On the morning of October 22, Thomas Chappel, a boatsteerer from Plymouth, England, decided to play a prank. Not telling anyone else on the Essex what he was up to, the mischievous Chappel (who was, according to Nickerson, “fond of fun at whatever expense”) brought a tinderbox ashore with him. As the others searched the island for tortoises, Chappel secretly set a fire in the underbrush. It was the height of the dry season, and the fire soon burned out of control, surrounding the tortoise hunters and cutting off their route back to the ship. With no other alternative, they were forced to run through a gauntlet of flame. Although they singed their clothes and hair, no serious injuries resulted-at least not to the men of the Essex.
By the time they returned to the ship, almost the entire island was ablaze. The men were indignant that one of their own had committed such a stupid and careless act. But it was Pollard who was the most upset. “[T]he Captain's wrath knew no bounds,” Nickerson remembered, “swearing vengeance upon the head of the incendiary should he be discovered.” Fearing a certain whipping, Ghappel did not reveal his role in the conflagration until much later. Nickerson believed that the fire killed thousands upon thousands of tortoises, birds, lizards, and snakes.
The Essex had left a lasting impression on the island. “When Nickerson returned to Charles years later, it was still a blackened wasteland. “Wherever the fire raged neither trees, shrubbery, nor grass have since appeared,” he reported. Charles would be one of the first islands in the Galapagos to lose its tortoise population. Although the crew of the Essex had already done its part in diminishing the world's sperm-whale population, it was here on this tiny volcanic island that they contributed to the eradication of a species.
When they weighed anchor the next morning, Charles remained an inferno. That night, after a day of sailing west along the equator, they could still see it burning against the horizon. Backlit by the red glow of a dying island, the twenty men of the Essex ventured into the farthest reaches of the Pacific, looking for another whale to kill.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Attack
EVEN TODAY, in an age of instantaneous communication and high-speed transportation, the scale of the Pacific is difficult to grasp. Sailing due west from Panama, it is 11,000 miles to the Malay Peninsula-almost four times the distance Columbus sailed to the New World-and it is 9,600 miles from the Bering Strait to Antarctica. The Pacific is also deep. Hidden beneath its blue surface are some of the planet's most spectacular mountain ranges, with canyons that plunge more than six miles into the watery blackness. Geologically, the volcano-rimmed Pacific is the most active part of the world. Islands rise up; islands disappear. Herman Melville called this sixty-four-million-square-mile ocean the “tide-beating heart of the earth.”
By November 16,1820, the Essex had sailed more than a thousand miles west of the Galapagos, following the equator as if it were an invisible lifeline leading the ship ever farther into the largest ocean in the world. Nantucket whalemen were familiar with at least part of the Pacific. Over the last three decades the coast of South America had become their own backyard. They also knew the western edge of the Pacific quite well. By the early part of the century, English whalers, most of them captained by Nantucketers, were regularly rounding the Cape of Good Hope and taking whales in the vicinity of Australia and New Zealand. In 1815, Hezekiah Coffin, the father of Pollard's young cousin Owen, had died during a provisioning stop in the islands off Timor, between Java and New Guinea.
Lying between the island of Timor and the west coast of South America is the Central Pacific, what Owen Chase called “an almost untraversed ocean.” The longitudes and latitudes of islands with names such as Ohevahoa, Marokinee, Owyhee, and Mowee might be listed in Captain Pollard's navigational guide, but beyond that they were-save for blood-chilling rumors of native butchery and cannibalism-a virtual blank.
All this was about to change. Unknown to Pollard, only a few weeks earlier, on September 29, the Nantucket whaleships Equator and Balaena stopped at the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time. In 1823, Richard Macy would be the first Nantucketer to provision his ship at the Society Islands, now known as French Polynesia. But as far as Pollard and his men knew in November of 1820, they were at the edge of an unknown world filled with unimaginable dangers. And if they were to avoid the fate of the ship they'd encountered at Atacames, whose men had almost died of scurvy before they could reach the South American coast for provisions, there was no time for far-flung exploration. It had taken them more than a month to venture out this far, and it would take at least that to return. They had, at most, only a few months of whaling left before they must think about returning to South America and eventually to Nantucket.
So far, the whales they had sighted in this remote expanse of ocean had proved frustratingly elusive. “Nothing occurred worthy of note during this passage,” Nickerson remembered, “with the exception of occasionally chasing a wild shoal of whales to no purpose.” Tensions mounted among the Essex's officers. The situation prompted Owen Chase to make an adjustment aboard his whaleboat. When he and his boat-crew did finally approach a whale, on November 16, it was he. Chase reported, not his boatsteerer, Benjamin Lawrence, who held the harpoon.
This was a radical and, for Lawrence, humiliating turn of events. A mate took over the harpoon only after he had lost all confidence in his boatsteerer's ability to fasten to a whale. William Comstocktold of two instances when mates became so disgusted with their boatsteerers' unsuccessful attempts to harpoon whales that they ordered them aft and took the iron themselves. One mate, Comstock wrote, screamed, “Who are you? What are you? Miserable trash, scum of Nantucket, a whimpering boy from the chimney corner. By Neptune I think you are afraid of a whale.” When the boatsteerer finally burst into tears, the mate ripped the harpoon from his hands and ordered him to take the steering oar.
With Chase at the bow and Lawrence relegated to the steering oar, the first mate's boat approached a patch of water where, Chase predicted, a whale would surface. Chase was, in his own words, “standing in the fore part, with the harpoon in my hand, well braced, expecting every instant to catch sight of one of the shoal which we were in, that I might strike.” Unfortunately, a whale surfaced directly under their boat, hurling Chase and his crew into the air. Just as had occurred after their first attempt at killing a whale, off the Falkland Islands, Chase and his men found themselves clinging to a wrecked whaleboat.
Given the shortage of spare boats aboard the Essex, caution on the part of the officers might have been expected, but caution, at least when it came to pursuing whales, was not part of the first mate's makeup. Taking to heart the old adage “A dead whale or a stove boat,” Chase reveled in the risk-and danger of whaling. “The profession is one of great ambition,” he would boast in his narrative, “and full of honorable excitement: a tame man is never known amongst them.”
four days later, on November 20, more than 1,500 nautical miles west of the Galapagos and just 40 miles south of the equator, the lookout saw spouts. It was about eight in the morning of a bright clear day. Only a slight breeze was blowing. It was a perfect day for killing whales.
Once they had sailed, to within a half mile of the shoal, the two shipkeepers headed the Essex into the wind with the maintopsail aback, and the three boats were lowered. The whales, unaware that they were being pursued, sounded.
Chase directed his men to row to a specific spot, where they waited “in anxious expectation,” scanning the water for the dark shape of a surfacing sperm whale. Once again, Chase tells us, he was the one with the harpoon, and sure enough, a small whale emerged just ahead of them and spouted. The first mate readied to hurl the harpoon and, for the second time in as many days of whaling, ran into trouble.
Chase had ordered Lawrence, the ex-harpooner, to steer the boat in close to the whale. Lawrence did so, so close that as soon as the harpoon sliced into it, the panicked animal whacked the already battered craft with its tail, opening up a hole in the boat's side. As water poured i
n, Chase cut the harpoon line with a hatchet and ordered the men to stuff their coats and shirts into the jagged opening. While one man bailed, they rowed back to the ship. Then they pulled the boat up onto the Essex's deck.
By this time, both Pollard's and Joy's crews had fastened to whales. Angered that he had once again been knocked out of the hunt, Chase began working on his damaged boat with a fury, hoping to get the craft operable while whales were still to be taken. Although he could have outfitted and lowered the extra boat (the one they had bargained for in the Cape Verde Islands, now lashed to the rack over the quarterdeck), Chase felt it would be faster to repair the damaged boat temporarily by stretching some canvas across the hole. As he nailed the edges of the canvas to the boat, his after oarsman, Thomas Nickerson-all of fifteen years old-took over the helm of the Essex and steered the ship toward Pollard and Joy, whose whales had dragged them several miles to leeward. It was then that Nickerson saw something off the port bow.
It was a whale-a huge sperm whale, the largest they'd seen so far-a male about eighty-five feet long, they estimated, and approximately eighty tons. It was less than a hundred yards away, so close that they could see that its giant blunt head was etched with scars, and that it was pointed toward the ship. But this whale wasn't just large. It was acting strangely. Instead of fleeing in panic, it was floating quietly on the surface of the water, puffing occasionally through its blowhole, as if it were watching them. After spouting two or three times, the whale dove, then surfaced less than thirty-five yards from the ship.
Even with the whale just a stone's throw from the Essex, Chase did not see it as a threat. “His appearance and attitude gave us at first no alarm,” he wrote. But suddenly the whale began to move. Its twenty-foot-wide tail pumped up and down. Slowly at first, with a slight side-to-side waggle, it picked up speed until the water crested around its massive barrel-shaped head. It was aimed at the Essex's port side. In an instant, the whale was only a few yards away-”coming down for us,” Chase remembered, “with great celerity.”
In desperate hopes of avoiding a direct hit, Chase shouted to Nickerson, “Put the helm hard up!” Several other crew members cried out warnings. “Scarcely had the sound of the voices reached my ears,” Nickerson remembered, “when it was followed by a tremendous crash.” The whale rammed the ship just forward of the forechains.
The Essex shook as if she had struck a rock. Every man was knocked off his feet. Galapagos tortoises went skittering across the deck. “We looked at each other with perfect amazement,” Chase recalled, “deprived almost of the power of speech.”
As they pulled themselves up off the deck, Chase and his men had good reason to be amazed. Never before, in the entire history of the Naritucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship. In 1807 the whaleship Union had accidentally plowed into a sperm whale at night and sunk, but something very different was happening here.
After the impact, the whale passed underneath the ship, bumping the bottom so hard that it knocked off the false keel-a formidable six-by-twelve-inch timber. The whale surfaced at the Essex's starboard quarter, the creature appeared, Chase remembered, stunned with the violence of the blow” and floated beside the ship, its tail only a few feet from the stern.
Instinctively, Chase grabbed a lance. All it would take was one perfectly aimed throw and the first mate might slay the whale that had dared to attack a ship. This giant creature would yield more oil than two, maybe even three, normal-sized whales. If Pollard and Joy also proved successful that day, they would be boiling down at least 150 barrels of oil in the next week-more than 10 percent of the Essex's total capacity. They might be heading back to Nantucket in a matter of weeks instead of months.
Chase motioned to stab the bull-still lying hull-to-hull with the Essex. Then he hesitated. The whale's flukes, he noticed, were perilously close to the ship's rudder. If provoked, the whale might smash the delicate steering device with its tail. They were too far from land, Chase decided, to risk damaging the rudder.
For the first mate, it was a highly uncharacteristic display of caution. “But could [Chase] have foreseen all that so soon followed,” Nickerson wrote, “he would probably have chosen the lesser evil and have saved the ship by killing the whale even at the expense of losing the rudder.”
A sperm whale is uniquely equipped to survive a head-on collision with a ship. Stretching for a third of its length between the front of the whale's battering ram-shaped head and its vital organs is an oil-filled cavity perfectly adapted to cushioning the impact of a collision. In less than a minute, this eighty-ton bull was once again showing signs of life.
Shaking off its woozy lethargy, the whale veered off to leeward, swimming approximately six hundred yards away. There it began snapping its jaws and thrashing the water with its tail, “as if distracted,” Chase wrote, “with rage and fury.” The whale then swam to windward,
crossing the Essex's bow at a high rate of speed. Several hundred yards ahead of the ship, the whale stopped and turned in the Essex's direction. Fearful that the ship might be taking on water, Chase had, by this point, ordered the men to rig the pumps. “[W]hile my attention was thus engaged,” the first mate remembered, “I was aroused with the cry of a man at the hatchway, 'Here he is-he is making for us again.'“ Chase turned and saw a vision of “fury and vengeance” that would haunt him in the long days ahead.
With its huge scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed-at least six knots. Chase, hoping “to cross the line of his approach before he could get up to us, and thus avoid what I knew, if he should strike us again, would prove our inevitable destruction,” cried out to Nickerson, “Hard up!” But it was too late for a change of course. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, the whale struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cathead on the port bow. This time the men were prepared for the hit. Still, the force of the collision caused the whalemen's heads to jounce on their muscled necks as the ship lurched to a halt on the slablike forehead of the whale. The creature's tail continued to work up and down, pushing the 238-ton ship backward until-as had happened after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream-water surged up over the transom.
One of the men who had been belowdecks ran up onto the deck shouting, “The ship is Ming with water!” A quick glance down the hatchway revealed that the water was already above the lower deck, where the oil and provisions were stored.
No longer going backward, the Essex was now going down. The whale, having humbled its strange adversary, disengaged itself from the shattered timbers of the copper-sheathed hull and swam off to leeward, never to be seen again.
The ship was sinking bow-first. The forecastle, where the black sailors slept, was the first of the living quarters to flood, the men's sea chests and mattresses floating on the rising tide. Next the water surged aft into the blubber room, then into steerage, where Nickerson and the other Nantucketers slept. Soon even the mates' and captain's cabins were awash.
As the belowdecks creaked and gurgled, the black steward, William Bond, on his own initiative, returned several times to the rapidly filling aft cabins to retrieve Pollard's and Chase's trunks and- with great foresight-the navigational equipment. Meanwhile Chase and the rest of the crew cut the lashing off the spare whaleboat and carried it to the waist of the ship.
The Essex began to list dangerously to port. Bond made one last plunge below. Chase and the others carried the whaleboat to the edge of the deck, now only a few inches above the ocean's surface. When the trunks and other equipment had been loaded aboard, everyone, including Bond, scrambled into the boat, the tottering masts and yards looming above them. They were no more than two boat lengths away when the Essex, with an appalling slosh and groan, capsized behind them.
Just at that moment, two miles to leeward, Obed Hendricks, Pollard's boatsteerer, casually glanced over his shoulder. He couldn't bel
ieve what he saw. From that distance it looked as if the Essex had been hit by a sudden squall, the sails flying in all directions as the ship fell onto her beam-ends.
“Look, look,” he cried, “what ails the ship? She is upsetting!”
But when the men turned to look, there was nothing to see. “[A] general cry of horror and despair burst from the lips of every man,” Chase wrote, “as their looks were directed for [the ship], in vain, over every part of the ocean.” The Essex had vanished below the horizon.
The two boat-crews immediately released their whales and began rowing back toward the place the Essex should have been-all the time speculating frantically about what had happened to the ship. It never occurred to any of them that, in Nickerson's words, “a whale [had] done the work.” Soon enough, they could see the ship's hull “floating upon her side and presenting the appearance of a rock.”
As Pollard and Joy approached, the eight men crowded into Chase's boat continued to stare silently at the ship. “[E]very countenance was marked with the paleness of despair,” Chase recalled. “Not a word was spoken for several minutes by any of us; all appeared to be bound in a spell of stupid consternation.”
From the point at which the whale first attacked, to the escape from the capsi/ing ship, no more than ten minutes had elapsed. In only a portion of that time, spurredby panic, eight of the crew had launched an unrigged whaleboat from the rack above the quarterdeck, a process that would have normally taken at least ten minutes and required the effort of the entire ship's crew. Now, here they were, with only the clothes on their backs, huddled in the whaleboat. It was not yet ten in the morning.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby-Dick Page 9
