Peak Warming Man said:

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.: xiii-xiv  Wiki.