kind of behaviour is at all typical of bull sperm whales, but that is not the point. It is a sad whaler that is lost to stove-in sides, and the story describes a freak-of-science 85ft bull ramming the 88ft Essex bow-on at "twice" a sperm whale's normal surface speed of 24 knots. (Sperm whales are fast!) That said, it was not unknown for a whaler to return to Nantucket leaking a thousand strokes an hour. It would, eventually, serve all concerned well to present the loss of Essex as a freak episode rather than as an example of poor workplace safety and, as we shall see, poor management.

So the survivors of the crew abandoned the ship on three whale boats. At this point, the crew of Ann Alexander, an old ship in poor condition which was lost to a side-stoving sperm whale in 1861, elected to  head north to pick up the rainy, west-trending tropical winds that would have taken them to Polynesia had they not been picked up three days later. Bligh, under similar conditions and not that far away, took a single launch weighed down by 19 men on a 47 day, 4000 mile voyage to Timor. 

Bligh had the good sense to head downwind. The crew of the Essex, on the other hand, voted to head south towards prevailing winds that might, with luck, take them to South America. The logic was that they preferred to avoid the "cannibal isles" of the Marquesas and Societies.

This they did not do. The boats touched at Henderson Island, today a remote and uninhabited dependency (but with its own website!) of the Pitcairn Islands territory, 120 miles from that island. Three sailors decided to stay on Henderson, in spite of its paucity of water.

They survived just fine. 

The ones who didn't underwent gruesome suffering and, ultimately, cannibalism. (This was unfortunate for the victims, but at least ensured that the memoirs of the survivors would sell well.) It's all either a tragedy in "the heart of the sea," or a Darwin Awards-level performance, and I'm personally inclined to vote the latter after reading the appalling statistics compiled in Custom of the Sea. who would have guessed that the losers in  "cannibal ballots" would turn out to be disproportionately from the bottom ranks of the shipboard social hierarchy?  

Whatever. I'm sure that the self-serving narratives of Captain Pollard and Owen Chase are entirely accurate.

In lieu of pencil sketches of the loss of the Essex, which do not do justice to what was likely not a very visually dramatic episode anyway, due to boats being low in the water and whales even lower, here is a more picturesque Google search item for "wreck of the Essex:" boats moored at the west end of the Langmere Wharf, Essex, England. 

Source

I've a feeling that the ummooring days of the boats on the foreground are over.