Oh @hyena-bro my sweet summer child, allow me to tell you the story of Mesperyian, the goddess who never was and never will be.
So it all started with this tumblr post, right?
And obviously people mentioned the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone, and the benefits of answering such goddesses as the most beautiful. But then Tumblr user 28weekslaterhater mentioned to answer the goddess Mesperyian (most beloved daughter of Hades) as the most beautiful. According to them, “jealous ho” Aphrodite burnt half of Mesperyian’s face off in a blind rage for being more beautiful than her.
This post began to spread to the fact-check-less masses of Tumblr, and more mythology sprouted up about this so-called “Mesperyian”, how she was the goddess of torture and punishment (even though a goddess of punishment already existed) and had to wear a cool mask because of the aforementioned face burning.
Everyone took it as gospel for years until various Tumblr users pointed out “hey if you happen to just… look up this goddess, the only thing you’ll find is this Tumblr post”. After that, it had been exposed that Mesperyian never fucking existed and that Tumblr user just completely made them up on the fly.
And that’s how Tumblr invented a Greek goddess
That’s one of the most greek god mythology things I’ve ever heard and based on that she’s to be treated as new to the roster.
Hades: I’ve only had Mesperyian for a year and a half but if anything happened to her I’d kill everyone on Earth and then myself
Oh the power of lack of fact checking
The lack of fact checking was how we got Greek mythology in the first place.
Guys this is a DIRECT quote from the Google page on her:
Mespyrian may not be a real Greek goddess, but gods are created by the people who believe in them and she is a perfect deity of the internet.
My life has been so much better ever since I traded my impostor syndrome to brilliant conman -syndrome. Do I deserve anything in life? Fuck no! Will I grasp it anyway? Fuck yes!
My art has never been worth shit, but watch me bullshit my way into art school! I am a horrid goblin, but watch me make these people like me! Am I qualified to do this task? Well I sure have the certificates that say that I am! And how did I get those? Who knows! Not me! I am so good at cheating, I don’t have to break a single rule to do it!
I am brilliant, fast, and absolutely drunk with power!
Finally a concise, accurate description of what I’ve been doing the past ten years
someone: passing mention of cannibalism, as a joke
me: HEY SO HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE WRECK OF THE WHALESHIP ESSEX??
so people have now, of course, asked me to explain this and I started trying to type up a short version of the story and uhhhh
UHHHH
it took me TWO FULL PAGES to get to the bit where the ship sinks
OKAY SO here is goddamnshinyrock’s version of the story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex, with bonus Notes On Whaling, which I am writing largely without looking things (other than numbers) up just to see if I CAN, so… expect some Chaos:
The Essex was a whaling vessel out of Nantucket and in 1820, under Captain Pollard, with a crew of 21 men, she left port, headed for the Pacific whaling grounds
by this point the whaling industry had largely extirpated the useable whale species in the Atlantic, so European and American whalers would sail south, stop over in the Azores or Madeira (or sometimes a Brazilian port) to add crew or supplies, round Cape Horn (through the most dangerous seas in the world!!), head north into the Pacific Ocean, catch enough whales to fill the hold with barrels of oil, and then do the whole thing in reverse. They’d expect to be gone for 3-5 years, rather than the 18 mo. voyages typical of Atlantic whaling.
Trivia: Herman Melville based the premise of Moby Dick on the fate of the Essex.
Our cast: Captain Pollard, first mate Owen Chase, cabin boy Thomas Nickerson are the main names to remember (the latter two wrote their own accounts of the voyage, and the captain… was the captain). The crew was effectively in stratified into three social classes (This will all become important later):
1. The white Nantucketers (Quakers), who included Pollard, Chase, and the second mate, considered themselves Above everyone else on board. This group also included Pollard’s young cousin, whom he had promised his family he’d look after. (That’s some ominous foreshadowing there for you there. )
2. The white sailors NOT from Nantucket island, looked down on by the Nantucketers
3. The black sailors, looked down on by both of the previous groups
The Essex had a series of mishaps before she even made it to the whaling grounds- she ran into a storm that caused damage and took out at least one of their whaleboats (20-ish ft long rowing boats, usually equipped with small sails, stored on deck and used when hunting the whales. Yes, they chased whales by rowing after them. Aren’t humans amazing?) and some assorted other bits of the ship. They did not stop for repairs before rounding the horn.
They DID stop in the Galapagos Islands for resupply before heading to the whaling grounds. They grabbed a bunch of giant tortoises to be a living food supply, and then one of the crew committed arson played a fun prank on the way out, starting a wildfire that completely denuded one of the islands and may have caused the extinction of several species.
