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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  But no matter how grim their prospects might seem, they were better than those of Hendricks's boat-crew. “Without a compass or a quadrant, Hendricks and his men were now lost in an empty and limitless sea.

  On February 6, the four men on Pollard's boat, having consumed “the last morsel” of Samuel Reed, began to “[look] at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds,” according to one survivor, “but we held our tongues.” Then the youngest of them, sixteen-year-old Charles Ramsdell, uttered the unspeakable. They should cast lots, he said, to see who would be killed so that the rest could live.

  The drawing of lots in a survival situation had long been an accepted custom of the sea. The earliest recorded instance dates back to the first half of the seventeenth century, when seven Englishmen sailing from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts were driven out to sea in a storm. After seventeen days, one of the crew suggested that they cast lots. As it turned out, the lot fell to the man who had originally made the proposal, and after lots were cast again to see who should execute him, he was killed and eaten.

  In 1765, several days after the crew of the disabled Peggy had eaten the remains of the black slave, lots were drawn to see who would be the next to serve as food. The lot fell to David Flatt, a foremastman and one of the most popular sailors in the crew. “The shock of the decision was great,” wrote Captain Harrison, “and the preparations for execution dreadful.” Flatt requested that he be given some time to prepare himself for death, and the crew agreed to postpone the execution until eleven the next morning. The dread of his death sentence proved too much for Flatt. By midnight he had become deaf; by morning he was delirious. Incredibly, a rescue ship was sighted at eight o'clock. But for David Flatt it was too late. Even after the Peggy's crew had been delivered to England, Harrison reported that “the unhappy Flatt still continued out of his senses.”

  Drawing lots was not a practice to which a Quaker whaleman could, in good conscience, agree. Friends not only have a testimony against killing people but also do not allow games of chance. Charles Ramsdell, the son of a cabinetmaker, was a Congregationalist. However, both Owen Coffin and Barzillai Ray were members of Nantucket's Friends Meeting. Although Pollard was not a Quaker, his grandparents had been, and his great-grandmother, Mehitable Pollard, had been a minister.

  Faced with similarly dire circumstances, other sailors made different decisions. In 1811, the 139-ton brig Polly, on her way from Boston to the Caribbean, was dismasted in a storm, and the crew drifted on the waterlogged hull for 191 days. Although some of the men died from hunger and exposure, their bodies were never used for food; instead, they were used as bait. Attaching pieces of their dead shipmate's bodies to a trolling line, the survivors managed to catch enough sharks to sustain themselves until their rescue. If the Essex crew had adopted this strategy with the death of Matthew Joy, they might never have reached the extreme that confronted them now.

  When first presented with young Ramsdell's proposal, Captain Pollard “would not listen to it,” according to an account related by Nickerson, “saying to the others, 'No, but if I die first you are welcome to subsist on my remains.'“ Then Owen Coffin, Pollard's first cousin, the eighteen-year-old son of his aunt, joined Ramsdell in requesting that they cast lots.

  Pollard studied his three young companions. Starvation had ringed their sunken eyes with a dark, smudgelike pigmentation. There was little doubt that they were all close to death. It was also clear that all of them, including Barzillai Ray, the orphaned son of a noted island cooper, were in favor of Ramsdell's proposal. As he had two times before-after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream and the sinking of the Essex-Pollard acquiesced to the majority. He agreed to cast lots. If suffering had turned Chase into a compassionate yet forceful leader, Pollard's confidence had been eroded even further by events that reduced him to the most desperate extreme a man can ever know.

  They cut up a scrap of paper and placed the pieces in a hat. The lot fell to Owen Coffin. “Mylad,mylad!”Pollardcriedout. “[I]f you don't like your lot, I'll shoot the first man that touches you.” Then the captain offered to take the lot himself. “Who can doubt but that Pollard would rather have met the death a thousand times,” Nickerson wrote. “None that knew him, will ever doubt.”

  But Coffin had already resigned himself to his fate. “I like it as well as any other,” he said softly.

  Lots were drawn again to see who would shoot the boy. It fell to Coffin's friend, Charles Ramsdell.

  Even though the lottery had originally been his idea, Ramsdell now refused to follow it through. “For a long time,” Nickerson wrote, “he declared that he could never do it, but finally had to submit.” Before he died, Coffin spoke a parting message to his mother, which Pollard promised to deliver if he should make it back to Nantucket. Then Coffin asked for a few moments of silence. After reassuring the others that “the lots had been fairly drawn,” he lay his head down on the boat's gunwale. “He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would later recall, “and nothing of him left.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the Eagle'sShadow

  CHASE AND HIS MEN lay in the bottom of their boat in a cold drizzle. All they had to shield them from the rain was a piece of tattered, water-soaked canvas. “Even had it been dry,” Nickerson wrote, “ [it] would have been but a poor apology for covering.”

  On January 28,1821, the breeze finally shifted into the west. But it brought them little comfort. “It had nearly become indifferent to us,” Chase wrote, “from what quarter it blew.” They now had too far to go and too few provisions to have any hope of reaching land. Their only chance was to be sighted by a ship. “[I]t was this narrow hope alone,” Chase remembered, “that prevented me from lying down at once to die.”

  They had fourteen days of hardtack left, but that assumed they could live two more weeks on only an ounce and a half a day. “We were so feeble,” Nicker son wrote, “that we could scarcely crawl about the boat upon our hands and knees.” Chase realized that if he didn't increase their daily portion-of bread, they all might be dead in as few as five days. It was time to abandon the strict rationing regime that had brought them this far and let the men eat “as pinching necessity demanded.”

  Success in a long-term survival situation requires that a person display an “active-passive” approach to the gradual and agonizing unfolding of events. “The key factor... [is] the realization that passivity is itself a deliberate and 'active' act,” the survival psychologist John Leach writes. “There is strength in passivity.” After more than two months of regimenting every aspect of his men's lives, Chase intuitively understood this-that it was now time to give “ourselves wholly up to the guidance and disposal of our Creator.” They would eat as much bread as they needed to stave off death and see where the westerly wind took them.

  By February 6 they were still alive, but just barely. “Our sufferings were now drawing to a close,” the first mate wrote. “ [A] terrible death appeared shortly to await us.” The slight increase in food intake had brought a return to their hunger pangs, which were now “violent and outrageous.” They found it difficult to talk and think clearly. Dreams of food and drink continued to torment them. “ [O]ften did our fevered minds wander to the side of some richly supplied table,” Nickerson remembered. His fantasies always ended the same way-with him “crying at the disappointment.”

  That night, rain squalls forced them to shorten sail. The off-islander Isaac Cole was on watch, and rather than awaken his companions, he attempted to lower the jib himself. But it proved too much for him. Chase and Nickerson awoke the next morning to find Cole despondent in the bilge of the boat. He declared that “all was dark in his mind, not a single ray of hope was left for him to dwell upon.” Like Richard Peterson before him, he had given up, asserting that “it was folly and madness to be struggling against what appeared so palpably to be our fixed and settled destiny.”

  Even, though he barely had the strength to articulate the words, Chase did his best to change Cole's mind. “
I remonstrated with him as effectually as the weakness both of my body and understanding would allow of.” Suddenly Cole sat up and crawled to the bow and hoisted the jib he had lowered, at such cost, the night before. He cried out that he would not give up and that he would live as long as any of them. “ [T]his effort was,” Chase wrote, “but the hectic fever of the moment.” Cole soon returned to the bottom of the boat, where he lay despairing for the rest of the day and through the night. But Cole would not be permitted the dignity of a quiet and peaceful death.

  On the morning of February 8, the seventy-ninth day since leaving the Essex, Cole began to rant incoherently, presenting to his frightened crew members “a most miserable spectacle of madness.” Twitching spasmodically, he sat up and called for a napkin and water, then fell down to the bottom of the boat as if struck dead, only to pop up again like a possessed jack-in-the-box. By ten o'clock he could no longer speak. Chase and the others placed him on a board they had laid across the seats and covered him with a few pieces of clothing.

  For the next six hours, Cole whimpered and moaned in pain, finally falling into “the most horrid and frightful convulsions” Chase had ever seen. In addition to dehydration and hypernatremia (an excess amount of salt), he may have been suffering from a lack of magnesium, a mineral deficiency that, when extreme, can cause bizarre and violent behavior. By four o'clock in the afternoon, Isaac Cole was dead.

  It had been forty-three days since they'd left Henderson Island, seventy-eight days since they'd last seen the Essex, but no one suggested-at least that afternoon-that they use Cole's body for food. All night the corpse lay beside them, each man keeping his thoughts to himself.

  When the crew of the Peggy shot and killed a black slave in 1765, one of the men refused to wait for the meat to be cooked. “ [B] eing ravenously impatient for food,” the sailor plunged his hand into the slave's eviscerated body and plucked out the liver and ate it raw. “The unhappy man paid dear for such an extravagant impatience,” Captain Harrison wrote, “for in three days after he died raving mad.” Instead of eating that sailor's body, the crew, “being fearful of sharing his fate,” threw it overboard. No one dared to consume the flesh of a man who had died insane.

  The next morning, February 9, Lawrence and Nickerson began making preparations for burying Cole's remains. Chase stopped them. All night he had wrestled with the question of what they should do. With only three days of hardtack left, he knew, it was quite possible that they might be reduced to casting lots. Better to eat a dead shipmate-even a tainted shipmate-than be forced to kill a man.

  “I addressed them,” Chase wrote, “on the painful subject of keeping the body for food.” Lawrence and Nickerson raised no objections and, fearful that the meat had already begun to spoil, “ [we] set to work as fast as we were able.”

  After separating the limbs from the body and removing the heart, they sewed up what remained of Cole's body “as decently” as they could, before they committed it to the sea. Then they began to eat. Even before lighting a fire, the men “eagerly devoured” the heart, then ate “sparingly of afewpieces of the flesh.” They cut the rest of the meat into thin strips-some of which they roasted on the fire, while the others were laid out to dry in the sun.

  Chase insisted that he had “no language to paint the anguish of our souls in this dreadful dilemma.” Making it all the worse was the thought that any one of the remaining three men might be next. “We knew not then,” the first mate wrote, “to whose lot it would fall next, either to die or be shot, and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.”

  The next morning they discovered that the strips of flesh had turned a rancid green. They immediately cooked the strips, which provided them with enough meat to last another six or seven days, allowing them to save what little bread they had left for what Chase called “the last moment of our trial.”

  In captain Pollard's boat, on February 11, only five days after the execution of Owen Coffin, Barzillai Ray died. Ray, whose biblical first name means “made of iron, most firm and true,” was nineteen years old. It was the seventh death George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell had witnessed in the month and a half since departing Henderson Island.

  Psychologists studying the phenomenon of battle fatigue during “World War II discovered that no soldiers-regardless of how strong their emotional makeup might be-were able to function if their unit experienced losses of 75 percent or more. Pollard and Ramsdell were suffering from a double burden; not only had they seen seven of nine men die (and even killed one of them), but they had been forced to eat their bodies. Like Pip, the black sailor in Moby-Dick who loses his mind after several hours of treading water on a boundless sea, Pollard and Ramsdell had been “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro.” Now they were alone, with only the corpse of Barzillai Ray and the bones of Coffin and Reed to sustain them.

  Three days later, on February 14, the eighty-fifth day since leaving the wreck, Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson ate the last of Isaac Cole. A week of living off human flesh, combined with their earlier decision to increase their daily ration of hardtack, had strengthened them to the point where they could once again manage the steering oar. But if they were stronger, they were also in a great deal of pain. As if the boils that covered their skin weren't enough, their arms and legs started to swell shockingly. Known as edema, this disfiguring accumulation of fluid is a common symptom of starvation.

  Several days of westerly winds had brought them to within three hundred miles of the islands of Masafuera and Juan Fernandez. If they averaged sixty miles a day, they might reach safety in another five days. Unfortunately, they had only three days of hardtack left.

  “Matters were now with us at their height,” Chase wrote. “[A]ll hope was cast upon the breeze; and we tremblingly and fearfully awaited its progress, and the dreadful development of our destiny.” Surrendering all prospects, the men were convinced that after two and a half months of suffering they were about to die nearly within sight of salvation.

  That night Owen Chase lay down to sleep, “almost indifferent whether I should ever see the light again.” He dreamed he saw a ship, just a few miles away, and even though he “strained every nerve to get to her,” she sailed off into the distance, never to return. Chase awoke “almost overpowered with the frenzy I had caught in my slumbers, and stung with the cruelties of a diseased and disappointed imagination.”

  The next afternoon, Chase saw a thick cloud to the northeast-a sure sign of land. It must be the island of Masafuera-at least that was what Chase told Lawrence and Nickerson. In two days, he assured them, they would be on dry land. At first, his companions were reluctant to believe him. Gradually, however, after “repeated assurances of the favorable appearances of things” on the part of Chase, “their spirits acquired even a degree of elasticity that was truly astonishing.” The wind remained favorable all night, and with their sails trimmed perfectly and a man tending the steering oar, their little boat made the best time of the voyage.

  The next morning the cloud still loomed ahead. The end of their ordeal was apparently only days away. But for fifteen-year-old Thomas Nickerson, the strain of anticipation had become too much. After bailing out the boat, he lay down, drew the mildewed piece of canvas over him like a shroud, and told his fellow crew members that “he wished to die immediately.”

  “I saw that he had given up,” Chase wrote, “and I attempted to speak a few words of comfort and encouragement to him.” But all the arguments that had served the first mate so well failed to penetrate Nickerson's inner gloom. “A fixed look of settled and forsaken despondency came over his face,” Chase wrote. “[H]e lay for some time silent, sullen, and sorrowful-and I felt at once... that the coldness of death was fast gathering upon him.”

  It was obvious to Chase that some form of dementia had seized the boy. Having watched Isaac Cole slip into a similar madness, Chase could not help but wonder if all of the
m were about to succumb to the temptations of despair. “[T]here was a sudden and unaccountable earnestness in his manner,” he wrote, “that alarmed me, and made me fear that I myself might unexpectedly be overtaken by a like weakness, or dizziness of nature, that would bereave me at once of both reason and life.” Whether or not it had been communicated to him through Cole's diseased flesh, Chase also felt the stirrings of a death wish as dark and palpable as the pillarlike cloud ahead.

  At seven o'clock the next morning, February 18, Chase was sleeping in the bottom of the boat. Benjamin Lawrence was standing at the steering oar. Throughout the ordeal, the twenty-one-year-old boat-steerer had demonstrated remarkable fortitude. He was the one who, two months earlier, had volunteered to swim underneath the boat to repair a sprung plank. As Lawrence had watched Peterson, Cole, and now Nicker son lose their grip on life, he had clung, as best he could, to hope.

  It was something his careworn family had become good at. His grandfather, George Lawrence, had married Judith Coffin, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. For many years the Lawrences had been part of the island's Quaker elite, but by the time Benjamin came into the world, his grandfather had suffered several financial reversals. The proud old man decided to move to Alexandria, Virginia, where, he told an acquaintance, he could “descend into a humble sphere among strangers, rather than... remain in a place where every object reminded him of his lost prosperity.” When Benjamin was ten years old, his father died during a voyage to Alexandria, leaving his wife with seven children to support.

  Safe in Lawrence's pocket was the piece of twine he had been working on ever since they'd left the wreck. It was now close to twelve inches long. He leaned into the steering oar and scanned the horizon.