In the Heart of the Sea

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  the men of the Essex ate and slept in three different areas: the captain's and mates' cabins, in the aft portion of the ship; steerage, where the boatsteerers and young Nantucketers lived, just forward of the officers; and the forecastle-the cramped, poorly lit quarters in the extreme forward part of the vessel, separated from steerage by the blubber room. The divide between the forecastle and the other living quarters was not just physical but also racial. According to Addison Pratt, a green hand on a Nantucket ship in 1820, the forecastle was “filled with darkies” while the white sailors who weren't officers lived in steerage. Reflecting the prejudices typical of a Nantucket whaleman, Thomas Nickerson considered himself “fortunate indeed to escape being so closely penned up with so large a number of blacks” in the Essex's forecastle.

  But the forecastle had its merits. Its isolation (the only way to enter it was from a hatchway in the deck) meant that its occupants could create their own world. When he sailed on a merchant voyage in the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, preferred the camaraderie of the forecastle to steerage, where “[y]ou are immediately under the eye of the officers, cannot dance, sing, play, smoke, make a noise, or growl [i.e., complain], or take an other sailor's pleasure.” In the forecastle the African American sailors indulged in the ancient seafaring tradition of “yarning”-swapping stories about passages, shipmates, and wrecks, along with other tales of the sea. They danced and sang songs, often accompanied by a fiddle; they prayed to their God; and, in keeping with yet another oceangoing tradition, they second-guessed the captain and his officers.

  by the following morning, many of the green hands found themselves in the throes of seasickness, “rolling and tumbling about the decks almost ready ... to die or be cast in to the sea,” Nickerson remembered. Nantucketers had what they considered a sure-fire cure for seasickness, a treatment that more delicate mortals might have considered even worse than the malady. The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.

  Chase was not about to coddle his queasy crew. That morning at eight bells sharp, he ordered all hands to clear the decks and prepare the ship for whaling. Even though the whale population in the waters to the southeast of the island along the edges of the Gulf Stream had been greatly diminished over the years, it was still quite possible to come across what Nantucketers called a shoal of sperm whales. Woe to the crew that was not ready when a whale was sighted.

  But for a whale to be sighted, a lookout had to be positioned aloft-not a pleasing prospect for a crew of seasick green hands. Every man was expected to climb to the head of the mainmast and spend two hours in search of whales. Some of the men were so weak from vomiting that they doubted they had the strength to hold on to a pitching spar for two hours. One of them, Nickerson said, even went so far as to protest that it was “altogether absurd and unreasonable” to expect them to look for whales, and that he, for one, “should not go, and he hoped the captain would not expect it of him.”

  The fact that this unnamed sailor specifically mentioned the captain instead of the first mate suggests that he was Pollard's cousin, seventeen-year-old Owen Coffin. Miserable and genuinely fearful for his life, Coffin may have made a desperate, ill-advised appeal to his kinsman for a reprieve from the first mate's discipline. But it was futile. According to Nickerson, whose narrative is not without irony, there followed a few “soft words” from the officers, along with “some little challenging of their spirits,” and it wasn't long before all the green hands had taken a turn at the masthead.

  like a skier traversing the face of a mountain, a Nantucket whaleship took an indirect route toward Cape Horn, a course determined by the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean. First, pushed by the westerlies, the ship sailed south and east toward Europe and Africa. There she picked up winds called the northeast trades, which took her back across the ocean again, in the direction of South America. After crossing the equator in an often airless region known as the doldrums, she worked her way south and west through the southeast trades into an area of variable winds. Then she encountered the band of westerlies that could make rounding the Horn so difficult.

  On the first leg of this southern slide down the Atlantic, there were provisioning stops at the Azores and Gape Verde Islands, where vegetables and livestock could be purchased for much less than they cost on Nantucket. These stops also gave the whalemen the opportunity to ship back any oil they might have obtained during their cruise across the Atlantic.

  On August 15, three days out of Nantucket, the Essex was making good time toward the Azores, with the wind out of the southwest, coming directly over her starboard side, or beam. Having left Nantucket late in the season, the officers hoped to make up lost time. As usual, three topgallant sails were pulling from the upper yards, but on this day the Essex also carried at least one studding sail, a rectangle of canvas mounted on a special spar temporarily fitted to the end of the fore topsail yard.

  Whaleships rarely set their studding sails, especially when they were in a region where whales might be sighted. Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry. Use of the studding sails meant that a captain wanted to wring the last possible quarter knot of speed from his ship. The sails were difficult to set and even harder to take down, especially with an inexperienced crew. Since the sails' booms projected out beyond the yards, there was a danger of dipping them into the water if the ship should begin to roll from side to side. For a whaleship full of green hands to approach the often tempestuous waters of the Gulf Stream with her studding sails frying indicated an aggressive, if not foolhardy, attitude on the part of her commander.

  With the extra sail area catching the wind, the Essex was moving well, probably at six to eight knots. The lookout spotted a ship ahead. Pollard ordered the helmsman to steer for her, and soon the Essex had caught up to what proved to be the whaleship Midas, five days out of New Bedford. Captain Pollard and the captain of the Midas exchanged shouted pleasantries, along with estimates of their longitude, and the Essex was soon pulling ahead, her entire crew undoubtedly enjoying the fact that their ship had proved to be what Nickerson called “the fastest sailor of the two.”

  Later that day, the weather began to deteriorate. Clouds moved into the sky, and it grew suspiciously dark to the southwest. “The sea became very rough,” Nickerson remembered, “which caused the ship to roll and tumble heavily.” A storm seemed imminent, but the Essex “continued to carry a press of sail throughout the night and [the officers] had no cause to disturb the hands except for their respective watches.”

  By the next morning they were in the Gulf Stream, and it was raining steadily. Nantucketers knew this eerily warm ocean current better than perhaps any other group of mariners. In the eighteenth century they had hunted sperm whales along its margins from Carolina to Bermuda. In 1786, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother, Abiah Folger, had been born on Nantucket, had used knowledge gleaned from his Nantucket “cousin,” whaling captain Timothy Folger, to create the first chart of the Gulf Stream.

  Many considerations, both nautical and psychological, went into a decision to shorten sail. No captain wanted to be needlessly timid, yet taking unnecessary risks, especially at the beginning of a voyage that might last as long as three years, was unwise. At some point the conditions became so rough that Pollard elected to take in the fore and mizzen topgallant sails yet to leave flying the main topgallant and also the studding sails, usually the first sails taken down in worsening weather. Pollard may have wanted to see how the Essex performed when pushed to the limit. They sailed on, refusing to back down.

  according to Chase, they could see it coming: a large black cloud rushing toward them from the southwest. Now was surely the time to shorten sail. But once again they waited, deciding the cloud was an inconsequential gust. They would ride it out. As Chase would
later admit, they “miscalculated altogether as to the strength and violence of it.”

  In delaying, even for a second, shortening sail in the face of an approaching squall, Pollard was now flaunting his disregard of traditional seafaring wisdom. The officers of the British Navy had a maxim: “never to be overtaken unprepared by [a squall], as never to be surprised by an enemy.” It was said that the sharper and more defined the storm cloud, the worse the wind; thunder and lightning were also bad signs. When jagged streaks of lightning began to crackle out of the forbidding black sky and thunder boomed, Pollard finally began to issue orders. But it was too late.

  In the face of an approaching squall, there were two options: either to point the ship into the oncoming wind, to relieve the pressure on the sails by letting them luff, or to turn almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction, away .from the wind, and let the storm blow the ship with it. This relieved the pressure on the forward sails as they became .partially becalmed in the shelter of the after ones. In the merchant service, in which ships were typically undermanned, some captains favored heading into the wind-what they called luffing through a squall-in part because heading up is the natural tendency of a sailing ship in a gust. Most captains, however, favored turning away from the wind-a strategy that required them to anticipate the arrival of the squall as the crew shortened the upper and aft sails. To attempt to bear away from the wind in the last few seconds before being struck by a squall was held to show “ a poor appreciation of the squall, or a lack of watchfulness.”

  This was precisely what happened to the Essex. As the squall approached, the helmsman was ordered to turn away from the direction of the wind and “run before it.” Unfortunately it took time for a ship the size of the Essex to respond to her rudder. When the gust slammed into the ship, she had just begun to turn and was sideways to the wind-the worst possible position.

  For the green hands, the sound alone was terrifying: the shrieking of the wind across the rigging and then a frenzied flapping of sails and creaking of the stays and masts. The Essex began to lurch to leeward- slowly at first, the ponderous weight of the ship's keel and ballast, not to mention the tons of stores stowed in her hold, refusing at first to yield, but then, as the wind increased, the ship inevitably succumbed to the merciless pressure of the wind.

  When a ship is heeled over by forty-five degrees or more, her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw. No matter how much he weighs, if the end of the seesaw on the other side of the pivot point is long enough, it becomes a lever that will eventually lift him up into the air as the distant tip of the seesaw settles softly to the ground. In the case of the Essex, the masts and their wind-pressed sails became levers prying the hull toward the point of no return, forcing it over until the tips of the yards were buried in the water. The Essex had been rolled almost ninety degrees onto her side- knocked over on her “beam-ends,” in the language of the sea.

  Those on deck clung to the nearest fixture, fearful that they might fall down into the lee scuppers, now under knee-deep water. Those below deck did their best to shield themselves from objects falling down around them. If he hadn't abandoned it already, the ship's cook was doing his best to scramble out of the cookhouse, the heavy stove and cookware threatening to burst through its frail wooden sides. The two whaleboats on the Essex's port side had disappeared beneath the waves, pressed underwater by the massive weight of the capsized ship. According to Chase, “The whole ship's crew were, for a short time thrown into the utmost consternation and confusion.”

  Yet amid all the chaos there was, at least on deck, a sudden sense of calm. When a ship suffers a knockdown, her hull acts as a barrier against the wind and rain. Even though the ship had been slammed against the water, the men were temporarily sheltered from the howling forces of the wind. Pollard took the opportunity to pull the crew back together. “[T]he cool and undismayed countenance of the captain,” Nickerson remembered, “soon brought all to their sober senses.” The order was given to let go all the halyards and let the sheets run, but “the ship lay so far upon her side that nothing would run down as desired.”

  If the squall continued to pin her on her beam-ends, the ship would begin to settle into the water as the sea rushed into the hull through her open hatchways. The longer she was over on her side, the greater the chances of the ballast and stores in her hold shifting to leeward, a disastrous turn of events from which she might never recover. Already the waves had wiped the cookhouse almost completely off the deck. As a last resort, it might be necessary to cut away the masts.

  The rain poured down and the lightning flashed, and time slowed to a crawl as the men clung to the weather rail. But before the axes came into play, the ship twitched back to life. The men could feel it in their hands and feet and in the pits of their stomachs-an easing of the awful strain. They waited for another gust to slam the ship back down again. But no-the ballast continued to exert its gravitational pull, lifting the three masts until the yards came clear of the water. As the masts swung into the sky, seawater rushed across the deck and out the scuppers. The Essex shuddered to the vertical and was a ship again.

  Now that the hull was no longer acting as a shield, the officers quickly realized that the squall had passed. But even if the wind had diminished, it was still blowing hard. The ship's bow was now pointed into the wind, the sails blown back against the masts. The rigging creaked in an eerie, unfamiliar way as the hull wallowed in the rain-whipped waves. The deck shifted, and the green hands temporarily lost their balance. This time the ship wasn't going over, she was going backward, water boiling up over the quarterdeck as her broad transom was pushed back against the waves, pummeling the spare whaleboat stored off the stern.

  Going backward in a square-rigged ship was dangerous. The sails were plastered against the masts, making it almost impossible to furl them. The pressure placed an immense amount of strain on the stays and spars. Since the rigging had not been designed for loads coming from this direction, all three masts might come tumbling down, domino fashion, across the deck. Already the windows in the stern were threatening to burst open and flood the captain's cabin. There was also the danger of breaking the ship's tall, narrow rudder, which became useless as water pressed against it.

  Eventually, the Essex's bow fell off to leeward, her sails filled, and she was once again making forward progress. Now the crew could do what they should have done before the storm-shorten sail.

  As the men aloft wrestled with the canvas, the wind shifted into the northwest and the skies began to brighten. But the mood aboard the Essex sank into one of gloom. The ship had been severely damaged. Several sails, including both the main topgallant and the studding sail, had been torn into useless tatters. The cookhouse had been destroyed. The two whaleboats that had been hung off the port side of the ship had been torn from their davits and washed away, along with all their gear. The spare boat on the stern had been crushed by the waves. That left only two workable boats, and a whaleship required a minimum of three, plus two spares. Although the Essex's stern boat could be repaired, they would be without a single spare boat. Captain Pollard stared at the splintered mess and declared that they would be returning to Nantucket for repairs.

  His first mate, however, disagreed. Chase urged that they continue on, despite the damage. The chances were good, he insisted, that they would be able to obtain spare whaleboats in the Azores, where they would soon be stopping to procure fresh provisions. Joy sided with his fellow mate. The captain's will was normally the law of the ship. But instead of ignoring his two younger mates, Pollard paused to consider their arguments. Four days into his first command, Captain Pollard reversed himself. “After some little reflection and a consultation with his officers,” Nickerson remembered, “it was deemed prudent to continue on our course and trust to fortune and a kind providence to make up our loss.”

  The excuse given to the crew was that with the wind now out of the northwest, it would have taken too long to return to N
antucket. Nickerson suspected that Chase and Joy had other motives. Both knew that the men had not taken kindly to their treatment by the mates. Seeing the knockdown as a bad omen, many of the sailors had become sullen and sour. If they returned to Nantucket, some of the crew would jump ship. Despite the seriousness of the loss of the whaleboats, it was not the time to return to port.

  Not surprisingly, given that he was the object of much of the crew's discontent, Chase, in his own account of the accident, never mentions that Pollard originally proposed turning back. As Chase would have it, the knockdown was only a minor inconvenience: ““We repaired our damage with little difficulty, and continued on our course.” But Nickerson knew differently. Many of the Essex's men were profoundly shaken by the knockdown and wanted to get off the ship. Whenever they passed a homeward-bound vessel, the green hands would lament, in the words of one, “0, how I wish I was onboard with them going home again, for I am heartily sick of these whaling voyages”-even though they had not yet even seen a whale.

  CHAPTER THREE

  First Blood

  after A provisioning stop in the Azores, which provided plenty of fresh vegetables but no spare whaleboats, the Essex headed south toward the Gape Verde Islands. Two weeks later they sighted Boavista Island. In contrast to the Azores' green, abundant hills, the slopes of the Cape Verdes were brown and sere, with no trees to offer relief from the burning subtropical sun. Pollard intended to obtain some hogs at the island of Maio a few miles to the southwest.