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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  “There's a sail! “he cried.

  Chase immediately scrambled to his feet. Just visible over the horizon was the speck of pale brown that Lawrence had taken for a sail. Chase stared for several suspenseful moments, gradually realizing that, yes, it was a sail-the topgallant of a ship, about seven miles away.

  “I do not believe it is possible,” Chase wrote, “to form a just conception of the pure, strong feelings, and the unmingled emotions of joy and gratitude, that took possession of my mind on this occasion.”

  Soon even Nickerson was up on his feet and gazing excitedly ahead.

  Now the question was whether they could catch up to the much larger vessel. The ship was several miles to leeward, which was an advantage for the smaller vessel, and heading slightly north of their position, which meant that it might intercept their line of sail. Could their whaleboat reach that crossing point at approximately the same time the ship did? Chase could only pray that his nightmare of the missed rescue ship would not prove true. “I felt at the moment,” Chase wrote, “a violent and unaccountable impulse to fly directly towards her.”

  For the next three hours they were in a desperate race. Their battered old whaleboat skimmed lightly over the waves at between four and six knots in the northwesterly breeze. Up ahead, the ship's sail plan continued to emerge from the distant horizon, revealing, with excruciating slowness, not only the topgallant sails but the topsails beneath and, finally, the mainsail and foresail. Yes, they assured themselves, they were catching up to the ship.

  There was no lookout at the vessel's masthead, but eventually someone on deck saw them approaching to windward and behind. Chase and his men watched in tense fascination as the antlike figures bustled about the ship, shortening sail. Gradually the whaleboat closed the distance, and the hull of the merchantman rose up out of the sea, looming larger and larger ahead of them until Chase could read her quarterboard. She was the Indian from London.

  Chase heard a shout and through glazed, reddened eyes saw a figure at the quarterdeck rail with a trumpet, a hailing device resembling a megaphone. It was an officer of the Indian, asking who they were. Chase summoned all his strength to make himself heard, but his desiccated tongue stumbled over the words: “Essex... whaleship... Nantucket.”

  The narratives of shipwreck survivors are filled with accounts of captains refusing to take castaways aboard. In some instances the officers were reluctant to share their already low supply of provisions; in others they were fearful the survivors might be suffering from communicable diseases. But as soon as Chase explained that they were from a wreck, the Indian's captain immediately insisted that they come alongside.

  When Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson attempted to climb aboard, they discovered that they didn't have the strength. The three men stared up at the crew, their eyes wide and huge within the dark hollows of their skulls. Their raw, ulcerated skin hung from their skeletons like noxious rags. As he looked down from the quarterdeck, Captain William Crozier was moved to tears at what Chase called “the most deplorable and affecting picture of suffering and misery.”

  The English sailors lifted the men from their boat and carried them to the captain's cabin. Crozier ordered the cook to serve them their first taste of civilized food-tapioca pudding. Made from the root of the cassava plant, tapioca is a high-calorie, easy-to-digest food rich in the proteins and carbohydrates that their bodies craved.

  Rescue came at latitude 33°45' south, longitude 81°03' west. It was the eighty-ninth day since Chase and his men had left the Essex, and at noon they came within sight of Masafuera. Chase had succeeded in navigating them across a 2,500-mile stretch of ocean with astonishing accuracy. Even though they had sometimes been so weak that they could not steer their boat, they had somehow managed to sail almost to within sight of their intended destination. In just a few days the Indian would be in the Chilean port of Valparaiso.

  Trailing behind on a towline was the whaleboat that had served the Nantucketers so well. Captain Crozier hoped to sell the old boat in Valparaiso and establish a fund for the men's relief. But the next night the weather blew up to a gale, and the boat, empty of men for the first time in three months, was lost.

  Three hundred miles to the south, Pollard and Ramsdell sailed on. For the next five days they pushed east, until by February 23, the ninety-fourth day since leaving the wreck, they were approaching the island of St. Mary's just off the Chilean coast. Over a year before, this had been the Essex's first landfall after rounding Cape Horn. Pollard and Ramsdell were on the verge of completing an irregular circle with a diameter of more than three thousand miles.

  It had been twelve days since the death of Barzillai Ray. They had long since eaten the last scrap of his flesh. The two famished men now cracked open the bones of their shipmates-beating them against the stone on the bottom of the boat and smashing them with the boat's hatchet-and ate the marrow, which contained the fat their bodies so desperately needed.

  Pollard would later remember these as “days of horror and despair.” Both of them were so weak that they could barely lift their hands. They were drifting in and out of consciousness. It is not uncommon for castaways who have been many days at sea and suffered both physically and emotionally to lapse into what has been called “a sort of collective confabulation,” in which the survivors exist in a shared fantasy world. Delusions may include comforting scenes from home-perhaps, in the case of Pollard and Ramsdell, a sunny June day on the Nantucket Commons during the sheepshearing festival. Survivors may find themselves in conversation with deceased shipmates and family members as they lose all sense of time.

  For Pollard and Ramsdell, it was the bones-gifts from the men they had known and loved-that became their obsession. They stuffed their pockets with finger bones; they sucked the sweet marrow from the splintered ribs and thighs. And they sailed on, the compass card wavering toward east.

  Suddenly they heard a sound: men shouting and then silence as shadows fell across them and then the rustle of wind in sails and the creaking of spars and rigging. They looked up, and there were faces.

  Of the Dauphin's twenty-one-man crew, at least three-Dimon Peters, Asnonkeets, and Joseph Squibb-were Wampanoags from Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. As children they had been taught a legend about the discovery of Nantucket that told of how, long before the arrival of the Europeans, a huge eagle appeared over a village on Cape Cod. The eagle would swoop down out of the sky and carry off children in its talons, then disappear over the waters to the south. Finally the villagers asked a benevolent giant named Maushop to find out where the eagle was taking their children. Maushop set off to the south, wading through the water until he came to an island he had never seen before. After searching all over the island, he found the bones of the children piled high beneath a large tree.

  On the morning of February 23, the crew of the Dauphin made a similar discovery. Looking down from a restless forest of spars and sails, they saw two men in awhaleboat filled with bones.

  The men were not much more than skeletons themselves, and the story that would be passed from ship to ship in the months ahead was that they were “found sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.” The Dauphin's captain, Zimri Coffin, ordered his men to lower a boat and bring the two survivors

  aboard. Like Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson before them, Pollard and Ramsdell were too weak to stand and had to be lifted up to the whaleship's deck. Both men were, in the words of a witness, “very low” when first brought aboard. But after being given some food, Pollard made an astonishing recovery.

  At around five o'clock that evening, the Dauphin spoke the whale-ship Diana from New York. The Diana's captain, Aaron Paddack, toward the end of a successful voyage, joined Captain Coffin for dinner. Also joining them was Captain George Pollard, Jr., formerly of the Essex.

  Like many survivors, Pollard was animated by a fierce and desperate compulsion to tell his story. Just as the gaunt, wild-eyed Ancient Mariner of Coleridge's po
em poured forth each harrowing detail to the Wedding Guest, so did Pollard tell them everything: how his ship had been attacked “in a most deliberate manner” by a large sperm whale; how they had headed south in the whaleboats; how his boat had been attacked once again, this time by “an unknown fish”; and how they had found an island where a “ few fowl and fish was the only sustenance.” He told them that three men still remained on the island. He told of how the rest of them had set out for Easter Island and how Matthew Joy had been the first to die. He told of how Chase's boat had become separated from them in the night and how, in rapid succession, four black men “became food for the remainder.” Then he told how, after separating from the second mate's boat, he and his crew “were reduced to the deplorable necessity of casting lots.” He told of how the lot fell to Owen Coffin, “who with composure and resignation submitted to his fate.” Lastly he told of the death of Barzillai Ray, and how Ray's corpse had kept both him and Ramsdell alive.

  Later that night, once he had returned to the Diana, Captain Paddack wrote it all down, calling Pollard's account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.” The question now became one of how the survivors would fare in the dark shadow of their story.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Homecoming

  ON FEBRUARY 25, 1821, Chase, Lawrence, andNickerson arrived in Valparaiso, Chile's largest port, set on a steep hill facing north across a wide bay. At any other time the story of the Essex would have captivated the city. But in February and March of that year, the citizens of Valparaiso were tensely awaiting news from the north. Revolutionary forces, having already secured Chile's independence from Spain, were bearing down on Royalists in Lima. It was Peru, not a few American castaways, that demanded Valparaiso's attention, allowing the Essex survivors to recuperate in relative privacy.

  From the beginning Chase and his men spoke openly about having resorted to cannibalism. On the day of the Nantucketers' arrival, the keeper of the port's official log of incoming and outgoing vessels matter-of-factly reported that the captain of the Indian had picked up three men who “survived with a little water and crackers... and with a shipmate that died and that they ate in the term of eight days.”

  The U.S. frigate Constellation was anchored at Valparaiso, and the acting American consul, Henry Hill, arranged to have Chase. Lawrence, and Nickerson taken to it. Even though it had been a week since their rescue, the survivors still presented an affecting sight. “[T]heir appearance...was truly distressing,” wrote Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, “bones working through their skins, their legs and feet much smaller and the whole surface of their bodies one entire ulcer.” Ridgely placed the three men under the care of his surgeon, Dr. Leonard Osborn, who supervised their recovery in the frigate's sickbay deep in the forward part of the third deck. It may have been hot and airless, but for three men who had spent eighty-nine consecutive days beneath the open sky, it was a wonderful comfort.

  The crew of the Constellation was so profoundly moved by the sufferings of Chase and his men that each sailor donated a dollar toward their assistance. When this was combined with money collected from the American and British residents of Valparaiso, the Essex survivors had more than $500 to help defray the costs of their convalescence.

  But the men's sufferings were not yet over. As the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment discovered in 1945, the recovery period was a torturous part of the ordeal. After three months, the Minnesota volunteers still had not returned to their normal weights, even though some were consuming more than five thousand calories a day. They would eat until their stomachs could not take any more, yet they still felt hungry. Many would continue to eat between meals. It wasn't until after six months of “supernormal eating” that they had regained the bodies they had once possessed.

  The Essex survivors were in much worse shape than the volunteers in the Minnesota experiment. After three months of abuse, their digestive systems had a difficult time handling the intake of increased quantities of food-a problem shared by Captain David Harrison of the Peggy in 1765. Upon his rescue, Harrison was given some chicken broth. It had been thirty-seven days since he'd last had a bowel movement, and soon after drinking some of the broth, he was wracked by excruciating abdominal pain. “I was ... at last relieved,” Harrison wrote, “by the discharge of acallous lump about the size of a hen's egg, and enjoyed a tranquillity of body, notwithstanding all my disorders, with which I was utterly unacquainted for some preceding weeks.”

  The day after their arrival in Valparaiso, Chase and his men received a visit from the governor, who had heard rumors that, instead of being the survivors of a wreck, the first mate and his men had killed the Essex's captain in a bloody mutiny. “For there was a whispering abroad,” Nickerson wrote, “that foul play had been used by us.” The governor was reassured enough by Chase's story that he allowed the Nantucketers to go freely about the city as soon as they were able.

  A week and a half later, on March 9, the Nantucket whaleship Hero arrived in Valparaiso. While cutting in a whale off St. Mary's Island, she'd been attacked by Spanish pirates. The Spaniards imprisoned the captain and the cabin boy on shore, then locked the rest of the crewbe-lowdecks and began to ransack the ship. When an unknown vessel appeared in the harbor, the pirates returned briefly to shore, allowing first mate Obed Starbuck to burst open the cabin door and retake the ship. Starbuck ordered his men to set sail, and although the pirates came to within yards of catching up to the fleeing whaleship, the Nantucketers were able to reach safety.

  As dramatic as that report was, the Hero bore even more sensational news. With mate Starbuck acting as skipper, the Hero had encountered three whaleships sailing together as an informal group-the Dauphin, the Diana, and the Two Brothers. Captain Zimri Coffin of the Dauphin told Starbuck that he had the captain of the Essex and another crew member aboard. Shortly afterward, Pollard and Ramsdell were transferred to the Two Brothers, which was headed for Valparaiso.

  It arrived on March 17. The five survivors had last seen one another on the night of January 12, when their boats had become separated in a howling gale more than two thousand miles out to sea. Since then, two of Chase's crew had died, four of Pollard's, and three of Joy's (then under Hendricks's leadership) before the second mate's boat and the three remaining men disappeared. Only Nantucketers had emerged from Pollard's and Chase's whaleboats alive.

  They had all suffered terribly, but it was Pollard and Ramsdell- found clutching the bones of their dead companions-who had come the closest to complete psychic disintegration. Of the anguish each of these two experienced, Pollard's was perhaps the greater. Ayear and a half earlier, his aunt had entrusted him with the care and protection of her oldest son, Owen. Pollard had not only presided over his cousin's execution but had eaten his flesh, thus participating in what one historian of cannibalism at seahas called the taboo of “gastronomic incest.”

  Pollard had demonstrated remarkable stamina immediately after his rescue, but his urgent need to tell his tale had almost killed him. Soon after that first night, he suffered a relapse. When Captain William Coffin of the Nan tucket whaleship Eagle offered the Essex survivors passage home, Pollard was judged to be too weak for a voyage around Cape Horn. On March 23, Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell bid farewell to their captain and left for Nantucket. In May, after two months of recuperation and solitary reflection, Pollard followed them in the whaleship Two Brothers.

  In the meantime, Commodore Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, had made arrangements for the rescue of Chappel, Weeks, and Wright from (as he was told) Ducie Island. Recently arrived in Valparaiso was the Surry, a trading vessel from Australia being loaded with fifteen thousand bushels of wheat. Her captain, Thomas Raine, agreed to stop at Ducie on his way back to Sydney and pick up the three Essex crew members, assuming, of course, they were still alive.

  The Surry left South America on March 10. Captain Raine and his crew arrived at Ducie
Island less than a month later, only to find the tiny coral atoll uninhabited. The shore was so thick with nesting birds it was impossible to walk without stepping on eggs. Raine decided that no one had visited this necklace of coral in a very long time.

  He studied his navigational guide and wondered if the Essex officers might have mistaken an island seventy miles to the west for Ducie. A few days later, on April 9, Henderson Island came within view. They approached it from the east, then began to follow the coastline to the north. Upon rounding a rocky headland they found a “ spacious bay” to the west. Raine ordered one of his men to fire a gun.

  At that moment, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright had just sat down to eat a tropic bird. Except for some berries and shellfish, birds and eggs were the only food left on Henderson. The landcrabs had disappeared. A few months before, the men had succeeded in catching five green turtles, but by the time they had eaten just one of the turtles, the meat on the other four had spoiled. Over the last four months, the tropic birds had proved exceptionally difficult to find, so the bird they had now was, for them, a bountiful feast. But food was not their gravest concern. What they still needed most was water.

  From the day after their seventeen shipmates left for Easter Island, the spring of freshwater never again emerged above the tide line. At low tide they could see freshwater bubbling up to the ocean's surface from the rock, but for the rest of their time on Henderson the spring always remained covered by saltwater.

  In desperation, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright dug a series of wells but were unable to reach groundwater. When it rained they would greedily collect the water that accumulated in the hollows of nearby rocks. Dehydration caused their tongues to swell and their lips to crack. After a five-day stretch without water, they reluctantly sucked the blood of a tropic bird but found themselves “much disordered” by it. While searching the crevices and caves for water, they discovered the remains, of the eight unidentified castaways, whose fate they feared would soon be their own. The skeletons lay side by side as if the people had decided to lie down and quietly die together. For Chappel, who had once been the wildest and least responsible of the Essex's crew, it was a sight that helped change his life. From that day forward, he would look to God. “I found religion not only useful,” he later wrote, “but absolutely necessary to enable me to bear up under these severe trials.”