Whaler Once Lost Tells its Tale at Last.

Yes, this is one of those stories I can't get enough of.  Especially this one with its connection to Melville and his Moby Dick. As reported in today's NYT:

HONOLULU — In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s.
Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.”
Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.)
Despite all that, Pollard survived and was given another ship to steer: the Two Brothers, the very boat that had brought the poor captain back to Nantucket.
And then, that ship sank, too.
On Friday, in a discovery that might bring a measure of peace to Captain Pollard, who survived his second wreck (though his career did not), researchers are to announce that they have found the remains of the Two Brothers. The whaler went down exactly 188 years ago after hitting a reef at the French Frigate Shoals, a treacherous atoll about 600 miles northwest of here. The trove includes dozens of artifacts: harpoon tips, whaling lances and three intact anchors.
The discovery is believed to be the first of a Nantucket whaler, one of an armada of ships that set sail during the early 19th century when the small Massachusetts island was an international capital of whaling. It was a risky pursuit that led sailors halfway across the world — and sometimes to the bottom of the sea.
“Very little material has been recovered from whale ships that foundered because they generally went down far from shore and in the deepest oceans,” said Ben Simons, chief curator of the Nantucket Historical Association. “We have a lot of logbooks and journals that record disasters at sea, but to be taken to the actual scene of the sunken vessel — that’s really what is so amazing about this.”
The discovery was, in some ways, as fortunate as Pollard was cursed.
The Two Brothers — which was bound for the newly opened Japan Grounds after whalers had fished out the Atlantic and parts of the South Pacific — was long known to have sunk on the night of Feb. 11, 1823, off the French Frigate Shoals.
A shrimp-shaped collection of reefs, the shoals were a notoriously tricky spot. Charts were not particularly reliable in that area, and Pollard was steering the Two Brothers without the aid of stars, since the sky had been overcast.
Several dozen boats are known to have sunk there or in neighboring atolls, all of which are now part of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, an enormous conservation area that covers nearly 140,000 square miles of ocean west of Hawaii.
In 2008, a team of marine archeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries set their sights on investigating several other wrecks, including a British whaling ship called the Gledstanes, which sank in the remote Kure Atoll in 1837, and the Churchill, which went down carrying a load of coconut meat in the French Frigate Shoals in 1917.
With a few spare days left before returning to Honolulu, however, the team decided to poke around a tiny sandbar known as Shark Island.
Kelly Gleason, the leader of the team, was in the water — crystal-clear shallows about 15 feet deep — when a colleague suddenly signaled that he had seen something.
“All of a sudden,” said Dr. Gleason, a marine archaeologist, “we came across this large anchor.”
The anchor, some 10 feet long, was peacefully resting on the seafloor, and was far too heavy to lift. (The federally protected monument also has strict rules about removal of artifacts.) Anchors, like so many other types of maritime technology, evolved over the years, making them easier to place in a specific time period, and Dr. Gleason was pretty sure the anchor she was seeing was from the early 1800s. 

There's more that includes a bitter-sweet ending to the story, HERE.

And so it goes.
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