Herman Melville fictionalized an actual whaling disaster.

Melville had heard about a notorious shipwreck from the son of one of its survivors while he was on the Acushnet. The whaleship Essex of Nantucket was attacked and sunk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in November 1820 by a huge sperm whale. Because they believed the locals ate them, its crew, who were left in three little boats with no food or water, decided to drift more than 4000 miles to South America rather than the 1200 miles to the Marquesas Islands, where Melville had had his paradise. Ironically, some of the castaways had to eat the corpses of their fellow sailors in order to survive.

Melville used the catastrophe to inspire the white whale's destruction of the Pequod of Nantucket in the book's climactic scene. The first time Melville went to Nantucket was only after the book was out. George Pollard, the captain of the Essex, who had survived the horrible experience and taken on the role of the town's night watchman, was personally interrogated by him. In a later essay, Melville stated, "To the islanders, he was a nobody - to me, the most magnificent man I ever encountered, tho' completely unassuming, even humble”.