In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby-Dick

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Several hundred miles to the south of the Marquesas were the islands of the Tuamotu Archipelago. These, too, had a dark and disturbing reputation among American sailors. To the west of the Tuamotus were the Society Islands, about two thousand miles away. Although he had no trustworthy information to go on, Pollard was under the impression that the Society Islands were a safer option than the Marquesas. With a little luck, these islands might be reached in less than thirty days. There were also the Hawaiian Islands, more than 2,500 miles to the northwest, but Pollard was fearful of the storms that frequented this region of the Pacific in the late fall. He stated his conclusion: They should sail for the Society Islands.

  Chase and Joy disagreed. They pointed out that, except for vague rumors, they were “entirely ignorant” of the Society islands. “[I]f [the islands were] inhabited,” the first mate wrote, “we presumed they were by savages, from whom we had as much to fear, as from the elements, or even death itself.” Nature had already betrayed them once- with the vicious attack on them by their rightful prey, the normally benign sperm whale. In the absence of any strong evidence to the contrary, Chase and Joy were disposed to believe that the people of the Society Islands practiced, like the Marquesans, an even more horrific inversion of the natural order: the eating of human flesh.

  Chase and Joy proposed what they felt was a better alternative. Although the easterly slant of the trade winds precluded sailing directly for the coast of South America, there was another possibility. If they sailed south for about 1,500 miles to latitude 26 ° south, they would enter a band of variable breezes which they could then ride to Chile or Peru. They figured their boats could cover a degree of latitude-sixty nautical miles-a day. That would put them in the variables in twenty-six days; thirty days later and they would be on the coast of South America. With enough bread and water to last about sixty days, it all seemed-at least to Chase and Joy-very feasible. And besides, somewhere along the way they might be spotted by another whaleship. The two mates lightly described their proposal as “going up the coast.”

  Just as he had after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream, Pollard succumbed to them. “Not wishing to oppose where there was two against one,” Nickerson remembered, “the captain reluctantly yielded to their arguments.” When writing of this “fatal error” later, the Essex's cabin boy asked, “How many warm hearts have ceased to beat in consequence of it?”

  Today, the Nantucketers' lack of knowledge of the Pacific, an ocean in which they had been sailing for several decades, seems incredible. Since before the turn of the century, China traders from the nearby ports of New York, Boston, and Salem had been making frequent stops at not only the Marquesas but also the Hawaiian Islands on their way to Canton. While rumors of cannibalism in the Marquesas were widespread, there was plenty of readily accessible information to the contrary.

  Several months before the Essex's departure from Nantucket in 1819, when both Pollard and Chase were on-island, an article appeared in the April 28 issue of the New Bedford Mercury with the latest news from the Marquesas. According to the Lion's Captain Townsend, who had recently returned from Canton with three natives from the island of Nukahivah, all had been peaceful on these islands ever since Captain David Porter had visited them during the War of 1812. “ [T]he benign influence of his name still remained with the natives, who live in great harmony and social intercourse,” the Mercury recorded. “The hostile tribes learnt war no more; and the Typees [formerly known for their cannibalism] were frequent visitors of the Lion, while she lay at that island.” Unfortunately, Pollard and his officers appear not to have read the report.

  Their ignorance of the Society Islands, in particular Tahiti, is even more extraordinary. Since 1797, there had been a thriving English mission on the island. Tahiti's huge royal mission chapel, 712 feet long and 54 feet wide, was bigger than any Quaker meetinghouse on Nantucket. As Melville noted in his copy of Chase's Narrative,

  All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might, in all human probability, have been avoided, had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti, from which they were not very distant at the time, & to which, there was a fair Trade wind. But they dreaded cannibals, & strange to tell knew not that... it was entirely safe for the Mariner to touch at Tahiti. But they chose to stem a head wind, & make a passage of several thousand miles (an unavoidably roundabout one too) in order to gain a civilized harbor on the coast of South America.

  The men of the Essex were the victims of their particular moment in the history of the whale fishery. The Offshore Ground had been discovered only the year before. In another fewyears whaleships would go so far from the coast of South America that they would be compelled to provision in the islands of the Central Pacific, making the opening up of the Marquesas and the Society Islands to the west an accomplished fact. But in November 1820, these islands were outside the bounds of what they considered to be reliable knowledge.

  Nantucketerswere suspicious of anything beyond their immediate experience. Their far-reaching success in whaling was founded not on radical technological advances or bold gambles but on a profound conservatism. Gradually building on the achievements of the generations before them, they had expanded their whaling empire in a most deliberate and painstaking manner. If new information didn't come to them from the lips of another Nantucketer, it was suspect.

  By spurning the Society Islands and sailing for South America, the Essex officers chose to take their chances with an element they did knowwell: the sea. “The whaling business is peculiarly an ocean life,” Obed Macy wrote. “The sea, to mariners generally, is but a highway over which they travel to foreign markets; but to the whaler it is his field of labor, it is the home of his business.” Or, as Melville would write in the “Nantucket” chapter of Moby-Dick: “The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.”

  For these Nantucketers the prospect of a long-distance voyage in twenty-five-foot boats was certainly daunting, but it was a challenge for which they were prepared. Their vessels, after all, were not cumbersome, run-of-the-mill lifeboats; these were whaleboats, high-performance craft that had been designed for the open ocean. Made of light, half-inch-thick cedar planks, a whaleboat possessed the buoyancy required to ride over rather than through the waves. “I would not have exchanged [my boat], old and crazy as she was,” Chase claimed, “for even a ship's launch,” the sturdy type of craft in which, three decades earlier, Captain -Bligh had sailed more than four thousand miles after the Bounty mutiny.

  The perils of whaling had given the Nantucketers a high tolerance for danger and suffering. They had been tossed in the air by the flukes of a whale; they had spent hours clinging to the battered remnants of a capsized whaleboat in a cold and choppy sea. “We are so much accustomed to the continual recurrence of such scenes as these,” Chase wrote, “thatwe become familiarized to them, and consequently always feel that confidence and self-possession, which teaches us every expedient in danger, and inures the body, as well as the mind, to fatigue, privation, and peril, in frequent cases exceeding belief.” Only a Nantucketer in November 1820 possessed the necessary combination of arrogance, ignorance, and xenophobia to shun abeckoning (albeit unknown) island and choose instead an open-sea voyage of several thousand miles.

  Pollard had known better, but instead of pulling rank and insisting that his officers carry out his proposal to sail for the Society Islands, he embraced a more democratic style of command. Modern survival psychologists have determined that this “social”-as opposed to “authoritarian”-form of leadership is ill suited to the early stages of a disaster, when decisions mustbe made quickly and firmly. Only later, as the ordeal drags on and it is necessary to maintain morale, do social leadership skills become important.

 
Whalemen in the nineteenth century had a clear understanding of these two approaches. The captain was expected to be the authoritarian, what Nantucketers called a fishy man. A fishy man loved to kill whales and lacked the tendency toward self-doubt and self-examination that could get in the way of making a quick decision. To be called “fishy to the backbone” was the ultimate compliment a Nantucketer could receive and meant that he was destined to become, if he wasn't already, a captain.

  Mates, however, were expected to temper their fishiness with a more personal, even outgoing, approach. After breaking in the green hands at the onset of the voyage-when they gained their well-deserved reputations as “spit-fires”-mates worked to instill a sense of cooperation among the men. This required them to remain sensitive to the crew's changeable moods and to keep the lines of communication open.

  Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities. Not all mates had the necessary edge to become captains, and there were many future captains who did not have the patience to be successful mates. There was a saying on the island: “[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.”

  Pollard's behavior, after both the knockdown and the whale attack, indicates that he lacked the resolve to overrule his two younger and less experienced officers. In his deference to others, Pollard was conducting himself less like a captain and more like the veteran mate described by the Nantucketer William H. Macy: “[H]e had no lungs to blow his own trumpet, and sometimes distrusted his own powers, though generally found equal to any emergency after it arose. This want of confidence sometimes led him to hesitate, where a more impulsive or less thoughtful man would act at once. In the course of his career he had seen many 'fishy' young men lifted over his head.”

  Shipowners hoped to combine a fishy, hard-driving captain with an approachable and steady mate. But in the labor-starved frenzy of Nantucket in 1819, the Essex had ended up with a captain who had the instincts and soul of a mate, and a mate who had the ambition and fire of a captain. Instead of giving an order and sticking with it, Pollard indulged his matelike tendency to listen to others. This provided Chase-who had no qualms about speaking up-with the opportunity to impose his own will. For better or worse, the men of the Essex were sailing toward a destiny that would be determined, in large part, not by their unassertive captain but by their forceful and fishy mate.

  Now that they had devised a plan, it was time to split up the crew among the three whaleboats. Since Chase's boat was in the worst shape, his crew remained at just six, while the other boats were obliged to carry seven men each.

  At the beginning of the voyage, the officers' prime consideration when choosing a man for a boat-crew had been whether or not he was a Nantucketer. In the aftermath of a disaster, ties of a family and friendship are, if anything, even more strongly felt, and it is apparent that the Nantucketers' clannishness, now intensified, strongly influenced the makeup of the three7 crews. So did rank. Of the twenty crew members, nine were Nantucketers, five were white off-islanders, and six were African Americans. As captain, Pollard was given the most Nantucketers-five out of the seven men in his boat. Chase managed to get two, along with two white Cape Codders and a black. Second mate Matthew Joy, however, the Essex's most junior officer, found himself without a single Nantucketer; instead he was given four of the six blacks.

  Feeling personally responsible for the welfare of the young Nantucketers aboard the Essex, Pollard made sure that his boat contained his eighteen-year-old cousin, Owen Coffin, and Coffin's two boyhood friends, Charles Ramsdell and Barzillai Ray. Thomas Nickerson's position as Chase's after oarsman meant that he was not included in this group but must manage as best he could on the leakiest of the three boats. From a Nantucketer's perspective, however, Chase's boat was preferable to Joy's.

  Although originally from Nantucket, Joy's family had moved to the recently established whaling port of Hudson, New York. Chase reported that Joy had been suffering from an undiagnosed illness, possibly tuberculosis, well before the sinking. Seriously ill and not a full-fledged Nantucketer, Joy was given only coofs. If the success of a group in a survival situation is dependent on strong, active leadership, Joy's six crew members were put at an immediate disadvantage. The Nantucketers had done their best to take care of their own.

  All twenty men were nominally under the command of Captain Pollard, but each boat-crew remained an autonomous entity that might at any moment become separated from the others. Each boat was given two hundred pounds of hardtack, sixty-five gallons of water, and two Galapagos tortoises. To ensure that discipline would be maintained even under the most arduous circumstances, Pollard gave each mate a pistol and some powder, keeping a musket for himself.

  At 12:30-less than a half hour after the officers had convened their council-they set out in a strong breeze, their schooner-rigged whaleboats, according to Nickerson, “a very handsome show on this our first start.” The men's spirits were the lowest they'd ever been. With the Essex receding rapidly behind them, they were beginning to appreciate what Nickerson called “the slender thread upon which our lives were hung.”

  All were affected by leaving their ship for the last time. Even the stoic Chase could not help but wonder at how “we looked upon our shattered and sunken vessel with such an excessive fondness and regret... [I]t seemed as if abandoning her we had parted with all hope.” The men exchanged frightened glances, even as they continued to search out the disappearing wreck, “as though,” Nickerson said, “it were possible that she could relieve us from the fate that seemed to await us.”

  By four o'clock that afternoon, they had lost sight of the Essex. Almost immediately, the men's morale began to improve. Nickerson sensed that, no longer haunted by the vision of the disabled ship, “ [we had been] relieved from a spell by which we had been bound.” He went so far as to claim that “now that our minds were made up for the worst, half the struggle was over.” With no turning back, they had only one recourse-to hold to their plan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At Sea

  AS DARKNESS APPROACHED at the end of the first day, the wind built steadily, kicking up a steep, irregular chop. The Essex whaleboats were hybrids-built for rowing but now adapted to sail-and the men were still learning how they handled. Instead of a rudder, each boat was equipped with a steering oar. This eighteen-foot lever enabled a rowed whaleboat to spin around in its own length, but it was not so effective in guiding a sailboat, and required the helmsman to stand at the cumbersome oar. At this early stage in the voyage, the whaleboats were dangerously overloaded. Instead of five hundred pounds of whaling equipment, each boat contained close to a thousand pounds of bread, water, and tortoises, and waves broke over the built-up gunnels and soaked the men. The boats were also without centerboards or skegs to help them track through the water, forcing the helmsmen to tug and push their steering oars as their little, deeply laden boats corkscrewed in the turbulent seas.

  Each boat-crew was divided into two watches. While half the men attempted to rest-curling up with the Galapagos tortoises in the bilge or leaning uncomfortably against the seats-the others steered, tended the sails, and bailed. They also attempted to keep an eye on the other boats, which would sometimes disappear entirely from view when they dipped down into the trough of a wave.

  At the start it had been decided that every effort would be made to keep the three boats together. Together they could help if one of them ran into trouble; together they could keep one anothers' spirits up. “[U]naided, and unencouraged by each other,” Chase observed, “there were with us many whose weak minds, I am confident, would have sunk under the dismal retrospections of the past catastrophe, and who did not possess either sense or firmness enough to contemplate our approaching destiny, without the cheering of some more determined countenance than their own.”

  There was also a more practical reason for staying together: there was not enough navigational equipment to go around. Pollard and Chase each had a compass,
a quadrant, and a copy of Bowditch's Navigator, but Joy had nothing. If his boat-crew should become separated from the other two, they would be unable to find their way across the ocean.

  Night came on. Although moon and starlight still made it possible to detect the ghostly paleness of the whaleboats' sails, the men's field of vision shrank dramatically in the darkness even as their perception of sounds was heightened. The whaleboats' clinker, or lapstrake, construction (with planks overlapping, resembling the clapboards of a house) made them much noisier than a smooth-bottomed boat, and the fussy, fluted sound of water licking up against their boats' lapped sides would accompany them for the duration of the voyage.

  Even at night the crews were able to maintain a lively three-way conversation among the boats. The subject on everyone's mind was of course the “means and prospects of our deliverance.” It was agreed that their best chance of survival lay in happening upon a whaleship. The Essex had sunk about three hundred miles north of the Offshore Ground. They still had about five days of sailing before they entered the Ground, where, they desperately hoped, they would come across a whaler.