HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A whale of a tale.
BEN KISSEL
A whale of a tale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's gonna be a whale of a tale.
BEN KISSEL
Whale of a tale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm excited about our lessons today. And I hope that you'll be gentle on the exam, Professor Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because a lot of these terms can get confusing.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's a lot of different...
BEN KISSEL
Well buddy, I hope you figure out what the answers are because I'm cheating off of you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please, please accept me.
BEN KISSEL
I accept you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can be friends together.
BEN KISSEL
That's why we're friends. I cheat off of you and then you get the answers right and then I passed the test and then I invite you to the party and I let you touch my boob in the dark, pretending I'm a woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be the most grateful thing I would ever experience.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please let me learn about whales today.
MARCUS PARKS
You don't have a chance in hell, buddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please let me learn about whales today!
BEN KISSEL
It's gonna be a whale of a tale!
MARCUS PARKS
No chance.
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. Finally, finally we're going back to the sea.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally. We've been out of the sea for what, 6-8 months now? Not since Blackbeard have we returned to the sea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And during Blackbeard, right, again we discovered things, we found out that the pirates obviously were a little bit more liberal, right. It was a fun little ship, it was more democratic.
BEN KISSEL
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just because they blow each other out of pure desperation for any kind of human contact, that doesn't mean they're liberal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But guess what? This time these guys are sucking dick and they mean it. All right. Because these guys are some smelly motherfuckers.
MARCUS PARKS
Very smelly.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man. You know you come up from the quarters, the main quarters, be like buddy, you got a little something on your beard there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like arr, yarr, I've been sucking the peg leg over here.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, the old peg leg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But today, a whale of a tale.
MARCUS PARKS
A whale of a tale.
BEN KISSEL
Whale of a tale. The tragedy of the Essex part 1.
MARCUS PARKS
So in the year 1820-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, I can smell it now.
BEN KISSEL
Bread, shit, yeast infection?
MARCUS PARKS
In the year 1820 an American whaling vessel called the Essex went down in the south Pacific Ocean after a massive sperm whale attacked and destroyed the ship thousands of miles from even the nearest uninhabited island.
BEN KISSEL
And I want to say that was one of Brendan Fraser's greatest performances and I am here to tell you he is back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Current!
BEN KISSEL
He is cool, he is nice, and it shows you nice guys who were super attractive when they were younger and really got famous because of their beauty can also succeed when they're older and a whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, that's what you do. And what I love is the climax of the film when they cut off the top of his head and dig deep into the white viscous cream that is the base of his skull.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They went and spent money at the end of it. It was really, it was wild.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was. Unexpected. Well the 21 souls aboard the Essex sought refuge in the smaller whale boats with limited provisions and only a vague idea of how and where they could be rescued. What followed was a sort of Donner party at sea. A tale of bad luck, bad decisions, and bad leadership.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fatal errors!
BEN KISSEL
No!
MARCUS PARKS
And as a result, 2/3 of the whalers who left the island of Nantucket a year before died horrific deaths on the water.
BEN KISSEL
So 14 out of 21, if my math is correct.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Something like that, sure.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, sure, sure.
BEN KISSEL
Something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Wow, you really did well.
BEN KISSEL
16? I'm not sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really quick math.
MARCUS PARKS
14!
BEN KISSEL
14!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. 7 x 2 is 14 and then 7 x 3 is 21. 2/3 dead, 14 dead. Good job, Ben.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really good work.
MARCUS PARKS
Well famously the destruction of the Essex inspired the climax in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which is all the fun stuff that Melville crammed into the end after making people read hundreds upon hundreds of pages about cytology and coins and endless fucking gams.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You love that stuff, Marcus, though. I know you love descriptions of gams, which you think it means sexy legs but it doesn't.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It means a whale party.
MARCUS PARKS
A gam is when two whaling ships meet each other on sea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they all trade stories.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like so When's the last time you saw a whale? Oh, I saw a whale three weeks ago! Oh and then I saw another one. Oh, that reminds me of another whale that I saw. Let's talk about it for 40 fucking pages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's called the first ever podcast.
BEN KISSEL
Let's just say that sperm whale is running a little low.
MARCUS PARKS
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sucking dick.
BEN KISSEL
Yes! That's my story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a secret. You've got to keep your special secret.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I know as an English major, I know the point of Moby Dick. I know that it's supposed to mirror the pace of being on a whaleship for months, if not years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's supposed to mirror the long periods of extreme boredom that are punctuated by moments of pure fucking adrenaline.
BEN KISSEL
See Marcus, this is why whoever wrote Moby Dick, Moby himself I would assume-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Herman Melville.
BEN KISSEL
He needed two friends like Henry and Ben to say Herman-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wrap it up!
BEN KISSEL
Getting a little bored here, Herman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But isn't it one of those books, because I remember cause I read Moby Dick or attempted to read Moby Dick at least when I was in high school.
MARCUS PARKS
Attempted. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think that a lot of it now it's one of those books where some nerd is always like but actually it's quite funny. And you're like I don't know, I actually, I might be wrong, I'm not certain.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I don't think it's actually quite funny.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually what you don't understand is it's a direct screaming parody of whaling life. And it's like I don't know, man.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No. It is actually written purposefully to be boring to mirror the life of a whaling vessel. That's what it's supposed to actually do is you're supposed to go along the whaling vessel, along the whaling voyage with them so you can learn what it's like to be a whaler.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's why people consider it to be so brilliant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If they can't understand me, how can they reach me?
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Put some tits in there. If you really want me engaged, I need a hell cube.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I need some tits, and I need like five more whales.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'm kind of with you on that, buddy, Herman Melville, he finished the end, with any luck they'll hate it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And they did actually at the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did.
BEN KISSEL
Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was panned.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Widely panned. Yeah, wasn't considered great until after he died.
BEN KISSEL
Herman Melville sounds like a Henny Youngman style comedian who only does racist jokes for the king.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He might have been.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well if the description of long periods of boredom punctuated by extreme action, if that description sounds familiar, studies have suggested that the PTSD suffered by some whalers back in the 19th century is very similar to the sort that soldiers have been experiencing since time immemorial.
BEN KISSEL
I don't want to be super stupid here but what about the fucking whales?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The whales.
MARCUS PARKS
We're going to get into the whales.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. They're sad, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Some people, yes okay. First of all as we wade into this episode, understand there's gonna be a lot of whale murder in this episode. But again these are viewed as allegorical creatures, right. At the time, now we love whales.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right now everyone's like oh wales, cute, fun. Love it. Want to ride one, want to fuck one if I could. Right?
BEN KISSEL
Sure!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone says that, they all want to have sex with these animals.
MARCUS PARKS
Everyone says that.
BEN KISSEL
Well I love Seaworld. Seaworld XXX.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. But back then, what they talk about in Moby Dick, the idea is the whale is sort of an exhaustive search for something you can't quite catch, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a mysterious beast of the ocean. It's way more of the wave than of the plate.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, it's a truly capitalist enterprise in which you're raping the earth in order for maximum profits. That is whaling at its core.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This whole thing is about lubey for factory machines.
BEN KISSEL
Great. Put your ear down to the earth really quick. And what do you hear it say? (whispering) Yes, I'm fine with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pocahontas was wrong!
BEN KISSEL
Yes, I'm fine with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was fucking wrong!
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. I'm happy you finally said it, Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
But when you bring 19th century American whaling down to its essentials, it is a fascinating yet brutal subject.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See just as the story of the Donner party was wrapped up in the frontier exploration of the mid 19th century, so too were vessels like the Essex, a major part of sea exploration during roughly the same time. Although the sorts of voyages taken by whaling ships were far more intense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They really were because they all said the same, the reading I was doing talked about how if you were a whaler, you never knew if you were coming back.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As soon as that ship was going, it said a lot of seafaring enterprises at the time that was common. But there was also whaling is an extremely dangerous job. It's almost like we should have figured something else out.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But our economy was heavily dependent on whales.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so we ended up going and getting further and further into this which is an extremely horrible, horrible job.
BEN KISSEL
Well not to mention you're constantly in the shadow of Bob Marley and you're like you know Bob's great, fantastic musician.
MARCUS PARKS
The Wailers. Bob Marley and the.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
But without the band. The Wailers, Bob, maybe not everyone would get your Rastafarian meanings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone wonders about the functions of Kissel's jokes and his bon mots and what they are is to drive the story forward.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's what we do. It's all about endless forward momentum.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. I love that Bob Marley song 'Don't Worry Be Happy'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like you can get permanently canceled just from that one.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just that one statement.
MARCUS PARKS
Well at its core, whaling is close range hunting on the open sea. It's something closer to a battle. Furthermore you're in what is basically a large rowboat and you're going up against the largest creature to ever exist in earth's history. An intelligent creature with a strong will to live.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally when hunting certain species of whale, specifically the sort that the Essex was after, whalers embarked on the longest voyages of any hunter in history, sometimes for years long stretches. And of course the longer you're out there, the deadlier the voyage has a chance of being.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because you just get lost, dog.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then the way they talk about how it's just confidence in wind. Man, I don't have any confidence in the goddamn wind. It changes every five seconds.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's scary out there. You don't know where you're going. You don't know where you're going.
MARCUS PARKS
They knew where they were going, Ben.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They don't know where they're going.
BEN KISSEL
No, they know what direction they're heading but do they know where they're going?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that's spiritual. You're talking about the difference between plot and story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now when it comes to the tragedy of the Essex, we actually know quite a bit about the voyage because the first mate wrote a 128 page narrative recounting the tale not too long after he and a few others were rescued amidst the bones of their shipmates.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The bones of their shipmates!
BEN KISSEL
Cool. So there you go, writing does serve a purpose.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And this was the accepted story for almost two centuries. But in 1980 an old notebook written by the cabin boy on the Essex, Tommy Nickerson-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I hope we edit out a couple of chapters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He was very fair about the sex but he did not like to necessarily talk about being a cannibal because he said he didn't want to spend his old age being recognized as one. But I say it's nice because it gives you more room at the supermarket.
BEN KISSEL
That's for damn sure.
MARCUS PARKS
What do you mean open about the sex? He didn't talk about the sex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean it bled off the page.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing but pure sensuality. I did look at, we'll get into the sensuality of whalers.
MARCUS PARKS
Sensuality, yes. Well this notebook, it was identified by a Nantucket whaling expert named Edouard Stackpole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know whaling books! They all smell like shit, slick to the touch.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It was identified as absolutely genuine.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And Nickerson was only 14 when he went out on the open sea.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But he was 71 when he finally wrote down the story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Holy crap. Okay. So he lived a long life.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the stories in Nickerson's notebook and the narrative written by first mate Owen Chase, they more or less matched up. But Nickerson's account was more warts and all which gave the story a much more human flavor. (evil laughter)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Devilish gallows humor!
BEN KISSEL
It's not foreshadowing if you fucking laugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(evil laughter) Devilish! Will they ever not be rogues at Last Podcast on the Left?
BEN KISSEL
People are going to eat each other in this episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not this episode, next episode.
MARCUS PARKS
Next episode.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, next episode. A whole bunch of it, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Great. Great, awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
But as far as our main source for this series goes, we have 'In The Heart of the Sea' by Nathaniel Philbrick, which is an absolutely fantastic account of the Essex tragedy that also features a solid overview of the wild world of whaling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll tell you what, they always have to blur out the blow holes. Which I actually think is disgusting. Hey, let's think about this. Free the blowhole.
BEN KISSEL
I completely agree. Is anyone named like someone without ED? Is there any masculine names in this?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, what do you mean? Yeah, there's Robert Pollard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. There's Wilmington Climax.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's Johnny Sucks-a-Lot.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when whaling was at its height, it was the fifth largest industry in America and extremely profitable.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As one expert said, you would be surprised at the profitability of these whales. And you're just like I'm dying here, sir.
MARCUS PARKS
Well before the discovery of petroleum, whale oil was the highest quality lubricant that humans could produce. And it made the best candles which was no small thing in an increasingly industrializing world decades away from electricity.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The smell of this, talk about this idea of these whale fat candles just burning and leaving a residue. Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But that's why they were actually so expensive because they didn't leave the residue. They didn't burn as much soot. They were said to be the favorite candle of Benjamin Franklin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, absolutely.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow. You can just see him in the shadows as he turns into the Dracul as he's banging a random gal with his big old belly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just looking into a mental mirror?
BEN KISSEL
No, he was a cool guy.
MARCUS PARKS
But in your mind Benjamin Franklin was a vampire?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. It weird, it's a whole other alt history. I've been trying to get him off this Benjamin Franklin is a vampire thing for a long time. It's been close to 12 years.
BEN KISSEL
No, Gary Oldman when he was vampire as a shadow. I'm saying Ben Franklin's shadow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're just mashing up a bunch of stuff. Again, hurtling forward.
MARCUS PARKS
Well somewhat sneakily, whaling was the industry that made America powerful enough and economically independent enough to separate from England, even if the number one customer for whale oil was the English.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of like massively psychologically and kind of symbolically appropriate that the thing that allowed America to become what it was at the time period was just the absolute devastation of every whale within hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of miles. But then selling that same whale blood to the very people that were in charge of us in the first place. But somehow that kept us separate because it seems like money was the only thing that anybody cared about.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It seems like it's a country founded by blubber.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. It's kind of like the wreck of the Essex is like the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I love that song.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But if Edmund ate Fitzgerald.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came to the whaling industry in America, it had always been centered around the weird little island of Nantucket just off of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, which by the 19th century had come to define itself in every aspect as a whaling community. In fact one prevailing Nantucket myth said that one of the founders, a man named Ichabod Paddock, had been quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(HENRY QUOTE) "Swallowed by a whale, and whose belly he found the devil and a mermaid playing cards for his soul."
BEN KISSEL
I think you stole that from Jonah in the bible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But again, allegorical.
BEN KISSEL
Allegorical.
MARCUS PARKS
No, Jonah didn't find the devil and a mermaid playing cards for his soul. That's a fantastic image.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cool. It's a good scrimshaw art piece you'd buy at a farmer's market.
BEN KISSEL
It sounds like you went to a casino called The Whale.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came to the types of whales that originally brought the English to Nantucket, they started with what they called right whales. Ben, do you know why they were called right whales?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pop quiz, hotshot! See how he fucks this up.
BEN KISSEL
Because-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He thinks Benjamin Franklin is Dracula.
BEN KISSEL
Because whenever you were thinking about a candle and you were getting in the mood with your girl, the whale was right there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you're saying the whale is cucking him, watching you from the side like a man in a hotel room.
MARCUS PARKS
Some whale from the sea just (whale sounds).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(whale sounds)
BEN KISSEL
I'll be your candle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
BEN KISSEL
I'll be your candle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's incorrect.
MARCUS PARKS
It's incorrect.
BEN KISSEL
No, I would assume because they go to the right.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no. It was because it was the right whale to kill.
BEN KISSEL
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. My answer was better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. It is just more obvious than you think.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how they get you on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how they get you.
BEN KISSEL
The final question isn't always that difficult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's what I'm saying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Playing the mind. And you're just looking at Regis Philbin, sweating, you're sweating looking at him and he's just there going it's unbelievable!
BEN KISSEL
He's been dead for a long time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. Yeah, I don't know who runs that show anymore.
BEN KISSEL
No idea.
MARCUS PARKS
Well right whales were actually baleen whales and their beached bodies had been harvested by the Wampanoag people of Massachusetts for centuries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know I once knew a man from Nantucket.
MARCUS PARKS
Who...?
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Did what? What did he do? What was his thing? What was his fucking deal, Henry?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Genocided a whole group of Native Americans that were there originally.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you knew him. That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. But in 1712, a man named Captain Hussey spotted a new whale off the coast of Nantucket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
New whale on the block!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Its blubber was superior to that of a right whale, providing a brighter and cleaner burning light. But what truly made this new whale special was what they found when they cracked open its skull.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These guys are so fucked up.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the first thing they thought of. Be like let's crack open its fucking head, let's see what it's fucking brains are like.
BEN KISSEL
What else are you gonna do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. You're right, I dunno.
BEN KISSEL
You'd be the only one that shows up with a spoon.
MARCUS PARKS
Now upon first exposing the fluid contained in the creature's head to oxygen, it looks sort of like vodka. But as the fluid oxidized, it came to look a lot more like come. So they named the substance spermaceti.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, nice.
MARCUS PARKS
And they called the creature the sperm whale.
BEN KISSEL
That's how it got its stupid name?
MARCUS PARKS
Yup. 100% true, my friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And watching these documentaries, seriously-
BEN KISSEL
Hold on a second. So this is the most dude way ever to name something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cut open the top of a fucking animal you don't know's head.
BEN KISSEL
Bro, looks like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You saw this animal for the first time.
BEN KISSEL
Yo, fucking Henry, man. You think that looks like come, dude?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Holy fucking shit. Was my older brother here earlier?
BEN KISSEL
What if we call it the come whale, dude? But like medical. Sperm! Sperm whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, looks like a whole bunch of guys from my gym were in there recently. No, the pleasure I had of watching so many of these historians trying to... Because again, we are children here, right. We're children.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course, of course, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're highly immature.
BEN KISSEL
They're the children! They were like looks like come!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Looks like come! Watching academians just being like named after the male ejaculate. Like trying to say the terms ejaculate or spermaceti and they can't figure out how to say it. But they can't smile, no one's allowed to laugh, no one's allowed to do anything.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Their favorite euphemism is seminal fluid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seminal fluid.
BEN KISSEL
Oh shut up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is so much dirtier than come!
BEN KISSEL
Shut up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because seminal fluid is what you scrape off a corpse.
BEN KISSEL
Oh gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come, at least everyone's alive in the room.
BEN KISSEL
Right, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now one could certainly say that they named this thing the sperm whale simply because the stuff looks like come. Doesn't have to be sexual.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Doesn't have to be.
MARCUS PARKS
Just looks like come and that's that. Looks like come, great.
BEN KISSEL
Sure, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they didn't have as much icing then.
BEN KISSEL
Right. So you use that, kind of scoop that up there.
MARCUS PARKS
But there seemed to be something about spermaceti that made writers weirdly sexual but not necessarily horny, if you get my meaning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
I do not. So that means that they're writing half hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'll see.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Half hard. So in Moby Dick, the protagonist and narrator, Ishmael, call me Ishmael-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
He experienced a sort of ecstasy as he squeezed the lumps of fresh spermaceti out of the head of the recently murdered sperm whale. This is what Ishmael said and this is written by Herman Melville who worked on a whaling vessel himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers hands and mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Well it's because it's like when people say about paper factories when it smells like farts.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like it smells like money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that these guys are like that. As you read about whalers because we'll get into how they render the oil and blah, blah, blah. But they said these disgusting things, it was worth so much money.
BEN KISSEL
No, I get it. It doesn't mean that they have to take great joy in popping the-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They got horny about it!
BEN KISSEL
Like Dr. Pimple Popper.
MARCUS PARKS
Here's another example. An 1874 memoir from a whaler named William M. Davis told of how luxurious it was to wade into pots of spermaceti to squeeze and strain out the fibers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah, excellent.
MARCUS PARKS
Where he quote "almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah yes.
BEN KISSEL
This is the of a fucking whale they're talking about, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it was so worth it, the money.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, can I just ask, so what are they getting out of the sperm?
MARCUS PARKS
Spermaceti.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That shit.
BEN KISSEL
And that's the candle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That goo.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the candle, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's what they're making the candle out of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The goop in the center of a sperm whale's head was worth more money than any other substance on earth at the time.
BEN KISSEL
So did they use the blubber from the body as well?
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into all of the blubber.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it wasn't like they used to do with the buffalo in the wild west where they'd kill it, cut off the fur, and then just fucking leave the corpse there.
BEN KISSEL
Sad.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they used every part of the whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually that's not true. I learned about it because they noticed that's how they would find whaling expeditions later on where they went was because they find the piles of dead... Because they would use chunks as much as they could.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the rest of it they'd leave.
MARCUS PARKS
No, not every part of the whale but they'd use the blubber.
BEN KISSEL
It's just the remnants.
MARCUS PARKS
They weren't just using the heads, they were doing the whole thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'd just find these floating islands of rotting whale meat just out in the ocean.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, of course. No because sailors didn't like whale meat, they said it was too tough, too gamey.
BEN KISSEL
I believe that, I believe that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they'd rather eat Jeff.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, we'll get to that. So they got this candle that comes from the come of the brain of the whale and they package it and then they put a little spruce in it and they call it Christmas tree and they sell it to your grandmother?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh no. Well let's think of it this way, this is before electricity. So this is the only way you're seeing at night. How is Ben Franklin gonna write at night if he doesn't have his candles?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And think about where America would be then, my friend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Think about there. Think about how Jonathan Harker would not have possibly gone through what he went visiting Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which the whole book, Dracula is all about a real estate deal.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is, it very much is.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the thing about sperm whales is that the spermaceti came with a greater risk. Sperm whales were far more aggressive than baleen whales and they were found further away from shore. But the quality of their oil was far higher than that of a baleen whale, so for many the reward outweighed the risk. Now of course whalers immediately slaughtered every sperm whale they could find within the immediate vicinity of New England. So they had to range further and further out to kill and find them.
BEN KISSEL
Real smart there.
MARCUS PARKS
Problem was it wasn't profitable to sail for three months, kill a whale, and sail another three months back with this whole whale carcass. So whale ships were turned into ghoulish floating factories where whalers could kill, butcher, and process carcass after carcass until the hull was filled to the brim with whale oil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, just fucking jiggling, gelatinous stink. (gagging)
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the smell is supposed to be just absolutely fucking putrid.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I'm sure.
MARCUS PARKS
It's supposed to be the worst smell on earth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
BEN KISSEL
I can see the Amazon smile logo that also looks like a penis, now that you think about it, you won't not see it.
MARCUS PARKS
Think about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, mine has that big golf club like swing at the very end of it. My penis goes a full L.
BEN KISSEL
It's actually not a bad design if that's where the G spot is of the gal that's your partner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. But it depends on how far mine is. Like it's pointing back at me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really weird.
MARCUS PARKS
It's unfortunate anatomy.
BEN KISSEL
It's kinda weird. Yeah, okay. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well then and only then could a whale ship return to Nantucket, after the entire hull was full of whale oil.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh god, they must have really... You must have known that they were coming a mile away.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They said that they did.
MARCUS PARKS
The did. And as a result, whaling voyages turned from seasonal affairs that may have lasted like 9 months at most to years long voyages.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And likewise the distance traveled became almost unfathomable. Unfathomable!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unfathomable!
BEN KISSEL
Unfathomable!
MARCUS PARKS
Unfathomable. By the late 1700s, Nantucket whale ships could be found in the Arctic circle, the west coast of Africa, and the east coast of South America.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact the British Navy used to complain that everywhere they went, expecting to find nothing and nobody, they'd find Nantucket whalers having whaled the fuck out of the area long before anyone else even thought of going there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just see a lot of robust women with their underwear sticking out of the top of their pants when we talk about this. But I also know that this is because these were the factories that this whale oil allowed us to have the entire industrial revolution inside of America.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the stuff that went into all of the machines. So they were desperate and the people that were paying for these whale boats were people like the Macy family, the Folgers family.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These are people like huge American quote unquote "dynasties".
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Were also needing this blubber.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, whaling is like the secret history of America.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as who those Nantucket whalers were, they were mostly Quakers, pacifists when it came to humans but fucking demons when it came to whales. See the Nantucket Quakers were extreme weirdos because as we all know the smaller the island, the stranger the folk.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Now whaling was such a part of Nantucket life that children were taught whaling terms from birth and bedtime stories usually involved killing whales or eluding cannibals, as one might imagine doing when you regularly deal with isolated south Pacific islands.
BEN KISSEL
I can't sleep, daddy. Wanna tell me another whale story?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, let me tell you a story. So it was me and my buddy, Paul. Right?
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we were on top of this whale, it was beached on the beach, right.
BEN KISSEL
I love this story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I said oh Paul, you can take the hole, you did such a good haul yesterday. I'm climbing up in the mouth, I'm gonna come in his ass backwards. No, listen, sit down, lay down. Lay down!
BEN KISSEL
I'm laying down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a story! This is how I afforded your private school.
BEN KISSEL
That's great, daddy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well speaking of which, there were whaling groupies. There were secret societies of young women who swore to only marry a man who had killed a whale.
BEN KISSEL
See? I don't know what I'm trying to say, but see? There used to be a time where a man was respected for his job.
MARCUS PARKS
Well these men could be identified by the pens they wore on their lapel to show that they'd indeed been blooded by blubber.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's always clout.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, always. And Nantucketeers even had their own toasts, not to life itself but to good whaling. They would raise their glasses and say quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(HENRY QUOTE) "Death to the living, long life to the killers, success to sailors' wives, and greasy luck to the whalers!"
MARCUS PARKS
Arr!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Arr!
BEN KISSEL
Arr! I'm actually going to be doing dry January so I won't be able to cheers this month.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I can tell when you're doing it because I could smell the Monster.
BEN KISSEL
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed greasy luck was needed because whaling was a deadly business. In 1810, a quarter of the women in Nantucket over the age of 23 had been widowed by the sea in one way or another. And four of the youngest crew members on the ill fated Essex had either lost fathers or were total orphans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean widow by the sea is one thing, have you ever been DPed by the moon?
BEN KISSEL
Oh it's brutal, brutal. Absolutely horrific what hat moon can do. So if you're the lady, they didn't love the guys, they just knew they were going to die young and they'd get a pension.
MARCUS PARKS
Well actually let's get right into that, you're not too far off.
BEN KISSEL
Please god.
MARCUS PARKS
Perhaps out of emotional necessity or complete honesty, the Quaker women of Nantucket seemed to revel in the fact that their husbands were constantly gone or in some cases dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is this why Natalie keeps asking me when we're going back on tour?
BEN KISSEL
This is unbelievable.
MARCUS PARKS
See in Quakerism the sexes were considered intellectually equal and the women of Nantucket maintained a complex web of personal and commercial relationships that kept Nantucket going while the men were away. Typically a woman could expect to see her husband for 3-4 months every 2-3 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
BEN KISSEL
Oh they didn't love these men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They liked the blubber.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes they did. She's making blubber money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they're doing their own, they're pulling their own weight.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're building the youth of Nantucket.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well so comfortable were these women with this arrangement that they even had a song celebrating how great it was to be married to someone they saw only briefly once every few years. Here are but a few lines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) "With his brow so nobly open and his dark and kindly eye, oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh. But when he says goodbye my love, I'm off across the sea. First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I'm free."
BEN KISSEL
Well it sounds horrible. Horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm one of the rougher wives.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you wonder why he goes and he volunteers for all these trips. When it comes down to it I suck a mean dick and I make a great chowder.
BEN KISSEL
You do. Yes indeed. So everyone's happy.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's a fun role reversal. The whole thing is like yeah, the wife's away for the weekend. But it's the same thing. Like thank god my husband's gone, I can't stand that motherfucker.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think that's a role reversal, that's the roles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually I do kind of feel like maybe it comes down to your husband might be riddled with PTSD from wrestling with one of the most violent animals that ever existed and the way in which he has to do it. And he's just a fucking gear in the cog.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In this whole fucking endless wheel of the whale industry that he's stuck on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
PTSD, STDs. You start seeing your wife as a whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You ever had a sea transmitted disease?
BEN KISSEL
No. I was stung by a jellyfish once. They can sting you even when they're dead. Kinda cool.
MARCUS PARKS
That is kinda cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Remember that about me.
MARCUS PARKS
You can sting even when you're dead?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wink. The jellyfish.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you might have a bit of a point there. An earlier verse of that song did talk about how much I love to spend whaling money when my husband is gone.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. Yeah I mean again, you're in it for the blubber.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you're in it for the blubber.
BEN KISSEL
I know what's going on.
MARCUS PARKS
And when it came to being truly independent, Nantucket women were quite forward thinking for the 19th century. Reportedly a common item found in the bedside drawer of a Nantucket home was a 6 inch plaster dildo, euphemistically called a 'he's at home'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a 'he's at home'.
BEN KISSEL
I'm just so happy that they didn't, oh I don't know, exaggerate too much. Like a 6 inch dildo is just fine. It's all we need.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just fine, it's all good.
BEN KISSEL
It's a humble dildo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is. Because again, hey, you don't want to replace him, you want to miss him.
BEN KISSEL
No. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the idea is you give them I'd say 4 inches.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. That's a normal one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's normal.
BEN KISSEL
4 inches.
MARCUS PARKS
But also remember it's made of plaster and it's gonna be very rigid. So if you get a plaster 8 incher in there, that's gonna be too much because the good thing about the 8 incher is when you get the rubber ones, they're flexible. But plaster, ugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever seen one?
MARCUS PARKS
A 'he's at home'?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at that, looks at this big old fucking crazy head on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was expecting a lot.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, holy shit. According to this one woman, she says that she felt that it was mostly myth about the 'he's at home'. But I think that's just because she already got one locked up and she doesn't understand why anybody needs it.
BEN KISSEL
Why would it be myth? I mean people masturbate all the time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But when it came to the whalers, they lived as is tradition for romanticized American professions of yore, absolutely fucking awful lives of hardship, exploitation, injury, and frequent death all while being expected to fulfill half a dozen areas of expertise. Whalers in the 1800s where sailors, hunters, butchers, explorers, factory workers, and merchants all at the same time. And yet whaling was one of the lowest paying jobs in America.
BEN KISSEL
Why? Literally put the Amazon logo on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because all of the money went up to the top.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of the money went up to the top and every one of these ships were bought into, they were all like time shared buildings, they were all owned by families that then would hire out the cruise. So it's like all of the money is getting more and more diluted.
MARCUS PARKS
It's basically the way American corporations are run today.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Whaling ships were the blueprint. It all began with whaling ships. During the industry's peak in the mid 19th century, ordinary seaman on a whaleship earned just about the same as women working in textile factories in Massachusetts. 2/3 of what they would have made if they'd just moved to Boston as unskilled laborers.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then you don't get the stories.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I guess not.
MARCUS PARKS
Put into perspective, the cabin boy who wrote the memoir of the sinking of the Essex was paid the modern equivalent of $3500 for two years of labor.
BEN KISSEL
That's it?
MARCUS PARKS
For two years of labor. Although room and board was technically included in the deal.
BEN KISSEL
The room and the board is a goddamn ship that smells like come from whales!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you should be thankful for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Now concerning the Essex, it was a relatively old ship when it set off for its last voyage in 1819. It had been in service for 20 years and had gone through numerous repairs. But the ship owners who should have long since retired it, they sent it out again and again while also refusing to do any repairs until they were absolutely necessary.
BEN KISSEL
They didn't care.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wouldn't you love to find out that this boat that you're going to spend three years on to go hunt one of the most dangerous animals in the water for everybody else's money, not yours.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if you found out that the guys that owned it, because this was the attitude of the Essex, were just being like we think we can squeeze one more trip out of it. Can you imagine being on a plane and hearing that being like we think we get one more?
BEN KISSEL
I mean that's literally the story of Lynyrd Skynyrd where they're like we're gonna have to repair this when we land. And we'll fix it up after take off. It's like god dang, setting themselves up to eat each other, apparently.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As we said, a vessel like the Essex was sort of like a modern corporation in which people could own shares of the ship. And most men who bought whale ship shares owned shares and multiple ships. So if one ship went down, no big whoop.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
20 people are dead but that's not you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's not you.
BEN KISSEL
No big whoop.
MARCUS PARKS
That's no big whoop because it's not you.
BEN KISSEL
It's not you.
MARCUS PARKS
But what that meant was also like modern corporations, the shareholder was king, corners were cut, and costs were kept to a minimum. And besides its old age, the Essex was severely under provision when it set out because it was accepted practice to nearly starve sailors for years at a time to maximize shareholder profits.
BEN KISSEL
Great, good for them. They're just like Exxon Mobil today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're just like. And oil, oil business.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But since shit always flows downhill, the whalers of Nantucket also took every opportunity to fuck over anyone who came in from the outside to join the whaling life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I get it, man. You want to be a part of this? It's kind of almost like a cult-like mentality.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You want to do this thing that sucks? Well I'm gonna show you how much it sucks because it sucks.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, cause it sucked for me so now it's gonna suck double for you.
BEN KISSEL
Right. Why? Now why are you volunteering to do it? Are you on the LAM? Are you running away from the law? What's going on?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also the love of the sea.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we'll get to it here in a second. I mean inexperienced sailors were called green hands and Nantucket children would actually wait on the docks for green hands to arrive so they could make fun of them for their poor life choices when they showed up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh you like going out on the that stupid boat there? Hey, fuck you, you're gonna be dead! You're gonna die out there!
BEN KISSEL
Why are they doing it? Why are they yelling at them?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fun!
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore once the green hand arrived on the island, everyone around them is talking in nautical terms all the time in a bizarre accent that says 'ail' instead of oil and 'sherp' instead of sharp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ail.
MARCUS PARKS
All while they're still using the and thou because they're a bunch of Quakers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. They were idiosyncratic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Are they werder people?
MARCUS PARKS
Werder?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Werder.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, definitely werder, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought werder was-
MARCUS PARKS
Werder is also Boston.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Werder.
MARCUS PARKS
Werder. Or is that Philly?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, Boston's wada.
MARCUS PARKS
Wada. Werder, isn't that Philly as well?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Werder.
BEN KISSEL
We just don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Wada. Ail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every one of these counties, we're gonna hear from.
MARCUS PARKS
Everyone from Grunbip County is gonna fucking get so mad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every one of them.
BEN KISSEL
When I worked at Burger King the general manager, big old gal, looked like a whale herself, she said werder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's great. Always moving forward.
BEN KISSEL
Burger King, baby.
MARCUS PARKS
Always moving forward, always moving back to fast food employment but moving forward again.
BEN KISSEL
Always. Also the 1980s logo of Burger King and the 1990s logo, extremely similar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's true. Again.
BEN KISSEL
Extremely similar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Looking forward.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once a Green Hand went to sign up for a voyage, no one told him about any of the pitfalls. And they did this as a rule. For example, a longer voyage did not mean more wages.
BEN KISSEL
Geez.
MARCUS PARKS
And all experienced sailors knew that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Sailors signed up for a fraction of the voyage's net profit, it was called a lay. But they never told the green hands because the green hands wouldn't sign up if they knew that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, no one would because it's all about what you catch, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So there's no guaranteed pay. So you have to go. So you could go out there, have your hands torn from your body by ropes-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come back with nothing and be paid nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually you could come back in debt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of guys went out on their first voyage, a lot of them came back and found that they had been paid either the equivalent of pennies a day or they would be hundreds of dollars in debt to the whaling company.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always read your contracts and if you can't read, you better learn real fast. Learn it within five minutes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it seems like they did it for the experience anyway.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Some of them did. I mean Herman Melville did.
BEN KISSEL
Did he actually whale?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He was obsessed with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He actually went out on a whaler, yeah. He wrote Moby Dick from 100% experience.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But the thing is that they had to keep the green hands in the dark because everybody except the man at the bottom needed to be in on the system.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
They needed to exploit somebody for the whole thing to work.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when it came to the Essex, it was actually considered a lucky ship because it had lasted through so many voyages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And as you may or may not know, we talked a little bit in the pirates episode and other episodes, sailors were extremely superstitious.
MARCUS PARKS
Extremely, yes. It was a large ship at 87 ft and the last several voyages had been captained by a man named Daniel Russell who had since been promoted to captain of a new and larger ship called the Aurora. That meant that Russell's first mate, George Pollard, I said Robert Pollard earlier, I think that's the guy who's in Guided By Voices.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It might be.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, I didn't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well George Pollard had earned a command, so he was promoted to captain of the Essex and his harpooner Owen Chase was moved up to first mate for what was unbeknownst to them the ship's last voyage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, Owen Chase, the ultimate fucking doom filled zoomer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was literally this is the equivalent, we'll talk about it but Owen Chase... You can only listen to your intern so much.
BEN KISSEL
I guess so. All right. So they got a promotion.
MARCUS PARKS
They did.
BEN KISSEL
To hell.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as the other men on the voyage went, you had your normal crew of youngsters aged 15-18, four kids named Thomas Nickerson, Barzillai Ray-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a great name.
MARCUS PARKS
Barzillai Ray is a wonderful name. It's either Barzil-ay or Barzil-aia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Barzil-aia.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I like Barzillai.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You also had Charles Ramsdell and Owen Coffin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was the goth one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well he was of the Nantucket Coffins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that was their ladies softball team.
MARCUS PARKS
The Coffins were actually a well respected family on the island. There were the Coffins, there were the Starbucks. The Starbucks were a huge family.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they are not of the Starbucks of the Starbucks family. They were inspired by Moby Dick, I looked it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Starbucks is not the last name, it's Howard Schultz that created Starbucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That guy did it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Starbuck is a character in-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My president. He'll always be my president.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's pretty great. Yeah. So it's the Coffin family. And I'll tell you one thing, Jerry Sneezer, they started Little Caesars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stupid. Stupid. No.
BEN KISSEL
And oh my god, Andy Queefs! Did you know the Queefs family?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah, that's worse. That's even worse.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well anyway it's nothing like Barry Shart or you can imagine anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Anything. A first name with a funny last name.
BEN KISSEL
Last name.
MARCUS PARKS
You can do anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Anything can be funny if the words are funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You too can podcast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well also one of the researchers I was looking at, because the 200 year anniversary of the sinking of the Essex was in November of 2020.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so I was watching these poor Nantucket historians, very frail, both in masks, very masked, 20 ft away from each other, trying to be interesting. It was very, very difficult.
BEN KISSEL
Difficult, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But one of them kept saying he did some research into the family connections on Nantucket. And he's like you know what's interesting is that everyone was cousins!
BEN KISSEL
Fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
Interesting, yes. In an island of 7000 people, everyone was cousins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were all fucking each other.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well also Owen Coffin was the cousin of Captain George Pollard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's the thing, for Nantucketers a whaling voyage was the first step towards a long and profitable career so long as you made your way to a mate's position or if you were lucky, a captain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was somewhat interns, at least the Nantucketers, there was a way path forward. But for everyone else on the ship, a whaling voyage was a desperate last resort. You did not want to end up on a whaling ship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
But in many ways that the rest of America was not, whaling ships were just the tiniest bit more egalitarian, just a bit. And it was one of the few places where a black man could be paid the same as a white man. Although he-
BEN KISSEL
Very little.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very little.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he still couldn't expect to be treated, housed, or fed the same but he could at the very least be paid the same.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's all because of the Quaker's view because they were anti slavery.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, very much so. But that is to say 7 black sailors signed up for the last voyage of the Essex, the last crew members to do so. And with the standard number of 21 men aboard, the Essex set sail for what was supposed to be a fairly routine two year long whaling voyage in August of 1819. Now Now George Pollard was already well acquainted with the Essex, having spent four years aboard as second and first mate, but this was his first voyage as captain. Likewise it was Owen Chase's first voyage as first mate. And if all went well, Pollard could be promoted to captain of a new ship following this voyage and Chase could be put in command of the Essex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta be careful, this is why you can't train. I'm sorry Fernando, we can't train the producers too well. Because all they're looking, they're looking at the back of your head, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're looking at your back and wondering when do I get to have the headphones on?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When do I get to get over there, right?
BEN KISSEL
Well Fernando does a great job as one of the cohosts of Abe Lincoln's Top Hat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's crushing it. He's already doing it! He's already doing it! It's beginning!
MARCUS PARKS
He's done it. It's over.
BEN KISSEL
He's right there.
MARCUS PARKS
It's happened.
BEN KISSEL
He can hear everything you're saying.
MARCUS PARKS
He's staring at you. He's staring at the back of my head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're all going! Fatal errors.
MARCUS PARKS
And so after the captain gave his speech on the first day of the voyage as was tradition-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay guys, just so you know-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Looking for whales number one.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Biggest fish you're gonna see today.
BEN KISSEL
The whale?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yarr.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So if you're curious is that a fish or a whale, is it bigger than you?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a whale. Okay, number two. Let's keep the farts to the top of the boat, okay.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't need everybody farting in the bottom of the boat because it's already gonna be smelly enough, okay? Good team. All right everyone break.
BEN KISSEL
Good team. Can I kill a dolphin?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you! And just show it to me so we can all have fun watching it scream.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We love screams here.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Well dolphins, speaking of which, they actually liked dolphin meat a little bit more than whale meat but they didn't really like eating dolphins that much. And it was actually very hard to kill a dolphin because they had only the harpoon to use and a dolphin's hide is very thick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's why we gotta use dynamite.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I've seen the very sad documentary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very sad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The Essex pushed off with high hopes and big expectations from the people in charge. High stakes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
High stakes.
BEN KISSEL
Why the hope?
MARCUS PARKS
Well because Pollard, it's a very old ship.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So he's been promoted to captain but he knows there's no future on the Essex, so I gotta do a great job on this so I can get promoted to a bigger ship.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And Chase is thinking like okay, this ship maybe has two voyages left in it. If I get promoted this next time then I can also get promoted. So again man, it is a corporate ladder that all these guys are desperately trying to climb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. All right, lemme teach you one thing about being a CEO. You see that carrot? You see it's in front of that person's nose? You pull it back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You pull it back.
BEN KISSEL
Pull it back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Make them jump.
BEN KISSEL
And then make them jump.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it is also you cannot overestimate and over say how valuable whale oil was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so every single time they were trying to get this shit, it was always a high priority for them, for the people up top.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But for the people on the bottom, the green hands, the voyage was immediately a nightmare. Most found themselves so seasick they were ready to die. Have you ever been seasick?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah dude.
MARCUS PARKS
It's fucking-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate it.
BEN KISSEL
Remember my face blew up?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
You remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Half of my face got swollen cause we went on a little expedition to go fishing. Oh, it was horrible.
MARCUS PARKS
Well but that was right up until they got what was called the Nantucket Cure. To cure seasickness-
BEN KISSEL
Tell me this is not gonna get sexual.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Well the sick man would be made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string which would then be yanked back out.
BEN KISSEL
Why? What? Why!?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you think about that? Explain this analogy. How does this make you feel better?
BEN KISSEL
You puke I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
I guess. But if that didn't work, you know what they'd do?
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
THey'd do it again. And if that didn't work, they'd do it again. And they'd do it again and again and again until the person stopped being sick or just started lying about feeling better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what? Wow, doctor. That's the best medicine I've ever had. Thank you so much, I'm done with that.
BEN KISSEL
I think it's more the latter, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now like most whale ships of the era, the Essex took an indirect route following the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic. They're trying to go down towards the southernmost tip of South America, they're trying to pop around over into the Pacific.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Swing around Cape Horn.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But this route took them all the way to North Africa where they planned to stop off at the Azores Islands for provisions before sailing back towards Cape Horn. But just three days out of Nantucket, the Essex was ravaged by a storm that almost sank the ship, 3 fucking days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
BEN KISSEL
Woo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a lot. Because I feel like there was a couple of other bad omens because they talked about how there was a storm, there was something else that happened on the island.
MARCUS PARKS
Someone saw like a weird...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, they saw a cryptid!
MARCUS PARKS
They saw a weird thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like a dragon or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They said that there was a sighting of a-
MARCUS PARKS
A sea monster!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sea monster.
MARCUS PARKS
They saw a sea monster, that's what it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They talked about it. But again, so superstitious.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone was immediately skittish about the boat leaving because there was this weird harbinger of doom around it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's not a sea monster, that's my wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My wife. Thank you very much, very good stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Even though Pollard had been on the Essex for years, he froze up when the storm blew in. And because he hesitated in giving the order to turn, the Essex was almost tipped over and two whale boats on deck were destroyed in the ensuing chaos.
BEN KISSEL
My promotion!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, literally. I didn't know that this could even happen. So a wind hit it. He just did it, he fucked up, he choked, he fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He steered the ship the wrong way. Wind hit it straight on, it went completely sideways. And they had to wait for a wind, if it was going to come, to come and pick them back up.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because otherwise one of the notes I read was like well the best part is that when the ship's sideways, at least it protects you from the wind.
BEN KISSEL
That is nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So then they're just stuck inside, like everyone's gripping, hanging from the sides of the boat and shit.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the cook had to dive out of the kitchen because all of his stoves and shit just fucking flew to the other side of the room and almost crushed him.
BEN KISSEL
Oh the poor fat cook.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(French accent) How the hell am I supposed to work in these conditions?
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Essex was still seaworthy after the storm but it was certainly weakened. But the loss of two whale boats was a big deal because a ship needed three whale boats and two to spare if it wanted to have a successful journey. And sure enough, Captain Pollard rightly decided that the voyage was a bust and a return to Nantucket for replacement boats and repairs was needed. Only three days out, what's the fucking difference?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, get back.
MARCUS PARKS
But his first and second mates disagreed, saying that all that could be taken care of once they arrived in Africa.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is why I say the intern from hell, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because Owen Chase, he worked his way up. But they basically sat and he was like you know we need to turn around. We're gonna repair, we're only three days out. We can just go, we can repair, we can turn back around.
BEN KISSEL
It's a carnival cruise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it is literally the equivalent of the new weird nepo baby hire you bring to your CEO's sphere, right. You got your 23 year old son of your VP who's got a cellphone in hand looking on Twitter. He's like how do you think Twitter will respond? Literally it's that vibe where you're gonna freak out the sailors.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I know you might be captain and all but I just arrived here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so I might know a little bit more.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm new blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm new blood, I'm a new direction, I'm a new vibe here. And so you might need to think about what you're doing and we need to actually do the opposite of what you're doing. I know you're in charge but...
BEN KISSEL
It's still up to the captain to make the right decision though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes it is. And it's not the worst call because the morale of the sailors, it's pretty low.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're three days out of a two year journey and they've already almost died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everything's all fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Not to mention if they went home, the amount of lesbian action they'd see as they enter their home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
BEN KISSEL
Because their wife is like I wasn't expecting you for another year, two years basically!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were doing the maiden criss cross.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
And so Pollard was swayed by his men for the first but certainly not the last time to make the wrong decision. Now predictably when they got to the Azores Islands there were no spare whale boats to be purchased. Likewise when they continued south to the Cape Verde Islands, they only found that there was but one spare whale boat to buy. And so after trading 30 starving hogs that were almost skeletons for half a barrel of beans, or of course actually they traded the beans for the hogs.
BEN KISSEL
Wait a second, they had a bunch of pigs on board this whole time?
MARCUS PARKS
It's gonna get even weirder than just the pigs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it gets weirder than that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'd listen to the pigs.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after they got all these starving hogs on board, they continued on their journey towards South America, one boat down. But then halfway between Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, three months into the journey, the crew heard a cry from the lookout for the first time.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, it was all those angry birds trying to kill the pigs!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thar she blows!
MARCUS PARKS
Now when the crew heard either thar she blows, thar she breaches, or thar goes flukes-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
All perfectly reasonable signals meaning hey, there's a whale, everyone on the ship jumped into action.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thar goes flukes is a really good thing to see. Cause you know a whale tail is when you see the underwear sticking out the back of the pants.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a fun thing to say instead of, cause it's disgusting to say oh look at that whale tail, we go thar goes flukes!
MARCUS PARKS
Thar goes flukes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's when you see underwear sticking out.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the men prepared the whale boats with harpoons and rope and the harpoons were sharpened one last time as the ship overtook the whale. And once the Essex was within a mile, three whale boats were launched, one commanded by the captain, one by the first mate, and one by the second mate. Where they were once sailors they were now hunters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude. They can put that other hat on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's fucking crazy what you have to do to hunt a whale.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it would be funny if they were just hunting Chris Christie.
MARCUS PARKS
Because he's a big fat guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? Again, always forward momentum, some of the best, most current jokes.
MARCUS PARKS
Chuga-chuga-chuga.
BEN KISSEL
Remember Bridgegate?
MARCUS PARKS
I remember Bridgegate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember Bridgegate. I remember his fupa.
BEN KISSEL
2014!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember the football team. Baseball.
MARCUS PARKS
Baseball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big fupa. Now each whale boat competed to see who could reach the whale first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But they also had to make sure to not scare the whale away by making too much noise. So the captains of the whale boat had to quietly coax and cajole the men in a way that's both aggressive and oddly tender. A little bit of cheerleading.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Here's an example. And Henry, I want you to do this verbatim. Please do this verbatim.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course, of course. This is verbatim. "Do for heaven's sakes, spring the boat don't move. You're all asleep, see. See, there she lies. Scoped. Scoped! I love you my dear fellows. Yes, yes, I do. I'll do anything for you. I'll give you my heart's blood to drink. Only take me up to this whale. Only this time for this one's pull. Oh St. Peter, St. Jerome, St. Stephen, St. James, St. John, the devil on two sticks, carry me up. Oh let me tickle him, let me feel of his ribs. There he goes on, go on. Oh most on, most on. Stand up Starbuck, don't hold your iron that way. Put one hand over the end of the pole now. Now look out! Dart, dart."
BEN KISSEL
Man, dude, you trying to flirt with me, man? We're gonna go kill this whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Men get very close on the little boats.
MARCUS PARKS
They do.
BEN KISSEL
I know they do!
MARCUS PARKS
Now on the first attempt at killing a whale on the Essex voyage, a 20 year old named Benjamin Lawrence threw the harpoon. But when it made contact with the whales hide, the once docile 60 ft long creature became a massive deadly monster.
BEN KISSEL
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
With just one swipe of his tail, a sperm whale could destroy a whale boat. And indeed when the harpoon whale got aggressive, a second whale came up from below and smashed in an entire side of the boat with one smack of the tail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sweet. (metal guitar riff)
BEN KISSEL
I wonder did whales call it go going humaning?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they were just trying to fuck. They were just trying to live lives.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And none of the men were injured but both whales were lost. Days later after the whale boat was repaired, the lookout sighted whales once again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There, she's coming! Ah white froth and cream!
MARCUS PARKS
And the boats were launched. After catching up to the whale, a harpoon was successfully lodged into the whale's thick hide and the creature took off dragging the boat on what was called a Nantucket sleigh ride.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what they do. So they stick the harpoon in and then the whale goes running and then you follow with the the boat being dragged by the whale.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then you slowly but surely pull yourself next to the whale by the rope.
BEN KISSEL
I didn't know that really happened. That happened in the first God of War. and I think Red Dead Redemption.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is real education, they're teaching the kids.
BEN KISSEL
They're teaching the kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did you get radicalized by an E-girl trying to get you to join the Airforce?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I'm gonna play the New Call of Duty: Modern Warfare but I've got to flip my entire political thoughts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. I think even to join technically.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to give money to someone.
BEN KISSEL
Starting to think they have weapons of mass destruction.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
BEN KISSEL
Better go over there for freedom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
More like weapons of mass distraction.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yellow cake.
BEN KISSEL
I remember. Hans Blix?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep, I remember all of this.
BEN KISSEL
Who else is 40?
MARCUS PARKS
Traveling at speeds of up to 20 miles an hour, a whale could drag a 25 ft whale boat by rope and harpoon for anywhere between 20 minutes and 24 hours, depending on how much the whale felt like putting up a fight.
BEN KISSEL
Dang.
MARCUS PARKS
Once the whale tired itself out though, the crew would haul themselves within stabbing distance and they're the real carnage would.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it gets fucking gnarly.
BEN KISSEL
So literally the whale at this point is exhausted, probably near death.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's tired for certain.
MARCUS PARKS
It's tired, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the harpooner and the mate would trade places so the mate could take the honor of the kill. And using a 12 ft long killing lance with a petal shaped blade, the mate would stab the whale again and again to find the whale's vital organs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it was not an exact science.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
May I say, aren't they always in the same spot?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's a very large... That's the thing, it's not like you're dealing with a bear.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You're dealing with an animal that can be anywhere between 40-80 ft long.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
80 feet long, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's the thing is that it's also one big tube.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's a tube of guts.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you're just fishing around with this fucking knife looking for the important ones.
BEN KISSEL
Right, it makes sense. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the goal was to find a group of coiled arteries in the vicinity of the lungs because the head was too hard to stab the brain and the heart was buried deep within the whale. But when that coil was punctured, everyone knew, because in author Nathaniel Philbrick's words, "the whale's spout would transform into a 15-20 ft tall geyser of gore."
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fucked up.
BEN KISSEL
It's like Nightmare on Elm Street when Johnny Depp got killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. This would be met with a cry of:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Chimney's afire!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That meant that the whale was drowning in its own blood and would soon be dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We've all had a chimney's afire moment though.
BEN KISSEL
Fun. Oh absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
After Buffalo Wild Wings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The whale would then vomit and die in a pool of its own blood and puke in a nasty drawn out death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very sad.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now once the whale was dead, the three whale boats would latch on and tow the 40-60 ton carcass back to the ship at a rate of one mile an hour.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, they're cooking!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh dude, usually they could expect to tow the creature about five miles. But once they got there, the entire crew turned from hunters to butchers and eventually factory workers.
BEN KISSEL
Where's the new hats?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
New hats!
BEN KISSEL
Tony, you're in charge of bringing the butcher hats!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what I am unless I have a new hat on!
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. All we got is these Dave & Buster's caps that say I Love Being A Cuck. Or I'm sorry, Dick's Last Resort.
MARCUS PARKS
Dick's Last Resort. But also at Dave & Buster's, every time I go there I see so many guys wearing hats that say I Love Being A Cuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah it's different though. I think they're just selling them like it's merch.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Well also speaking of death, you know Buster committed suicide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's true.
BEN KISSEL
It's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is true.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If the lord of fun can't live, I don't know what we're supposed to do.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when it came to the first whale killed on the ill fated voyage of the Essex, the corpse was tied to the starboard side. Pieces of blubber were cut from the whale and lowered into the blubber room below decks where it would eventually be processed into oil. Once all the blubber was stripped, the sperm whale's head, which constituted a third of the sperm whale's total length-
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It was cut off and hauled up to the ship's deck, pouring out blood and gore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(gagging) It's so gross.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just must have been so fucking gross.
MARCUS PARKS
Really ploppy, a lot of plop, plop, plop.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they also built these giant kilns that were on the boat, right. So they had these like brick ovens in the center that they used to boil the blubber into the oil.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
For artisanal pizza.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, it is definitely from fin to table.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we'll get to the boiling of the blubber here in a second. But once they brought up the head, a hole would be cut out of the top of the skull and men would climb inside the head with buckets to remove all the spermaceti they could get their hands on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Arr! I love the smell of spermaceti in the morning.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause you'd just get right in there, man. They would just be scooping out with their hands because they want to get every little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
Every little bit.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, spelunking for sperm.
MARCUS PARKS
Spelunking for spunk.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just spunking.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after that the men would return to the body and probe the whale's intestinal tract with a lance, searching for another substance called ambergris.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's going to be full of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was. That's the thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It basically is.
MARCUS PARKS
They're doing the worst possible shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But guess what it was used to make.
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
Perfume!
BEN KISSEL
Poopy?
MARCUS PARKS
Perfume.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Perfume.
BEN KISSEL
No, I know. But it was the whale poop that made the perfume?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what.
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't the whale poop, it was something like it was some sort of disease.
BEN KISSEL
Perfume was made out of a disease?
MARCUS PARKS
Basically I think what it was, it was sort of like if you crusted out-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull gray or blackish color.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Kind of if you crusted out somebody's arteries.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like fatty arteries. It's kind of like if you crusted that out and then made perfume out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
And it smelled good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is used to allow the scent to endure much longer. But now they figured out a new way to do that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, no one's gotta do that anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it said that sometimes dogs love it.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good. Oh isn't that nice?
MARCUS PARKS
And it was worth more than its weight in gold.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the whale blubber would then be boiled in a process called trying out the whale. See when the blubber was boiled into oil, it produced cracklings on the surface.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(gagging)
BEN KISSEL
That's not bad. You would eat a crackling. A good old crackling?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Normally I love a crackling.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But they would skim off the cracklings and use it as fuel, meaning the whale was used to burn itself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quit burning yourself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. One Green Hand described the trying as having the quality of a quote "indescribable uncouthness".
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I feel that, yeah. I feel that it is indescribably uncouth.
BEN KISSEL
This isn't that bad. They gotta cook up the whale, they gotta prepare it.
MARCUS PARKS
They're also doing that on a deck that is covered in half an inch of blood, there's guts everywhere, the carcass is strewn all over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Strewn everywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Everyone is covered in this shit for days at a time. Actually that used to be a trick that they'd play on the green hands. It smelled so awful and it was so terrible that the green hands would change out of their clothes after every shift. What they didn't know is that your clothes are ruined if you wore them during the trying.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
So what they would have to do is buy more clothes from the ship's canteen and that's how the green hands got into debt to the ship before they even came back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Boom. Perfect.
BEN KISSEL
Business on business on business on business.
MARCUS PARKS
On business, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It'd be fun to make a bloody snow angel.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Look at me! Look at me! Typical green hand.
MARCUS PARKS
Well additionally the smelly, thick, greasy, black smoke created by this process smelled in Herman Melville's words quote "like the left wing of the day of judgment, an argument for the pit."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then again, as we talked about a little bit earlier, some of the more experienced whalers would they say love the smell because that means the expedition's going well.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this process went on continuously in shifts for three days. After it was all done, the deck would be mopped up, the corpse would be cut away, and the search for another whale would begin anew. Now by the time the Essex had killed this first whale, they'd already been out at sea for four months, a poor showing by any measure.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, one whale, four months? Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it was bad.
MARCUS PARKS
This was disconcerting to everyone on board because remember, whalers made a share, not a wage, and the voyage wasn't over until the hold was full of oil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there was no guaranteed exit to their contract.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they could be out there, they are out there until the hold is full.
BEN KISSEL
It's like they're actively killing their product with no ability to regenerate it as well.
MARCUS PARKS
That was a concern to them.
BEN KISSEL
So it gets harder and harder and harder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pocahontas was wrong, all right? We said this at the top of the episode.
BEN KISSEL
Wow! Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pocahontas was incorrect because was Pocahontas in charge of Walmart? I don't think so.
BEN KISSEL
She wasn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She had sex with a 60 year old man.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she was 12 at the time.
BEN KISSEL
You could buy her action figure though at Walmart, buy a toy.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In the end, that where she finally gets her comeuppance.
BEN KISSEL
You can also buy the Guy Fawkes masks at Walmart and Target.
MARCUS PARKS
It's great. That's wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is sharply ironic in the most dark way possible.
BEN KISSEL
They won, they won.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And our board game, also available at Target.
BEN KISSEL
Target!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Good work, guys.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Very fun. The only complaint I've had is from people who are too stupid to figure it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You mean us?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, us.
MARCUS PARKS
Us, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Literally because they explained it to us and we're like well we can't do that. But no, people have loved the game.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once the Essex finally rounded Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America, they made their way up the coast of Peru where they finally hit some luck and they began killing whales at a clip of one every five days. But just as things were turning around, the Essex met with the Aurora, owned by the same company and captained by the former captain of the Essex, Daniel Russell. Now Russell told Pollard that he'd heard about a spot over 1000 miles west of South America where another captain said that he'd fairly quickly filled up his ship with 2000 barrels of whale oil.
BEN KISSEL
This is the competition! This is a lie!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It also doesn't make any sense because he just whaled it. It's like trying to go on the slot machine after the person just won the jackpot, being like oh this one's lucky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you're a fucking moron.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I remember that when you don't win at a slot machine and then they cover you in whale blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Man, they gotta stop this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the reasoning was somewhat sound. It was like okay, this guy killed all these whales last November, it's May when they're talking to each other, it's May of 1820. So you can go this November and then you can get the spoils this time. And that's the thing is at this time there are millions of whales in the ocean.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not like there's like 15 whales that everyone's trying to kill.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of whales.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will I feel for the marine biologists that they talk to in all of these documentaries because each one of them, literally on the verge of tears.
MARCUS PARKS
They love whales so much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They love whales, whales are their life. And the whole time they're like (sad voice) and the sperm whale can only really reproduce every five years. Which I mean of course, yeah, it's horrible.
MARCUS PARKS
(sad voice) It's a tragedy, it's awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's that too. So they don't really repopulate that fast.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no. They really don't. (sad voice) The sperm whales, we now know have a specific language for each family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(sad voice) Each family and they have names for each other.
BEN KISSEL
They do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very sad.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very sad. Very sad.
BEN KISSEL
That is sad, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this new spot was called the offshore ground and in reality it was more like 1500 miles off the coast of South America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These guys really estimate a lot of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Big estimations.
MARCUS PARKS
From what we now know, the offshore ground is roughly the area around Tahiti and Easter Island, it's the South Pacific. So taking a chance, Captain Pollard decided to head into fairly untested waters because they were only halfway to filling their ship with oil after having been away for well over a year. And really this is again not the worst decision, had it not been for one fateful whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Then finally he's nominated for an Oscar.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Now before heading to the offshore ground, Pollard ordered his men to stop off at the Galapagos Islands so they could farm for tortoises because true to form, whalers were a fucking virus that consumed everything in their path in the pursuit of oil.
BEN KISSEL
Well tortoises are fun because they're also their own little bowls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that is sort of how they use it. But it's really fucked up what they did to the turtles.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they had this idea of like turtles don't eat.
BEN KISSEL
What do you mean?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just had this kind of fantasy idea that oh no a turtle, you can just keep it on a boat because it just doesn't eat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, turtle doesn't eat.
BEN KISSEL
A turtle does eat.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing is a turtle actually can go a year without, or a Galapagos tortoise can go a year without food or water because their metabolism is extremely slow.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they're funny.
MARCUS PARKS
But to the whalers this meant turtles don't eat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Turtles don't eat.
BEN KISSEL
Well for a year, you know, that makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Well tortoises, they weighed between 80-100 lbs, some could be as heavy as 400 lbs. There's some massive tortoises out there. And sailors loved eating Galapagos tortoises which we now consider to be one of the most precious animals in existence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So fucked up. Yeah, that's another one they're like this is tasty, why don't we cut off the head and throw the rest of it in the garbage? Yeah, excellent.
BEN KISSEL
You'd eat it, Henry. You'd eat a tortoise right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't like turtle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've had turtle, I don't like it.
BEN KISSEL
Just cause you don't like it.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
If you loved it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah sure, that'd be great, I'd love it. Yeah, wipe them out. But I hate it, I think it's gross. So let them live.
BEN KISSEL
But also it was the turtle just competing with the dolphin and the whale, so turtle meat is probably much better.
MARCUS PARKS
Turtle meat was top because it was lean and tasty, it was a white meat.
BEN KISSEL
You could make a soup.
MARCUS PARKS
You can make a soup, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, you can make a soup.
MARCUS PARKS
And their necks are actually full of fresh water, so that's an extra source of water.
BEN KISSEL
That's a straw!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not tasty, it's not like Poland Spring.
BEN KISSEL
They're little straws.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they are because they evolved in a volcanic environment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so fucked up. So fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
And so the Essex crew disembarked and collected 180 tortoises for the rest of the voyage.
BEN KISSEL
A lot.
MARCUS PARKS
Just imagine this fucking crew of whalers just hauling off on the Galapagos Islands with a bunch of sacks and just getting all the turtles and taking all the turtles away. And they stacked them like boulders in the hull.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And then the turtles that they couldn't stack, they just littered the fucking deck with tortoises.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let them walk.
BEN KISSEL
It's kind of fun to have a bunch of turtles around. I bet just somebody was like that's my turtle, you don't fuck with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh there must be. I guarantee there's a couple of them being like that's my friend.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Well because they're doing nothing for weeks at a time. Nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're just sitting on a boat.
BEN KISSEL
Hanging out with turtles.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, just talk to the turtle.
BEN KISSEL
You can play hungry, hungry turtles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you can't play hungry, hungry turtles because they thought that they were not hungry, hungry turtles.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not content with depleting the tortoise population of the island, one of the harpooners lit some bushes on fire as a prank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, look at this. Look at what I'm doing. Isn't that funny? You thought I'd leave one thing alone but no, no, I just set fire to that as well.
BEN KISSEL
My uncle did that for July 4th one day on accident.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
He threw a grenade, blew up a bunch of bushes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh that's fine, that's in Wisconsin.
BEN KISSEL
Nah, that was in North Dakota.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can set a whole fire to whole patches of Wisconsin.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it was the 80s I think.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this fire burned on the entire island, like it engulfed the entire island in flames.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And it was still a blackened wasteland years later, never fully recovered. Still to this day kind of fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's like 30 years before Darwin.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Something like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, by the time Darwin got to the Galapagos Islands, not only had whalers completely just decimated the population, but San Franciscans had also discovered that turtles are super tasty. So there was this pipeline from the Galapagos Islands to San Francisco.
BEN KISSEL
I can see that.
MARCUS PARKS
People just going, getting a bunch of turtles, bringing them back, slaughtering all of them on the fucking bay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just being a turtle and just being like you guys have beef, you guys have chicken, you guys have pork.
BEN KISSEL
I want some turtle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have so many other far more delicious meats than us. How in the living fuck did you find me? I'm covered in a protective shell.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's all of it saying don't eat me, don't eat me, leave me alone.
MARCUS PARKS
Sailing thousands of miles to grab them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of you dying of scurvy and all just to eat this disgusting wormy meat.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. It's ready to go. Again, it is a microwaveable dinner of the sea.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Now to give you some perspective on how time worked on a whale ship, the Essex heard about the offshore ground in May and set course but they didn't actually arrive there until as I said November of 1820. This was actually perfect timing because that was the month in which sperm whales were supposed to arrive there. It's presumed that it was a breeding ground. By then they were 1000 miles from the Galapagos Islands and hadn't seen a whale in weeks which raised tensions even further.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But finally the lookout spotted a whale and first mate Owen Chase was the first to launch his boat. But before he could throw his harpoon, the whale surfaced underneath his boat with enough force to throw Chase into the air and the creature escaped, further increasing frustration aboard the Essex and especially further increasing the frustration in Owen Chase.
BEN KISSEL
I bet you the turtles laughed though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, being like gotcha, you fucking bitches.
MARCUS PARKS
Four days later whale spouts were seen once again. But while the other two boats managed to harpoon whales, Owen Chase's whale boat got smashed by a whale tail. Anger that he had been knocked out of the hunt again, Chase hurriedly repaired his boat by very quickly and very loudly nailing canvas over the hole and he returned to the fray.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This was the captain's idea.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
First mate's idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He was like let's just fix this up real quick, we gotta get him back out there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So instead of properly fixing it, we'll just nail this piece of canvas to it which is kinda interesting.
BEN KISSEL
I haven't seen such a large whale tail since I was at the outlet mall in New Jersey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? That's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Now behind the helm of the Essex was cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, all of 15 years old. Because when the whale ships launched, almost everyone on board were on those ships, only three people were left behind to keep the ship from sinking.
BEN KISSEL
I mean that's where you want to be, you wanna be left behind in that situation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much so, very much so.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Well Nickerson later wrote that off the port bow he saw very suddenly the largest sperm whale anyone onboard had ever seen, an 80 ton leviathan, 85 ft long, as big as the ship itself!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Because we had run through a lot of the bigger whales already because this was a bull whale, it was a large male whale. And we've discovered at this point that we have been searching for these big whales because that's what fills up the hull faster than a bunch of tiny ones.
BEN KISSEL
I've seen some documentary footage on that, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this was a rare find and this thing was specifically extremely on the fringe of sperm whale sites. It was almost like at first you're like yes, look at all the oil! And then you're like oh no.
BEN KISSEL
They gotta deal with it, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now whales rarely attack ships, usually opting instead for the whale boats that were obviously trying to kill it. In fact in Nantucket lore, no whale had ever made a direct assault on the main ship or at least no one had ever returned to tell the tale of a whale attacking a ship.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa. You telling me it's a whale tale about a tail of a whale hurting your boat?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good.
BEN KISSEL
That's good. It's like a limerick.
MARCUS PARKS
But this was no ordinary encounter, this was the whale of Ahab.
BEN KISSEL
Oh...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The book.
MARCUS PARKS
The book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not like an Instagram influencer.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I see.
MARCUS PARKS
Captain Ahab. It's a literary allusion.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you know the whale of ACAB is covered in tattoos and stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa. Current.
MARCUS PARKS
Antifa!
BEN KISSEL
Antifa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're more like Aunt Tifa.
BEN KISSEL
You really nailed it. We're hip.
MARCUS PARKS
Well swimming beneath the surface of the water with its head directly pointed at the Essex, the whale dove and came back up 35 yards away and with a tremendous crash it rammed the side of the ship, sending sailors and tortoises flying across the deck.
BEN KISSEL
Man, what a day for the tortoise. He's just gotta be like come on, can I get a break out here?
MARCUS PARKS
The whale then swam under the ship and bumped the bottom hard enough to knock off the false keel. Then it resurfaced near the rear at the starboard quarter. Now at this point first mate Owen Chase actually had a chance to harpoon the whale and maybe save the ship. But he hesitated.
BEN KISSEL
Owen!
MARCUS PARKS
But that was actually the right decision because the tail was dangerously close to the ship's rudders. And if the rudders were damaged, everyone would be fucked. And conventional knowledge held that this whale probably didn't attack the ship on purpose. Conventional knowledge is whales don't attack ships. So it's like okay, well I'll just get it the next time around.
BEN KISSEL
Have we thought about maybe removing those huge perfect whale tits from the bottom of our vessel?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know, I wouldn't recognize the bow without it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it seems like this whale really wants to fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He probably did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is kind of probably what it was doing was there, was fucking.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a lot of theories.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot of theories. But had Chase taken the chance, he might have averted the many tragedies to come. The whale, still in his sort of insane rage that none of the whalers had ever witnessed-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate Velma! I hate Velma!
BEN KISSEL
Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
It began snapping its huge jaws and thrashing at the water. Then it turned back towards the Essex at a distance of 600 yards and at twice his original speed, it torpedoed the ship with its skull.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is very cinematic.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're just sitting in a boat. And you watch this thing because they said it was stunned, right, so it was kind of like flopping next to it and they're like oh what is it gonna do? And they watch it swim away and they're like-
BEN KISSEL
Thank god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then just watching it turn around.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like oh holy shit. And it just destroys. Because they're talking about like eyes a wonder, the way they talk about it. When it just hit the boat, they're all literally like we've never even heard of this happening.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, brutal.
MARCUS PARKS
And with that the Essex began sinking bow first.
BEN KISSEL
Nice. If you're a whale, this is a great day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a good get.
BEN KISSEL
You got all the food.
MARCUS PARKS
Well one of the sailors, William Bond, had on his own initiative retrieved the navigational equipment in the officer's quarters and ran it back to the spare whale boat being prepared for sea. Had he not done that, no one would have survived. Bond and the others made it just as the deck of the Essex was inches above the ocean surface and the great old ship capsized moments later. Two miles away the third whale boat commanded by captain Pollard could only watch as the Essex sank below the horizon.
BEN KISSEL
I mean so much better to watch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I guess.
BEN KISSEL
Like thank god we're not that guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know everything is fucked. Because all of your shit was on that.
BEN KISSEL
Right, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. When Pollard and his men returned, they found the hull floating on her side and each man stared at the wreckage in silence in what Chase called quote "the paleness of despair". By Owen's later reckoning, it was less than 10 minutes time between the whale's first attack and the eventual capsizing of the ship.
BEN KISSEL
So the lesson, take the chance when you can.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every day, take your shot.
MARCUS PARKS
Take your shot.
BEN KISSEL
Take your shot, take your chance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Take your shot. Tell Becky you like her today.
BEN KISSEL
Sure, sure. Are you in the middle of-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Harpoon Becky in the belly and drag yourself closer to her, mine her for her oil which is her blood-
MARCUS PARKS
Her ambergris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Her ambergris. Cut off the top of her head and suck out her brains.
BEN KISSEL
You want to be a comedian but you live in Mondovi, Wisconsin? You can pick up, you get on the plane, you go to New York City.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You move to downtown Mondovi. You start a Yuckle Hut.
BEN KISSEL
You start there, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In downtown Mondovi.
BEN KISSEL
Mondovi.
MARCUS PARKS
And now the 21 men were all huddled together in what amounted to large open air rowboats with only the clothes on their backs and a bunch of now fairly useless harpoons. But all this begs the question, why did the great beast attack?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate Velma!
BEN KISSEL
I know, I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well author Nathaniel Philbrick believed that it may have been a case of mistaken identity. See sperm whales use a cartilaginous clapper system.
BEN KISSEL
Tell me more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how I can see where Kissel is in the dark.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
The cartilaginous clapper system is used to create a clicking sound that sperm whales use to see through echolocation and they use it to communicate with other whales. Here's what it sounds like. (audio of whale echolocation sounds)
BEN KISSEL
Well thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
MARCUS PARKS
Ovaltine. All right.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Isn't that a funny joke? You guys don't get the reference. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the females have a more- Was it quite droll?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was quite droll.
BEN KISSEL
Droll, very funny. Almost a British sense of humor on the whale.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the females have a Morse code-like series of clicks, it's closer to what we just heard. But males have slower, louder clicks that whalers called clangs. And they learned to listen for clangs because a clang meant a bull and that meant more oil.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Clangs often sounded like the tapping of a hammer. And it's thought that when first mate Owen Chase nailed the piece of canvas to the bottom of his whale boat in haste, he might have transmitted sounds that told this other whale that there was a competing bull in his territory.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And he might have been there slinging his own, his actual come.
MARCUS PARKS
He might have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He might have been. We don't know. And they're also saying did he bumped into the boat accidentally? There's some of that talk. They don't know whether he first hit it and he didn't know what it was and then he's like what? What the fuck, you trying me? And then he came back around and he did it again.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or it was the devil himself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, or it was the devil himself.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
That's also another theory, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It could be.
MARCUS PARKS
But it was more like he wasn't trying to fuck the ship, it was that he was trying to kill another whale that was trying to fuck his whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. His whales.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. I've seen reality TV, I know how this works.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been watching a lot of Bridezilla recently.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, not doing well.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is why they had this theory. Typically when a whale fought with a whale boat or a whale ship, it used its jaws or its tail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But whalers have noted that competing male sperm whales will attack each other in a similar way to how the 85 ft long bull attacked the Essex, head on. And while the Essex was indeed made of strong white oak, it was 21 one years old and had gone through two serious storms during that last voyage alone.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Making it no match for the leviathan that attacked it.
BEN KISSEL
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And ironically it has since been found that the echolocation system in sperm whales seems to be built around the organ that produces spermaceti.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Italian accent) Spermaceti.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa. So this thing was full of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, to the brim. Frothing with it.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
And that means that the thing that the whalers were killing the whales to get was their eventual engine of destruction!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, that's like being someone who makes wine who's killed by grapes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, I slipped on these grapes.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fell on my artillery shell, it went up my ass.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, that does happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we've seen that, two different stories.
BEN KISSEL
Like twice a year on Side Stories somebody gets something shoved up their ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fell!
BEN KISSEL
I fell!
MARCUS PARKS
And so Captain Pollard ordered his men to salvage what they could from the floating wreckage. They found two casks of bread, 600 lbs of hardtack, and several barrels of freshwater. Now this sounds like a lot and it was.
BEN KISSEL
I mean no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was for a year long journey, it's a lot to have.
BEN KISSEL
Two loaves of fucking bread?
MARCUS PARKS
No, 600 lbs of hardtack, that's a lot.
BEN KISSEL
What's hardtack?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hard bread.
MARCUS PARKS
It's hard bread.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that is bread.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's a hard biscuit that you have to soak in water in order to eat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is difficult because they don't have any water.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well actually saltwater might be good on that.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's not. Actually they tried.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into why that's a horrible idea in the next episode.
BEN KISSEL
What about a little sardine?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dehydrates you.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that even this was far too much for the whale boats to carry, they're 25- foot longboats.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And there's seven guys in each of these rowboats. So they don't have a whole lot of room for food or for huge barrels of freshwater.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
So they took what they could fit along with a lot of tortoises and a couple of hogs.
BEN KISSEL
Are they ever eating these goddamn hogs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You got to. It's hard because now you gotta find the room, you gotta take them apart.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And after three days of salvaging what they could and constructing makeshift sails for their whale boats, they called them jibs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That is nice.
MARCUS PARKS
The men were suddenly quote, I love this phrase, "bludgeoned with despair".
BEN KISSEL
Oh they got sad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know that feeling a little bit. But not like that, not like being marooned on a boat thousands of miles away from a coastline.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No but just like being surrounded by a bunch of bread and pigs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being like ugh, all these bread and pigs but I can't eat them because none of them are prepared. And it's hell. That's hell.
MARCUS PARKS
That's hell, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's hell.
MARCUS PARKS
Some of the men began fainting from anxiety as reality set in. And they couldn't eat or drink which this should have been when they were eating and drinking, at least kind of putting on some pounds because they were having to leave a lot of food behind. But they couldn't because they were so fucking scared.
BEN KISSEL
Oh come on. How scared you gotta be not to be able to eat?
MARCUS PARKS
I've been, that's like a daily occurrence.
BEN KISSEL
No, no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Some of us react different. I'm an eater when I am scared.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Gotta build up. That's technically your brain, your reptilian brain saving your life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's mental insulation, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well sometimes your reptilian brain tells you you can't eat because something is trying to kill you.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but-
MARCUS PARKS
If you stop to eat, then that thing is going to kill you. That's mine.
BEN KISSEL
No, no, no. You can eat on the go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The key is you gotta release scat. If you release scat then the predator looks for your scat.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Scat is almost a hologram you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, always.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I love that scene in Star Wars where that was just scat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Scat.
BEN KISSEL
Being like Darth Vader's here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Help me, Obi-Wan.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But things were made worse- I'm sorry, I'm just thinking of Darth Vader. Actually what I was thinking about was Jar Jar Binks' scat.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Cause he was so scared when the pudu came and he said oh no you got the donkey pudu or whatever the pudu was, there was a lot of pudu.
BEN KISSEL
Don't know what that was all about. I do like Jar Jar, I'm team Jar Jar. And without him they wouldn't have survived because he knew how to fly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know. He did serve a function.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He didn't know how to do the boat though, he just sat there and screamed the entire time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Whatever, he's funny comic relief.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Meesa so Jar Jar.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He was a funny comic relief.
MARCUS PARKS
He just screamed.
BEN KISSEL
But I think he would have little turds. I think he would have rabbit-like turds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, like pellets.
BEN KISSEL
Like pellets. Or is it like that hippo video where the poop... I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. I don't know, I haven't gotten to the Disney+ series yet.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Well things were made worse-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jar Jar's Shit.
BEN KISSEL
Seriously, we're very close to that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always moving forward.
MARCUS PARKS
Getting real close.
BEN KISSEL
Everything is content. It's all content.
MARCUS PARKS
Things were made worse the next morning when the Essex began to break apart and the whale oil-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jar Jar should shitting on a fucking toilet, Mickey Mouse just masturbating in front of him.
BEN KISSEL
Meeso shitty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, they won't let me pitch. They won't hear my pitches anymore.
BEN KISSEL
Dude, I know, man. I know. We had our chances at pitch meetings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh we had them.
MARCUS PARKS
Starter logs.
BEN KISSEL
We dramatically blew those in a way that was almost watching our manager be so sad and then we were laughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we were laughing.
BEN KISSEL
Because we had no choice. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Essex began to break apart and the whale oil that the men had worked so hard to harvest slicked around them in a reeking pool from which there was no immediate escape. Now by noon on the fourth day, Captain Pollard had made his navigational calculations and was ready to discuss options with his first and second mate, of which there were actually quite a few.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
First, they could backtrack to the Galapagos Islands 1500 miles away. This was a bad option for multiple reasons. And likewise Hawaii, that was also discussed, they knew where Hawaii was, but the small vessels couldn't survive Hawaii's storm season. They were right in the middle of it. They could also sail west towards the island of Marquesas about 1200 miles away which was a pretty smart move. Marquesas had been a popular support for Chinese traders for decades and the island of Tahiti was reachable as well. Both could be reached in less than 30 days.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds fun.
MARCUS PARKS
But by 1820 Nantucket sailors had come to believe that many South Pacific Islands were infested with cannibals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Coincidence?
BEN KISSEL
Strange.
MARCUS PARKS
See a few years earlier, a US Navy captain had published reports that in time of famine the people of the Marquesas Islands would butcher wives, children, and aged parents for food. And another visitor to the island said that the natives greatly enjoyed human flesh and quote "those who have once eaten it can with difficulty abstain from it."
BEN KISSEL
Oh they just absolutely love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think coconuts might be better.
BEN KISSEL
Oh absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But again it is also a bit like a fear of the unknown race.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like you look at this thing and you kind of paint it being like oh no they're primitive so they must eat each other. But also there was also within sailing life cannibalism was kind of referred to as a thing that did happen.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they called it the custom of the sea, that was their euphemism.
BEN KISSEL
Oh well that's horrifying. what they called it. It's kind of like Cannibal Holocaust in a way.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing, was cannibalism practiced on South Pacific Islands from time to time? Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Was it Cannibal Holocaust? No, it's not.
BEN KISSEL
I'd give them my pinky toe. I'd be like here's a little tip, thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, why don't you suck on that bone a little bit, all right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, suck on that bone, there's some good marrow in there.
MARCUS PARKS
And from what it seems, Captain Pollard probably knew this, especially since Tahiti was by this time home to a thriving English mission complete with a large chapel. But Captain Pollard's style of captaining was decidedly more democratic which was absolutely the wrong style in a fix such as this.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like when you're on a bunch of boats, right, and everything's gone, you're fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Fucked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The idea of taking a vote at that point-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're like let's just go with my fucking idea.
BEN KISSEL
You gotta be a leader just sometimes, then you get back to the democracy when you're on the boat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get back to the democracy.
BEN KISSEL
When you're on the land.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this isn't the time to check the polls, Owen.
BEN KISSEL
No. You gotta lead here.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Pollard knew that heading to the islands would increase their chances of survival but most of the men were scared not only of the cannibals but by the fact that the people on those islands also openly accepted and practiced homosexuality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is just like you're on a boat, bro.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know that you provide comfort every once in a while.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know you see a man hurting for it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you sit near him being like arr, I could get in them.
BEN KISSEL
Their homophobia was so deep. They're marooned in the middle of fucking nowhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Possibly gonna be whale meat at any time. But the idea of seeing another man's ball sack was like I'd rather have this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'd rather eat hard bread?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're seeing a ball sack all day!
MARCUS PARKS
It was both things combined with each other. Like not only are they cannibals but they have sex with each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They kiss.
BEN KISSEL
They have sex with each other.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean come on, we're here at sea, yeah we'll suck each other's dicks all the fucking time but they love each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They fall in love.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Private Ben Shapiro, that's really not the biggest deal. It doesn't matter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(nasally voice) A woman should only be wet if you dunk her in a pool.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(nasally voice) You should push her in a river.
BEN KISSEL
I know, you're a manly man. Can you go back to please cleaning out all the turtles.
MARCUS PARKS
And so instead of hanging out with a bunch of chill gay dudes in Tahiti, probably having a wonderful time-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Incredible!
BEN KISSEL
Oh man. Chapter 7: Margaritas. Chapter 9: Piña Coladas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Piña coladas.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, this really jumped the shark there, Herman.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead of that, they went with arguably the worst option.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
They decided to follow the easterly trade winds back to the coast of South America, 1500-2000 miles away by their reckoning, where they'd hopefully be picked up by another whaling vessel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this would become forever memorialized in the writing as the fatal error.
BEN KISSEL
All that had to happen was one dude had to raise his hand much like they did in the 90s and say brother, they're gay? More pussy for us. And then everyone would have been like more pussy for us!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Holy fucking shit!
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Brother, my paradigm!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Flipped it.
BEN KISSEL
Flipped the paradigm.
MARCUS PARKS
As a result, in trying to avoid cannibalism the crew very ironically guaranteed it.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's where we'll pick back up for the conclusion to our series on the tragedy of the Essex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And that's why it's good to be skinny on a boat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
It really is. I'm starting to think I'm a little pro whale.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all are.
MARCUS PARKS
We all are, of course! All pro whale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all are pro whale because it comes down to it, they asked for it. You went out there, you went to try to hunt this giant animal and just fucking sitting there. And then sometimes it's gonna fuck you up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then maybe we'll figure out, I bet you, because they talk about how many times these ships went missing, how many more whales killed ships?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It must have happened way more than they ever thought that it did.
BEN KISSEL
All for fucking candles.
MARCUS PARKS
For candles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well no, candles were a part of it but it was straight up it's the lubrication for all of the factory machines.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
The machines.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's the lubrication. Yeah, we'll get into it later but yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean really what happened with whaling is-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we'll be slick with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we'll be real slick with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The next two episodes we're going to be completely covered in KY.
BEN KISSEL
That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it wasn't until the discovery of petroleum in 1859 that whale oil started going out of fashion. So you compared it to Exxon Mobil, yeah, Exxon Mobil was what killed the whaling industry. It all comes back to lubrication, man, all of it.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. That's why I'm pro Exxon Mobil to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Brave stance.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, really brave.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you all so much for listening. Do we have anything to announce? We have our Australian tour in August.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That has been rescheduled completely.
BEN KISSEL
The dates are there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would like to invite you out, I'm going to put up information on my social media but we're gonna be doing a bit of a Side Stories live April 8th in Hollywood.
BEN KISSEL
Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That'll be at a movie theater helping me promote a project I'm working on.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Help me promote a project I'm working on called Disaster Man. But it's gonna be big fun live show.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait, it'll be so fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's gonna be great. So come out, we'll give you more information as it rolls out.
BEN KISSEL
And you know it's another classic Last Podcast booking. I got a phone call from Henry and he was like you don't mind I've booked us on a show, do ya? And I was like absolutely not!
MARCUS PARKS
Also another Last Podcast booking because this is the first I'm hearing of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
BEN KISSEL
It's for Side Stories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's for Side Stories.
BEN KISSEL
It's just going to be entertainment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can just sit and watch.
BEN KISSEL
You can just be entertained by us.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's perfect. Why would I do that?
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Can't believe it.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
If I'm coming, if I'm showing up in the audience why don't I just come on stage?
BEN KISSEL
Well why would I have sex with the cow if I can get the milk for free?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, why am I having sex with this guy at the cow shop?
BEN KISSEL
That's great. Well you're not invited. You get an anti ticket. Give him an anti ticket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly. Here's a ticket so you can go anywhere but here.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Great, perfect. Sounds good. Perfect. I'll go watch a movie.
BEN KISSEL
Go watch one of your bands that you like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't see Avatar 2, it's a waste of time.
BEN KISSEL
I heard it was fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fine, it's a screensaver that talks. But also check out Deep Dives.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're having another season of LPN Deep Dives, this time it is with the beautiful Natalie Jean and the very talented Jackie Zebrowski.
BEN KISSEL
And beautiful Jackie Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Also yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you guys can check it out. It's based on the book series 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' which is a fuck book.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's a fuck book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a series of erotica books that's apparently very thick.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so they're going to talk about it. This book series has ripped through the lives of our families.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every woman in our sphere ended up getting addicted to these books.
BEN KISSEL
Horny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're humming with it. They're humming with these fae, man. They really deep dick.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Valentine's Day is when that will be.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. And thanks for supporting our little Sirius ventures.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
Open Lines and Hail Yourself, that's Monday and Tuesday at 6 PM PST. I've been enjoying that, we've been enjoying the phone calls and just another little nice way to interact.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like to see the people.
BEN KISSEL
And I got to meet Brandon Marshall the football player.
MARCUS PARKS
The football player? Wow.
BEN KISSEL
And I said I'm Ben Kissel and he said I'm Brandon Marshall. And he was very nice. And then he regards me now.
MARCUS PARKS
That's great!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
BEN KISSEL
He waved at me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all I want to be. I wanna be the hello Ms. Anderson.
MARCUS PARKS
However I would like to ask you though, if Henry would have introduced himself, do you think that he would have kept noticing Henry? Because you're the same size as Brandon Marshall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he sees you as a thing that he can recognize. I feel like he'd just throw towels at me.
BEN KISSEL
No, no. We record next to each other and I think he's impressed with how energetic we are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, he hates us. That means he fucking hates us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, I told him what we cover. I was like UFOs aliens, fun stuff. He's like that sounds really cool because he talks about football. So anyway he can be a guest on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's do it, let's get him!
MARCUS PARKS
That'd be great! That'd be awesome!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's flip him!
BEN KISSEL
Very attractive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, big guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh and also Last Comic Book on the Left Volume 2.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is out, it is delivering, it is shipping to you.
MARCUS PARKS
It is shipped. Yeah, we got them in the mail, they look fucking fantastic.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
There's some great stories by some amazing writers.
BEN KISSEL
Incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
We got fucking Rick Veitch, we got James Tynion, we got David Mack do a fucking variant cover for it.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It's fucking amazing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so cool looking.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's great, it's beautiful. And we put a lot of work into it and I'm glad you can finally get it too.
BEN KISSEL
And unlike Playboy, I read it for the pictures. Okay everyone, thank you all so much for listening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm listening, I just had to turn around.
BEN KISSEL
Hail yourselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leave the whales alone.
MARCUS PARKS
Please. Please.
BEN KISSEL
Stay away from the sea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For now.
MARCUS PARKS
They're fascinating, mysterious creatures. Let them be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Until they've figured out how to build a military.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then they're coming back. I feel like they're going to come for revenge.
BEN KISSEL
Can you bring a big spear onto a carnival cruise and just start whaling on it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just hang out by the hamburger buffet?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh because they're big people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's where my family was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Klumps.