In the Heart of the Sea (13 page)

Chase maintained that when the whale first struck the ship, it was going about three knots, the velocity of a whale at normal cruising speed. Whitehead, whose research vessel was once bumped into by a pregnant whale, speculates that the bull might have even initially run into the Essex by mistake.

Whatever prompted the encounter, the whale was clearly not prepared for something as solid and heavy as a whaleship, which at 238 tons weighed approximately three times more than it did. The Essex might have been an old, work-worn whaleship, but she had been built to take her share of abuse. She was constructed almost entirely of white oak, one of the toughest and strongest of woods. Her ribs had been hewn from immense timbers, at least a foot square. Over that, laid fore and aft, were oak planks four inches thick. On top of the planks was a sheathing of yellow pine, more than half an inch thick.

Extending down from the waterline (the point of impact, according lu Nickerson) was a layer of copper. The bull had slammed into a solid wooden wall.

What had begun as an experimental, perhaps unintentional jab with its head soon escalated into an all-out attack.

Like male elephants, bull sperm whales tend to be loners, moving from group to group of females and juveniles and challenging whatever males they meet along the way. The violence of these encounters is legendary. One whaleman described what happened when a bull sperm whale tried to move in on another bull's group:

When the approaching bull attempted to join the herd, he was attackedby one of the establishedbulls, which rolled over on its back and attacked with its jaw... Large pieces of blubber and flesh were taken out. Both bulls then withdrew and again charged at full tilt. They locked jaws and wrestled, each seemingly to try to break the other's jaw. Great pieces of flesh again were torn from the animals' heads. Next they either withdrew or broke their holds, and then charged each other again. The fight was even more strenuous this time, and little could be seen because of the boiling spray. The charge and withdrawal were repeated two or three times before the water quieted, and then for a few seconds the two could be seen lying head to head. The smaller bull then swam slowly away and did not attempt to rejoin the cows... A whaleboat was dispatched, and the larger bull was captured. The jaw had been broken and was hanging by the flesh. Many teeth were broken and there were extensive head wounds.

Instead of fighting with its jaws and tail-the way whales commonly dispatched whaleboats-the Essex whale rammed the ship with its head, something that, Chase insisted, “has never been heard of amongst the oldest and most experienced whalers.” But what most impressed the first mate was the remarkably astute way in which the bull employed its God-given battering ram. Both times the whale had approached the vessel from a direction “calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock.” Yet, even though it had come at the Essex from ahead, the whale had avoided striking the ship directly head-on, where the ship's heavily reinforced stem, the vertical timber at the leading edge of the bow, might have delivered a mortal gash.

Chase estimated that the whale was traveling at six knots when it struck the Essex the second time and that the ship was traveling at three knots. To bring the Essex to a complete standstill, the whale, whose mass was roughly a third of the ship's, would have to be moving at more than three times the speed of the ship, at least nine knots. One naval architect's calculations project that if the Essex had been a new ship, her oak planking would have withstood even this tremendous blow. Since the whale did punch a hole in the bow, the Essex's, twenty-one-year-old planking must have been significantly weakened by rot or marine growth.

Chase was convinced that the Essex and her crew had been the victims of “decided, calculating mischief on the part of the whale. For a Nantucketer, it was a shocking thought. If other sperm whales should start ramming ships, it would be only a matter of time before the island's whaling fleet was reduced to so much flotsam and jetsam.

Chase began to wonder what “unaccountable destiny or design” had been at work. It almost seemed as if something-could it have been God?-had possessed the beast for its own strange, unfathomable purpose. Whatever or whoever might be behind it, Chase was convinced that “anything but chance” had sunk the Essex.

After listening to the first mate's account of the sinking, Pollard attempted to take command of the dire situation. Their first priority, he announced, was to get as much food and water out of the wreck as possible . To do that, they needed to cut away the masts so that the still partially floating hull could right. The men climbed onto the ship and began to hack away at the spars and rigging with hatchets from the whaleboats. 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.

Forty-five minutes later, the masts had been reduced to twenty-foot stumps and the Essex was floating partly upright again, at a forty-five-degree angle. Although most of the provisions were unreachable in the lower hold, there were two large casks of bread between decks in the waist of the ship. And since the casks were on the Essex's upper side, the men could hope that they were still dry.

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.

In need of shelter from the mounting wind and waves, yet fearful the Essex might at any moment break up and sink like a stone, Pollard ordered that they tie up to the ship but leave at least a hundred yards of line between it and themselves. Like a string of ducklings trailing their mother, they spent the night in the lee of the ship.

The ship shuddered with each wave. Chase lay sleepless in his boat, staring at the wreck and reliving the catastrophe over and over again in his mind. Some of the men slept and others “wasted the night in unavailing murmurs,” Chase wrote. Once, he admitted, he found himself breaking into tears.

Part of him was guilt-wracked, knowing that if he had only hurled the lance, it might have all turned out differently. (When it came time to write his own account of the attack, Chase would neglect to mention that he had the chance to lance the whale-an omission Nickerson made sure to correct in his narrative.) But the more Chase thought about it, the more he realized that no one could have expected a whale to attack a ship, and not just once but twice. 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.”

As they bobbed in the lee of the wreck, the men of the Essex were of no mind to debate the whale's motives. Their overwhelming question was how twenty men in three boats could get out of a plight like this alive.

ALL night the wind blew out of the southeast. Waves beat against the stricken hull, dislodging spars and casks and splintering timbers. Jagged debris might at any time pierce the frail sides of the three whaleboats tied up to leeward of the ship, so each officer posted a man in the bow of his boat and commanded him to keep a sharp lookout for floating objects bearing down on them and to shove those objects aside before they could do damage. It was terrifying duty-straining to see what threat would next emerge from the darkness.

When the sun lit the eastern horizon, the men rose up blinking from the bilges of the boats, most of them having had little sleep. “[W]e began to think of doing something,” Chase recalled, “what, we did not know.”

The three boat-crews returned to the wreck, and for most of the morning the men wandered about the wave-washed deck “in a sort of vacant idleness.” The officers instructed them to search for any additional provisions that might have floated up from the depths of the hold during the night. Except for a few more Galapagos tortoises, of which they already had as many as could be safely carried in the whaleboats, they found nothing of use.

The obvious next step was to make preparations for leaving the wreck. But this was a prospect that none of the men wanted to contemplate, no matter how “cheerless and desolate” their current circumstances might be. “Our thoughts... hung about the ship, wrecked and sunken as she was,” Chase remembered, “and we could scarcely discard from our minds the idea of her continuing protection.”

Eventually some of the men began stripping the sails off the ship to make sails for the three whaleboats. Luckily Chase's trunk contained the necessary needles and twine, and the men set to work. Others were directed to build masts for the whaleboats from the ship's spars. Once the crew had been given specific tasks to accomplish, the change in morale was swift. Nickerson noticed “more cheerful faces than we dared to expect.”

As the men worked-equipping each boat with two short masts, two spritsails, and a small sail up forward known as a jib-a lookout remained posted on the stump of the Essex's foremast, gazing out across the ocean for a sail. At noon, Chase took an observation and determined that the prevailing southeasterly winds and westerly current had driven the Essex and her crew almost fifty miles to the northwest of where they'd been the day before-away from the distant coast of South America. For the first mate, this troubling information made clear “the necessity of not wasting our time, and of endeavoring to seek some relief wherever God might direct us.”

The wind increased throughout the day, making it difficult to work in the whaleboats, especially when waves broke across them, drenching the men. The officers realized that some further modifications were necessary to increase the vessels' seaworthiness. Using rough cedar boards from the wreck, the men built up the sides of each boat by more than half a foot. This simple alteration-done almost as an afterthought-proved crucial. “[T]he boats must otherwise have taken in so much water,” Chase wrote, “that all the efforts of twenty such weak, starving men as we afterwards came to be, would not have sufficed to keep [them from swamping].”

It was also now clear that they had to work out some method of shielding their provisions of bread from the salt spray. Each end of the whaleboat contained a cupboardlike space called a cuddy. After wrapping the bread in several layers of canvas, they placed it in the boat's aft cuddy, as far as they could from the waves breaking at the bow. Having it in the aft cuddy also made it easy for the officer at the steering oar to monitor the bread's distribution to the rest of the crew.

When darkness began to come on, they reluctantly put aside their hammers, nails, needles, and twine and once again tied up the whaleboats in the lee of the wreck. It was still blowing hard, and all twenty men dreaded what Chase called “the horrors of another tempestuous night.” It wasn't just the discomfort of attempting to sleep in a tiny rocking boat but also the prospect of an entire night with nothing to distract them from their fears.

The same men who had worked so cheerfully at modifying the whaleboats were suddenly bludgeoned by despair. “[T]he miseries of their situation came upon them with such force,” Chase remembered, “as to produce spells of extreme debility, approaching almost to fainting.” Even though it had been almost two days since their last meal, they found it impossible to eat. Their throats parched by anxiety, they indulged instead in frequent drinks of water.

Chase lay down in the bottom of his boat and began to pray. But his supplication provided little consolation: “Sometimes... a light hope would dawn, but then, to feel such an utter dependence on... chance alone for aid and rescue, would chase it again from my mind.” Rather than contemplating the possible means of their deliverance, Chase found himself once again reliving the circumstances that had brought them to this point, especially “the mysterious and mortal attack of the animal.”

By seven o'clock the next morning, the ship's deck had broken almost entirely from the hull. Like a whale dying in a slow-motion flurry, the Essex in dissolution made for a grim and disturbing sight, her joints and seams working violently in the waves. She was bleeding from the burst casks within her hull, surrounding the men in a reeking slick of whale oil-a yellowish slime that coated the boats' sides and slopped over the gunwales with the waves. The boats became slippery and dangerous to move around in. The fluid that only a few days before had been their fortune, their obsession, was now their torment.

Chase decided that something must be done. He rowed over to Pollard and declared that it was time for them to sail “towards the nearest land.” The captain stalled, insisting that they scavenge the wreck one last time for provisions they might have overlooked. Only after he had the opportunity for another observation at noon, he said, would he discuss what to do next.

Pollard's noon observation revealed that they had drifted nineteen miles to the north, taking them across the equator during the night. Now, with their sails ready and Pollard's navigational calculations complete, it was time for what Chase termed a “council.” So, with his two mates joining him in his whaleboat, Pollard spread out before them their two copies of Bowditch's Navigator and its list of the latitudes and longitudes of “Friendly and other Islands in the Pacific Ocean” and began the discussion of what they should do.

Since their sail-equipped whaleboats could travel only with the wind, their options were quite limited. Backtracking their way to the Galapagos and beyond that to South America, a trip of more than two thousand miles, meant bucking both the southeasterly trade winds and a strong west-flowing current. Pollard deemed it impossible. Sailing to the west, however, was another matter. The closest islands in this direction were the Marquesas, about 1,200 miles away. Unfortunately, the Essex men had heard that their native inhabitants had a reputation for cannibalism. Several travelers to the Marquesas, including Captain David Porter of the U.S. frigate Essex, who visited these islands during the War of 1812, had published reports of the frequent wars among the natives. “ [I]n times of famine,” insisted another visitor, “the men butcher theirwives, and children, and aged parents.” Georg von Langsdorff, whose ship touched at the Marquesas in 1804, claimed that the natives found human flesh so delicious “that those who have once eaten it can with difficulty abstain from it.” Langsdorff, along with several others, remarked on the great size and strength of the Marquesan men. There were also reports of ritualized homosexual activity among the natives, which, unlike the rumors of cannibalism, have been confirmed by modern-day anthropologists. The officers agreed that the Marquesas must be avoided.