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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser speak of the effects of a “tormenting memory” and cite William James's reference to the San Francisco earthquake in “Disaster: Effects on Mental and Physical State” (pp. 443-44). Hilde Bluhm in “How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps” speaks of the importance of self-expression in promoting psychic survival (p. 10). John Leach, in Survival Psychology, refers to activities such as Lawrence's creation of a piece of twine as “tasking,” which he defines as “the breaking down of the person's aim or purpose into simple tasks so that life can be handled one step at a time” (p. 152); he refers to one subject who dealt with a particularly long-term situation by making himself “a rudimentary set of golf clubs and wooden balls” (p. 153).

  My discussion of navigation is based in large part on J. B. Hewson's A History of the Practice of Navigation, especially his chapter on navigation by latitude and dead reckoning (pp. 178-225). Francis Olmsted

  in Incidents of a Whaling Voyage also provides an interesting account of navigation on a whaleship (pp. 43-44). My thanks to Donald Treworgy of Mystic Seaport for sharing his expertise with me; according to Treworgy in a personal communication: “If Pollard of the Essex did not learn to work a lunar until the next voyage, it seems very unlikely that he would have had a chronometer for doing a time sight in 1819. Marine chronometers in 1819 were still handmade, costly and not always reliable.” According to Obed Macy, who speaks of Nantucket's whaling captains' being “lunarians” in his History, by the 1830s the island's whaleships were “generally furnished with chronometers” (p. 218). On Captain Bligh's remarkable feat of navigation in an open boat, see Bounty's Launch (pp. 24, 60-61).

  In his History Obed Macy tells how the crew of the Union tied their two whaleboats together (p. 233). In Survive the Savage Sea, Dougal Robertson recounts how his wooden sailing yacht was rammed repeatedly and sunk by several killer whales. Robert Pitman and Susan Chivers describe how a pod of killer whales attacked and killed a sperm whale in “Terror in Black and White,” Natural History, December 1998 (pp. 26-28). The description of Chase's dissection of a tortoise is based, in parr. on Dougal Robertson's detailed account of cutting up a green turtle (p. 109).

  Chase calls the conditions they experienced on December 8 as a “perfect gale.” Dean King's^f Sea of Words defines gale as a “wind of an intensity between that of a strong breeze and a storm. In the 19th century, it was more precisely denned as blowing at a speed of between 28 and 55 nautical miles per hour. In a gale, the waves are high with crests that break into spindrift, while in a strong gale the crests topple and roll and dense streaks of foam blow in the wind” (p. 202). Richard Hub-bard's Boater's Bowditch: The Small Craft American Practical Navigator includes a table that puts the theoretical maximum of waves with unlimited fetch in Force 9 (41-47 knots) at40feet(p. 312). William Van Dorn's Oceanography and Seamanship also includes a useful table thai indicates the rate of sea state growth as a function of wind speed and duration (p. 189).

  John Leach speaks of the “perceptual narrowing” that occurs in th-e aftermath of a disaster (p. 124), a factor that undoubtedly contribu: to the Essex survivors' unswerving commitment to their original plan, even though heading for the Society Islands remained a possibility throughout the first month after the sinking.

  chapter eight: Centering Down

  The best accounts of the sufferings of the people aboard the Medusa raft are from two of the survivors, J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard, in Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal; see also Alexander McKee's Death Haft. W. J. McGee's analysis of the sufferings of Pablo Valencia in the southwestern Arizona desert appears in his now famous article, “Desert Thirst as Disease.”

  My description of gooseneck barnacles is based on information provided by James Carlton, Director of the Williams-Mystic Program at Mystic Seaport (personal communication, October 1998). For a description of how the crustaceans are commonly eaten, see the Epicuri-ous Dictionary (http://www2.condenet.com). My thanks to James McKenna on the faculty of the Williams-Mystic Program for providing me with detailed information on why some portions of the Pacific support less life than others (personal communication, March 23, 1999). M. F. Maury's chart indicating the “Desolate Region” appears in plate five of his Wind and Current Charts.

  Willits Ansel, in The Whaleboat, tells how to clench a nail (pp. 88-89). W. Jeffrey Bolster discusses the “blacks' spiritual leadership” aboard a ship in Blackjacks (p. 125); he also recounts the story of the black cook's praying for the deliverance of a whaleship. My description of how Quakers “centered down” is based on Arthur Worr all's Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (pp. 91-95). For an excellent summary of the effects of starvation on disaster victims, see John Leach's Survival Psychology (pp. 87-99). Throughout their narratives, Chase and Nickerson occasionally contradict themselves concerning the amount of water and, especially, bread rations. In this and other chapters I have assumed that the downward progression of their daily rations of bread was from six ounces to three ounces and, finally (after leaving Henderson Island), to one and a half ounces, while the daily water ration remained at half a pint.

  chapter nine: The Island

  For an account of the Nantucketer Mayhew Folger's “discovery” of Pitcairn Island, see Greg Dening's Mr. Bligh's Bad Language (pp. 307-38) and Walter Hayes's The Captain from Nantucket and the Mutiny on the Bounty (pp. 41-47). To this day, Pitcairners rely on miro and tau

  wood harvested at Henderson to produce the wood carvings they sell to tourists; see Dea Birkett's Serpent in Paradise for a description of i modern-day wood-collecting voyage from Pitcairn to Henderson (pp. 81-96). From 1991 to 1992, a team of scientists under the aegis of the Sir Peter Scott Commemorative Expedition to the Pitcairn Islands se: up abase camp on the north heach of Henderson Island-almost exacdv where the Essex survivors landed more than 170 years earlier. The scientists flew to Tahiti, then sailed the two thousand miles to Henderscc on a chartered yacht. Supplies of food and water were shipped in every three months from Auckland, New Zealand. I have relied heavily on the book the expedition produced, The Pitcairn Islands: Biogeograpky, Ecology and Prehistory, edited by Tim Benton and Tom Spencer, for information about Henderson Island.

  The presence of a “fresh water lens” beneath a coral island is discussed in William Thomas's “The Variety of Physical Environments Among Pacific Islands” in Man's Place in the Island Ecosystem: A Symposium, edited by F. R. Fosberg (pp. 26-27). Thomas Heffernan cites Robert McLoughlin's account of the medical examination of the skeletons on Henderson Island in Stove by a Whale (pp. 84-85). The behavior between the man-of-war hawks and tropic birds can still be observe! on Henderson Island. See ]. A. Vickery and M. De L. Brooke's “Tt-r Kleptoparastic Interactions Between Great Frigatebirds and Maskei Boobies on Henderson Island, South Pacific” in The Condor. Althoagr a great frigatebird is another name for a man-of-war hawk, a masked boobie is a different species from a tropic bird, the kind of bird Nickerson claimed to have seen on Henderson.

  T. G. Benton and T. Spencer describe how flora and fauna spread throughout the Pacific Islands in “Biogeographic Processes at the limits of the Indo-West Pacific Province” in The Pitcairn Islands (pp 44). My account of human habitation on Henderson is indebte: Spencer and T. G. Benton's “Man's Impact on the Pitcairn Islands” 11 * 375-76) and Marshall Weisler's “Henderson Island Prehistory: Cc-k-nization and Extinction on a Remote Polynesian Island,” also in The Pit-cairn Islands (pp. 377-404). In “Obesity in Samoans and a Perspectwt on Its Etiology in Polynesians,” in The American Journal of'Clinical'_>»-trition, Stephen McGarvey writes:

  Polynesian settlement required long ocean voyages into prevailing trade winds and unknown waters. The sailors on these

  early voyages of indeterminate length and unclear destinations may have experienced a significant risk of starvation and death when on-board food supplies dwindled and ceased. Overweight individuals and/or those with efficient metabolisms, presumably mediated by
hyperinsulinemia, may have better survived such voyages because of their large store of energy reserves in the form of adipose tissue... Surviving sailors of these discovery voyages and, thus, the first settlers may have been those able to use and store food energy efficiently, perhaps via thrifty-genotype mechanisms, (p. 1592S)

  McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern-day Samoans are characterized by “massive adiposity and high prevalence of obesity.” See also his article “The Thrifty Gene Concept and Adiposity Studies in Biological Anthropology.” When it comes to the men in the Essex whaleboats, McGarvey postulates in a personal communication (May 11,1999) that the health and nutrition of the men before the whale attack, not any racial or genetic predisposition, were the primary factors influencing their ability to survive. The statistics concerning the relative life spans of black and white infants are from Barbara M. Dixon's Good Health for African Americans (p. 27).

  Pollard's public letter left on Henderson was quoted from in the Sydney Gazette (June 9,1821). Other accounts claim that Owen Chase also left a letter; one source says it was addressed to his wife, another to his brother. As extra protection, Pollard placed the letters in a small lead case before putting them in a wooden box nailed to the tree.

  chapter ten: The Whisper of Necessity

  Statistical information on wind directions in trade-wind zones comes from William Thomas's “The Variety of Physical Environments Among Pacific Islands,” in Man's Place in the Island Ecosystem, edited by F. R. Fosberg (p. 31). My thanks to the Nantucket Quaker expert Robert Leach for providing me with information on Matthew Joy's background (personal communication, May 28, 1998). According to Aaron Paddack's letter (based on Pollard's account and at the NHA): “Matthew P. Joy (second officer) died through debility & costiveness.”

  The findings of the Minnesota starvation experiment are contained in the two-volume Biology of Human Starvation, by Ancel Keys et al. A

  readable summary and analysis of the findings are contained in Harold Guetzkow and Paul Bowman's Men and Hunger: A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers, a guide still in use today. The term “stomach masturbation” is referred to by Hilde Bluhm in “How Did They Survive?” (p. 20). Guetzkow and Bowman speak of starvation and “so-called American characteristics” in Men and Hunger (p. 9).

  One example of the claims made for dehydration and starvation as a “natural and quite tolerable” way to die can be found on the Web site http://www.asap-care.com/fluids.htm: “Dehydration and starvation have proven to be very tolerable while dying. This is easy to understand because people have been dying comfortably for thousands of years without artificial tube feedings and fluid supports... [These] are natural events that should be allowed to occur when death is imminent, not fought relentlessly and avoided at any and all costs.”

  chapter eleven: Games of Chance

  Chase's narrative and Aaron Paddack's letter disagree slightly concerning the timing of events on Pollard's and Hendricks's boats after their separation from Chase. Since Paddack wrote his letter on the nigh: of Pollard's rescue after listening to the captain's own account, I have taken it to be a more reliable source concerning the sequence of events on these two boats.

  The reference to survival cannibalism at sea being so widespread in the nineteenth century is from Brian Simpson's Cannibalism and thf Common Law (p. 121). The second canto of Byron's Don Juan, published in the summer of 1819, illustrates the attitudes and assumptions of the time:

  lxvi

  -Tis thus with people in an open boat, They live upon the love of life, and bear More than can be believed, or even thought, And stand like rocks the tempest's wear and tear; And hardship still has been the sailor's lot, Since Noah's ark went cruising here and there...

  lxvii

  But Man is a carnivorous production, And must have meals, at least one meal a day:

  He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction, But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey; Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way, Your laboring people think beyond all question, Beef, veal, and mutton, better for digestion.

  lxviii And thus it was with our hapless crew...

  The most comprehensive treatment of the Nottingham Galley is contained in a scholarly edition of Kenneth Roberts's novel Boon Island. I have used Captain Dean's earliest edition of his narrative published in 1711, reprinted in Donald Wharton's In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives, 1610-1766 (pp. 153-55). Edward Leslie's Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors contains an excellent discussion of the Nottingham Galleywreck, along with other famous incidences of maritime cannibalism, including the Essex disaster. Also see chapter five, “The Custom of the Sea,” in Simpson's Cannibalism and the Com-monLaw (pp. 95-145).

  Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner's Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest provides a detailed analysis of how much meat an average human would provide (pp. 34-35), as does Stanley Garn and Walter Block's “The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism,” in American Anthropologist (p. 106). In The Biology of Human Starvation, Ancel Keys et al. cite autopsies of starvation victims in which “adipose tissues contained no cells with fat globules” (p. 170); they also cite information on the percentage weight losses of the organs of starvation victims (p. 190). My thanks to Beth Tornovish and Tim Lepore for their estimates of the amount of meat and calories the Essex starvation victims would have provided. For a modern-day survivalist's guide to cannibalism (complete with a diagram of a human body indicating the preferred cuts of meat and even a list of recipes), see Shiguro Takada's Contingency Cannibalism: Superhard-core Survivalism 's Dirty Little Secret.

  According to P. DeurenbergetaL, in “Body Mass Index and Percent Body Fat: A Meta Analysis Among Different Ethnic Groups,” in the International Journal of Obesity, “Blacks have lower body fat for the same

  Body Mass Index (BMI) compared to Caucasians” (pp. 1168-69). For accounts of the Donner Party and the increased survival rates of the women relative to the men, see George Stewart's Ordeal by Hunger and Joseph King's Winter of Entrapment. Another example of women outlasting men in a starvation situation is found in Ann Saunders's account of her ordeal after the ship on which she was a passenger (along with only one other woman) became disabled on its way from New Brunswick to Liverpool in 1826. After twenty-two days in the rigging of the waterlogged ship, the six survivors (all of whom resorted to cannibalism) included the two women passengers. In addition to a physiological advantage, Pollard's age may have given him an attitudinal edge when it came to long-term survival. According to John Leach, “Those under twenty-five suffer because they have not yet learned to conserve energies. They have difficulty pacing themselves for the long haul... [P]assivity does not come naturally to youth” (Survival Psychology. p. 172). '

  Both Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance (pp. 205-9) and John Leach in Survival Psychology speak of Shackleton's unique ability to embody different leadership styles. According to Leach, Shackletonwas “a rare man who was capable of both types of leadership. He was clearly a dominant character capable of decisive initial leadership while possessing an incredible degree of perseverance” (p. 141). Frank Worsley makes the comments concerning Shackleton's sensitivity to his men in Shackleton's Boat Journey (pp. 169-70).

  In Biology of Starvation, Keys provides a summary of the physiological effects of starvation that includes a poor tolerance to cold temperatures and a darkening of the skin, particularly about the face (pp. 827-28). Brian Simpson, in Cannibalism and the CommonLaw, tells of the “belief that cannibalism, once practiced, easily becomes a habit” (p. 149). Guetzkow and Bowman speak of how semistarvation had “coarsened” the men in the Minnesota experiment (p. 32). David Harrison's account of the sufferings aboard the Peggy appears in Donald Whar-ton's/ra the Trough of the Sea (pp. 259-77); although the sailors claimed that the black slave was picked to be killed by lottery, Captain Harrison had “some strong suspici
ons that the poor Ethiopian was not altogether treated fairly; but on recollection, I almost wondered that they had given him even the appearance of an equal chance with themselves” (p. 269). Herbert Bloch describes “modern feral communities” in “The Personality of Inmates of Concentration Camps” (p. 335). Hilde Bluhm

  in “How Did They Survive?” refers to the inmate who spoke of “killing” his feelings (p. 8); Bluhm also quotes from the female prisoner who took on a “savage cunning” in order to survive in the death camps (p. 22). While living with the Ihalmiut in the Northwest Territory, Farley Mowatt learned the vital importance of fat to a people living on an all-meat diet. In People of the Deer he writes, “an eternal craving for fat is part of the price of living on an all-meat diet” (p. 85).

  The first recorded instance of drawing lots in a survival situation at sea was published in 1641; see Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law (pp. 122-23). The description of David Flatt's reaction to his death sentence aboard the Peggy is told by Harrison (Wharton, pp. 271-76). See also H. Bluestone and C. L. McGahee's “Reaction to Extreme Stress: Impending Death by Execution.” My thanks to Friends Robert Leach and Michael Royston for their insights regarding Quakerism's stand on gambling and killing (personal communication, June 3,1998). Leach also provided me with information regarding the Quaker background of George Pollard (personal communication, May 22, 1998). R. B. Forbes, in the pamphlet Loss of the Essex, Destroyed by a Whale, refers to how the men aboard the Polly fished for sharks with people's body parts (pp. 13-14). My account of the drawing of lots and execution of Owen Coffin is based not only on testimonies from Pollard (as recorded by George Bennet, in Heffernan [p. 215]), Chase, and Nickerson but also on a letter Nickerson wrote to Leon Lewis dated October 27, 1876 (at the NHA). In the letter Nickerson claims that Pollard was Coffin's executioner, which contradicts his own account in the narrative, where he says that it was Ramsdell who shot Coffin. Since other accounts claim it was Ramsdell, I have assumed that Nickerson was mistaken in the letter.