AS CHASE’S men lay immobilized by hunger in the bottom of their boat, yet another member of Hendricks’s crew died. This time it was Isaiah Sheppard, who became the third African American to die and be eaten in only seven days. The next day, January 28—the sixty-eighth day since leaving the wreck—Samuel Reed, the sole black member of Pollard’s crew, died and was eaten. That left William Bond in Hendricks’s boat as the last surviving black in the Essex’s crew. There was little doubt who had become the tropic birds and who had become the hawks.
