In the Heart of the Sea

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  One hundred and eleven years later, in the middle of the Pacific, ten men of the Essex reached a similar conclusion. Two months after deciding to spurn the Society Islands because, in Pollard's words, “we feared we should be devoured by cannibals,” they were aboutto eat one of their own shipmates.

  First they had to butcher the body. On Nantucket there was a slaughterhouse at the foot of Old North Wharf where any island boy could watch a cow or sheep be transformed into marketable cuts of meat. On a whaleship it was the black members of the crew who prepared and cooked the food. In the case of the Essex, more than thirty hogs and dozens of tortoises had been butchered by the African American cook before the whale attack. And, of course, all twenty crew members had taken part in the cutting up of several dozen sperm whales. But this was not a whale or a hog or a tortoise. This was Lawson Thomas, a shipmate with whom they had shared two hellish months in an open boat. Whoever butchered Thomas's body had to contend not only with the cramped quarters of a twenty-five-foot boat but also with the chaos of his own emotions.

  The crew of the Nottingham Galley, the ship that wrecked off Maine, had found it so difficult to begin the gruesome task of cutting up the carpenter's body that they pleaded with the reluctant Captain Dean to do it for them. “ [T]heir incessant prayers and entreaties at last prevailed,” Dean wrote, “and by night I had performed my labor.” Dean, like most sailors forced to resort to cannibalism, began by removing the most obvious signs of the corpse's humanity-the head, hands, feet, and skin-and consigned them to the sea.

  If Hendricks and his men followed Dean's example, they next would have removed Thomas's heart, liver, and kidneys from the bloody basket of his ribs. Then they would have begun to hack the meat from the backbone, ribs, and pelvis. In any case, Pollard reported that after lighting a fire on the flat stone at the bottom of the boat, they roasted the organs and meat and began to eat.

  Instead of easing their hunger pangs, their first taste of meat only intensified their atavistic urge to eat. The saliva flowed in their mouths as their long-dormant stomachs gurgled with digestive juices. And the more they ate, the hungrier they became.

  Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the phenomenon of cannibalism have estimated that the average human adult would provide about sixty-six pounds of edible meat. But Lawson Thomas's body was not average. Autopsies of starvation victims have revealed a dramatic atrophy of muscle tissue and a complete absence of fat- replaced, in some instances, by a translucent gelatinous substance. Starvation and dehydration had also shrunk Thomas's internal organs, including the heart and liver. His body may have yielded as little as thirty pounds of lean, fibrous meat. On the following day, when the captain's store of bread ran out, Pollard and his men “were glad to partake of the wretched fare with the other crew.”

  Two days later, on January 23-the sixty-third day since leaving the wreck-yet another member of Hendricks's crew died and was eaten. And like Lawson Thomas before him, Charles Shorter was black.

  It was likely that the African Americans had suffered from an inferior diet prior to the sinking. But there may have been yet another factor at work. Arecent scientific study comparing the percentage of body fat among different ethnic groups claims that American blacks tend to have less body fat than their Caucasian counterparts. Once a starving body exhausts its reserves of fat, it begins consuming muscle, a process that soon results in the deterioration of the internal organs and, eventually, death. The blacks' initially lower amount of body fat meant that they had begun living off muscle tissue before the whites.

  The importance of body fat in determining long-term survival under starvation conditions was shown among the members of the Donner Party, a group of settlers who became snowbound in the foothills of the Sierras during the winter of 1847. Despite their reputation as the weaker sex, the women tended to outlast the men, thanks in part to their higher percentage of body fat (approximately ten percent more than males). Now that people had begun to die among the Essex crew, it was no accident that the first to go (with the exception of the sickly Matthew Joy, who, in Chase's words, “did not die of absolute starvation”) were African American.

  Of the whites, the Essex's, twenty-nine-year-old captain had an advantage. He was short, had a tendency toward corpulence prior to the ordeal, and being older had a lower metabolic rate. Of these twenty sailors, Pollard was the most likely to survive this ordeal of starvation. Yet, given the complex range of factors-psychological as well as physiological-influencing each man's health, it was impossible to predict with total precision who would live and who would die.

  More than a hundred miles to the south, as their shipmates consumed their second body in four days, Owen Chase and his men drifted in a windless sea. A week of eating only one and a half ounces of bread a day had left them “hardly able to crawl around the boat, and possessing but strength enough to convey our scanty morsel to our mouths.” Boils had begun to break out on their skin. On the morning of January 24, with another day of calms and broiling sun ahead of them, Chase was certain that some of his crew would not see nightfall. “[W]hat it was that buoyed me above all the terrors which surrounded us,” Chase wrote, “God alone knows.”

  That night, the first mate had a vivid dream. He had just sat down to a “splendid and rich repast, where there was everything that the most dainty appetite could desire.” But just as he reached for his first taste of food, he “awoke to the cold realities of my miserable situation.” Fired to a kind of madness by his dream, Chase began to gnaw on the leather sheathing of an oar only to find that he lacked the strength in his jaws to penetrate the stiff, salt-caked hide.

  With the death of Peterson, Chase's crew had been whittled down to only three-Nantucketers Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson, along with Isaac Cole from Rochester, Massachusetts. As their sufferings mounted, the men relied increasingly on the first mate. Chase reported that they “press[ed] me continually with questions upon the probability of our reaching land again. I kept constantly rallying my spirits to enable me to afford them comfort.”

  Chase had changed since the beginning of the ordeal. Instead of the harsh disciplinarian who had doled out rations with a gun by his side, he now spoke to the men in what Nickerson described as an almost cheerful voice. As their torments reached new heights, Chase recognized that it wasn't discipline his men needed but encouragement. For as they had all seen with Peterson, hope was all that stood between them and death.

  Chase's ability to adjust his manner of leadership to the needs of his men begs comparison to one of the greatest and most revered leaders of all time, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton's feat of delivering all twenty-seven men of his Antarctic expedition to safety has been called “the supreme epic of leadership in totally impossible circumstances.” In 1916, after seventeen months of fighting the cruelesi conditions imaginable-which included a grueling trek across the pack-ice, two voyages in tiny, whaleboat-size craft over a storm-tossed Southern Ocean, and a terrifying hike across the jagged peaks of South Georgia-Shackleton finally reached a whaling station and safety, then returned to rescue those he had left behind on Elephant Island.

  Shackleton's sensitivity to the needs of his men was legendary. “So great was his care of his people,” his associate Frank Worsley wrote, “that, to rough men, it seemed at times to have a touch of the woman about it, even to the verge of fussiness.” But Shackleton was also capable of insisting on a Bligh-like discipline. On an earlier expedition, when one of the men felt his freedoms were being infringed upon, Shackleton quelled the insurrection by knocking the man to the ground. This combination of decisive, authoritative action and an ability to empathize with others is rarely found in a single leader. But Chase, at twenty-three (almost half Shackleton's age), had learned to move beyond the ruthless intensity of a fishy man and do everything in his power to lift his men from the depths of despair.

  Nickerson called the first mate a “remarkable man” and recognized Chase's genius for identifying hope in a s
eemingly hopeless situation. Having already endured so much, Chase reasoned, they owed it to one another to cling as tenaciously to life as possible: “I reasoned with them, and told them that we would not die sooner by keeping our hopes.” But it was more than a question of loyalty to one another. As far as Chase was concerned, God was also involved in this struggle for survival. “[T]he dreadful sacrifices and privations we [had] endured were to preserve us from death,” he assured them, “and were not to be put in competition with the price which we set upon our lives.” In addition to saying it would be “unmanly to repine at what neither admitted of alleviation nor cure,” Chase insisted that “it was our solemn duty to recognize in our calamities an overruling divinity, by whose mercy we might be suddenly snatched from peril, and to rely upon him alone, 'Who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.'“ Although they had seen little evidence of the Lord's mercy in the last two months, Chase insisted that they “bear up against all evils... and not weakly distrust the providence of the Almighty, by giving ourselves up to despair.”

  For the next three days the wind continued out of the east, forcing them farther and farther south. “[I]t was impossible to silence the rebellious repinings of our nature,” Chase admitted. “It was our cruel lot not to have had one bright anticipation realized-not one wish of our thirsting souls gratified.”

  On January 26, the sixty-sixth day since leaving the wreck, their noon observation indicated that they had sunk to latitude 36° south, more than 600 nautical miles south of Henderson Island and 1,800 miles due west of Valparaiso, Chile. That day the searing sun gave way to a bitterly cold rain. Starvation had lowered their body temperatures by several degrees, and with few clothes to warm their thin bodies, they were now in danger of dying of hypothermia. They had no choice but to try to head north, back toward the equator.

  With the breeze out of the east, they were forced to tack, turning with the steering oar until the wind came from the starboard side of the boat. Prior to reaching Henderson, it had been a maneuver they had accomplished with ease. Now, even though the wind was quite light, they no longer had the strength to handle the steering oar or trim the sails. “[A]fter much labor, we got our boat about,” Chase remembered, “and so great was the fatigue attending this small exertion of our bodies, that we all gave up for a moment and abandoned her to her own course.”

  With no one steering or adjusting the sails, the boat drifted aimlessly. The men lay helpless and shivering in the bilge as, Chase wrote, “the horrors of our situation came upon us with a despairing force and effect.” After two hours, they finally marshaled enough strength to adjust the sails so that the boat was once again moving forward. But now they were sailing north, parallel to, but not toward, the coast of South America. Like Job before him, Chase could not help but ask, “[What] narrow hopes [still] bound us to life?”

  As chase's men lay immobilized by hunger in the bottom of their boat, yet another member of Hendricks's crew died. This time it was Isaiah Sheppard, who became the third African American to die and be eaten in only seven days. The next day, January 28-the sixty-eighth day since leaving the wreck-Samuel Reed, the sole black member of Pollard's crew, died and was eaten. That left William Bond in Hendricks's boat as the last surviving black in the Essex's crew. There was little doubt who had become the tropic birds and who had become the hawks.

  Sailors commonly accepted that eating human flesh brought a person's moral character down to the level of those “brutish savages” who voluntarily indulged in cannibalism. On Boon Island in 1710, Captain Dean had noticed a shocking transformation among his crew once they began to eat the carpenter's body. “I found (in a few days) their natural dispositions changed,” Dean wrote, “and that affectionate, peaceable temper they had all along hitherto, discovered totally lost; their eyes staring and looking wild, their countenances fierce and barbarous.”

  But it wasn't the act of cannibalism that lowered a survivor's sense of civility; rather, it was his implacable hunger. During the first leg of their voyage, Chase had noticed that their sufferings had made it difficult for them to maintain “so magnanimous and devoted a character to our feelings.”

  Even under the controlled circumstances of the 1945 Minnesota starvation experiment, the participants were aware of a distressing change in their behavior. A majority of the volunteers were members of the Church of the Brethren, and many had hoped that the period of deprivation would enhance their spiritual lives. But they found just the opposite to be true. “Most of them felt that the semi-starvation had coarsened rather than refined them,” it was reported, “and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”

  In another notorious case of survival cannibalism, sailors aboard the badly damaged Peggy were reaching the final stages of starvation on the stormy Atlantic in 1765. Although they still had more than enough left of the vessel's cargo of wine and brandy, it had been eighteen days since they'd eaten the last of their food. Emboldened by alcohol, the first mate informed the captain that he and the rest of the crew were going to kill and eat a black slave. The captain refused to take part

  and, too weak to oppose them, overheard the terrifying sounds of the execution and subsequent feast from the cabin. A few days later, the crew appeared at the captain's door, looking for another man to kill. “I... [told them] that the poor Negro's death had done them no service,” Captain Harrison wrote, “as they were as greedy and as emaciated as ever... The answer which they gave to this, was, that they were now hungry, and must have something to eat.”

  Like the crew of the Peggy, the Essex survivors were no longer operating under the rules of conduct that had governed their lives prior to the ordeal; they were members of what psychologists studying the effects of the Nazi concentration camps have called a “modern feral community”-a group of people reduced to “an animal state very closely approaching 'raw' motivation.” Just as concentration camp inmates underwent, in the words of one psychologist, “starvation ... in a state of extreme stress,” so did the men of the Essex live from day to day not knowing which one of them would be the next to die.

  Under these circumstances, survivors typically undergo a process of psychic deadening that one Auschwitz survivor described as a tendency to “kill my feelings.” Another woman expressed it as an amoral, even immoral, will to live: “Nothing else counted but that I wanted to live. I would have stolen from husband, child, parent or friend, in order to accomplish this. Therefore, every day I disciplined myself with a sort of low, savage cunning, to bend every effort, to devote every fiber of my being, to do those things which would make that possible.”

  Within a feral community, it is not uncommon for subgroups to develop as a collective form of defense against the remorseless march of horror, and it was here that the Nantucketers-their ties of kinship and religion stitching them together-had an overwhelming advantage. Since there would be no black survivors to contradict the testimonies of the whites, the possibility exists that the Nantucketers took a far more active role in insuring their own survival than has been otherwise suggested. Certainly the statistics raise suspicion-of the first four sailors to be eaten all were black. Short of murdering the black crew members, the Nantucketers could have refused to share meat with them.

  However, except for the fact that the majority of the blacks were assigned to a whaleboat commanded by a sickly mate, there is no evidence of overt favoritism in the boats. Indeed, what appears to have distinguished the men of the Essex was the great discipline andhuman compunction they maintained throughout the whole ordeal. If necessity forced them to act like animals, they did so with the deepest regrets. There was a reason why William Bond in Hendricks's boat was the last African American left alive. Thanks to his position as steward in the officers' quarters, Bond had enjoyed a far more balanced and plentiful diet than his shipmates in the forecastle. But now that he was the only black among six whites, Bond had to wonder what the future held.

  Given the cruel mathematics of survival cannib
alism, each death not only provided the remaining men with food but reduced by one the number of people they had to share it with. By the time Samuel Reed died on January 28, the seven survivors each received close to three thousand calories' worth of meat (up by almost a third since the death of Lawson Thomas). Unfortunately, even though this portion may have been roughly equivalent to each man's share of a Galapagos tortoise, it lacked the fat that the human body requires to digest meat. No matter how much meat they now had available to them, it was of limited nutritional value without a source of fat.

  The following night,-January 29, was darker than most. The two boat-crews were finding it difficult to keep track of each other; they also lacked the strength to manage the steering oars and sails. That night, Pollard and his men looked up to find that the whaleboat containing Obed Hendricks, William Bond, and Joseph West had disappeared. Pollard's men were too weak to attempt to find the missing boat-either by raising a lantern or firing a pistol. That left George Pollard, Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Barzillai Ray - all Nantucketers-alone for the first time since the sinking of the Essex. They were at latitude 35 “south, longitude 100°west, 1,500 miles from the coast of South America, with only the half-eaten corpse of Samuel Reed to keep them alive.