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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  A circumstance in their favor was that, unlike merchant vessels, whaleships almost always had a lookout posted at the masthead, so in whaling territory they had a better chance of being seen. Against them was the immensity of the Offshore Ground. It encompassed an enormous amount of ocean-more than twice the area of the state of Texas, a rectangle about three hundred miles north to south and almost two thousand miles from east to west. There were at least seven whaleships on the Offshore Ground at this time. But even if there were double that number, the odds were poor that three whaleboats sailing along a straight line through the Ground (which might take only four or five days to cross) would be spotted by a ship.

  One possibility was to extend their time in the Offshore Ground and actively search for whalers. But that was a gamble. If they searched the region and didn't find a ship, they would jeopardize their chances of reaching South America before their food supplies ran out. As it was, they would be entering the western extreme of the Ground and would have a difficult time heading east against the southeasterly trades.

  There was another factor influencing their decision to continue on with the original plan. After having fallen victim to such a seemingly random and inexplicable attack, the men felt an overpowering need to reclaim at least some control of their own destiny. Being sighted by a whaleship would, according to Chase, not “depend on our own exertions, but on chance alone.” Reaching South America, on the other hand, depended “on our own labors.” From Chase's perspective, this made all the difference and demanded that they not “lose sight, for one moment, of the strong probabilities which, under Divine -Providence, there were of our reaching land by the route we had prescribed to ourselves.”

  The plan had one iron requirement: they had to make their provisions last two months. Each man would get six ounces of hardtack and half a pint of water a day. Hardtack was a simple dried bread made out of flour and water. Baked into a moisture-free rock to prevent spoilage, hardtack had to be broken into small pieces or soaked in water before it was eaten, if a sailor didn't want to crack a tooth.

  The daily ration was equivalent to six slices of bread, and it provided about five hundred calories. Chase estimated that this amounted to less than a third of the nourishment required by “an ordinary man.” Modern dietary analysis indicates that for a five-foot, eight-inch person weighing 145 pounds, these provisions met about a quarter of his daily energy needs. True, the men of the Essex had more than just bread; they had tortoises. Each tortoise was a pod of fresh meat, fat, and blood that was capable of providing as many as 4,500 calories per man-the equivalent of nine days of hardtack. Yet, even augmented by the tortoises, their daily rations amounted to a starvation diet. If they did succeed in reaching South America in sixty days, each man knew he would be little more than a breathing skeleton.

  But as they would soon discover, their greatest concern was not food but rather water. The human body, which is 70 percent water, requires a bare minimum of a pint a day to remove its waste products. The men of the Essex would have to make do with half that daily amount. If they experienced any hot weather, the deficit would only increase.

  That first night of their journey, Chase, Pollard, and Joy distributed the rations of bread and water to their boat-crews. It was two days after the sinking now, and the men's interest in food had finally returned; the bread was quickly eaten. There was something else they craved: tobacco. A whaleman almost always had a quid of tobacco in his mouth, going through more than seventy pounds of it in a single voyage. In addition to all their other woes, the crew of the Essexhad to contend with the jittery withdrawal symptoms associated with nicotine addiction.

  After the meager meal, the men not on watch went to sleep. “Nature became at last worn out with the watchings and anxieties of the two preceding nights,” Chase recalled, “and sleep came insensibly upon us.” But as his men fell into what he judged to be a dreamless stupor, Chase found himself in the middle of a waking nightmare.

  Unable to sleep for the third night in a row, he continued to dwell obsessively on the circumstances of the ship's sinking. He could not get the creature out of his mind: “[T]he horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my reflections.” In his desperate attempts to find some explanation for how a normally passive creature could suddenly become a predator, Chase was plagued by what psychologists call a “tormenting memory”-a common response to disasters. Forced to relive the trauma over and over again, the survivor finds larger, hidden forces operating through the incident. The philosopher William James felt this compulsion firsthand some years later. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he wrote: “I realize now how inevitable were men's earlier mythological versions [of disaster] andhow artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits which science educates us.”

  For most disaster victims, the repeated flashbacks of a tormenting memory have a therapeutic value, gradually weaning the sufferer from anxieties that might otherwise interfere with his ability to survive. There are some, however, who cannot rid themselves of the memory. Melville, building upon Chase's account, would make his Captain Ahab a man who never emerged from the psychic depths in which Chase had writhed these three nights. Just as Chase was convinced that the whale that attacked the Essex exhibited “decided, calculating mischief,” so was Ahab haunted by a sense of the white whale's “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.” Locked in his own private chamber of horrors, Ahab resolved that his only escape was through hunting down and killing Moby Dick: “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Chase, on a tiny boat a thousand miles from land, did not have the possibility of revenge. Ahab was fighting a symbol; Chase and his shipmates were fighting for their lives.

  the next morning, the men were greatly relieved to discover that after a night of high winds all three boats were still close together. The wind built throughout the day, requiring them to shorten sail. The boats' schooner rigs could be easily adapted to the changing conditions, and after the sails were reefed, Chase reported, the men “didnot apprehend any very great danger from the then violence of the wind.” The high seas, however, continued to afflict them. Constantly wet from the salt spray, they had begun to develop painful sores on their skin that the violent bouncing of the boats only exacerbated.

  In his sea chest, Chase found an assortment of useful items: a jack-knife, a whetstone, three small fish hooks, a cake of soap, a suit of clothes, a pencil, and ten sheets of writing paper. As first mate, Chase had been responsible for keeping the Essex's log, and using the pencil and paper he now attempted to start “a sort of sea journal”-despite the horrendous conditions. “It was with much difficulty... that I could keep any sort of record,” Chase remembered, “owing to the incessant rocking and unsteadiness of the boat and the continual dashing of spray of the sea over us.”

  Chase's journal-keeping satisfied more than an official obligation; it also fulfilled a personal need. The act of self-expression-through writing a journal or letters-often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears. After beginning his informal log, Chase would never again suffer another sleepless night tortured by his memory of the whale.

  There were other daily rituals. Every morning they shaved with the same knife Chase used to sharpen his pencil. Benjamin Lawrence spent a portion of each day twisting stray strands of rope into an ever lengthening piece of twine. The boatsteerer vowed that if he should ever get out of the whaleboat alive, he would save the string as a memorial to the ordeal.

  At noon they paused to take an observation. Determining the angle of the sun with a quadrant was not easy on a tiny, wave-tossed boat.

  Their best estimate put them at latitude 0 °58' south. It was an encouraging indication. They had not only crossed back over the equator but had traveled approximately seventy-one nautical miles since leaving the wreck the day before, putting them ahead of their daily tar
get of sixty miles. In the afternoon the wind moderated, enabling them to shake out the reefs in their sails and dry their wet clothes in the sun.

  That day Pollard decided to abandon “the idea altogether of keeping any correct longitudinal reckoning.” To maintain an accurate estimate of a vessel's position, it is necessary to keep track of both its north-to-south position, or latitude, and its east-to-west position, or longitude. A noon observation with a quadrant indicates only a craft's latitude. If a navigator in 1820 had a chronometer-an exceptionally accurate timepiece adapted to the rigors of being stored on a ship-he could compare the time of his noon sight with the time in Greenwich, England, and calculate his longitude. But chronometers at this time were expensive and not yet widely used on Nantucket whaleships.

  The alternative was to perform what was called a lunar observation, or simply a lunar. This was an extremely complicated process that involved as many as three hours of calculations before the vessel's longitude could be determined-an impossibility on a whaleboat. Besides, according to Nickerson, Pollard had not yet learned how to work a lunar.

  That left dead reckoning. The officers of every ship kept a careful record of its heading, as indicated by the compass, and its speed. Speed was determined by throwing a knotted length of line with a piece of wood at the end of it (called a log line) into the water and determining how much of it (that is, how many “knots”) ran out in a set period of time. A sandglass, known as a slowglass, was used to measure the time. The ship's speed and direction were recorded, and this information was transferred onto a chart, where the captain established the ship's estimated position.

  Survivors of other maritime catastrophes-most notably the Bounty's Captain Bligh-placed in similar situations managed to navigate successfully with dead reckoning. Soon after being abandoned in the middle of the Pacific in the ship's launch, Captain Bligh manufactured his own log line and trained his men to count the seconds as it was run out. Bligh's estimates of their latitude and longitude proved amazingly accurate, enabling him to find the distant island of Timor, one of history's greatest feats of navigation.

  Chase explained that “having no glass, nor log-line,” they decided that itwas futile to maintain an estimate of their longitude. If Pollard's inability to work a lunar is any indication, he was not a particularly skilled navigator or an unusually unskilled one. There were many captains who were also navigating their vessels by dead reckoning and, like Pollard, never expected to find themselves in such a situation. By forgoing all estimates of their longitude, he and his men were now sailing blind, with no way to determine their distance from South America.

  In the afternoon a school of porpoises surrounded the three boats and followed them until well after sunset. That night the wind built to almost a gale. Chase and his crew watched in horror as the planks of their old boat worked and twisted in the waves. The boat was in such terrible shape, Nicker son claimed, that he normally would not have felt safe sailing ten miles in it, let alone the thousands they had ahead ofthem.

  By the morning of Friday,-November 24, the third day in the boats, the waves were “very large,” according to Chase, “and increased, if possible, the extreme uncomfortableness of our situation.” Nickerson observed that if they'd been aboard the Essex, the wind would have seemed unexceptional, but now, he said, “in our crippled state it answers the purpose of a gale, and keeps us constantly wet and chilled through.” That day an immense wave broke over Chase's boat and almost filled it with water. The swamped boat threatened to roll over on its side as kegs, tortoises, and Chase's sea chest floated up from the bottom and knocked against the men. They bailed frantically, knowing that the next wave might sink them.

  Once they'd brought the boat out of danger, they discovered that some of the hardtack-which they'd carefully wrapped in sailcloth- had been soaked by the seawater. They did their best to salvage as much of the damaged bread as possible. Over the course of the next few days, they would seize every chance to dry the dissolving lumps in the sun. While this saved the provisions from what Nickerson called “utter ruin,” the bread remained infiltrated with salt, the worst possible thing for their already water-deprived bodies. “The bread being our only dependence,”Nickerson remembered, “[this] gave ... us on the whole a cheerless prospect”-a prospect that only worsened when they learned that a portion of the bread on Pollard's boat had also been damaged. A few days before, the officers had possessed cautious faith in “the human means at our command”; now they recognized “ our utter dependence on that divine aid we so much the more stood in need of.”

  At eight o'clock the next morning, the man assigned to bailing Chase's boat became alarmed. Try as he might, he couldn't keep ahead of the rising tide of water. Their boat, he alerted the rest of the crew, was sinking. Soon all six men were searching for the new leak, their hands probing desperately in the sloshing bilge, feeling the boat's sides for the gush of incoming water. It wasn't until they'd torn up the floor that they discovered the problem: one of the planks in the bow had sprung from the hull, and water was pouring in. The leak was about six inches below the waterline, and if they were going to fix it, they needed to figure out some way to get at it from the outside.

  The sprung board was on the starboard, or leeward, side, and Chase immediately “hove about,” using the steering oar to turn the boat so that the wind was now coming over the other side. This put the leak on the windward, or “high,” side; Chase hoped to heel the boat over enough so that the hole would rise up out of the water.

  Noticing that Chase had suddenly veered away, Pollard brought his own boat around and headed for the first mate. After shortening sail, Pollard came alongside and asked what was wrong.

  Now that the captain's boat was beside them, Chase ordered his own crew to move to the port side and as far aft as possible, canting the bow up into the air. Working from Pollard's boat, the first mate and captain attempted to steady the bow, realign the board, and hammer it into place. There was little room for error. The end of the board was already riddled with old nail holes, and it was critical that they drive in each new nail cleanly. Even though they were being bounced up and down by the waves, Chase and Pollard managed “to drive in a few nails, and secured [the plank], much beyond our expectations.” Soon all three boats were once again sailing to the south.

  “This little incident, although it may seem small,” Nickerson recalled, “[caused] amongst us the greatest excitement.” With a clear demonstration that their whaleboats might fall apart around them at any time, the men felt “a great gloominess over the natural prospects of our deliverance.” They knew that the longer the ordeal lasted, the more the boats would suffer in “the heavy and repeated racking of the swell.” All it took was the starting of a single nail, and one of these boats might be lost forever.

  For the men in Chase's crew it had been an especially trying day. That evening Richard Peterson, the sole African American on their boat, led them in prayers and a few hymns. Nickerson remembered how the words and songs of the “pious old colored man... drew our minds from our present miseries to seek deliverance from a higher power.” That comfort notwithstanding, by the morning of November 26, the tentative optimism with which the men had begun the boat voyage had eroded into despair.

  For the last four days the windy and overcast weather had made it impossible to take an observation. Judging by the compass course they'd been forced to steer, their sails strapped in tight against the southeasterly trades, they knew they had been sailing parallel to, rather than toward, the coast of South America. They also knew that their boats, which were without centerboards, had a tendency to sideslip to leeward. Because of that slippage, they must now be well to the west of where they should have been. Despite having made significant progress south, they were no closer to their ultimate destination. The hopeful talk of being rescued by a passing whaleship had ceased. “[W]e looked forward,” Chase wrote, “not without an extreme dread, and anxiety, to the gloomy and disheartening prospect before
us.”

  That afternoon the breeze dropped to a more comfortable level, allowing them to spread out their damaged bread to dry. Then the wind shifted, gradually backing into the north. For the first time since leaving the Essex, they were able to steer toward South America. Men began to talk about how far ahead of schedule they would be if the wind would only hold.

  But it was not to last. The next day, the wind shifted back into the east and “destroyed the fine prospect we had entertained of making a good run.” As if to mock them, the following day the wind veered even farther, to the east-southeast. Then it started to blow hard.

  That night they shortened sail and “began to entertain fears that we should be separated” in the darkness. To prevent just such an occurrence, the crew of the Union, the Nantucket ship that accidentally rammed into a whale in 1807, tied their boats together at night. But tethering interfered with sailing ability. The officers of the Essex-so intent on reaching the distant coast of South America-were reluctant to compromise their boats' speed. Instead of tying themselves together, they sailed in a kind of formation, with Chase in the lead, Pollard in the middle, and Joy taking up the rear. If they could remain within one hundred feet of one another, each could always see the other two whaleboats' white sails in the darkness.

  at about eleven o'clock, Chase lay down in the bottom of his boat to sleep. He had just nodded off when he was startled awake by a cry from one of his men. Captain Pollard, the man said, was calling out to them in the darkness. Chase sat up and listened. In the howling wind and breaking waves, he could hear Pollard shouting to Joy, whose boat was nearest to him. Chase tacked around and sailed for the other two boats, only dimly visible in the moonless dark, and asked what was wrong. Given what had happened to the Essex only a week before, the reply seemed like a sick joke.