In the Heart of the Sea (19 page)

“[W]e made but a very sorry progress,” Chase remembered. “Hunger and thirst, and long inactivity, had so weakened us, that in three hours every man gave out, and we abandoned the further prosecution of the plan.” Air rattled in their desiccated throats and lungs as they lay panting in the boats. Despite the raging heat of their bodies, their thin papery skin was without a hint of perspiration. Gradually the noise of their breathing ebbed, and they were once again deafened by the forbidding silence of a windless and empty ocean.

The next morning they detected a changea rustling of the water and a movement across their faces as, for the first time in five days, a light breeze poured out across the sea. Even though it was from precisely the wrong direction (southeast), the men welcomed it “with almost frenzied feelings of gratitude and joy.”

By noon it was blowing a gale. The wind had veered into the east-southeast, and once again, they were forced to take in all sail and lower the masts. The next day the wind moderated, and soon their sails were pulling them along. Despite the improvement in the weather, that night proved to be, Chase-recalled, “one of the most distressing nights in the whole catalogue of our sufferings.”

They now knew that even if the wind did miraculously shift into the west, they no longer had enough water to last the thirty or more days it would take to sail to the coast of Chile. Their physical torments had reached a terrible crescendo. It was almost as if they were being poisonedby the combined effects of thirst and hunger. A glutinous and bitter saliva collected in their mouths that was “intolerable beyond expression.” Their hair was falling out in clumps. Their skin was so burned and covered with sores that a splash of seawater felt like acid burning on their flesh. 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.

Throughout this long and dismal week, the men had attempted to sustain themselves with a kind of mantra: “ 'Patience and long-suffering' was the constant language of our lips,” Chase remembered, “and a determination, strong as the resolves of the soul could make it, to cling to existence as long as hope and breath remained to us.” But by the night of December 19, almost precisely a month since the sinking of the Essex, several of the men had given up. Chase could see it in their “lagging spirits and worn out frames”-”an utter indifference to their fate.” One more day, maybe two, and people would start to die.

The next morning began like so many others. Nickerson recalled how at around seven o'clock, they were “sitting in the bottom of our little boat quite silent and dejected.” Nineteen-year-old William Wright, from Cape Cod, stood up to stretch his legs. He glanced to leeward, then looked again.

“There is land!” he cried.

CHAPTER
NINE

The Island

THE MEN IN THE chase's boat stared eagerly ahead. Ravaged by hunger and thirst, half blinded by glare from the sea and sky, they had seen mirages before, and they feared this might prove to be another. But all of them could see the white sandy beach in the distance. “It was no visionary delusion,” Nickerson wrote, “but in reality 'Land Ho.'”

Even the most decrepit of Chase's men sprang to life. “We were all aroused in an instant,” the first mate remembered, “as if electrified... A new and extraordinary impulse now took possession of us. We shook off the lethargy of our senses, and seemed to take another, and a fresh existence.” At first glance, the island bore an eerie resemblance to their native Nantucket: a low rise of sand topped with green. Chase called it “a basking paradise before our longing eyes.” Nickerson immediately assumed that it marked “the final end to [our] long confinement and sufferings,” and added, “Never have my eyes rested on anything so pleasingly beautiful.”

It wasn't long before the men in the other two boats had seen the island. Spontaneous cheers rose from their cracked and swollen lips. “It is not within the scope of human calculation,” Chase wrote, “to divine what the feelings of our hearts were on this occasion. Alternate expectation, fear, gratitude, surprise, and exultation, each swayed our minds, and quickened our exertions.”

By eleven o'clock they were within a quarter mile of the island.

They could now see that instead of sand, it was made mostly of rock, with thirty-foot vertical cliffs lining the shore. Beyond the cliffs, the interior of the island was amazingly flat, yet “fresh and green with vegetation.” This boded well, they assured themselves, for the presence of ample supplies of water.

Pollard and Chase studied their copies of Bowditch's Navigator. Judging from the day's previous observation, they determined it must be Ducie Island at latitude 24 °20' south, longitude 124 °40' west. After a month at sea, after traveling approximately 1,500 nautical miles, they were farther from the coast of South America than when they had started.

The men's immediate concern was that the island might be inhabited. “In our present state,” Nickerson wrote, “we could have made but feeble resistance to an attack from natives.” Keeping about a hundred yards from shore, they began sailing around the island. “We... frequently fir [ed] a pistol,” Nickerson remembered, “as we glided past some valley or nook in the woods to arouse its inhabitants should there be any within hearing. But neither friend nor foe appeared.”

The island was an irregular oblong, about six miles long and three miles wide, rimmed by a jagged ledge of rocks and coral. The three boat-crews gradually made their way to the north end, which put them in the lee of the southeasterly trades. At a bend in the shoreline they found the island's largest beach. “ [T]his seemed the most promising position we had seen,” Nickerson wrote, “to make an attempt to land with our boats.” But first Chase would lead a preliminary scouting party while the three boats stood offshore, just in case they “should unexpectedly find savages in ambush.”

Chase, with musket in hand, and two others were dropped off on a large rock. By the time they'd waded ashore, they were already exhausted. “Upon arriving at the beach,” the first mate recalled, “it was necessary to take a little breath, and we laid down for a few minutes to rest our weak bodies.” They sat on the coarse coral sand, drinking in the sights and sounds of a stunningly beautiful island world. The cliffs behind them were festooned with flowers, shrubs, grasses, and vines. Birds flew about them, seemingly unconcerned by the men's presence. After a month of deprivation and suffering, they were about to enjoy, Chase was convinced, “a rich banquet of food and drink.” But first they had to find a source of water.

They split up, each one hobbling down the uneven beach in a different direction. In an inlet Chase was able to spear an eighteen-inch fish with the ramrod of his musket. He dragged the fish onto the shore and immediately sat down to eat. His two companions joined him, and in less than ten minutes the fish was consumed-”bones, and skin, and scales, and all.”

They now imagined they were strong enough to attempt a climb of the cliffs, which they figured to be the most probable source of water. But instead of rocks glistening with moisture, Chase found a dry, scrubby wall of dead coral. The shrubs and vines were not strong enough to support his weight, forcing him to grab the cutting edges of coral. Slashed and bruised, Chase realized he did not have the strength to reach the top.

The euphoria of only a few hours before gave way to the realization that this sterile outcropping of fossilized sea organisms might be without drinkable water. If this was true, every second they remained on the island reduced their already slim chances of survival. No matter how tempting it might be to spend at least one night on solid ground, Chase's first inclination was to set sail for South America immediately: “I never for one moment lost sight of the main chance, which I conceived we still had, of either getting to the coast, or of meeting some vessel at sea.”

When he returned to the beach he discovered that one of the men had some promising news. He had found a cleft in a rock that exuded the slightest trickle of water-just enough to wet his lips, but no more. Perhaps it was advisable to spend the night on the island and devote the next day to searching for water. Chase and his companions went out to the boats, and Chase told Pollard what he thought. They agreed to land.

They dragged the boats up onto a grassy area beneath a stand of trees. “We then turned [the boats] bottom upwards,” Nickerson remembered, “thus forming a protection from the night dews.” The men fanned out along the shore, and after collecting a few crabs and fish, they settled down beneath the boats, ate their catch, then stretched out their bony limbs for the first time in a month. Sleep soon followed. “[F]ree from all the anxieties of watching and labor,” Chase wrote, “[we] gave ourselves up to an unreserved forgetfulness and peace of mind.”

Morning came quickly and, with it, a return to the agonies of hunger and thirst. They were now so severely dehydrated that they had begun to lose the ability to speak. “Relief,” Chase wrote, “must come soon, or nature would sink.” They wandered the beach like ragged skeletons, pausing to lean against trees and rocks to catch their breath. They tried chewing the waxy green leaves of the shrubs that grew in the cliffs, but they were bitter to the taste. They found birds that made no attempt to escape when they plucked them from their nests. In the crevices of the rocks sprouted a grass that, when chewed, produced a temporary flow of moisture in their mouths. But nowhere did they find fresh water.

As soon as they strayed beyond the beach, they discovered that the island was a scrap heap of fractured coral as sharp and piercing as shattered glass. Many of the men had no shoes, which made it impossible for them to explore any great distance from their encampment. They also feared that if they did venture out, they might not have the stamina to return before nightfall, thus exposing themselves “to attacks of wild beasts, which might inhabit the island.” That evening they returned, Nickerson wrote, “sorrowing and dejected to our little town of boats in the valley.”

But Pollard had a surprise for them. The captain and his steward, William Bond, had spent the day gathering crabs and birds, and by the time the men returned from their searches, Pollard and Bond were in the midst of roasting what Nickerson called “a magnificent repast,” Prior to the sinking, food had been a source of dissension between Pollard and his men. Now it was what brought them together, and this time it was the master who was serving his crew. “ Here everyone seated himself upon the beautiful green grass,” Nickerson remembered, “and perhaps no banquet was ever enjoyed with greater gusto or gave such universal satisfaction.”

Pollard had done everything he could that day to increase the health and morale of his men. Chase remained focused on the “main chance”: getting to South America and safety. Restless and impatient as always, he had become convinced that they were wasting their time on this island without water. “In this state of affairs, we could not reconcile it to ourselves to remain longer at this place,” he wrote. “[A] day, an hour, lost to us unnecessarily here, might cost us our preservation.” That evening Chase expressed his concerns to Pollard: “I addressed the substance of these few reflections to the captain, who agreed with me in opinion, upon the necessity of taking some decisive steps in our present dilemma.”

While he agreed with his first mate in principle, Pollard attempted to defuse some of Chase's impetuousness. The captain pointed out that without a new supply of water, their chances of survival were next to nil. To push blindly ahead without exhausting every possibility of finding a spring would be a tragic mistake. “After some considerable conversation on this subject,” Chase wrote, “it was finally concluded to spend the succeeding day in the further search for water, and if none should be found, to quit the island the morning after.”

The men of the Essex did not know that they were within just a few hundred miles of saving themselves. Pollard and Chase were mistaken as to their whereabouts. This was not Ducie Island but rather Henderson Island, at virtually the same latitude but seventy miles to the west. Both islands are part of a group named for its most famous member, Pitcairn, an island whose history was inextricably linked with Nantucket. In 1808, a sealing captain from Nantucket named Mayhew Fol-ger stumbled across Pitcairn (whose location was incorrectly recorded on all available navigational guides) and discovered the answer to a nineteen-year-old mystery: what had happened to Fletcher Christian and the Bounty.

After abandoning Captain Bligh in the ship's launch in 1789, the Bounty mutineers had wandered the Pacific. They picked up some native women and a few men in Tahiti, and eventually made their way to an uninhabited island in the southeastern extreme of Polynesia. In 1820, a small community of Bounty descendants was flourishing on Pitcairn. Just four hundred miles to the southwest, a few days' sail from Henderson, they would have provided the Essex crew with all the food and water they needed. But Pitcairn was not listed in their Bowditch's Navigator. Even if it had been, it's questionable whether they could have found it. As it was, they were off by almost a hundred miles when they tried to determine their current location.

Henderson Island began as a coral atoll about 370,000 years ago. Twenty thousand years later, volcanic activity associated with Pitcairn caused the land underneath the atoll to rise. Today, the cliffs of Henderson are between thirty and thirty-five feet high and enclose a dry fossil lagoon. Surrounded by a vast ocean, this uninhabited speck of coral might seem an unlikely source of anyone's salvation.

As much as sixty-five inches of rain falls on Henderson each year. This water does not all run off into the sea or evaporate into the air. Much of it seeps down through the thin soils and layers of fossilized coral to a depth of a foot or so above sea level. Here it flows into a horizontal layer of freshwater saturating the rock and sand. The freshwater, which is lighter than saltwater, floats on the surface of the sea in the shape of a dome or lens beneath the island. But, unless they could find a spring, all this groundwater would be of no use to the men of the Essex.