Nickerson was born in
Harwich, Massachusetts, the son of Rebecca (Gibson) and Thomas Nickerson. His mother was from
Nantucket while his father was from
Cape Cod. Both his parents died before he was two years old, and he was raised by his grandparents on Nantucket. Nickerson made his first sea voyage in 1819, at the age of fourteen, on the ill-fated whaler
Essex, which sailed from Nantucket Harbor. A whale rammed and sank
Essex on November 20, 1820. The first mate,
Owen Chase, later wrote about the incident in the
Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, a book that inspired
Herman Melville to write
Moby-Dick. When
Essex sank her crew took to three small boats and set off for the coast of South America. After a harrowing 89 days at sea, Nickerson and two companions were rescued by . Nickerson returned to sea after his rescue, serving on other whale ships. He became a boatsteerer on the whaler , which was wrecked on 11 February 1823. Nickerson eventually worked his way up to captain of a merchant vessel. Upon retiring he ran a boarding house in Nantucket, which was visited by the writer
Leon Lewis, who encouraged him to write down his story of the three months he was lost at sea with the
Essex survivors. Nickerson did this, and in 1876, he sent an 80-page manuscript, as well as accounts of other adventures he had later in life, to Lewis for editing. Lewis, however, never prepared the manuscript for publication and left it in a trunk in the care of Darius Ogden, a neighbor in
Penn Yan, New York. Nickerson died in 1883, seven years after sending his manuscript to Lewis. The trunk containing the manuscript was inherited by Ogden's grandson, James Finch. The trunk's contents were finally inspected in 1960 and
The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats was discovered. Finch's wife Ann, recognizing the manuscript's importance, contacted the
Nantucket Historical Association. It took another twenty years before it was authenticated by
Edouard A. Stackpole, a Nantucket whaling historian. The Finches donated the manuscript to the Association, who published an abridged version in 1984, a century after Nickerson's death. ==In popular culture==