In the Heart of the Sea (12 page)

Chase had ordered Lawrence, the ex-harpooner, to steer the boat in close to the whale. Lawrence did so, so close that as soon as the harpoon sliced into it, the panicked animal whacked the already battered craft with its tail, opening up a hole in the boat's side. As water poured in, Chase cut the harpoon line with a hatchet and ordered the men to stuff their coats and shirts into the jagged opening. While one man bailed, they rowed back to the ship. Then they pulled the boat up onto the Essex's deck.

By this time, both Pollard's and Joy's crews had fastened to whales. Angered that he had once again been knocked out of the hunt, Chase began working on his damaged boat with a fury, hoping to get the craft operable while whales were still to be taken. Although he could have outfitted and lowered the extra boat (the one they had bargained for in the Cape Verde Islands, now lashed to the rack over the quarterdeck), Chase felt it would be faster to repair the damaged boat temporarily by stretching some canvas across the hole. As he nailed the edges of the canvas to the boat, his after oarsman, Thomas Nickerson-all of fifteen years old-took over the helm of the Essex and steered the ship toward Pollard and Joy, whose whales had dragged them several miles to leeward. It was then that Nickerson saw something off the port bow.

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 thirty-five yards from the ship.

Even with the whale just a stone's throw from the Essex, Chase did not see it as a threat. “His appearance and attitude gave us at first no alarm,” he wrote. But suddenly the whale began to move. Its twenty-foot-wide tail pumped up and down. Slowly at first, with a slight side-to-side waggle, it picked up speed until the water crested around its massive barrel-shaped head. It was aimed at the Essex's port side. In an instant, the whale was only a few yards away-”coming down for us,” Chase remembered, “with great celerity.”

In desperate hopes of avoiding a direct hit, Chase shouted to Nickerson, “Put the helm hard up!” Several other crew members cried out warnings. “Scarcely had the sound of the voices reached my ears,” Nickerson remembered, “when it was followed by a tremendous crash.” The whale rammed the ship just forward of the forechains.

The Essex shook as if she had struck a rock. Every man was knocked off his feet. Galapagos tortoises went skittering across the deck. “We looked at each other with perfect amazement,” Chase recalled, “deprived almost of the power of speech.”

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 Naritucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship. In 1807 the whaleship Union had accidentally plowed into a sperm whale at night and sunk, but something very different was happening here.

After the impact, the whale passed underneath the ship, bumping the bottom so hard that it knocked off the false keel-a formidable six-by-twelve-inch timber. The whale surfaced at the Essex's starboard quarter, the creature appeared, Chase remembered, stunned with the violence of the blow” and floated beside the ship, its tail only a few feet from the stern.

Instinctively, Chase grabbed a lance. All it would take was one perfectly aimed throw and the first mate might slay the whale that had dared to attack a ship. This giant creature would yield more oil than two, maybe even three, normal-sized whales. If Pollard and Joy also proved successful that day, they would be boiling down at least 150 barrels of oil in the next week-more than 10 percent of the Essex's total capacity. They might be heading back to Nantucket in a matter of weeks instead of months.

Chase motioned to stab the bull-still lying hull-to-hull with the Essex. Then he hesitated. The whale's flukes, he noticed, were perilously close to the ship's rudder. If provoked, the whale might smash the delicate steering device with its tail. They were too far from land, Chase decided, to risk damaging the rudder.

For the first mate, it was a highly uncharacteristic display of caution. “But could [Chase] have foreseen all that so soon followed,” Nickerson wrote, “he would probably have chosen the lesser evil and have saved the ship by killing the whale even at the expense of losing the rudder.”

A sperm whale is uniquely equipped to survive a head-on collision with a ship. Stretching for a third of its length between the front of the whale's battering ram-shaped head and its vital organs is an oil-filled cavity perfectly adapted to cushioning the impact of a collision. In less than a minute, this eighty-ton bull was once again showing signs of life.

Shaking off its woozy lethargy, the whale veered off to leeward, swimming approximately six hundred yards away. There it began snapping its jaws and thrashing the water with its tail, “as if distracted,” Chase wrote, “with rage and fury.” The whale then swam to windward,

crossing the Essex's bow at a high rate of speed. Several hundred yards ahead of the ship, the whale stopped and turned in the Essex's direction. Fearful that the ship might be taking on water, Chase had, by this point, ordered the men to rig the pumps. “[W]hile my attention was thus engaged,” the first mate remembered, “I was aroused with the cry of a man at the hatchway, 'Here he is-he is making for us again.'“ Chase turned and saw a vision of “fury and vengeance” that would haunt him in the long days ahead.

With its huge scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed-at least six knots. Chase, hoping “to cross the line of his approach before he could get up to us, and thus avoid what I knew, if he should strike us again, would prove our inevitable destruction,” cried out to Nickerson, “Hard up!” But it was too late for a change of course. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, the whale struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cathead on the port bow. This time the men were prepared for the hit. Still, the force of the collision caused the whalemen's heads to jounce on their muscled necks as the ship lurched to a halt on the slablike forehead of the whale. The creature's tail continued to work up and down, pushing the 238-ton ship backward untilas had happened after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream-water surged up over the transom.

One of the men who had been belowdecks ran up onto the deck shouting, “The ship is Ming with water!” A quick glance down the hatchway revealed that the water was already above the lower deck, where the oil and provisions were stored.

No longer going backward, the Essex was now going down. The whale, having humbled its strange adversary, disengaged itself from the shattered timbers of the copper-sheathed hull and swam off to leeward, never to be seen again.

The ship was sinking bow-first. The forecastle, where the black sailors slept, was the first of the living quarters to flood, the men's sea chests and mattresses floating on the rising tide. Next the water surged aft into the blubber room, then into steerage, where Nickerson and the other Nantucketers slept. Soon even the mates' and captain's cabins were awash.

As the belowdecks creaked and gurgled, the black steward, William Bond, on his own initiative, returned several times to the rapidly filling aft cabins to retrieve Pollard's and Chase's trunks and-with great foresight-the navigational equipment. Meanwhile Chase and the rest of the crew cut the lashing off the spare whaleboat and carried it to the waist of the ship.

The Essex began to list dangerously to port. Bond made one last plunge below. Chase and the others carried the whaleboat to the edge of the deck, now only a few inches above the ocean's surface. When the trunks and other equipment had been loaded aboard, everyone, including Bond, scrambled into the boat, the tottering masts and yards looming above them. They were no more than two boat lengths away when the Essex, with an appalling slosh and groan, capsized behind them.

Just at that moment, two miles to leeward, Obed Hendricks, Pollard's boatsteerer, casually glanced over his shoulder. He couldn't believe what he saw. From that distance it looked as if the Essex had been hit by a sudden squall, the sails flying in all directions as the ship fell onto her beam-ends.

“Look, look,” he cried, “what ails the ship? She is upsetting!”

But when the men turned to look, there was nothing to see. “[A] general cry of horror and despair burst from the lips of every man,” Chase wrote, “as their looks were directed for [the ship], in vain, over every part of the ocean.” The Essex had vanished below the horizon.

The two boat-crews immediately released their whales and began rowing back toward the place the Essex should have been-all the time speculating frantically about what had happened to the ship. It never occurred to any of them that, in Nickerson's words, “a whale [had] done the work.” Soon enough, they could see the ship's hull “floating upon her side and presenting the appearance of a rock.”

As Pollard and Joy approached, the eight men crowded into Chase's boat continued to stare silently at the ship. “[E]very countenance was marked with the paleness of despair,” Chase recalled. “Not a word was spoken for several minutes by any of us; all appeared to be bound in a spell of stupid consternation.”

From the point at which the whale first attacked, to the escape from the capsi/ing ship, no more than ten minutes had elapsed. In only a portion of that time, spurredby 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.

It was then that Chase fully appreciated the service that William Bond had rendered them. He had salvaged two compasses, two copies of Nathaniel Bowditch's New American Practical Navigator, and two quadrants. Chase later called this equipment “the probable instruments of our salvation... [W]ithout them,” he added, “all would have been dark and hopeless.”

For his part, Thomas Nickerson was swept by a sense of grief, not for himself, but for the “ship. The giant black craft that he had come to know so intimately had been dealt a deathblow. “Here lay our beautiful ship, a floating and dismal wreck,” Nickerson lamented, “which but a few minutes before appeared in all her glory, the pride and boast of her captain and officers, and almost idolized by her crew.”

Soon the other two whaleboats came within hailing distance. But no one said a word. Pollard's boat was the first to reach them. The men stopped rowing about thirty feet away. 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.”

Even by the colossal standards of a sperm whale, an eighty-five-foot bull is huge. Today, male sperm whales, which are on average three to four times bulkier than females, never grow past sixty-five feet. Sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead has his doubts that the Essex whale could have been as large as Chase and Nicker son claimed it was. However, the logs of Nantucket whalemen are filled with references to bulls that, given the amount of oil they yielded, must have been on the order of the Essex whale. It is an established fact that whalemen in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries killed male sperm whales in disproportionate numbers: not only were they longer than the females but the males' oil-rich spermaceti organs accounted for a larger portion of that length. In 1820, before a century and a half of selective killing had rid the world of large bulls, it may have indeed been possible to encounter an eighty-five-foot sperm whale. Perhaps the most convincing evidence resides in the hallowed halls of the Nantucket Whaling Museum. There, leaning against the wall, is an eighteen-foot jaw taken from a bull that was estimated to have been at least eighty feet long.

The sperm whale has the largest brain of any animal that has ever lived on earth, dwarfing even that of the mighty blue whale. The large size of the sperm whale's brain may be related to its highly sophisticated ability to generate and process sound. Just beneath its blowhole, a sperm whale has what the whalemen referred to as a monkey's muzzle, a cartilaginous clapper system that scientists believe to be the source of the clicking sounds it uses to “see” the world through echolocation. 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.

Whalemen often heard sperm whales through the hulls of their ships. The sound-steady clicks at roughly half-second intervals-bore such a startling similarity to the tapping of a hammer that the whalemen dubbed the sperm whale “the carpenter fish.” 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.