In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (National Book Award Winner)

by Nathaniel Philbrick

As noon approached, Captain Pollard shoved off in his boat to take an observation with his quadrant. They were at latitude 0 °40’ south, longitude 119 °0’ west, just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on earth.

Through the holes they chopped into the deck they were able to extract six hundred pounds of hardtack. Elsewhere they broke through the planks to find casks of freshwater—more, in fact, than they could safely hold in their whaleboats. They also scavenged tools and equipment, including two pounds of boat nails, a musket, two pistols, and a small canister of powder. Several Galapagos tortoises swam to the whaleboats from the wreck, as did two skinny hogs. Then it began to blow.

Instead of acting as a whale was supposed to—as a creature “never before suspected of premeditated violence, and proverbial for its inoffensiveness”—this big bull had been possessed by what Chase finally took to be a very human concern for the other whales. “He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered,” the first mate wrote, “and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”

TODAY, the Nantucketers’ lack of knowledge of the Pacific, an ocean in which they had been sailing for several decades, seems incredible. Since before the turn of the century, China traders from the nearby ports of New York, Boston, and Salem had been making frequent stops at not only the Marquesas but also the Hawaiian Islands on their way to Canton. While rumors of cannibalism in the Marquesas were widespread, there was plenty of readily accessible information to the contrary.

Nantucketers were suspicious of anything beyond their immediate experience. Their far-reaching success in whaling was founded not on radical technological advances or bold gambles but on a profound conservatism. Gradually building on the achievements of the generations before them, they had expanded their whaling empire in a most deliberate and painstaking manner. If new information didn’t come to them from the lips of another Nantucketer, it was suspect.

POLLARD had known better, but instead of pulling rank and insisting that his officers carry out his proposal to sail for the Society Islands, he embraced a more democratic style of command. Modern survival psychologists have determined that this “social”—as opposed to “authoritarian”—form of leadership is ill suited to the early stages of a disaster, when decisions must be made quickly and firmly. Only later, as the ordeal drags on and it is necessary to maintain morale, do social leadership skills become important.

Of the twenty crew members, nine were Nantucketers, five were white off-islanders, and six were African Americans. As captain, Pollard was given the most Nantucketers—five out of the seven men in his boat. Chase managed to get two, along with two white Cape Codders and a black. Second mate Matthew Joy, however, the Essex’s most junior officer, found himself without a single Nantucketer; instead he was given four of the six blacks.

To maintain an accurate estimate of a vessel’s position, it is necessary to keep track of both its north-to-south position, or latitude, and its east-to-west position, or longitude. A noon observation with a quadrant indicates only a craft’s latitude. If a navigator in 1820 had a chronometer—an exceptionally accurate timepiece adapted to the rigors of being stored on a ship—he could compare the time of his noon sight with the time in Greenwich, England, and calculate his longitude.

Survivors of other maritime catastrophes—most notably the Bounty’s Captain Bligh—placed in similar situations managed to navigate successfully with dead reckoning. Soon after being abandoned in the middle of the Pacific in the ship’s launch, Captain Bligh manufactured his own log line and trained his men to count the seconds as it was run out. Bligh’s estimates of their latitude and longitude proved amazingly accurate, enabling him to find the distant island of Timor, one of history’s greatest feats of navigation.

That night the officers agreed that if they should ever become separated again, no action would be taken to reassemble the convoy. Too much time was being lost trying to keep the boats together. Besides, if one of the boats either capsized or became unrepairable, there was little the other crews could do. All three boats were already overloaded, and to add any more men would result in the eventual deaths of all of them. The prospect of beating away the helpless crew of another boat with their oars was awful to contemplate, even if they all realized that each boat should go it alone. However, so strong was what Chase called “the extraordinary interest which we felt in each other’s company” that none of them would consider voluntarily separating. This “desperate instinct” persisted to such a point that, even in the midst of conditions that made simply staying afloat a full-time occupation, they “continued to cling to each other with a strong and involuntary impulse.”

On December 9, well into their third week in the open boats, they drew abreast of the Society Islands. If they had headed west, sailing along latitude 17° south, they would have reached Tahiti, perhaps in as little as a week. There were islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago that they might have sighted in less than half that time. They would have also been sailing with the wind and waves, easing the strain on the boats.

The story of the Medusa became a worldwide sensation. Two of the survivors penned an account that inspired a monumental painting by Théodore Géricault. In 1818 the narrative was translated into English and became a best-seller. Whether or not they had heard of the Medusa, the men of the Essex were all too aware of what might happen if sufficient discipline was not maintained.

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.

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.

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.

Stephen McGarvey has speculated that the people who survived these voyages tended to have a higher percentage of body fat before the voyage began and/or more efficient metabolisms, allowing them to live longer on less food than their thinner companions. (McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern-day Polynesians suffer from a high incidence of obesity.)

They had all seen how the man-of-war hawks robbed the tropic birds of their food. As conditions deteriorated on the boats, one could only wonder who of these nine Nantucketers, six African Americans, and five white off-islanders would become the hawks and who would become the tropic birds. Chappel, Wright, and Weeks decided that they did not want to find out.

For as long as men had been sailing the world’s oceans, famished sailors had been sustaining themselves on the remains of dead shipmates. By the early nineteenth century, cannibalism at sea was so widespread that survivors often felt compelled to inform their rescuers if they had not resorted to it since, according to one historian, “suspicion of this practice among starving castaways was a routine reaction.”

One hundred and eleven years later, in the middle of the Pacific, ten men of the Essex reached a similar conclusion. Two months after deciding to spurn the Society Islands because, in Pollard’s words, “we feared we should be devoured by cannibals,” they were about to eat one of their own shipmates.

Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the phenomenon of cannibalism have estimated that the average human adult would provide about sixty-six pounds of edible meat.

Two days later, on January 23—the sixty-third day since leaving the wreck—yet another member of Hendricks’s crew died and was eaten. And like Lawson Thomas before him, Charles Shorter was black. It was likely that the African Americans had suffered from an inferior diet prior to the sinking. But there may have been yet another factor at work. A recent scientific study comparing the percentage of body fat among different ethnic groups claims that American blacks tend to have less body fat than their Caucasian counterparts.

Chase’s ability to adjust his manner of leadership to the needs of his men begs comparison to one of the greatest and most revered leaders of all time, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton’s feat of delivering all twenty-seven men of his Antarctic expedition to safety has been called “the supreme epic of leadership in totally impossible circumstances.”

Shackleton’s sensitivity to the needs of his men was legendary. “So great was his care of his people,” his associate Frank Worsley wrote, “that, to rough men, it seemed at times to have a touch of the woman about it, even to the verge of fussiness.” But Shackleton was also capable of insisting on a Bligh-like discipline. On an earlier expedition, when one of the men felt his freedoms were being infringed upon, Shackleton quelled the insurrection by knocking the man to the ground. This combination of decisive, authoritative action and an ability to empathize with others is rarely found in a single leader.

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.

Even under the controlled circumstances of the 1945 Minnesota starvation experiment, the participants were aware of a distressing change in their behavior. A majority of the volunteers were members of the Church of the Brethren, and many had hoped that the period of deprivation would enhance their spiritual lives. But they found just the opposite to be true. “Most of them felt that the semi-starvation had coarsened rather than refined them,” it was reported, “and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”

Like the crew of the Peggy, the Essex survivors were no longer operating under the rules of conduct that had governed their lives prior to the ordeal; they were members of what psychologists studying the effects of the Nazi concentration camps have called a “modern feral community”—a group of people reduced to “an animal state very closely approaching ‘raw’ motivation.” Just as concentration camp inmates underwent, in the words of one psychologist, “starvation . . . in a state of extreme stress,” so did the men of the Essex live from day to day not knowing which one of them would be the next to die. Under these circumstances, survivors typically undergo a process of psychic deadening that one Auschwitz survivor described as a tendency to “kill my feelings.”

Within a feral community, it is not uncommon for subgroups to develop as a collective form of defense against the remorseless march of horror, and it was here that the Nantucketers—their ties of kinship and religion stitching them together—had an overwhelming advantage. Since there would be no black survivors to contradict the testimonies of the whites, the possibility exists that the Nantucketers took a far more active role in insuring their own survival than has been otherwise suggested.

Given the cruel mathematics of survival cannibalism, each death not only provided the remaining men with food but reduced by one the number of people they had to share it with.

Unfortunately, even though this portion may have been roughly equivalent to each man’s share of a Galapagos tortoise, it lacked the fat that the human body requires to digest meat. No matter how much meat they now had available to them, it was of limited nutritional value without a source of fat.

ON FEBRUARY 6, the four men on Pollard’s boat, having consumed “the last morsel” of Samuel Reed, began to “[look] at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds,” according to one survivor, “but we held our tongues.” Then the youngest of them, sixteen-year-old Charles Ramsdell, uttered the unspeakable. They should cast lots, he said, to see who would be killed so that the rest could live.

Drawing lots was not a practice to which a Quaker whaleman could, in good conscience, agree. Friends not only have a testimony against killing people but also do not allow games of chance.

They cut up a scrap of paper and placed the pieces in a hat. The lot fell to Owen Coffin. “My lad, my lad!” Pollard cried out. “[I]f you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.” Then the captain offered to take the lot himself. “Who can doubt but that Pollard would rather have met the death a thousand times,” Nickerson wrote. “None that knew him, will ever doubt.” But Coffin had already resigned himself to his fate. “I like it as well as any other,” he said softly.

requires that a person display an “active-passive” approach to the gradual and agonizing unfolding of events. “The key factor . . . [is] the realization that passivity is itself a deliberate and ‘active’ act,” the survival psychologist John Leach writes.

THE narratives of shipwreck survivors are filled with accounts of captains refusing to take castaways aboard. In some instances the officers were reluctant to share their already low supply of provisions; in others they were fearful the survivors might be suffering from communicable diseases. But as soon as Chase explained that they were from a wreck, the Indian’s captain immediately insisted that they come alongside.

Rescue came at latitude 33 °45’ south, longitude 81 °03’ west. It was the eighty-ninth day since Chase and his men had left the Essex, and at noon they came within sight of Masafuera. Chase had succeeded in navigating them across a 2,500-mile stretch of ocean with astonishing accuracy. Even though they had sometimes been so weak that they could not steer their boat, they had somehow managed to sail almost to within sight of their intended destination. In just a few days the Indian would be in the Chilean port of Valparaiso.

The crew of the Constellation was so profoundly moved by the sufferings of Chase and his men that each sailor donated a dollar toward their assistance. When this was combined with money collected from the American and British residents of Valparaiso, the Essex survivors had more than $500 to help defray the costs of their convalescence.

But the men’s sufferings were not yet over. As the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment discovered in 1945, the recovery period was a torturous part of the ordeal. After three months, the Minnesota volunteers still had not returned to their normal weights, even though some were consuming more than five thousand calories a day. They would eat until their stomachs could not take any more, yet they still felt hungry. Many would continue to eat between meals. It wasn’t until after six months of “supernormal eating” that they had regained the bodies they had once possessed.

Of the anguish each of these two experienced, Pollard’s was perhaps the greater. A year and a half earlier, his aunt had entrusted him with the care and protection of her oldest son, Owen. Pollard had not only presided over his cousin’s execution but had eaten his flesh, thus participating in what one historian of cannibalism at sea has called the taboo of “gastronomic incest.”

The Surry’s crew discussed what to do next. They might have to return the following day for the other two men. But Chappel refused to abandon his two shipmates even temporarily. With a rope tied around his waist, he dove into the water and swam back over the coral to the beach. One at a time, the three of them were pulled out to the boat. They suffered many cuts and bruises from the reef, but all made it to the Surry alive.

THE only Essex crew members not accounted for were the three men—Obed Hendricks, Joseph West, and William Bond—in the second mate’s boat, which separated from Pollard’s on the night of January 29. Months later, long after Captain Raine had searched Ducie Island, the atoll to the east of Henderson, another ship touched down there. The crew discovered a whaleboat washed up on the brittle shore, with four skeletons inside. In 1825 the British navy captain Frederick William Beechey, who visited both Ducie and Henderson Islands, made the connection between this ghostly vessel of bones and the lost Essex boat. If this was indeed the second mate’s whaleboat and the skeletons belonged to Hendricks, West, Bond, and perhaps Isaiah Sheppard, the last of the crew to die before the separation from Pollard, then it had drifted for more than a thousand miles, finally coming to rest within a day’s sail of where it had started on December 27, 1820.

The community of Nantucket was overwhelmed as well. Obed Macy, the meticulous keeper of Nantucket’s historical record, chose not to mention the disaster in his journal. Although articles quickly appeared about the Essex in the New Bedford Mercury, Nantucket’s own fledgling newspaper, the Inquirer, did not write about the disaster that summer. It was as if Nantucketers were refusing to commit to an opinion about the matter until they had first had a chance to hear from the Essex’s captain, George Pollard, Jr.

And when it was all done, he had to answer to his ship’s owners, who expected nothing less than a full hold of oil. It was little wonder, then, that a whaling captain was paid, on average, three times what the commander of a merchant vessel received.

For his own part, Pollard did not allow the horror he had experienced in the whaleboat to defeat him, displaying an honesty and directness concerning the disaster that would sustain him all his life. Captain George Worth of the Two Brothers was so impressed with the integrity of the former captain of the Essex during the two-and-a-half-month voyage back from Valparaiso that he recommended Pollard as his replacement. Soon after his return, Pollard was formally offered command of the Two Brothers.

It would be difficult for any reader of Chase’s book alone to appreciate the true scope of the disaster. In particular, the fact that five out of the first six men to die were black is never commented on by Chase. By keeping many of the most disturbing and problematic aspects of the disaster offstage, Chase transforms the story of the Essex into a personal tale of trial and triumph.

George Pollard, however, was given the ultimate vote of confidence. On November 26, 1821, a little more than three months after returning to Nantucket and just a few days after the appearance of Chase’s narrative, he set sail for the Pacific as captain of the Two Brothers. But perhaps the most extraordinary endorsement Pollard received came from two of his crew members. For Pollard wasn’t the only Essex man aboard the Two Brothers; two others had chosen to serve under him again. One was Thomas Nickerson. The other was Charles Ramsdell, the boy who had spent ninety-four days in a whaleboat with him. If there was someone who had come to know Captain Pollard, it was Charles Ramsdell.

But there was at least one indication that Pollard had not emerged from the ordeal entirely unscathed. Wilkes noted an unusual feature in the captain’s cabin. Attached to the ceiling was a large amount of netting, and it was filled with provisions—primarily potatoes and other fresh vegetables. Captain Pollard, the man who had almost starved to death only the year before, could now simply reach over his head and pull down something to eat. Wilkes asked Pollard how, after all that he had suffered, he could dare go to sea again. “He simply remarked,” Wilkes wrote, “that it was an old adage that the lightning never struck in the same place twice.” But in the case of Captain Pollard, it did.

Pollard finished the conversation by relating how he had recently lost his second whaleship on a shoal off the Hawaiian Islands. Then, in what Bennet called “a tone of despondency never to be forgotten by him who heard it,” Pollard confessed, “[N]ow I am utterly ruined. No owner will ever trust me with a whaler again, for all will say I am an unlucky man.”

A disturbing rumor began to be whispered about the streets of town, a rumor that was still being told on Nantucket almost a hundred years later. It had not been Owen Coffin who had drawn the short piece of paper, the gossipmongers claimed, it had been George Pollard. It was only then that his young cousin, already near death and convinced he would not last the night, offered and even insisted on taking the captain’s place.

Pollard took his duties so seriously that he was known, according to Phinney, as the town “gumshoe”—a streetwise detective familiar with the intimate details of an island whose population would grow from seven thousand to ten thousand over the next two decades.

Chase’s first voyage as captain of the Charles Carroll was a financial success. After three and a half years, he returned in March 1836 with 2,610 barrels of oil, almost twice the return of his first voyage as captain aboard the Winslow. But the voyage came at a great personal cost. Nine months after her husband left the island, Nancy Chase gave birth to a daughter, Adeline. A few weeks later, Nancy was dead. Greeting their father at the wharf in the spring of 1836 were Phebe Ann, almost sixteen; Lydia, thirteen; William Henry, eleven; and Adeline, two and a half—a girl who had no memory of her mother and had never known her father. Chase wasn’t home a month before he had remarried. Eunice Chadwick was just twenty-seven years old, and she now had four stepchildren to care for. By the end of August, after less than five months of marriage, she was waving good-bye to her new husband. This was to be Chase’s last voyage as a whaling captain. He was forty years old and, if all went well, would be able to retire to his house on Orange Street.