In the Heart of the Sea (11 page)

Herman Melville was profoundly affected by the Galapagos in the 1840s, ultimately writing a series of sketches entitled “The Encantadas.” For Melville, there was something terrifyingly nonhuman about these islands. He described them as a place where “change never comes” and spoke of their “emphatic uninhabitableness”:

Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them. The showers refresh the deserts, but in these isles, rain never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. “Have mercy upon me,” the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, “and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.”

To sea travelers, one great attraction of the Galapagos was their tortoises. The naturalist Charles Darwin visited these islands in 1835 aboard the Beagle and noted that the tortoises on each island, like his famous finches, varied markedly from one another-the tortoises in the coloring and shape of their shells. The creatures were interesting in another way to U.S. Navy captain David Porter. His frigate Essex visited the islands in 1813 and carried off a vast number of tortoises-an estimated four tons-to feed his crew on their voyage to the Marquesas.

By the time the whaleship Essex ventured to these islands seven years later, sailors had devised a well-established procedure for what they called turpining. Equipped with canvas harnesses, the seamen fanned out over the island, often following the deeply rutted tortoise tracks that crisscrossed the rocky surface, hoping these would lead them to their prey. The tortoises averaged about eighty pounds, but it wasn't unusual to find one that weighed four hundred pounds or more. If a sailor came across a tortoise that was too big for one person to carry, he'd call for help by crying out, “Townho!”-a corruption of the Wampanoag whaling word “townor.” In most cases, however, it was just one man per tortoise. After flipping the tortoise on its back and pinning it down with a large rock, which kept the creature from retracting its feet, the whaleman secured the ends of his canvas harness to the tortoise's legs, then swung the animal onto his back. Walking for several miles over the uneven surface of Hood Island in 105-degree temperatures with an eighty-pound tortoise strapped to one's back was not easy, particularly since each man was expected to bring back three tortoises a day to the ship. As far as Nickerson was concerned, turpining was the most difficult and exhausting form of work he'd ever known, especially given the tortoise's “constant uneasiness” while strapped to a seaman's sweat-soaked back.

During their stay at” Hood Island, Benjamin Lawrence, Owen Chase's boatsteerer, ran into trouble. He found a tortoise and set out in what he thought was the direction of the ship, belatedly realizing he'd gone in precisely the opposite direction. Eventually, he abandoned his tortoise and made his way down to the burning sands of the beach and began to backtrack toward the ship.

By the middle of the afternoon, the Essex was still not in sight and Lawrence was feeling the torments of severe thirst. He came across another tortoise and proceeded to cut off the reptile's snakelike head. The blood spurting from the neck was a startlingly cool 62 degrees in the 110-degree sun. After drinking his fill, Lawrence left the dead tortoise on the beach and resumed his search for the ship. He found it at dusk, but dreading what Nickerson termed “the laugh which would be turned upon him if he returned to the boat empty handed,” he headed back into the island's interior in search of a tortoise. It was thoroughly dark by the time Lawrence, tortoise-laden, staggered down to the beach and was greeted by the men who had been sent out to search for him.

In the next four days the crew collected 180 tortoises on Hood. Then the Essex headed for nearby Charles Island. The short cruise gave Nickerson the opportunity to observe the creatures, which were for the most part stacked like boulders in the hold, although some of them were left to wander the ship's deck. One of the reasons Galapagos tortoises were so valued by the whalemen was that they could live for more than a year without any food or water. Not only was the tortoise's meat still plump and tasty after that long period, but it also yielded as much as eight to ten pounds of fat, which Nickerson described as “clear and pure as the best of yellow butter and of a rich flavor.”

Some sailors insisted that the tortoises felt no pangs of hunger during their time on a whaleship,but Nickerson was not so sure. As the voyage progressed he noticed that they were constantly licking everything they encountered on the ship's deck. The tortoises' gradual starvation ended only when they were slaughtered for food.

On Charles Island the whalemen had created a crude post office-a simple box or cask sheltered by a giant tortoise shell, in which mail could be left for transportation back to Nantucket. While on Charles during the War of 1812, Captain David Porter had used to his tactical advantage information gleaned from letters left by British whaling captains. For the men of the Essex, the Charles Island mail drop offered an opportunity to reply to the letters they had received via the Aurora. They also collected another hundred tortoises. Nickerson claimed that these tortoises, which proved disappointingly scarce, were the sweetest-tasting of the Galapagos.

It was on Charles Island that they procured a six-hundred-pound monster of a tortoise. It took six men to carry it to the beach on crossed poles. No one knew how old a tortoise of this size might be, but on nearby Albemarle Island there was “Port Royal Tom,” a giant tortoise whose shell had been carved with countless names and dates, the oldest going back to 1791. (Tom was reported still to be alive as late as 1881.)

Nickerson, who exhibited a Darwinesque interest in the natural world, made careful note of the many other creatures inhabiting Charles Island, including green tortoises, pelicans, and two kinds of iguanas. During his last day on the island, however, Nickerson was shaken by an event more in keeping with Melville's vision of the Galapagos than with Darwin's.

On the morning of October 22, Thomas Chappel, a boatsteerer from Plymouth, England, decided to play a prank. Not telling anyone else on the Essex what he was up to, the mischievous Chappel (who was, according to Nickerson, “fond of fun at whatever expense”) brought a tinderbox ashore with him. As the others searched the island for tortoises, Chappel secretly set a fire in the underbrush. It was the height of the dry season, and the fire soon burned out of control, surrounding the tortoise hunters and cutting off their route back to the ship. With no other alternative, they were forced to run through a gauntlet of flame. Although they singed their clothes and hair, no serious injuries resulted-at least not to the men of the Essex.

By the time they returned to the ship, almost the entire island was ablaze. The men were indignant that one of their own had committed such a stupid and careless act. But it was Pollard who was the most upset. “[T]he Captain's wrath knew no bounds,” Nickerson remembered, “swearing vengeance upon the head of the incendiary should he be discovered.” Fearing a certain whipping, Ghappel did not reveal his role in the conflagration until much later. Nickerson believed that the fire killed thousands upon thousands of tortoises, birds, lizards, and snakes.

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.

When they weighed anchor the next morning, Charles remained an inferno. That night, after a day of sailing west along the equator, they could still see it burning against the horizon. Backlit by the red glow of a dying island, the twenty men of the Essex ventured into the farthest reaches of the Pacific, looking for another whale to kill.

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. The Pacific is also deep. Hidden beneath its blue surface are some of the planet's most spectacular mountain ranges, with canyons that plunge more than six miles into the watery blackness. Geologically, the volcano-rimmed Pacific is the most active part of the world. Islands rise up; islands disappear. Herman Melville called this sixty-four-million-square-mile ocean the “tide-beating heart of the earth.”

By November 16,1820, the Essex had sailed more than a thousand miles west of the Galapagos, following the equator as if it were an invisible lifeline leading the ship ever farther into the largest ocean in the world. Nantucket whalemen were familiar with at least part of the Pacific. Over the last three decades the coast of South America had become their own backyard. They also knew the western edge of the Pacific quite well. By the early part of the century, English whalers, most of them captained by Nantucketers, were regularly rounding the Cape of Good Hope and taking whales in the vicinity of Australia and New Zealand. In 1815, Hezekiah Coffin, the father of Pollard's young cousin Owen, had died during a provisioning stop in the islands off Timor, between Java and New Guinea.

Lying between the island of Timor and the west coast of South America is the Central Pacific, what Owen Chase called “an almost untraversed ocean.” The longitudes and latitudes of islands with names such as Ohevahoa, Marokinee, Owyhee, and Mowee might be listed in Captain Pollard's navigational guide, but beyond that they were-save for blood-chilling rumors of native butchery and cannibalism-a virtual blank.

All this was about to change. Unknown to Pollard, only a few weeks earlier, on September 29, the Nantucket whaleships Equator and Balaena stopped at the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time. In 1823, Richard Macy would be the first Nantucketer to provision his ship at the Society Islands, now known as French Polynesia. But as far as Pollard and his men knew in November of 1820, they were at the edge of an unknown world filled with unimaginable dangers. And if they were to avoid the fate of the ship they'd encountered at Atacames, whose men had almost died of scurvy before they could reach the South American coast for provisions, there was no time for far-flung exploration. It had taken them more than a month to venture out this far, and it would take at least that to return. They had, at most, only a few months of whaling left before they must think about returning to South America and eventually to Nantucket.

So far, the whales they had sighted in this remote expanse of ocean had proved frustratingly elusive. “Nothing occurred worthy of note during this passage,” Nickerson remembered, “with the exception of occasionally chasing a wild shoal of whales to no purpose.” Tensions mounted among the Essex's officers. The situation prompted Owen Chase to make an adjustment aboard his whaleboat. When he and his boat-crew did finally approach a whale, on November 16, it was he. Chase reported, not his boatsteerer, Benjamin Lawrence, who held the harpoon.

This was a radical and, for Lawrence, humiliating turn of events. A mate took over the harpoon only after he had lost all confidence in his boatsteerer's ability to fasten to a whale. William Comstocktold of two instances when mates became so disgusted with their boatsteerers' unsuccessful attempts to harpoon whales that they ordered them aft and took the iron themselves. One mate, Comstock wrote, screamed, “Who are you? What are you? Miserable trash, scum of Nantucket, a whimpering boy from the chimney corner. By Neptune I think you are afraid of a whale.” When the boatsteerer finally burst into tears, the mate ripped the harpoon from his hands and ordered him to take the steering oar.

With Chase at the bow and Lawrence relegated to the steering oar, the first mate's boat approached a patch of water where, Chase predicted, a whale would surface. Chase was, in his own words, “standing in the fore part, with the harpoon in my hand, well braced, expecting every instant to catch sight of one of the shoal which we were in, that I might strike.” Unfortunately, a whale surfaced directly under their boat, hurling Chase and his crew into the air. Just as had occurred after their first attempt at killing a whale, off the Falkland Islands, Chase and his men found themselves clinging to a wrecked whaleboat.

Given the shortage of spare boats aboard the Essex, caution on the part of the officers might have been expected, but caution, at least when it came to pursuing whales, was not part of the first mate's makeup. Taking to heart the old adage “A dead whale or a stove boat,” Chase reveled in the risk-and danger of whaling. “The profession is one of great ambition,” he would boast in his narrative, “and full of honorable excitement: a tame man is never known amongst them.”

four days later, on November 20, more than 1,500 nautical miles west of the Galapagos and just 40 miles south of the equator, the lookout saw spouts. It was about eight in the morning of a bright clear day. Only a slight breeze was blowing. It was a perfect day for killing whales.

Once they had sailed, to within a half mile of the shoal, the two shipkeepers headed the Essex into the wind with the maintopsail aback, and the three boats were lowered. The whales, unaware that they were being pursued, sounded.

Chase directed his men to row to a specific spot, where they waited “in anxious expectation,” scanning the water for the dark shape of a surfacing sperm whale. Once again, Chase tells us, he was the one with the harpoon, and sure enough, a small whale emerged just ahead of them and spouted. The first mate readied to hurl the harpoon and, for the second time in as many days of whaling, ran into trouble.