by Walter Karp
The men endured the unendurable. Painful boils broke out on their wasted flesh. The cramps of empty bowels tormented their waking hours, the dreams of food their nights. Chase himself awoke with such a craving that he ripped a piece of cowhide from one of the oars and tried vainly to chew it. Too weak to stand, the men struggled to set sails and steer. On January 15, when a hungry shark began chomping at the boat, someone grabbed a lance - a weapon that had ended the lives of countless sperm whales - to kill it and make a feast of its flesh. He was too weak even to pierce the shark’s skin. In the end, the men were relieved just to drive it away from the boat.
The fickle wind unnerved them as well. It would blow favorably for a day, reviving hopes, then turn dead against them for two more days, dashing hopes again. By far the worst days were when the wind failed entirely, and all they could do was strip the sails from the masts and lie under them from dawn until dusk, abandoning the boat to the mercy of the waves. Their minds, said Chase, were now “dark, gloomy, and confused.” One night, when they came upon a shoal of whales, the men cowered for hours in the bottom of the boat, terrified. Chase refused to let his men give up. Again and again, he pleaded with them to trust their efforts, keep faith in God’s will, and fight against despair. These pleadings probably helped; by now, all that kept the men alive was a vestige of the will not to die.
Proof of that came on January 20 when Richard Peterson, an African American, quietly told Chase that he wanted no more rations. He had, said Chase, “made up his mind to die rather than endure further misery.” After assuring Chase that he had made peace with himself and his Maker, Peterson calmly lay back in the boat. “In a few minutes, he became speechless,” Chase said. “The breath appeared to be leaving his body without producing the least pain, and at four o’clock, he was gone.” The will not to live had brought death within hours. The next day, Peterson’s four comrades buried him at sea. They were now, according to Chase’s reckoning, 1,300 miles from the Juan Fernandez Islands - 1,600 miles from Chile, in 35° south latitude.
On the strength of one-and-a-half ounces of daily bread and the fortitude of a twenty-three-year-old leader, the crew's will to live remained intact for several more days in Chase’s boat, although it was not until January 28 that a favoring wind began to blow strong and steady. It seemed to come too late. On the morning of February 7, Chase’s men had only three days of food left - twelve mouthfuls of bread - and several hundred miles still to cross: “Our sufferings were now drawing to a close; a terrible death appeared shortly to await us.” That morning, Isaac Cole told Chase that all was “dark” in his mind, “not a single ray of hope was left for him to dwell upon.” Chase tried to buoy him up, although what it was that still buoyed Chase, “God alone knows,” as he put it. Once again, however, the wish not to live brought death. On the morning of February 8, Cole called wildly for a napkin and water, then fell senseless into the bottom of the boat. Seven hours later, after suffering repeated convulsions, he perished.
The next morning, when his mates began preparing his body for sea burial, Chase told them to stop. Cole’s body must not be consigned to the sea; it was the food that might save them. The two remaining sailors didn’t argue. They cut the wasted limbs from Cole’s body and the stilled heart from his chest and ate some of the raw flesh. The rest they cooked on a flat rock they had taken from Henderson’s Island. “In this manner,” Cole wrote, “did we dispose of our fellow-sufferer. . . . We knew not then to whose lot it would fall next, either to die or be shot and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.” The fate they dreaded when they turned their backs on Tahiti was now threatening them.
THE WORST CHASE feared had already befallen the men of two vessels separated from him and his crew by the storm of January 12. As early as January 14, the five men left on Joy’s boat had run out of food entirely and had been barely kept alive by the scant provisions left on Captain Pollard’s boat. That sharing was an extraordinary act of love and loyalty, for how tempting it must have been for six starving men to sail away from their comrades and save what they had for themselves. The price of Pollard’s charity, however, was quickly exacted. On January 21, not an ounce of bread was left on the captain’s boat. After two days without food, starvation claimed Lawson Thomas on Joy’s boat; his surviving boat mates shared the man’s flesh. Between January 25 and 28, three more men died, and their flesh, too, was shared between the boats. Then, on the night of January 28, a storm separated Pollard’s group from the three men still alive on Joy’s boat. They were never seen again. Four starving men remained in Pollard's boat: the captain, a cabin boy named Owen Coffin, a Barzillai Ray from Portugal, and a third Nantucket man, Charles Ramsdell.
On February 1, the flesh of their stricken comrades, their sole source of food, was gone. What happened next was related a few years later by Pollard to two English missionaries after he was shipwrecked a second time in the South Pacific. Out of food, “we looked at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds, but we held our tongues. . . . I am sure we loved one another as brothers all the time; yet our looks told plainly what must be done.” By lot, the victim would be chosen and shot for his flesh. His executioner would be chosen by lot, as well. Ramsdell drew the executioner’s straw. When the cabin boy Coffin drew the victim’s, Pollard said, “I started forward and cried out, ‘My lad, my lad, if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.’ The poor, emaciated boy hesitated for a moment or two, then, quietly laying his head down upon the gunwale of the boat, he said, ‘I like it as well as any other.’ He was soon dispatched, and nothing of him left.” Pollard then cried out to his listeners: “I can tell you no more. My head is on fire at the recollection. I hardly know what I say.”
That was February 1. Ten days later on February 11, Ray succumbed to starvation, and his flesh prolonged the lives of his two survivors: Pollard and Ramsdell. By now, the two horror-haunted whaleboats - the captain’s and the first mate’s - were sailing on a perfectly parallel course, with Chase’s boat some 300 miles farther north. On February 18, three men were still alive on Chase’s boat, but their carefully hoarded food was gone, and Chile was still 300 miles away. That morning, Chase dozed at the rudder while seventeen-year-old Thomas Nicholson lay in the bottom of the boat, praying for death. Suddenly, the third man aboard cried out: “There’s a sail!” Chase struggled to his feet to gaze “in a state of abstraction and ecstasy upon the blessed vision of a vessel seven miles off.” It was a prison ship out of London.
A few more miles of tense sailing and the ordeal was over. They had been at sea eighty-three days and had traveled 4,500 miles in an open boat. Moreover, in a superb feat of navigation, Chase had brought his men from Henderson’s Island to within a few miles of the Juan Fernandez Islands. Five days later, Pollard and Ramsdell were rescued at sea, 100 miles from the Chilean coast.
SUCH IS THE “wondrous story” of the whaleship Essex that inspired the literary masterpiece Moby Dick. Of the seventeen men who had pushed off from Henderson’s Island on December 27, 1820, only five survived, all of them from Nantucket. And, because they survived, the three castaways on Henderson’s Island survived as well. A British ship picked them up on April 2, after 102 days of living on birds, berries, and rainwater.
By the end of 1821, all five survivors were home on Nantucket, their health and strength restored. All of them returned swiftly to the sea and to whaling. In time, all four of Captain Pollard’s surviving crewmen commanded whaleships of their own, prospered, and lived long lives. They gave few outward signs of their ordeal. In later years, however, Chase spoke of a compulsion: Every time he returned to Nantucket, he would go up into the attic of his house and stowaway crackers and bits of food.
Misfortune dogged only Captain Pollard. When he returned to Nantucket in 1825, after his second ship crashed on a Pacific reef, the spirit that had sustained him throughout the Essex ordeal deserted him. Retiring from the sea, at thirty-six, he became a night watchman on the island - me
ek, mute, yet strangely at peace. After his anguished lapse before the two English missionaries, George Pollard never again spoke about his Essex ordeal. Nor did the people of Nantucket care to hear of it. In that community, where ties of kinship bound so many whaling families together, the revenge of the whale touched too many lives too intimately to bear repeating. The veil of silence was still intact some eighty years later when a Nantucket girl asked the aged daughter of an Essex survivor about what had happened so long ago, and so far away. The old woman rose to her feet and said firmly but quietly, “Miss Molly, here we never mention the Essex.”
Published by New Word City LLC, 2014
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