In the Heart of the Sea (16 page)

Chase explained that “having no glass, nor log-line,” they decided that itwas futile to maintain an estimate of their longitude. If Pollard's inability to work a lunar is any indication, he was not a particularly skilled navigator or an unusually unskilled one. There were many captains who were also navigating their vessels by dead reckoning and, like Pollard, never expected to find themselves in such a situation. By forgoing all estimates of their longitude, he and his men were now sailing blind, with no way to determine their distance from South America.

In the afternoon a school of porpoises surrounded the three boats and followed them until well after sunset. That night the wind built to almost a gale. Chase and his crew watched in horror as the planks of their old boat worked and twisted in the waves. The boat was in such terrible shape, Nicker son claimed, that he normally would not have felt safe sailing ten miles in it, let alone the thousands they had ahead ofthem.

By the morning of Friday,-November 24, the third day in the boats, the waves were “very large,” according to Chase, “and increased, if possible, the extreme uncomfortableness of our situation.” Nickerson observed that if they'd been aboard the Essex, the wind would have seemed unexceptional, but now, he said, “in our crippled state it answers the purpose of a gale, and keeps us constantly wet and chilled through.” That day an immense wave broke over Chase's boat and almost filled it with water. The swamped boat threatened to roll over on its side as kegs, tortoises, and Chase's sea chest floated up from the bottom and knocked against the men. They bailed frantically, knowing that the next wave might sink them.

Once they'd brought the boat out of danger, they discovered that some of the hardtack-which they'd carefully wrapped in sailcloth-had been soaked by the seawater. They did their best to salvage as much of the damaged bread as possible. Over the course of the next few days, they would seize every chance to dry the dissolving lumps in the sun. While this saved the provisions from what Nickerson called “utter ruin,” the bread remained infiltrated with salt, the worst possible thing for their already water-deprived bodies. “The bread being our only dependence,”Nickerson remembered, “[this] gave ... us on the whole a cheerless prospect”-a prospect that only worsened when they learned that a portion of the bread on Pollard's boat had also been damaged. A few days before, the officers had possessed cautious faith in “the human means at our command”; now they recognized “ our utter dependence on that divine aid we so much the more stood in need of.”

At eight o'clock the next morning, the man assigned to bailing Chase's boat became alarmed. Try as he might, he couldn't keep ahead of the rising tide of water. Their boat, he alerted the rest of the crew, was sinking. Soon all six men were searching for the new leak, their hands probing desperately in the sloshing bilge, feeling the boat's sides for the gush of incoming water. It wasn't until they'd torn up the floor that they discovered the problem: one of the planks in the bow had sprung from the hull, and water was pouring in. The leak was about six inches below the waterline, and if they were going to fix it, they needed to figure out some way to get at it from the outside.

The sprung board was on the starboard, or leeward, side, and Chase immediately “hove about,” using the steering oar to turn the boat so that the wind was now coming over the other side. This put the leak on the windward, or “high,” side; Chase hoped to heel the boat over enough so that the hole would rise up out of the water.

Noticing that Chase had suddenly veered away, Pollard brought his own boat around and headed for the first mate. After shortening sail, Pollard came alongside and asked what was wrong.

Now that the captain's boat was beside them, Chase ordered his own crew to move to the port side and as far aft as possible, canting the bow up into the air. Working from Pollard's boat, the first mate and captain attempted to steady the bow, realign the board, and hammer it into place. There was little room for error. The end of the board was already riddled with old nail holes, and it was critical that they drive in each new nail cleanly. Even though they were being bounced up and down by the waves, Chase and Pollard managed “to drive in a few nails, and secured [the plank], much beyond our expectations.” Soon all three boats were once again sailing to the south.

“This little incident, although it may seem small,” Nickerson recalled, “[caused] amongst us the greatest excitement.” With a clear demonstration that their whaleboats might fall apart around them at any time, the men felt “a great gloominess over the natural prospects of our deliverance.” They knew that the longer the ordeal lasted, the more the boats would suffer in “the heavy and repeated racking of the swell.” All it took was the starting of a single nail, and one of these boats might be lost forever.

For the men in Chase's crew it had been an especially trying day. That evening Richard Peterson, the sole African American on their boat, led them in prayers and a few hymns. Nickerson remembered how the words and songs of the “pious old colored man... drew our minds from our present miseries to seek deliverance from a higher power.” That comfort notwithstanding, by the morning of November 26, the tentative optimism with which the men had begun the boat voyage had eroded into despair.

For the last four days the windy and overcast weather had made it impossible to take an observation. Judging by the compass course they'd been forced to steer, their sails strapped in tight against the southeasterly trades, they knew they had been sailing parallel to, rather than toward, the coast of South America. They also knew that their boats, which were without centerboards, had a tendency to sideslip to leeward. Because of that slippage, they must now be well to the west of where they should have been. Despite having made significant progress south, they were no closer to their ultimate destination. The hopeful talk of being rescued by a passing whaleship had ceased. “[W]e looked forward,” Chase wrote, “not without an extreme dread, and anxiety, to the gloomy and disheartening prospect before us.”

That afternoon the breeze dropped to a more comfortable level, allowing them to spread out their damaged bread to dry. Then the wind shifted, gradually backing into the north. For the first time since leaving the Essex, they were able to steer toward South America. Men began to talk about how far ahead of schedule they would be if the wind would only hold.

But it was not to last. The next day, the wind shifted back into the east and “destroyed the fine prospect we had entertained of making a good run.” As if to mock them, the following day the wind veered even farther, to the east-southeast. Then it started to blow hard.

That night they shortened sail and “began to entertain fears that we should be separated” in the darkness. To prevent just such an occurrence, the crew of the Union, the Nantucket ship that accidentally rammed into a whale in 1807, tied their boats together at night. But tethering interfered with sailing ability. The officers of the Essex-so intent on reaching the distant coast of South America-were reluctant to compromise their boats' speed. Instead of tying themselves together, they sailed in a kind of formation, with Chase in the lead, Pollard in the middle, and Joy taking up the rear. If they could remain within one hundred feet of one another, each could always see the other two whaleboats' white sails in the darkness.

at about eleven o'clock, Chase lay down in the bottom of his boat to sleep. He had just nodded off when he was startled awake by a cry from one of his men. Captain Pollard, the man said, was calling out to them in the darkness. Chase sat up and listened. In the howling wind and breaking waves, he could hear Pollard shouting to Joy, whose boat was nearest to him. Chase tacked around and sailed for the other two boats, only dimly visible in the moonless dark, and asked what was wrong. Given what had happened to the Essex only a week before, the reply seemed like a sick joke.

Pollard told them that his boat had been attacked by a whale.

Instead of a sperm whale, it had been a smaller, but more aggressive, killer whale. These eight-to twelve-ton toothed whales feed on warm-blooded animals such as dolphins and seals. They hunt in packs and have even been known to attack and kill sperm whales. There have been documented cases in which killer whales, also known as orcas, have repeatedly rammed and sunk wooden sailing yachts.

Pollard explained that, entirely unprovoked, the whale had slammed its head against their boat and taken a sizable bite out of it. Then it proceeded to “play about” the boat, batting it around with its head and tail as a cat might toy with a mouse, before it finally attacked once again, this time splitting the boat's stem. As the whale churned up the water around them, the men grabbed the two poles that held up the tips of the sails (known as sprit poles) and repeatedly punched the creature's sides. Chase arrived just as Pollard and his men succeeded in beating back the whale and sending it swimming away.

Pollard's boat had begun to swamp, so he ordered his crew to transfer their provisions to the other boats. All night the three boats lay huddled together in the swells. Unable to see very far in the inky darkness, the men let their imaginations fill the void with their fears. Over the last week they had contended with stiff headwinds, spoiled provisions, and leaky boats. To be attacked by yet another whale was the crowning blow: “ [I]t seemed to us as if fate was wholly relentless, in pursuing us with such a cruel complication of disasters.” They searched the water's black surface, convinced that the whale would reappear. “We were not without our fears that the fish might renew his attack, some time during the night, upon one of the other boats, and unexpectedly destroy us.” Without their ship to protect them, the hunters had become the prey.

The next morning they accomplished a quick repair of Pollard's boat by nailing thin strips of wood along the interior of the broken section. Once again, they were on their way, this time in a strong southeasterly breeze. That day the men in Chase's boat began to experience overpowering sensations of thirst-a lust for water that made it impossible to think about anything else. Despite the dryness of their mouths, they talked compulsively about their cravings. Only gradually did they realize the cause of their distress.

The day before, they had started eating the saltwater-damaged bread. The bread, which they had carefully dried in the sun, now contained all the salt of seawater but not, of course, the water. Already severely dehydrated, the men were, in effect, pouring gasoline on the fire of their thirsts-forcing their kidneys to extract additional fluid from their bodies to excrete the salt. They were beginning to suffer from a condition known as hypernatremia, in which an excessive amount of sodium can bring on convulsions.

“The privation of water is justly ranked among the most dreadful of the miseries of our life,” Chase recorded. “[T]he violence of raving thirst has no parallel in the catalogue of human calamities.” Chase claimed that it was on this day, November 28-the sixth since leaving the wreck-that “our extreme sufferings here first commenced.”

Even after they realized that the bread was responsible for their agony, the men in the first mate's boat resolved to continue eating the damaged provisions. The bread would spoil if it wasn't eaten soon, and their plan was contingent on a full sixty days of provisions. “Our determination was, to suffer as long as human patience and endurance would hold out,” Chase wrote, “having only in view, the relief that would be afforded us, when the quantity of wet provisions should be exhausted.”

The next day it became clear that the strain of sailing in the open ocean, day and night, for more than a week had taken its toll on the boats. The seams were gradually pulling apart, and all three craft now had to be bailed constantly. On board Chase's boat the situation was the most dire, but the first mate refused to give in. With his hammer in hand, he attended to even the most trivial repair. “[B]eing an active and ingenious man,” Nickerson recalled, the first mate let “no opportunity pass whereby he [could] add a nail by way of strengthening” the boat's ribs and planks. The incessant activity helped to divert Chase's men from the reality of their situation. They were in the worst of the three boats, but they had a leader who had dedicated himself to postponing its disintegration until it was beyond his final powers to prevent it.

That morning a school of iridescent dolphin fish appeared in the waters surrounding the boats and followed them for most of the day. Placing pieces of a white rag on one of Chase's fish hooks, they attempted, in Nickerson's words, “to use all our persuasive powers... to induce them to come aboard.” The fish proved “as tenacious of their existence as ourselves” and refused to bite.

By the following day, the men's hunger had become almost as difficult to bear as their thirst. The weather proved the best they'd seen since le'aving the Essex eight days before, and Chase proposed that they attempt to allay “the ravenous gnawings upon our stomachs” by eating one of the tortoises. All the men readily agreed, and at one o'clock that afternoon, Chase's dissection began. First they flipped the tortoise on its back. As his men held its beak and claws, Chase slit the creature's throat, cutting the arteries and veins on either side of the vertebrae in the neck. Nickerson claimed that “all seemed quite impatient of the opportunity to drink the blood as it came oozing from the wound of the sacrificed animal,” eager to consume it before it coagulated.

They collected the blood in the same tin cup from which they drank their water rations. Despite their shrieking thirst, some of the men could not make themselves drink the blood. For this part, Chase “took it like a medicine to relieve the extreme dryness of my palate.”

All of them, however, were willing to eat. Chase inserted his knife into the leathery skin beside the neck and worked his way around the shell's edge, cutting with a sawing motion until he could lift out the meat and guts. With the help of the tinderbox stored in the whaleboat's small keg of emergency equipment, they kindled a fire in the shell and cooked the terrapin, “entrails and all.”