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January 10 - January 15, 2022
That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined.
One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucket’s whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call “Quakers with a vengeance.”
First they saw bones—human bones—littering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat were the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered with sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates.
EVEN though it is little remembered today, the sinking of the whale-ship Essex by an enraged sperm whale was one of the most well-known marine disasters of the nineteenth century.
Of the twenty men who escaped the whale-crushed ship, only eight survived. The two men rescued by the Dauphin had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific—farther by at least 500 miles than Captain William Bligh’s epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackleton’s equally famous passage to South Georgia Island.
Then, around 1960, an old notebook was found in the attic of a home in Penn Yan, New York. Not until twenty years later, in 1980, when the notebook reached the hands of the Nantucket whaling expert Edouard Stackpole, was it realized that its original owner, Thomas Nickerson, had been the Essex’s cabin boy.
I immersed myself in the documented experiences of other whalemen from the era; I read about cannibalism, survival at sea, the psychology and physiology of starvation, navigation, oceanography, the behavior of sperm whales, the construction of ships—anything that might help me better understand what these men experienced on the wide and unforgiving Pacific Ocean.
immersed myself in the documented experiences of other whalemen from the era; I read about cannibalism, survival at sea, the psychology and physiology of starvation, navigation, oceanography, the behavior of sperm whales, the construction of ships—anything that might help me better understand what these men experienced on the wide and unforgiving Pacific Ocean.
Relentlessly acquisitive, technologically advanced, with a religious sense of its own destiny, Nantucket was, in 1821, what America would become.
In July of 1819 the Essex was one of a fleet of more than seventy Nantucket whaleships in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
NANTUCKET was a town of roof dwellers. Nearly every house, its shingles painted red or left to weather into gray, had a roof-mounted platform known as a walk. While its intended use was to facilitate putting out chimney fires with buckets of sand, the walk was also an excellent place to look out to sea with a spyglass, to search for the sails of returning ships.
Nantucketers had good reason to be superstitious. Their lives were governed by a force of terrifying unpredictability—the sea. Due to a constantly shifting network of shoals, including the Nantucket Bar just off the harbor mouth, the simple act of coming to and from the island was an often harrowing and sometimes catastrophic lesson in seamanship.
Nantucket, which means “faraway land” in the language of the island’s native inhabitants, the Wampanoag, was a mound of sand eroding into an inexorable ocean, and all its residents, even if they had never left the island, were all too aware of the inhumanity of the sea.
Every fall, hundreds of right whales appeared to the south of the island and remained until the early spring. So named because they were “the right whale to kill,” right whales grazed the waters off Nantucket much like seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, English Nantucketers had instituted a system of debt servitude that provided them with a steady supply of Wampanoag labor. Without the island’s native inhabitants, who outnumbered Nantucket’s white population well into the 1720s, the island would never have become a successful whaling port.
The sperm whale might be faster and more aggressive than the right whale, but it was far more enriching. With no other means of support, Nantucketers dedicated themselves to the single-minded pursuit of the sperm whale, and they soon outstripped their whaling rivals on the mainland and Long Island.
Living on an island that was almost the same distance from the mainland as England was from France, Nantucketers developed a British sense of themselves as a distinct and superior people, privileged citizens of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “Nation of Nantucket.”
THROUGHOUT the seventeenth century, English Nantucketers resisted all attempts to establish a church on the island, partly because a woman by the name of Mary Coffin Starbuck forbade it.
It was Mary Starbuck’s conversion to Quakerism that established the unique fusion of spirituality and covetousness that would make possible Nantucket’s rise as a whaling port.
Nantucketers took a dim view of off-islanders. They called them “strangers” or, even worse, “coofs,” a term of disparagement originally reserved for Cape Codders but broadened to include all of those unlucky enough to have been born on the mainland.
While many of the attendees were there for the good of their souls, those in their teens and early twenties tended to have other motives. No other place on Nantucket offered a better opportunity for young people to meet members of the opposite sex.
The imprinting of a young Nantucketer began at the earliest age. The first words a baby was taught included the language of the chase—“townor,” for instance, a Wampanoag word meaning that the whale has been sighted for a second time. Bedtime stories told of killing whales and eluding cannibals in the Pacific. One mother approvingly recounted how her nine-year-old son attached a fork to the end of a ball of darning cotton and then proceeded to harpoon the family cat.
In 1810 there were forty-seven fatherless children on Nantucket, while almost a quarter of the women over the age of twenty-three (the average age of marriage) had been widowed by the sea.
This mortal life decays apace How soon the bubble’s broke Adam and all his numerous race Are Vanity and Smoke.
For a whaleman and his family, it was a punishing regimen: two to three years away, three to four months at home. With their men gone for so long, Nantucket’s women were obliged not only to raise the children but also to run many of the island’s businesses. It was largely the women who maintained the complex web of personal and commercial relationships that kept the community functioning.
The islander Eliza Brock recorded in her journal what she called the “Nantucket Girl’s Song”: Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea, For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me. But every now and then I shall like to see his face, For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace, With his brow so nobly open, and his dark and kindly eye, Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh. But when he says “Goodbye my love, I’m off across the sea,” First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I’m free.
There is little doubt that intimacy—physical as well as emotional—between a wife and a husband must have been difficult to establish under the tremendously compressed circumstances of the few months available between voyages. An island tradition claims that Nantucket women dealt with their husbands’ long absences by relying on sexual aids known as “he’s-at-homes.”
Whalemen did not work for wages; they were paid a share, or lay—a predetermined portion of the total take—at the end of the voyage. This meant that whatever work a shipowner could extract from a sailor prior to a voyage was, in essence, free or, to Nickerson’s mind, “a donation of . . . labor” on the part of the sailor. A shipowner might advance a seaman some money to help him purchase the clothing and equipment necessary for the voyage, but it was deducted (with interest) from his lay at the conclusion of the voyage.
On this island of perpetual motion, job-seeking seamen were expected to whittle. It was the way a man whittled that let people know what kind of berth he expected. A whaleman with at least one voyage under his belt knew enough to draw his knife always away from him. This signaled that he was looking for a boatsteerer’s berth. Boatsteerers, on the other hand, whittled in the opposite direction, toward themselves; this indicated that they believed they were ready to become a mate. Not knowing the secret codes that Nantucketers had developed, a green hand simply whittled as best he knew how.
If someone was cross-eyed, he was “born in the middle of the week and looking both ways for Sunday.”
As they boarded the packet for Nantucket, the seven African Americans knew at least one thing: they might not be paid well for their time aboard a Nantucket whaler, but they were assured of being paid no less than a white person with the same qualifications. Since the time when Native Americans had made up the majority of Nantucket’s labor force, the island’s shipowners had always paid men according to their rank, not their color.
Even Nickerson admitted that Nantucket whaling captains had a reputation as “Negro drivers.” Significantly, Nantucketers referred to the packet that delivered green hands from New York City as the “Slaver.”
The mate of a Nantucket whaleship routinely underwent an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he left his island home, stepping out of his mild Quaker skin to become a vociferous martinet. “You will often hear a Nantucket mother boast that her son ‘who is met of a ship is a real spit-fire,’” William Comstock wrote, “meaning that he is a cruel tyrant, which on that island is considered the very acme of human perfection.”
Nantucketers had what they considered a sure-fire cure for seasickness, a treatment that more delicate mortals might have considered even worse than the malady. The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.
Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry. Use of the studding sails meant that a captain wanted to wring the last possible quarter knot of speed from his ship.
In the face of an approaching squall, there were two options: either to point the ship into the oncoming wind, to relieve the pressure on the sails by letting them luff, or to turn almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction, away from the wind, and let the storm blow the ship with it. This relieved the pressure on the forward sails as they became partially becalmed in the shelter of the after ones.
The excuse given to the crew was that with the wind now out of the northwest, it would have taken too long to return to Nantucket. Nickerson suspected that Chase and Joy had other motives. Both knew that the men had not taken kindly to their treatment by the mates. Seeing the knockdown as a bad omen, many of the sailors had become sullen and sour. If they returned to Nantucket, some of the crew would jump ship. Despite the seriousness of the loss of the whaleboats, it was not the time to return to port.
If the mate shouted, “Pull three,” only those men whose oars were on the starboard side began to row. “Pull two” directed the tub oarsman and bow oarsman, whose oars were on the port side, to row. “Avast” meant to stop rowing, while “stern all” told them to begin rowing backward until sternway had been established.
After the ship’s system of blocks and tackles hauled the head up onto the deck, the men cut a hole into the top of the case and used buckets to remove the oil. One or two men might then be ordered to climb into the case to make sure all the spermaceti had been retrieved.
Instead of seeing their prey as a fifty- to sixty-ton creature whose brain was close to six times the size of their own (and, what perhaps should have been even more impressive in the all-male world of the fishery, whose penis was as long as they were tall), the whalemen preferred to think of it as what one commentator called “a self-propelled tub of high-income lard.”
Since each whaleboat required a six-man crew, this now left only two shipkeepers whenever whales were being hunted. Two men could not safely manage a square-rigged ship the size of the Essex. If a storm should kick up, they would find it almost impossible to shorten sail. Yet Pollard, in a hurry to reach the Offshore Ground by November, had no alternative but to set out to sea shorthanded. Down a crew member and a whaleboat, the Essex was about to head out farther off the coast of South America than she had ever sailed before.
The sperm whales’ network of female-based family units resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.
The Essex had left a lasting impression on the island. When Nickerson returned to Charles years later, it was still a blackened wasteland. “Wherever the fire raged neither trees, shrubbery, nor grass have since appeared,” he reported. Charles would be one of the first islands in the Galapagos to lose its tortoise population. Although the crew of the Essex had already done its part in diminishing the world’s sperm-whale population, it was here on this tiny volcanic island that they contributed to the eradication of a species.
EVEN TODAY, in an age of instantaneous communication and high-speed transportation, the scale of the Pacific is difficult to grasp. Sailing due west from Panama, it is 11,000 miles to the Malay Peninsula—almost four times the distance Columbus sailed to the New World—and it is 9,600 miles from the Bering Strait to Antarctica.
It was a whale—a huge sperm whale, the largest they’d seen so far—a male about eighty-five feet long, they estimated, and approximately eighty tons. It was less than a hundred yards away, so close that they could see that its giant blunt head was etched with scars, and that it was pointed toward the ship. But this whale wasn’t just large. It was acting strangely. Instead of fleeing in panic, it was floating quietly on the surface of the water, puffing occasionally through its blowhole, as if it were watching them. After spouting two or three times, the whale dove, then surfaced less than
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As they pulled themselves up off the deck, Chase and his men had good reason to be amazed. Never before, in the entire history of the Nantucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship.
From the point at which the whale first attacked, to the escape from the capsizing ship, no more than ten minutes had elapsed. In only a portion of that time, spurred by panic, eight of the crew had launched an unrigged whaleboat from the rack above the quarterdeck, a process that would have normally taken at least ten minutes and required the effort of the entire ship’s crew. Now, here they were, with only the clothes on their backs, huddled in the whaleboat. It was not yet ten in the morning.
Pollard stood at the steering oar, staring at the capsized hulk that had once been his formidable command, unable to speak. He dropped down onto the seat of his whaleboat, so overcome with astonishment, dread, and confusion that Chase “could scarcely recognize his countenance.” Finally Pollard asked, “My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?” Chase’s reply: “We have been stove by a whale.”
Whales also use clicking signals to communicate over distances of up to five miles. Females tend to employ a Morse code-like series of clicks, known as a coda, and male sperm whales make slower, louder clicks called clangs. It has been speculated that males use clangs to announce themselves to eligible females and to warn off competing males.
On the morning of November 20, 1820, sperm whales were not the only creatures filling the ocean with clicking sounds; there was also Owen Chase, busily nailing a piece of canvas to the bottom of an upturned whaleboat. With every blow of his hammer against the side of the damaged boat, Chase was unwittingly transmitting sounds down through the wooden skin of the whaleship out into the ocean. Whether or not the bull perceived these sounds as coming from another whale, Chase’s hammering appears to have attracted the creature’s attention.
