In the Heart of the Sea

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  That afternoon, a school of flying fish surrounded the three whale-boats. Four of the fish hit the sails of Chase's boat. One fell at the first mate's feet and, instinctively, he devoured it whole, scales and all. As the rest of the crew scrambled for the other three fish, Chase found himself inclined to laugh for the first time since the sinking of the Essex at “the ludicrous and almost desperate efforts of my five companions, who each sought to get a fish.” The first mate might insist on the disciplined sharing of the bread and water, but a different standard prevailed when it came to windfalls such as flying fish-then, it was every man for himself.

  The next day the wind dropped to almost nothing, and Chase proposed that they eat their second tortoise. As had happened eleven days earlier, the “luxuriant repast... invigorated our bodies, and gave a fresh flow to our spirits.” Over the next three days, the wind remained light. The temperature climbed and the men languished beneath a cloudless sky. “[H]aving no way of screening ourselves from [the sun's] piercing rays,” Nickerson wrote, “our suffering became most intolerable as our short allowance of water was barely enough to support life.”

  On Wednesday, December 13, the wind sprang out of an unexpected direction-the north-bringing with it “a most welcome and unlocked for relief.” It was now possible to steer directly for South America. Their noon observation revealed that they had barely reached latitude 21° south, putting them at least five degrees (or three hundred nautical miles) from the band of light variable winds that they hoped would propel them east. But the officers chose to believe that they had “run out of the trade-winds, and had got into the variables, and should, in all probability, reach the land many days sooner than we expected.”

  When the northerly breeze vanished the following day, they were devastated: “But alas! Our anticipations were but a dream, from which we shortly experienced a cruel awaking.” The men's gloomy reflections grew even darker as the calm persisted for three more days, baking them beneath a blinding, unyielding sun: “The extreme oppression of the weather, the sudden and unexpected prostration of our hopes, and the consequent dejection of our spirits, set us again to thinking, and rilled our souls with fearful and melancholy forebodings.”

  By December 14, the twenty-third day since leaving the Essex, they were rapidly approaching their deadline for reaching the variables. But they were stuck in a calm, with hundreds of miles still to go to the south. If they were to have any hope of reaching the coast alive, their provisions would have to last them considerably longer than sixty days. Chase announced to his men that he was cutting their rations of hardtack in half, to only three ounces a day. He studied his crew carefully, looking for any signs of resistance. “No objections were made to this arrangement,” Chase reported. “ [A]ll submitted, or seemed to do so, with an admirable fortitude and forbearance.”

  Even though their supply of water was in even greater danger of running out, Chase had no alternative but to maintain their daily ration at half a pint. “ [Our] thirst had become now incessantly more intolerable than our hunger,” he wrote, “and the quantity then allowed was barely sufficient to keep the mouth in a state of moisture, for about one third of the time.”

  In 1906, W. J. McGee, Director of the St. Louis Public Museum, published one of the most detailed and graphic descriptions of the ravages of extreme dehydration ever recorded. McGee's account was based on the experiences of Pablo Valencia, a forty-year-old sailor-turned-prospector, who survived almost seven days in the Arizona desert without water. The only liquid Valencia drank during his ordeal was the few drops of moisture he was able to extract from a scorpion and his own urine, which he collected each day in his canteen.

  The men of the Essex were driven to similar extremes. “In vain was every expedient tried to relieve the raging fever of the throat,” Chase recalled. They knew that drinking saltwater would only worsen their condition, but this did not stop some of them from attempting to hold small quantities of it in their mouths, hoping that they might absorb some of the moisture. It only increased their thirst. Like Valencia, they drank their urine. “Our suffering during these calm days,” Chase wrote, “almost exceeded human belief.”

  The Essex survivors had entered what McGee describes as the “cotton-mouth” phase ofthirst. Saliva becomes thick and foul-tasting; the tongue clings irritatingly to the teeth and the roof of the mouth. Even though speech is difficult sufferers are often moved to complain ceaselessly about their thirst until their voices become so cracked and hoarse that they can speak no more. A lump seems to form in the throat, causing the sufferer to swallow repeatedly in a vain attempt to dislodge it. Severe pain is felt in the head and neck. The face feels full due to the shrinking of the skin. Hearing is affected, and many people begin to hallucinate.

  Still to come for the Essex crew were the agonies of a mouth that has ceased to generate saliva. The tongue hardens into what McGee describes as “a senseless weight, swinging on the still-soft root and striking foreignly against the teeth.” Speech becomes impossible, although sufferers are known to moan and bellow. Next is the “blood sweats” phase, involving “a progressive mummification of the initially living body.” The tongue swells to such proportions that it squeezes past the jaws. The eyelids crack and the eyeballs begin to weep tears of blood. The throat is so swollen that breathing becomes difficult, creating an incongruous yet terrifying sensation of drowning. Finally, as the power of the sun inexorably draws the remaining moisture from the body, there is “living death,” the state into which Pablo Valencia had entered when McGee discovered him on a desert trail, crawling on his hands and knees:

  [H]is lips had disappeared as if amputated, leaving low edges of blackened tissue; his teeth and gums projected like those of a skinned animal, but the flesh was black and dry as a hank of jerky; his nose was withered and shrunken to half its length, and the nostril-lining showing black; his eyes were set in a wink-less stare, with surrounding skin so contracted as to expose the conjunctiva, itself black as the gums... ; his skin [had] generally turned a ghastly purplish yet ashen gray, with great livid blotches and streaks; his lower legs and feet, with forearms and hands, were torn and scratched by contact with thorns and sharp rocks, yet even the freshest cuts were so many scratches in dry leather, without trace of blood.

  Thanks to their daily half pint of water, the men of the Essex had not yet reached this point-but they were deteriorating rapidly. As the sun beat down out of an empty blue sky, the heat became so intolerable that three of the men in Chase's boat decided to hang over the gunwale and cool their blistered bodies in the sea. Almost as soon as the first man dropped over the side, he shouted with excitement. The bottom of their boat was covered with what he described as small clams. He quickly pulled one off and ate it, pronouncing it a “most delicious and agreeable food.”

  Actually not clams, these were gooseneck barnacles. Unlike the whitish, cone-shaped barnacles commonly seen on dock pilings and ships, goosenecks are stalked barnacles, with a dark brown shell surrounding a fleshy, pinkish-white neck. A medieval myth claimed that once these barnacles grew to a sufficient size, they would transform themselves into geese and fly away. Today the Coast Guard uses the size of the gooseneck barnacles growing on the bottom of a derelict craft to determine how long the vessel has been at sea. They can grow to half a foot in length, but the barnacles on Chase's whaleboat were probably not much more than a few inches long.

  Soon all six men were plucking the crustaceans off the boat's bottom and popping them into their mouths “like a set of gluttons.” Gooseneck barnacles have long been considered a delicacy in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, and are farmed commercially today in the state of Washington. Connoisseurs, who eat the tubelike neck only after peeling off the outer skin, compare the taste to crab, lobster, or shrimp. The Essex men, not as discriminating, consumed everything but the shells.

  “[A]fter having satisfied the immediate craving of the stomach,” Chase wrote, “we gathered large quantities and laid them up in the boat.
” But getting the men back aboard proved a problem. They were too weak to pull themselves over the gunwale. Luckily, the three men who couldn't swim had elected to remain on the boat and were able to haul the others in. They had intended to save the uneaten goosenecks for another day. But after less than a half hour of staring at the delectable morsels, they surrendered to temptation and ate them all.

  Except for flying fish, gooseneck barnacles would be the only marine life the Essex crew would manage to harvest from the open ocean. Indeed, these twenty whalemen were singularly unsuccessful in catching the fish that castaways normally depend on for survival. Part of the problem was that their search for the band of variable winds had taken them into a notoriously sterile region of the Pacific.

  For an ocean to support life, it must contain the nutrients necessary for the production of phytoplahkton, the organism at the base of the ocean's food chain. These nutrients come from two places: the land, through rivers and streams, and from the organic material on the ocean floor. The region into which the Essex crew had now ventured was so far removed from South America that the only source of nutrients was at the bottom of the sea.

  Cold water is denser than warm water, and when the surface waters of the ocean cool in the winter months, they are replaced by the warmer water underneath, creating a mixing action that brings the nutrient-rich waters at the bottom up to the surface. In the subtropical region, however, the temperature is fairly constant throughout the year. As a result, the ocean remains permanently divided into a warm upper layer and a cold lower layer, effectively sealing off the bottom nutrients from the surface.

  Over the next few decades seamen became well aware that the waters in this portion of the Pacific were almost devoid offish and birds. In the middle of the nineteenth century Matthew Fontaine Maury compiled a definitive set of wind and current charts based largely on information provided by whalemen. In his chart of the Pacific is a vast oval-shaped area, stretching from the lower portion of the Offshore Ground to the southern tip of Chile, called the “Desolate Region.” Here, Maury indicates, “[m]ariners report few signs of life in sea or air.” The three Essex whaleboats were now in the heart of the Desolate Region. Like Pablo Valencia, they had journeyed into their very own valley of death.

  The calm continued into December 15, the twenty-fourth day of the ordeal. Despite the windless conditions, Chase's boat was taking on even more water than usual. Their search for the leak once again prompted them to pull up the floorboards in the bow. This time they discovered that a plank next to the keel, at the very bottom of the boat, had pulled loose. If they had been on the deck of the Essex, they would have simply flipped the boat over and renailed the plank. But now, in the middle of the ocean, they had no way of reaching the underside of the boat. Even Chase, whom Nickerson described as their boat's “doctor,” could not figure out a way to repair it.

  After a few moments' consideration, the twenty-one-year-old boatsteerer Benjamin Lawrence ventured a proposal. He would tie a rope around his waist and dive underwater with the boat's hatchet in his hand. As Chase hammered in a nail from the inside of the boat, Lawrence would hold the hatchet against the outside of the plank. When the tip of the nail hit the metal face of the hatchet, it would curl

  up like a fishhook and be driven back into the boat. The last blows of Chase's hammer would set the head of the nail while drawing the planks tightly together. This was known as clenching a nail and was usually performed with a tool known as a backing iron. For now, the hatchet would have to do.

  On the Essex, Lawrence's abilities as aboatsteerer had been called into question, and he had been forced to surrender the harpoon to his demanding first mate. This time, however, it was Lawrence to whom Chase and the rest of the boat-crew looked for guidance. Chase readily agreed to the plan, and soon Lawrence was in the water, pressing the hatchet up against the bottom of the boat. Just as he had predicted, the sprung plank was drawn in snug. Even Chase had to admit that it “answered the purpose much beyond our expectations.”

  The oppressive conditions continued through the next day and “bore upon our health and spirits with an amazing force and severity.” Some of the men experienced thirst-induced delusions. “The most disagreeable excitements were produced by it,” Chase commented, “which added to the disconsolate endurance of the calm, called loudly for some mitigating expedient-some sort of relief to our prolonged sufferings.” The need for action intensified when the noon observation revealed that they had drifted ten miles backward in the last twenty-four hours.

  All around them, the unruffled ocean reached out to the curved horizon like the bottom of a shiny blue bowl. Their parched mouths made talking, let alone singing hymns, difficult. The prayer meetings, alongwith their progress, ceased. That Sunday they sat silently in their boats', desperate for deliverance, knowing that back on Nantucket thousands of people were sitting on the wooden benches of the North and South Meeting Houses, waiting for God's will to be revealed.

  At worship, a Quaker sought to “center down,” shutting out all worldly cares in his attempt to find the divine spirit. When a person was moved to speak, he chanted in a peculiar way-a kind of half-singing, half-sobbing that could break into more natural speech. Although only a few of the Essex crew were active Quakers, all of the Nantucketers had, at one time or another, attended a meeting. The protocol and rhythms of a Friends meeting were part of their shared cultural heritage.

  Up until this point, it had been the African Americans, specifically the sixty-year-old Richard Peterson, who had led the men in prayer. This was not uncommon at sea. White sailors often looked to blacks and their evangelical style of worship as sources of religious strength, especially in times of peril. In 1818, the captain of a ship about to go down in a North Atlantic gale beseeched the black cook, a member of New Bedford's Baptist church, to seek the Lord's help on the crew's behalf. The cook knelt down on the tossing deck and “prayed most fervently for God to protect and save us from the dreadful, raging storm.” The ship survived.

  But that afternoon, it was Pollard who was finally moved to speak beneath the punishing sun. His voice ravaged by dehydration, he proposed in a halting rasp that they attempt to row their way out of the calm. Each man would be given double rations during the day, and then that night they would row “until we should get a breeze from some quarter or other.”

  All readily agreed to the proposal. At last, after days of being stuck as if pinned to a place in the ocean, with nothing to distract them from their thirst and hunger, they had something to prepare for. They ate the bread-and felt every sublimely refreshing drop of water seep into their cracked and shriveled mouths. They looked forward to the night ahead.

  Under normal circumstances, rowing was a task that helped define each man's worth on a whaleship. Each crew took pride in its ability to row effortlessly, for hours at a time, and nothing made the men happier than passing another boat. But that night any flickering of those competitive fires was soon extinguished. Though in their teens and twenties, they rowed like old men-wincing and groaning with every stroke. For the last three weeks, their bodies had been consuming themselves. Without any natural padding to cushion their bones, they found the simple act of sitting to be a torture. Their arms had shrunk to sticks as their muscles withered, making it difficult to hold, let alone pull, the oars. As man after man collapsed in a slumped heap, it became impossible to continue.

  “[W]e made but a very sorry progress,” Chase remembered. “Hunger and thirst, and long inactivity, had so weakened us, that in three hours every man gave out, and we abandoned the further prosecution of the plan.” Air rattled in their desiccated throats and lungs as they lay panting in the boats. Despite the raging heat of their bodies, their thin papery skin was without a hint of perspiration. Gradually the noise of their breathing ebbed, and they were once again deafened by the forbidding silence of a windless and empty ocean.

  The next morning they detected a change-a rustling of the water and a movement across t
heir faces as, for the first time in five days, a light breeze poured out across the sea. Even though it was from precisely the wrong direction (southeast), the men welcomed it “with almost frenzied feelings of gratitude and joy.”

  By noon it was blowing a gale. The wind had veered into the east-southeast, and once again, they were forced to take in all sail and lower the masts. The next day the wind moderated, and soon their sails were pulling them along. Despite the improvement in the weather, that night proved to be, Chase-recalled, “one of the most distressing nights in the whole catalogue of our sufferings.”

  They now knew that even if the wind did miraculously shift into the west, they no longer had enough water to last the thirty or more days it would take to sail to the coast of Chile. Their physical torments had reached a terrible crescendo. It was almost as if they were being poisonedby the combined effects of thirst and hunger. A glutinous and bitter saliva collected in their mouths that was “intolerable beyond expression.” Their hair was falling out in clumps. Their skin was so burned and covered with sores that a splash of seawater felt like acid burning on their flesh. Strangest of all, as their eyes sunk into their skulls and their cheekbones projected, they all began to look alike, their identities obliterated by dehydration and starvation.

  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.