In the Heart of the Sea

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Francis Olmsted's description of the delights of Atacames (pp. 161-63) includes an interesting account of a chapel: “Down the sides of the altar, the drippings of sperm candles used in the service, had run like the stalactites of some subterranean cavern” (p. 171).

  As far as I know, this is the first time that the name of the deserter,

  Henry Dewitt, has appeared in print. The name is recorded in a crew list that seems to have been written down soon after Pollard left on his subsequent voyage in the fall of 1821 (Pollard is listed as “Capt. Two Brothers”). The list includes all twenty of the previously known Essex crew members plus “Henry De Wit-runaway” (NHA Collection 64, Scrap-book 20). In his discussion of the number of shipkeepers aboard the Beaver in 1791, Clifford Ashley makes the claim that “two men would have been insufficient to handle” a ship of 240 tons (p. 60).

  William H. Macy records the unique pronunciation of Galapagos (p. 167). Colnett's account of his explorations in the Pacific include a diagram of how to cut up a sperm whale that Obed Macy would use in his History; Colnett describes the Galapagos as a sperm-whale nursery (A Voyage to... the South Pacific Ocean, p. 147). My summary of Hal Whitehead's observations of sperm-whale society are taken from his articles “Social Females and Roving Males” and “The Behavior of Mature Male Sperm Whales on the Galapagos Islands Breeding Grounds.” Wbitehead did not see whales copulating in the Galapagos grounds. “That we never saw copulation is not surprising,” he writes. “Although there are reports in the literature of sperm whales being observed copulating, these reports are few, somewhat contradictory, and not always convincing” (p. 696). Whitehead cites a description made by A. A. Berzin of a male approaching a female from underneath (p. 694).

  The account of repairing a leak on the Aurora is in Stackpole's The Sea-Hunters (pp. 305-6). According to Reginald Hegarty, “Sea-boring worms could not penetrate metal but if a small piece of copper was accidentally torn off, quite a section of sheathing would soon be so honeycombed that it would wash off, taking more copper with it. The planking would then be exposed and in a short time a section of planking would have its strength eaten away” (p. 60). For an exhaustive description of how leaks were repaired on wooden vessels, see Harland (pp. 303-4).

  Herman Melville's description of the Galapagos appears in “The Encantadas” (p. 126). On the tortoise's cool body temperature, see Charles Townsend's “The Galapagos Tortoises” (p. 93); Townsend alsc speaks of “Port Royal Tom” (p. 86). For a summary of the history of the post office on Charles Island, see Slevin's “The Galapagos Islands” (pp. 108-11). Charles Townsend records that “the terrapin on Charles Island were exterminated very early” (p. 89).

  chapter five: The Attack

  My description of the scale of the Pacific Ocean is based largely on Ernest Dodge's Islands andEmpires (p. 7); see also Charles Olson's Call Melshmael, especially his concluding chapter “Pacific Man” (pp. 113-19). For an account of the whalers' activities in the western Pacific in the early nineteenth century, see Stackpole's Sea-Hunters (pp. 254-56). Hezekiah Coffin's death in the vicinity of Timor is referred to in Mary Hayden Russell's journal of a whaling voyage; after mentioning the island of “Ahoyna,” she writes: “ [Here] your dear Father in a former voyage had the misfortune to hury his Mate, Hezekiah Coffin, andwherehe only escap'd the jaws of death himself (NHA Collection 83). For the islands listed in Pollard's copy of Bowditch's Navigator, see Heffernan's Stove by a Whale (pp. 243-46). Stackpole tells of the first whalers at Hawaii and the Society Islands in The Sea-Hunters (pp. 275-89).

  William Comstock's description of a mate taking over the harpoon from his hoatsteerer is in Voyage to the Pacific (pp. 24-25). Nickerson's narrative claims that Chase was at the steering oar-not, as Chase claims, at the bow with the harpoon in his hand-during their last two attempts to fasten to whales. In this instance I have decided to trust Chase's account, although the possibility exists that he was, in fact, at the steering oar and that the ghostwriter introduced an error. Adding to the uncertainty is an earlier statement Chase makes in his narrative: “There are common sailors, boat-steerers, andharpoon-ers: the last of these is the most honorable and important. It is in this station, that all the capacity of the young sailor is elicited; on the dexterous management of the harpoon, the line, and the lance, and in the adventurous positions which he takes alongside of his enemy, depends almost entirely the successful issue of his attack” (p. 17). Contrary to what Chase states in this passage, it was the boatsteerer who threw the harpoon and the mate or boatheader (never called a har-pooner, a term used instead to describe the boatsteerer) who was considered the “most honorable and important.” This maybe, once again, a case of the ghostwriter's confusing the assigned roles in a whaleboat, but for the purposes of this narrative I have taken it to be Chase's description of the role he created for himself on his whaleboat: a mate who threw both the harpoon and the lance and directed the boatsteerer from the bow.

  Other whalemen, however, thought differently. An old Nantucket captain in William H. Macy's There She Blows! states: “We have all heard of the Essex affair... I remember it well, for I was cruising on Chili at that time in the Plutarch, and from the statements of the survivors, it is plain enough that the whale went to work deliberately and with malice prepense, as the lawyers would say, to destroy the ship” (p. 133).

  My description of how the Essex was constructed is based on several sources. John Currier in “Historical Sketch of Ship Building on the Merrimac River” claims that ships constructed in Amesbury at the time of the Essex were “built almost entirely of oak; their decks alone being of native white pine. The ribs, planking, ceiling, beams and knees were cut from oak timber, floated down the river or drawn by ox teams from within a radius of ten or fifteen miles” (p. 34). My thanks to Roger Ham-bidge and Ted Kaye of Mystic Seaport for directing me to a specifications list of the whaleship Hector in Albert Cook Church's Whale Ships and Whaling (pp. 174-79). Thanks also to Mark Starr at the Shipyard Documentation Office of Mystic Seaport for providing me with the specifications of the Charles W. Morgan. I also relied on Reginald Hegarty's Birth of a Whaleship.

  My thanks to Professor Ted Ducas of the Physics Department at Wellesley College for speaking to me about the physics of whales in general and the wreck of the Essex in particular. My thanks also to Peter Smith, a naval architect at Hinckley Yachts, who calculated the potential forces involved in a collision between an 80-ton whale and a 238-ton ship, and the strength of a whaleship's construction (personal communications, December 18 and 23,1998).

  chapter six: The Plan

  In Survival Psychology, John Leach writes of the apathy that commonly affects survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, known as the “recoil period” (pp. 24-37, 129-134). In “Disaster: Effects of Mental and Physical State,” Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser discuss the reluctance of survivors to leave the scene of a disaster (p. 444). Concerning whaleboats in the early nineteenth century, Erik Ronnberg, Jr., states, “Depictions of boats from this period-in the form of paintings, lithographs, and logbook sketches-make it clear that rowing was the usual if not exclusive form of propulsion. Those sources that do show whaleboats under sail indicate that the sprit rig was most favored and

  the boats were guided with a steering oar with no rudder in evidence. This compounded by the lack of a centerboard, would have severely handicapped the boats' abilities to sail to windward; indeed, this rig and steering configuration would be efficient only in the pursuit of whales downwind” (To Build a Whaleboat, p.l). As Ronnberg also points out, these early boats were of clinker or lapstrake construction, not the batten-seam construction that typified boats in later years. Instead of being white (as were almost all whaleboats by the middle of the nineteenth century), the Essex boats were probably quite colorful-perhaps dark blue and red, the color of the ship's flag; see Ansel (p. 95).

  Caleb Grain's “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels” contains an excellent
synopsis of early-nineteenth-century accounts of Marquesan cannibalism and homosexuality (p. 30). For a discussion of the kinds of stories about native cannibalism that were told by the seamen of the era, see Gananath Obeyesekere's “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Figi: Seamen's Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. There was also a disturbing racial aspect to the rumors of cannibalism that sailors swapped in the forecastles of whaleships. A Maori chief from New Zealand who had been brought to London in 1818 insisted that “black men had a much more agreeable flavor than white” (in Tannahill's Flesh and Blood, p. 151). Suggesting that this was accepted as a fact among Nantucket whalemen was the experience of Captain Benjamin Worth off the coast of New Zealand in 1805. Worth told of how when a gale threatened to drive his ship ashore, the blacks in the crew begged him to do everything he could to make for open ocean since “the natives preferred Negro flesh to that of the white man” (in Stack-pole's The Sea-Hunters, pp. 399-400). The officers of the Essex were between voyages when the stories about the peaceful state of the natives of Nukahivah appeared in the New Bedford Mercury (April 28, 1819). Melville's statement about the Essex crew's decision “to gain a civilized harbor” is part of the comments he wrote in the back pages of his own copy of Chase's narrative, a transcript of which is included in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (pp. 978-95). Ernest Dodge in Islands and Empires speaks of the gigantic royal mission chapel in Tahiti, built in 1819, the same year the Essex left Nantucket (p. 91).

  Obed Macy's remarks about the Nantucketers' intimate knowledge

  of the sea is in his History (p. 213). Such was not, apparently, the case when it came to the landmasses of the world. William Comstock recounts an incident that reveals just how geographically ignorant a Nantucketer could be. At one point the officer of a Nantucket whaleship “very honestly desired to be informed whether England was on the continent, or' stood alone by itself,' and on being answered by another officer that it was in the County of Great Britain, wanted to know how far it was from London” (The Life of Samuel Comstock, p. 57). If a whaleman could be this vague about an island with which Nantucket had always had a close commercial connection, it is little wonder that the men of the Essex were without any information concerning the islands of the Central Pacific. For a detailed drawing of the launch Captain Bligh and his men sailed to the island of Timor, see A. Richard Mansir's edition of Bligh's The Journal of Bounty's Launch.

  Leach in Survival Psychology discusses the differences between authoritarian and social leaders (p. 140), while Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance: Survival at the Extremes speaks of the different personality types required in what he calls the escape and survival periods following a disaster (pp. 210-11). The analysis of a career first mate versus a “fishy” man is based on William H. Macy's words about the first mate Grafton, whom Macy describes as a “man of rather thoughtful cast of mind, of much intelligence, and possessed of an extensive stock of information upon many subjects, with a habit of generalizing and a clearness of expression which rendered him an agreeable companion to all with whom he came in contact. Though a good whaleman, Grafton [the first mate] was not what is known to the connoisseur as a 'fishy man'“ (pp. 44-45). John Leach in Survival Psychology writes about the importance family connections take on during a disaster (p. 156), as well as the relationship of strong leadership to survival (p. 139).

  chapter seven: At Sea

  See Ronnberg's To Build a Whaleboat for an excellent analysis of the difficulties of sailing an early-nineteenth-century whaleboat (pp. 1-4). Concerning the sound made by a clinker-style whaleboat, Clifford Ashley writes in The Yankee Whaler: “[T]he name [of clinker] was formed in imitation of the sound made by the boat while going through water. I have frequently noted this in a clinker-built tender. As the whale

  the boats were guided with a steering oar with no rudder in evidence. This compounded by the lack of a centerboard, would have severely handicapped the boats' abilities to sail to windward; indeed, this rig and steering configuration would be efficient only in the pursuit of whales downwind” (To Build a Whaleboat, p.l). As Ronnberg also points out, these early boats were of clinker or lapstrake construction, not the batten-seam construction that typified boats in later years. Instead of being white (as were almost all whaleboats by the middle of the nineteenth century), the Essex boats were probably quite colorful-perhaps dark blue and red, the color of the ship's flag; see Ansel (p. 95).

  Caleb Grain's “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels” contains an excellent synopsis of early-nineteenth-century accounts of Marquesan cannibalism and homosexuality (p. 30). For a discussion of the kinds of stories about native cannibalism that were told by the seamen of the era, see Gananath Obeyesekere's “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Figi: Seamen's Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. There was also a disturbing racial aspect to the rumors of cannibalism that sailors swapped in the forecastles of whaleships. A Maori chief from New Zealand who had been brought to London in 1818 insisted that “black men had a much more agreeable flavor than white” (in TannahiU's Flesh and Blood, p. 151). Suggesting that this was accepted as a fact among Nan tucket whalemen was the experience of Captain Benjamin Worth off the coast of New Zealand in 1805. Worth told of how when a gale threatened to drive his ship ashore, the blacks in the crew begged him to do everything he could to make for open ocean since “the natives preferred Negro flesh to that of the white man” (in Stack-pole's The Sea-Hunters, pp. 399-400). The officers of the Essex were between voyages when the stories about the peaceful state of the natives of Nukahivah appeared in the New Bedford Mercury (April 28, 1819). Melville's statement about the Essex crew's decision “to gain a civilized harbor” is part of the comments he wrote in the back pages of his own copy of Chase's narrative, a transcript of which is included in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (pp. 978-95). Ernest Dodge in Islands and Empires speaks of the gigantic royal mission chapel in Tahiti, built in 1819, the same year the Essex left Nantucket (p. 91).

  Obed Macy's remarks about the Nantucketers' intimate knowledge

  of the sea is in his History (p. 213). Such was not, apparently, the case when it came to the landmasses of the world. William Comstock recounts an incident that reveals just how geographically ignorant a Nantucketer could be. At one point the officer of a Nantucket whaleship “very honestly desired to be informed whether England was on the continent, or' stood alone by itself,' and on being answered by another officer that it was in the County of Great Britain, wanted to know how far it was from London” (The Life of Samuel Comstock, p. 57). If awhaleman could be this vague about an island with which Nantucket had always had a close commercial connection, it is little wonder that the men of the Essex were without any information concerning the islands of the Central Pacific. For a detailed drawing of the launch Captain Bligh and his men sailed to the island of Timor, see A. Richard Mansir's edition of Bligh's The Journal of Bounty's Launch.

  Leach in Survival Psychology discusses the differences between authoritarian and social leaders (p. 140), while Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance: Survival at the Extremes speaks of the different personality types required in what he calls the escape and survival periods following a disaster (pp. 210-11). The analysis of a career first mate versus a “fishy” man is based on William H. Macy's words about the first mate Grafton, whom Macy describes as a “man of rather thoughtful cast of mind, of much intelligence, and possessed of an extensive stock of information upon many subjects, with a habit of generalizing and a clearness of expression which rendered him an agreeable companion to all with whom he came in contact. Though a good whaleman, Grafton [the first mate] was not what is known to the connoisseur as a 'fishy man'“ (pp. 44-45). John Leach in Survival Psychology writes about the importance family connections take on du
ring a disaster (p. 156), as well as the relationship of strong leadership to survival (p, 139).

  chapter seven: AtSea

  See Ronnberg's To Build a Whaleboat for an excellent analysis of the difficulties of sailing an early-nineteenth-century whaleboat (pp. 1-4). Concerning the sound made by a clinker-style whaleboat, Clifford Ashley writes in The Yankee Whaler: “[T]he name [of clinker] was formed in imitation of the sound made by the boat while going through water. I have frequently noted this in a clinker-built tender. As the whale

  grew wary [later in the nineteenth century], the noise was found objectionable, and therefore a smooth-sided boat, to glide more silently upon the unsuspecting animal, was adopted” (p. 61).

  Ashley records the location of the Offshore Ground as latitude 5 ° to 10”south, longitude 105°to 125°west (p. 41). Thomas Heffernanhas identified at least seven whaleships that were in the neighborhood of the Essex at the sinking: three from Nantucket (the Governor Strong, the Thomas, and the Globe); three from New Bedford (the Balaena, the Persia, the Golconda); and one from England (the Coquette) (p. 77).

  For information on hardtack, see Sandra Oliver's Saltwater Food-ways (p. 107). The nutritional content of the hardtack rations and Galapagos tortoises, as well as the estimate of how much weight the men would lose over the course of sixty days, were determined with the help of Beth Tornovish and Dr. Timothy Lepore on Nantucket. Statistics relating to the body's water needs come from Understanding Normal and Clinical Nutrition, by Eleanor Whitney et al. (pp. 272-75). As a point of comparison, Captain Bligh set his men's initial daily rations at one ounce of bread (as opposed to six ounces for the men of the Essex) and a quarter pint (compared to ahalfpint) ofwater (Bounty's Launch, p. 36). Francis Olmstead observed that many of the crew aboard the whaleship on which he sailed had “laid in from fifty to seventy pounds of tobacco as their solace for the voyage, and will probably have to obtain a fresh supply from the captain before they return home” (pp. 83-84).