Owen Chase (1798-1869) was the first mate on the now famous voyage of the ship Essex, sunk by a whale in 1820 in the South Pacific. Chase wrote about the incident in Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. This book, published in 1821, would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick and later was detailed by Nat Philbrick in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

The tragic loss and resulting cannibalism made a popular tale.