In the Heart of the Sea

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Crevecoeur records, “I was much surprised at the disagreeable smell which struck me in many parts of the town; it is caused by the whale oil and is unavoidable; the neatness peculiar to these people can neither remove or prevent it” (p. 111). The smell apparently emanated from right-whale oil as opposed to sperm oil; see Clifford Ashley's The Yankee Whaler (p. 56). Owen Chase in his narrative of the Essex disaster claims that the upperworks of the Essex were entirely overhauled prior to her leaving in the summer of 1819. William H. Macy describes ships being coppered in Nantucket Harbor (p. 14). On the life span of a whaleship, see In Pursuit of Leviathan by Davis et al. (p. 240). Roger Hambidge, shipwright at Mystic Seaport, spoke to me about the phenomenon of iron sickness inwhaleships and stated that twenty years was about the average life of a ship, a statement corroborated by the statistical analysis in Davis et al. (p. 231). Obed Macy's concerns about the condition of whaleships is in a January 1822 entry in his journal. A listing of Nantucket vessels and their owners in 1820 has Gideon Folger and Sons as owning both the Essex and the Aurora (NHA Collection 335, Folder 976).

  William Comstock makes the derogatory remark concerning Nantucket Quakers in The Life of Samuel Comstock (pp. 39-40), where he also speaks of the owners' tendency to underprovision their ships (p. 73). Davis et al. have calculated the return on investment shipping agents typically received in New Bedford (In Pursuit of Leviathan, p. 411); Nantucket owners in the boom year of 1819 were undoubtedly reaping a similar, if not higher, profit. The description of poor economic times on the mainland is in the New Bedford Mercury (June 4. 1819), which quotes from an article in the Baltimore Federal Republi-

  can. The comings and goings of the Nantucket whaling fleet can he traced in Alexander Starbuck's History of Nantucket (pp. 428-33).

  William H. Macy speaks of the “grand plaza of Nantucket” (p. 15) and how the island's boys would taunt the green hands (p. 21). William F. Macy defines “watching the pass” (p. 140); he also defines “foopaw” (p. 126), “rantum scoot” (p. 134), “manavelins” (p. 131), and the idiom used to describe someone who is cross-eyed (p. 121). William Comstock tells of the whittling code on Nantucket (Voyage to the Pacific, p. 68). More than fifty years earlier, Crevecoeur remarked on the Nantucketers' almost compulsive need to whittle: “[T]hey are never idle. Even if they go to the market-place, which is (if I maybe allowed the expression) the coffee-house of the town, either to transact business or to converse with their friends, they always have a piece of cedar in their hands, and while they are talking, they will, as it were, instinctively employ themselves in converting it into something useful, either in making bungs or spoils for their oil casks, or other useful articles” (p. 156). Joseph San-som tells of how everyone on the island used sea phrases (Crosby, p. 143). A sampling of the unique pronunciations of Nantucketers is recorded in “Vocabulary of English Words, with the corresponding terms as used by the Whalemen” in The Life of Samuel Comstock (p. 57).

  The green hand Addison Pratt tells of how he was examined by the shipowner and the captain (p. 12); William H. Macy speaks of how the owners and captains judged the men by their eyes and build (p. 19). William Comstock tells of green hands whose ignorance led them to insist on the longest lay possible (Voyage to the Pacific, pp. 11-12). William H. Macy explains how first-time captains were the lowest in the pecking order in finding a crew (p. 19).

  I have used the time frame described by Nickerson to calculate when the Essex was floated over the Nantucket Bar. Pratt provides a detailed description of the loading of a Nantucket whaleship during this period (p. 13). According to Richard Henry Dana, “The average allowance1, in merchant vessels, is six pounds of bread a week, and three quarts of water, and one pound and a half of beef, or one and a quarter of pork, a day, to each man” (The Seaman's Friend, p. 135). William H. Macy tells of how a whaleship was always full, whether it was with provisions or oil (pp. 33-34).

  It is difficult to determine exactly how many whaleboats the Essex was originally equipped with since Nickerson and Chase seem to dis-

  agree on the subject. She had a minimum of two spare hoats; that it wasn't uncommon for a ship of this period to have three spares is indicated by Comstock. “Two spare boats, placed on a frame over head, shaded the quarter deck, while another, placed on spars which projected over the stern, was ready to be cleared at a moment's warning” (Voyage to the Pacific, p. 14).

  Pratt describes taking a packet from Boston to Nantucket (p. 11). According to James and Lois Horton, there were three African American communities in Boston at this time: the “black” section of Beacon Hill in West Boston (where the Museum of Afro-American History is now located); to the north in the area now occupied by the Massachusetts General Hospital; and near the wharves of the North End. The Hortons say that the North End neighborhood “had once been the largest black neighborhood in the city,” but was losing ground to the other areas as of 1830 (pp. 4-5). In Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, there is a black cook whose wife lives on Robinson's Alley (between Hanover and Unity streets) in the North End (pp. 179-80). For a summary discussion of the relative equality enjoyed by blacks on shipboard, see W. Jeffrey Bolster's Blackjacks (pp. 1-6). James Freeman provides the 1807 description of how blacks had replaced Indians as a workforce in the Nantucket whale fishery (Crosby, p. 135). Comstock tells of the harsh treatment of African Americans in The Life of Samuel Comstock (pp. 37-38). William H. Macy claims that the packet delivering green hands from New York to Nantucket was commonly referred to as “the Slaver” (pp. 9,17).

  William F. Macy defines gam as a “social visit and talk. Originally this term was applied to a school of whales, and its use by the whalemen is doubtless derived from that source. Whaleships meeting at sea often hove to, and the captains would visit back and forth during the time the ships were in company. Under certain conditions the crews were allowed the privilege also” (p. 126). At the onset of his voyage, the green hand narrator of William H. Macy's There She Blows! feels “that pride in my floating home springing up within me, which every seaman feels for his vessel” (p. 36). According to Ashley, a sailor's mattress, filled with either corn husks or straw, was called a “Donkey's Breakfast” (p. 54). On August 16, 1819 (four days after the Essex left Nantucket), Obed Macy recorded: “The grasshoppers have destroyed the greater part of the turnips”; he also mentions them in September. Information concerning the Chilicom.es from Starbuck (p. 432).

  chapter two: Knockdown

  The letter written by the Essex owners to Captain Daniel Russell is at the NHA. The marriage of George Pollard and Mary Riddell (June 17, 1819) is recorded in the Church Records of the South Congregational (now Unitarian) Church on Nantucket, as are the marriages of Owen Chase (the first mate of the Essex) and Peggy Gardner (on April 28, 1819) and Matthew Joy (second mate) andNancySlade (August?, 1817). Curiously, the minister was paid $2.00 for Joy's marriage, $1.50 for Chase's, and $1.25 for Pollard's.

  For a description of the division of duties among a ship's officers while weighing anchor, see Richard Henry Dana's Seaman's Friend (pp. 139-40). Information on Captain Pollard's appearance comes from Joseph Warren Phinney's “Nantucket, Far Away and Long Ago,” in Historic Nantucket (p. 29), with notes by his granddaughter Diana Taylor Brown, to whom I am grateful for providing me with a copy of Phinney's original manuscript. Owen Chase's appearance is based on information in the crew list of the Florida (his first ship after the Essex): “five feet, ten inches tall, dark complexioned and brown haired” (Heffernan, p. 120). In the Nantucket Registry of Deeds Grantee Book 22 (p. 262), Owen Chase's father, Judah, is listed as a “husbandman.” Owen Chase's remarks concerning the number of voyages required to become a commander are from his narrative, as are all subsequent quotations attributed to him. While Chase claimed it took just two voyages to qualify to be a captain, the evidence suggests that four was the usual minimum number of voyages (Stuart Frank, personal communication, Oct. 25, 1999). Clifford Ashley, in The Yankee Whaler, describes the use of a whaler's
windlass (pp. 49-50), as does Falconer in his Marine Dictionary.

  Reuben Delano, in The Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano, speaks of the dramatic sea change that occurred among the officers once a Nantucket whaleship left the island (p. 14). William Comstock defines “spit-fire” in The Life of Samuel Comstock (p. 71);he also tells of how Nantucketers stuck together aboard a whaleship (p. 37). William H. Macy describes the competition among the officers when it came to picking whaleboat crews (p. 39); he also speculates that Noah may have been the first captain to address his crew (p. 40). Pratt's comments about blacks being relegated to the forecastle of a Nantucket whaleship is in his Journals (pp. 14-15). Richard Henry Dana tells of his preference for the forecastle in Two Years Before the Mast (p. 95).

  W. Jeffrey Bolster speaks of “yarning” and other activities in the forecastle in Black Jacks (pp. 88-89).

  William H. Macy describes the seasickness cure common among Nantucketers (p. 19). My thanks to Don Russell, a descendant of Essex captain Daniel Russell, who mentioned to me a family tradition concerning this same cure. According to Ashley, the lookouts positioned themselves inside hoops installed on the fore and main royal-masts chest-high above the crosstrees (p. 49). However, at this relatively early period in the fishery, there is no evidence of hoops having been installed on the masts of Nantucket whaleships. In Voyage to the Pacific, Comstock writes: “Two jack cross trees were made by the captain, and placed over the top gallant heads, one at the fore, the other at the main. One man was stationed on each, to look out for whales, and relieved every two hours. One of the boatsteerers was kept continually aloft with the man on the main top gallant cross trees, so that while one watched, the other covertly slept” (p. 20).

  My discussion of studding sails and the knockdown is based largely on John Harland's invaluable Seamanship in the Age of Sail. According to Harland, the danger of dipping a studding-sail boom into the water even applied to a topgallant studding sail. Darcy Lever's 1819 seamanship guide provides a detailed and illustrated description of taking in studding sails (pp. 82-83); he also has a section entitled “A Ship on Her Beam Ends” (pp. 96-97). Benjamin Franklin's chart of the Gulf Stream is in Everett Crosby's Nantucket in Print (pp. 88-89). According to Harland, when shortening sail,” [t]he most lofty, and the most cumbersome sail was got off first, ideally before the squall hit. Studdingsails (particularly topgallant and lower)... were particularly at risk if the ship were caught unprepared” (p. 222). The naval saying concerning squalls is in Harland (p. 221), as are the other quoted sources.

  Harland discusses what happens as a heeling ship approaches the point of no return. “[W]ith greater angles, the righting arm increases rapidly with the angle up to about 45 degrees, after which it decreases and at a certain critical angle, disappears” (p. 43). In his nautical dictionary Falconer provides this definition of “beam-ends”: “A ship is said to be on her beam-ends when she inclines very much on one side, so that her beams approach to a vertical position; hence also a person lying down is said to be on his beam-ends.” Addison Pratt tells of a knockdown off Cape Horn: “[W]e were knocked down upon our beam-ends by a heavy squall of wind. All hands were called to reduce sail, as the

  decks... were nearly perpendicular, the leescuppers being knee deep under water. All the way we could get fore and aft was by holding onto the weather rail, the vessel was pitching heavily and the night being very dark” (p. 17). My thanks to Chuck Gieg, who shared with me his personal experience of a knockdown on the training ship Albatross in the 1960s (the basis for the movie White Squall). Harland discusses the perils of a ship sailing backward (pp. 70,222).

  chapter three: FirstBlood

  The American Consul at Maio in the Cape Verde Islands may have known the Essex's second mate. Both Ferdinand Gardner and Matthew Joy were from Nantucket families that had moved to Hudson, New York, the improbable location of a Nantucket-spawned whaling port started in the aftermath of the Revolution.

  My description of a whale hunt is based on many accounts, but primarily those provided by William H. Macy, Clifford Ashley, Willits Ansel in The Whaleboat, and the remarkable amount of information assembled in the “Whaleboat Handbook” used by the Mystic Seaport Whaleboat demonstration staff. My thanks to Mary K. Bercaw for making the handbook available to me. The description of how the sighting of a whale “enlivened” the crew is from Charles Nordhoff's Whaling and Fishing (p. 100). Ansel speaks of the roles of the different oarsmen (p. 26) and the relative speeds of awhaleboat and a sperm whale (pp. 16-17). Ashley tells of whaleboat crews bent on “whaling for glory”: “They raced and jockeyed for position, and in a close finish, with boats jammed together at the flank of a whale, have been known deliberately to foul one another; to dart harpoons across each other's boats, imperiling both the boats and the lives of all concerned, and then to ride blithely off, fast to the whale, waving their hands or thumbing noses to their unfortunate comrades struggling in the water” (p. 110). Comstock recounts the mate's exhortation to his whaleboat crew in Voyage to the Pacific^. 23-24). In “Behavior of the Sperm Whale,” Caldwell, Cald-well, and Rice record a whaleman's observation that the spoutof awhale smelled “fetid” and stung a man's skin (p. 699). Ansel relates Charles Beetle's account of a novice boatsteerer fainting at the prospect of harpooning a whale (p. 21).

  According to Clifford Ashley, who shipped out on a whaling voyage in the early twentieth century, sperm whales were capable of dragging

  whaleboats along at bursts of up to twenty-five miles per hour. He adds, “I have been in motor speed boats at better than forty-five miles per hour, and found it a tame performance after a 'Nantucket Sleighride'“ (p. 80).

  Francis Olmsted describes the use of a spade to cripple a fleeing sperm whale (p. 22). The lance had a line attached to the end of it, enabling the mate to retrieve it after every throw (Ashley, p. 87). Caldwell et al. speak of dying whales vomiting “pieces of squid the size of whale-boats” (p. 700). Enoch Cloud's horrified response to the death of a whale occurred during a voyage in the 1850s and is in Enoch's Voyage (p. 53). Ansel speaks of dead whales being towed back to the ship headfirst (p. 23).

  In his History, Obed Macy provides a step-by-step description of cutting up (including the removal of the head) and boiling a whale (pp. 220-24). According to Clifford Ashley, early cutting stages were “short fore-and-aft planks hung overside, one forward and one aft of the gangway” (The Yankee Whaler, p. 97). Just how greasy the deck of a whale-ship could become is indicated by Charles Nordhoff: “The oil washes from one side to the other, as the ship lazily rolls in the seaway, and the safest mode of locomotion is sliding from place to place, on the seat of your pantaloons” (p. 129); Nordhoff also describes the stench of the try-works smoke. Davis et al. speak of ambergris (In Pursuit of Leviathan. pp. 29-30). According to Obed Macy, “The ambergris is generally discovered by probing the intestines with a long pole” (p. 224). Although whalemen would soon be pioneering the folk art of scrimshaw by carving designs on the teeth of sperm whales, it is highly unlikely that the crew of the Essex in 1819 were saving their whales' teeth (Stuart Frank, personal communication, July 1999). J. Ross Browne recounts the “murderous appearance” of a whaleship at night (p. 63). William H. Macy gives the description of appropriate “trying-out clothes” (p. 80).

  Richard Henry Dana tells of how a crew's morale can deteriorate in Two Years Before the Mast (p. 94). For a discussion of the differences in shipboard fare served to those in the cabin and the forecastle, see Sandra Oliver's Saltwater Foodways (pp. 97-99,113). Oliver provides the information concerning the average caloric intake of a sailor in the nineteenth century (p. 94). Moses Morrell was the green hand who lamented his gradual starvation aboard a Nantucket whaleship; his journal is at the NHA. If Pollard appears to have overreacted to his

  men's complaints about food, it was nothing compared to the response of Captain Worth aboard the Globe: “When any man complained to Captain Worth that he was suffering with hunger, he would tell him to
eat iron hoops; and several times gagged the complainants' mouths with pump-bolts” (Life of Samuel Comstock, p. 73).

  chapter four: The Lees of Fire

  Captain Bligh abandoned his attempt to round Cape Horn after thirty days (the time it took the whaleship Essex to double the Horn); that the decision was made under extreme duress is made clear by Sir John Barrow: “[T]he ship began to complain, and required pumping every hour; the decks became so leaky that the commander was obliged to allot the great cabin to those who had wet berths” (p. 41). David Porter tells of rounding the Horn in his Journal (p. 84). Although the Beaver was the first Nantucket whaleship to enter the Pacific, the Emilia, a British ship captained by James Shield, was the first whaler to round the Horn in 1788 (Slevin, p. 52).

  Captain Swain's words about the scarcity of whales are cited in Edouard Stackpole's The Sea-Hunters (p. 266). Obed Macy's mention of the need for a new whaling ground was recorded on September 28, 1819; his journal also reveals that he followed the political situation in South America closely.

  Robert McNally characterizes the whalemen's attitude toward whales as a “tub of lard” in So Remorseless a Havoc (p. 172). Charles Nordhoff refers to the old whalemen's delight in trying out (p. 131), while William H. Macy speaks of how “boiling” inspired thoughts of home (p. 87). The events that occurred on Nantucket in December 1819 are from Obed Macy's journal. William H. Macy testified to how long it took for mail to reach the Pacific: “[N]ews from home even a year old was heartily welcomed; while the advent of a whaler five or six months out was a perfect windfall” (p. 154). For an account of the discovery of the Offshore Ground, see Stackpole (pp. 266-67).