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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Throughout this long and dismal week, the men had attempted to sustain themselves with a kind of mantra: “ 'Patience and long-suffering' was the constant language of our lips,” Chase remembered, “and a determination, strong as the resolves of the soul could make it, to cling to existence as long as hope and breath remained to us.” But by the night of December 19, almost precisely a month since the sinking of the Essex, several of the men had given up. Chase could see it in their “lagging spirits and worn out frames”-”an utter indifference to their fate.” One more day, maybe two, and people would start to die.

  The next morning began like so many others. Nickerson recalled how at around seven o'clock, they were “sitting in the bottom of our little boat quite silent and dejected.” Nineteen-year-old William Wright, from Cape Cod, stood up to stretch his legs. He glanced to leeward, then looked again.

  “There is land!” he cried.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Island

  THE MEN IN THE chase's boat stared eagerly ahead. Ravaged by hunger and thirst, half blinded by glare from the sea and sky, they had seen mirages before, and they feared this might prove to be another. But all of them could see the white sandy beach in the distance. “It was no visionary delusion,” Nickerson wrote, “but in reality 'Land Ho.'”

  Even the most decrepit of Chase's men sprang to life. “We were all aroused in an instant,” the first mate remembered, “as if electrified... A new and extraordinary impulse now took possession of us. We shook off the lethargy of our senses, and seemed to take another, and a fresh existence.” At first glance, the island bore an eerie resemblance to their native Nantucket: a low rise of sand topped with green. Chase called it “a basking paradise before our longing eyes.” Nickerson immediately assumed that it marked “the final end to [our] long confinement and sufferings,” and added, “Never have my eyes rested on anything so pleasingly beautiful.”

  It wasn't long before the men in the other two boats had seen the island. Spontaneous cheers rose from their cracked and swollen lips. “It is not within the scope of human calculation,” Chase wrote, “to divine what the feelings of our hearts were on this occasion. Alternate expectation, fear, gratitude, surprise, and exultation, each swayed our minds, and quickened our exertions.”

  By eleven o'clock they were within a quarter mile of the island.

  They could now see that instead of sand, it was made mostly of rock, with thirty-foot vertical cliffs lining the shore. Beyond the cliffs, the interior of the island was amazingly flat, yet “fresh and green with vegetation.” This boded well, they assured themselves, for the presence of ample supplies of water.

  Pollard and Chase studied their copies of Bowditch's Navigator. Judging from the day's previous observation, they determined it must be Ducie Island at latitude 24 °20' south, longitude 124 °40' west. After a month at sea, after traveling approximately 1,500 nautical miles, they were farther from the coast of South America than when they had started.

  The men's immediate concern was that the island might be inhabited. “In our present state,” Nickerson wrote, “we could have made but feeble resistance to an attack from natives.” Keeping about a hundred yards from shore, they began sailing around the island. “We... frequently fir [ed] a pistol,” Nickerson remembered, “as we glided past some valley or nook in the woods to arouse its inhabitants should there be any within hearing. But neither friend nor foe appeared.”

  The island was an irregular oblong, about six miles long and three miles wide, rimmed by a jagged ledge of rocks and coral. The three boat-crews gradually made their way to the north end, which put them in the lee of the southeasterly trades. At a bend in the shoreline they found the island's largest beach. “ [T]his seemed the most promising position we had seen,” Nickerson wrote, “to make an attempt to land with our boats.” But first Chase would lead a preliminary scouting party while the three boats stood offshore, just in case they “should unexpectedly find savages in ambush.”

  Chase, with musket in hand, and two others were dropped off on a large rock. By the time they'd waded ashore, they were already exhausted. “Upon arriving at the beach,” the first mate recalled, “it was necessary to take a little breath, and we laid down for a few minutes to rest our weak bodies.” They sat on the coarse coral sand, drinking in the sights and sounds of a stunningly beautiful island world. The cliffs behind them were festooned with flowers, shrubs, grasses, and vines. Birds flew about them, seemingly unconcerned by the men's presence. After a month of deprivation and suffering, they were about to enjoy, Chase was convinced, “a rich banquet of food and drink.” But first they had to find a source of water.

  They split up, each one hobbling down the uneven beach in a different direction. In an inlet Chase was able to spear an eighteen-inch fish with the ramrod of his musket. He dragged the fish onto the shore and immediately sat down to eat. His two companions joined him, and in less than ten minutes the fish was consumed-”bones, and skin, and scales, and all.”

  They now imagined they were strong enough to attempt a climb of the cliffs, which they figured to be the most probable source of water. But instead of rocks glistening with moisture, Chase found a dry, scrubby wall of dead coral. The shrubs and vines were not strong enough to support his weight, forcing him to grab the cutting edges of coral. Slashed and bruised, Chase realized he did not have the strength to reach the top.

  The euphoria of only a few hours before gave way to the realization that this sterile outcropping of fossilized sea organisms might be without drinkable water. If this was true, every second they remained on the island reduced their already slim chances of survival. No matter how tempting it might be to spend at least one night on solid ground, Chase's first inclination was to set sail for South America immediately: “I never for one moment lost sight of the main chance, which I conceived we still had, of either getting to the coast, or of meeting some vessel at sea.”

  When he returned to the beach he discovered that one of the men had some promising news. He had found a cleft in a rock that exuded the slightest trickle of water-just enough to wet his lips, but no more. Perhaps it was advisable to spend the night on the island and devote the next day to searching for water. Chase and his companions went out to the boats, and Chase told Pollard what he thought. They agreed to land.

  They dragged the boats up onto a grassy area beneath a stand of trees. “We then turned [the boats] bottom upwards,” Nickerson remembered, “thus forming a protection from the night dews.” The men fanned out along the shore, and after collecting a few crabs and fish, they settled down beneath the boats, ate their catch, then stretched out their bony limbs for the first time in a month. Sleep soon followed. “[F]ree from all the anxieties of watching and labor,” Chase wrote, “[we] gave ourselves up to an unreserved forgetfulness and peace of mind.”

  Morning came quickly and, with it, a return to the agonies of hunger and thirst. They were now so severely dehydrated that they had begun to lose the ability to speak. “Relief,” Chase wrote, “must come soon, or nature would sink.” They wandered the beach like ragged skeletons, pausing to lean against trees and rocks to catch their breath. They tried chewing the waxy green leaves of the shrubs that grew in the cliffs, but they were bitter to the taste. They found birds that made no attempt to escape when they plucked them from their nests. In the crevices of the rocks sprouted a grass that, when chewed, produced a temporary flow of moisture in their mouths. But nowhere did they find fresh water.

  As soon as they strayed beyond the beach, they discovered that the island was a scrap heap of fractured coral as sharp and piercing as shattered glass. Many of the men had no shoes, which made it impossible for them to explore any great distance from their encampment. They also feared that if they did venture out, they might not have the stamina to return before nightfall, thus exposing themselves “to attacks of wild beasts, which might inhabit the island.” That evening they returned, Nickerson wrote, “sorrowing and dejected to our little town of boats in
the valley.”

  But Pollard had a surprise for them. The captain and his steward, William Bond, had spent the day gathering crabs and birds, and by the time the men returned from their searches, Pollard and Bond were in the midst of roasting what Nickerson called “a magnificent repast,” Prior to the sinking, food had been a source of dissension between Pollard and his men. Now it was what brought them together, and this time it was the master who was serving his crew. “ Here everyone seated himself upon the beautiful green grass,” Nickerson remembered, “and perhaps no banquet was ever enjoyed with greater gusto or gave such universal satisfaction.”

  Pollard had done everything he could that day to increase the health and morale of his men. Chase remained focused on the “main chance”: getting to South America and safety. Restless and impatient as always, he had become convinced that they were wasting their time on this island without water. “In this state of affairs, we could not reconcile it to ourselves to remain longer at this place,” he wrote. “[A] day, an hour, lost to us unnecessarily here, might cost us our preservation.” That evening Chase expressed his concerns to Pollard: “I addressed the substance of these few reflections to the captain, who agreed with me in opinion, upon the necessity of taking some decisive steps in our present dilemma.”

  While he agreed with his first mate in principle, Pollard attempted to defuse some of Chase's impetuousness. The captain pointed out that without a new supply of water, their chances of survival were next to nil. To push blindly ahead without exhausting every possibility of finding a spring would be a tragic mistake. “After some considerable conversation on this subject,” Chase wrote, “it was finally concluded to spend the succeeding day in the further search for water, and if none should be found, to quit the island the morning after.”

  The men of the Essex did not know that they were within just a few hundred miles of saving themselves. Pollard and Chase were mistaken as to their whereabouts. This was not Ducie Island but rather Henderson Island, at virtually the same latitude but seventy miles to the west. Both islands are part of a group named for its most famous member, Pitcairn, an island whose history was inextricably linked with Nantucket. In 1808, a sealing captain from Nantucket named Mayhew Fol-ger stumbled across Pitcairn (whose location was incorrectly recorded on all available navigational guides) and discovered the answer to a nineteen-year-old mystery: what had happened to Fletcher Christian and the Bounty.

  After abandoning Captain Bligh in the ship's launch in 1789, the Bounty mutineers had wandered the Pacific. They picked up some native women and a few men in Tahiti, and eventually made their way to an uninhabited island in the southeastern extreme of Polynesia. In 1820, a small community of Bounty descendants was flourishing on Pitcairn. Just four hundred miles to the southwest, a few days' sail from Henderson, they would have provided the Essex crew with all the food and water they needed. But Pitcairn was not listed in their Bowditch's Navigator. Even if it had been, it's questionable whether they could have found it. As it was, they were off by almost a hundred miles when they tried to determine their current location.

  Henderson Island began as a coral atoll about 370,000 years ago. Twenty thousand years later, volcanic activity associated with Pitcairn caused the land underneath the atoll to rise. Today, the cliffs of Henderson are between thirty and thirty-five feet high and enclose a dry fossil lagoon. Surrounded by a vast ocean, this uninhabited speck of coral might seem an unlikely source of anyone's salvation.

  As much as sixty-five inches of rain falls on Henderson each year. This water does not all run off into the sea or evaporate into the air. Much of it seeps down through the thin soils and layers of fossilized coral to a depth of a foot or so above sea level. Here it flows into a horizontal layer of freshwater saturating the rock and sand. The freshwater, which is lighter than saltwater, floats on the surface of the sea in the shape of a dome or lens beneath the island. But, unless they could find a spring, all this groundwater would be of no use to the men of the Essex.

  They weren't the first to be enticed by Henderson and then cheated. Although they weren't aware of it, in the cliffs behind them was a cave in which lay eight human skeletons.

  A medical examination performed on the bones in 1966 revealed that they were of Caucasian origin, which suggests that these unidentified people, like the Essex crew, had been shipwreck survivors. The examination also revealed that one of the skeletons had belonged to a child between three and five years old. All eight people had died of dehydration.

  The next morning-December 22, the thirty-first since leaving the wreck-the men resumed their search for water. Some, like Nickerson, climbed into the cliffs; others investigated the rocks along the beach. Chase returned to where they had found evidence of fresh water two days before. The rock was about a quarter mile from their encampment and, with a hatchet and an old rusted chisel, he and two others made their way across the sand.

  “The rock proved to be very soft,” Chase wrote, “and in a very short time I had obtained a considerable hole, but, alas! without the least wished-for effect.” As the sun rose in the sky, Chase continued to peck away at the rock, hoping that by deepening the hole, he might establish a flow of water. “[B]ut all my hopes and efforts were unavailing,” he remembered, “and at last I desisted from further labor, and sat down near it in utter despair.”

  Then he noticed something curious. On the beach, in the direction of the boats, two men were lugging a container of some sort. He was amazed to see them begin to run. “[T]he idea suddenly darted across my mind,” Chase wrote, “that they had found water, and were taking a keg to fill it.” Up in the cliffs, Nickerson had noticed the same display of “extraordinary spirit and activity” and soon became part of a general rush for the beach.

  The men had, in fact, found a spring bubbling up from a hole in a large flat rock. “The sensation that I experienced was indeed strange, and such as I shall never forget,” Chase remembered. “At one instant I felt an almost choking excess of joy, and at the next I wanted the relief of a flood of tears.”

  By the time Chase reached the spring, men had already begun to drink, eagerly filling their mouths with the miraculous nectar. Mindful that in their dehydrated condition it was dangerous to drink too much water too quickly, Chase exhorted them to sip only small quantities and to wait several minutes between drinks. But their thirst proved overpowering, and some of the men had to be held back. Despite the officers' best efforts, several of the crew “thoughtlessly swallowed large quantities of [water], until they could drink no more.” But the agonizing cramps Chase had warned against never came: “[I]t only served to make them a little stupid and indolent for the remainder of the day.”

  Once everyone had been given a chance to drink, they began to marvel at their good fortune. The spring was so far below the tide line that it was exposed for just a half hour at dead low; at high tide it was as much as six feet underwater. They had time to fill only two small kegs before the rock once again disappeared below the surf.

  After collecting more fish and birds, they sat down for the evening meal. With a dependable source of water and a seemingly bountiful supply of food, they now thought it possible to hold out indefinitely on the island. At the very least, they could stay at Henderson until they had recovered their strength and repaired their worn-out whaleboats for a final attempt at reaching South America. That night they agreed to remain on the island for at least another four or five days before they decided “whether it would be advisable to make any arrangement for a more permanent abode.” Their stomachs full and their thirst slaked, they quickly drifted off into what Chase described as “a most comfortable and delicious sleep.”

  At eleven o'clock the next morning, they returned to the spring. They arrived just as the tide fell below the rock. At first the water was somewhat brackish, raising fears that the spring was not as reliable a source of fresh water as they had first thought. But as the tide continued to retreat, the quality of the water steadily improved. After filli
ng their casks with about twenty gallons, they set out in search of food.

  Every spare moment of every day was, in Chase's words, “employed in roving about for food.” The evening hours proved the most productive, for it was then that the plump white birds known as tropic birds, about the size of chickens, returned to shore to feed their young. Approaching stealthily, the men would “pounce upon [the birds] with a stick and take them without difficulty.”

  They were not the only ones who lay in wait for the tropic birds each evening. There were also what Nickerson called the man-of-war hawks. But instead of killing the tropic birds, the hawks had what scientists call a kleptoparasitic relationship with them, pecking their backs and beating them with their wings until the tropic birds disgorged the fish that had been intended for their young. With the regurgitated food in their beaks, the hawks would fly away, “leaving,” Nickerson observed, “the young tropicbirds supperless.”

  The following day, December 24, they detected an alarming change. Nickerson noticed that the birds, “being so constantly harassed, began to forsake the island.” That evening some of the crew returned to camp complaining that they had not been able to find enough to eat. In just five'days, these twenty voracious men had exhausted their portion of the island. “Every accessible part of the mountain, contiguous to us, or within the reach of our weak enterprise,” Chase wrote, “was already ransacked, for bird's eggs and grass, and was rifled of all that they contained.”

  deep in the Desolate Region, Henderson Island had never been rich in natural resources. Scientists believe that flora and fauna originally spread to the islands of the Pacific from the luxuriant margins of Southeast Asia, and Henderson is more than nine thousand miles from this source. Making it even more difficult for life to reach this isolated outcropping of coral is the direction of the prevailing winds and currents. Like the men of the Essex, birds and plant species had to fight their way upwind and upstream to reach Henderson. Moreover, the island is south of the Tropic of Capricorn, a relatively cool band of water that acts as a further barrier to the spread of tropical species. As a result, Henderson has always been a difficult place for man to live.