In November of 1820, the Nantucket whaling ship Essex was rammed twice by an 85-foot sperm whale as its crew harpooned the whale’s podmates. The whale won and the Essex sank, a full 1500 nautical miles west of the Galapagos Islands.

The ship’s captain, George Pollard, Jr., the first mate, Owen Chase, and the second mate, Matthew Joy, each took command of a whaleboat and a third of the crew. Thus began 90 plus days of survivalist hell, complete with delirium, deprivation and ultimately cannibalism, until the 8 barely surviving members of the crew were rescued.

Captain Pollard was one of the survivors. Traumatized by having eaten his young cousin, whom he had sworn to protect, and although he made some bad calls that contributed to the disaster, he was given command of another whaler, the Two Brothers, after his return to Nantucket. His luck did not change, sadly, and the Two Brothers hit a reef on French Frigate Shoals, northwest of Honolulu, and sank in February of 1823. That was the end of Captain Pollard’s career. He went back to Nantucket and spent the rest of his days as a night watchman.

The wreckage of his life would find a form of immortality, however, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Melville met Owen Chase’s son when they were both serving on different whalers in the early 1840s, and Chase lent him his father’s memoirs of the Essex tragedy. This account was a major inspiration for Moby Dick. Melville would seek Pollard out in the early 1850s after Moby Dick was published and they apparently had quite the meeting of the minds.

Now archaeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries exploring the French Frigate Shoals area have found the wreck of the Two Brothers. Whaler shipwrecks are rarer than hen’s teeth, because most of them sank in high seas, not near the shore. This is in fact the first Nantucket whaler ever found. The only other one in existence is the Charles W. Morgan which was honorably retired after 80 years of service and is now a National Historic Landmark on display at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.

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.

Divers soon found more debris, including several iron trypots, cauldrons in which blubber was boiled down into oil, the ultimate goal of the lucrative but highly speculative whaling trade. It was a brutal pursuit for both the whales, which were hunted nearly to extinction, and the sailors, who faced years at sea, meager rations and the omnipresent possibility of death.

Archaeologists have found around 80 total artifacts from the ship, including rigging, blubber hooks, ceramics and cast iron cooking pans. They are hoping to put some of the smaller pieces on permanent display in Hawaii, but the large scale items like the anchors will remain on the ocean floor.

For more details about the find and some beautiful high resolution pictures of the finds, see the NOAA website.

A hand-painted animation cel from Mickey Mouse’s first color adventure will be sold at Heritage Auction’s Comics and Comic Art Auction on February 24-25. This same cel went for $420,000 in a private sale in 1999, still the record for the most expensive animation cel ever sold.

The cel is from 1935’s “The Band Concert” in which Mickey attempts to conduct Goofy and a variety of other characters in a rousing performance of “The William Tell Overture.” Circumstances — a wind storm, a bee, Donald Duck trying to mess them up by playing “Turkey in the Straw” on a piccolo — conspire to make this challenging, but the band plays on undeterred. The reason this particular animation cel is so valuable is that it is the only production setup in existence to feature Mickey and the full band.

This charming and beautiful cel set-up shows Mickey and company at the beginning of the cartoon, greeting their audience. It’s the “pie-eye” Mickey at his best, and this incredible scene has never looked better. Professional restoration has been done by Ron Stark of S/R Laboratories. The image area measures approximately 12″ x 9.5″, professionally matted and framed to an overall size of 26.75″ x 22.75″.

The seller is Kerby Confer, a Maryland radio executive with an extensive and top quality collection of original Disney pieces. He bought it in 2001 for an unknown sum (maybe he already broke the $420,000 record in the 1999 sale). Heritage Auction has put an extremely conservative $100,000 estimate on the piece

Animation cels (short for celluloid, even though by 1935 they were actually made out of cellulose acetate which doesn’t burst into flame quite so readily) are transparent sheets onto which animation characters were painted. They were then overlaid onto a static background. This allowed studios to create an assembly line of different teams of artists working on characters in the same scene. Disney stopped using cels in 1990, replacing them with computer animation. The Little Mermaid was the last of her kind.