In the Heart of the Sea (24 page)

Under these circumstances, survivors typically undergo a process of psychic deadening that one Auschwitz survivor described as a tendency to “kill my feelings.” Another woman expressed it as an amoral, even immoral, will to live: “Nothing else counted but that I wanted to live. I would have stolen from husband, child, parent or friend, in order to accomplish this. Therefore, every day I disciplined myself with a sort of low, savage cunning, to bend every effort, to devote every fiber of my being, to do those things which would make that possible.”

Within a feral community, it is not uncommon for subgroups to develop as a collective form of defense against the remorseless march of horror, and it was here that the Nantucketers-their ties of kinship and religion stitching them together-had an overwhelming advantage. Since there would be no black survivors to contradict the testimonies of the whites, the possibility exists that the Nantucketers took a far more active role in insuring their own survival than has been otherwise suggested. Certainly the statistics raise suspicion-of the first four sailors to be eaten all were black. Short of murdering the black crew members, the Nantucketers could have refused to share meat with them.

However, except for the fact that the majority of the blacks were assigned to a whaleboat commanded by a sickly mate, there is no evidence of overt favoritism in the boats. Indeed, what appears to have distinguished the men of the Essex was the great discipline andhuman compunction they maintained throughout the whole ordeal. If necessity forced them to act like animals, they did so with the deepest regrets. There was a reason why William Bond in Hendricks's boat was the last African American left alive. Thanks to his position as steward in the officers' quarters, Bond had enjoyed a far more balanced and plentiful diet than his shipmates in the forecastle. But now that he was the only black among six whites, Bond had to wonder what the future held.

Given the cruel mathematics of survival cannibalism, each death not only provided the remaining men with food but reduced by one the number of people they had to share it with. By the time Samuel Reed died on January 28, the seven survivors each received close to three thousand calories' worth of meat (up by almost a third since the death of Lawson Thomas). Unfortunately, even though this portion may have been roughly equivalent to each man's share of a Galapagos tortoise, it lacked the fat that the human body requires to digest meat. No matter how much meat they now had available to them, it was of limited nutritional value without a source of fat.

The following night,-January 29, was darker than most. The two boat-crews were finding it difficult to keep track of each other; they also lacked the strength to manage the steering oars and sails. That night, Pollard and his men looked up to find that the whaleboat containing Obed Hendricks, William Bond, and Joseph West had disappeared. Pollard's men were too weak to attempt to find the missing boat-either by raising a lantern or firing a pistol. That left George Pollard, Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Barzillai Ray - all Nantucketers-alone for the first time since the sinking of the Essex. They were at latitude 35 “south, longitude 100°west, 1,500 miles from the coast of South America, with only the half-eaten corpse of Samuel Reed to keep them alive.

But no matter how grim their prospects might seem, they were better than those of Hendricks's boat-crew. “Without a compass or a quadrant, Hendricks and his men were now lost in an empty and limitless sea.

On February 6, the four men on Pollard's boat, having consumed “the last morsel” of Samuel Reed, began to “[look] at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds,” according to one survivor, “but we held our tongues.” Then the youngest of them, sixteen-year-old Charles Ramsdell, uttered the unspeakable. They should cast lots, he said, to see who would be killed so that the rest could live.

The drawing of lots in a survival situation had long been an accepted custom of the sea. The earliest recorded instance dates back to the first half of the seventeenth century, when seven Englishmen sailing from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts were driven out to sea in a storm. After seventeen days, one of the crew suggested that they cast lots. As it turned out, the lot fell to the man who had originally made the proposal, and after lots were cast again to see who should execute him, he was killed and eaten.

In 1765, several days after the crew of the disabled Peggy had eaten the remains of the black slave, lots were drawn to see who would be the next to serve as food. The lot fell to David Flatt, a foremastman and one of the most popular sailors in the crew. “The shock of the decision was great,” wrote Captain Harrison, “and the preparations for execution dreadful.” Flatt requested that he be given some time to prepare himself for death, and the crew agreed to postpone the execution until eleven the next morning. The dread of his death sentence proved too much for Flatt. By midnight he had become deaf; by morning he was delirious. Incredibly, a rescue ship was sighted at eight o'clock. But for David Flatt it was too late. Even after the Peggy's crew had been delivered to England, Harrison reported that “the unhappy Flatt still continued out of his senses.”

Drawing lots was not a practice to which a Quaker whaleman could, in good conscience, agree. Friends not only have a testimony against killing people but also do not allow games of chance. Charles Ramsdell, the son of a cabinetmaker, was a Congregationalist. However, both Owen Coffin and Barzillai Ray were members of Nantucket's Friends Meeting. Although Pollard was not a Quaker, his grandparents had been, and his great-grandmother, Mehitable Pollard, had been a minister.

Faced with similarly dire circumstances, other sailors made different decisions. In 1811, the 139-ton brig Polly, on her way from Boston to the Caribbean, was dismasted in a storm, and the crew drifted on the waterlogged hull for 191 days. Although some of the men died from hunger and exposure, their bodies were never used for food; instead, they were used as bait. Attaching pieces of their dead shipmate's bodies to a trolling line, the survivors managed to catch enough sharks to sustain themselves until their rescue. If the Essex crew had adopted this strategy with the death of Matthew Joy, they might never have reached the extreme that confronted them now.

When first presented with young Ramsdell's proposal, Captain Pollard “would not listen to it,” according to an account related by Nickerson, “saying to the others, 'No, but if I die first you are welcome to subsist on my remains.'“ Then Owen Coffin, Pollard's first cousin, the eighteen-year-old son of his aunt, joined Ramsdell in requesting that they cast lots.

Pollard studied his three young companions. Starvation had ringed their sunken eyes with a dark, smudgelike pigmentation. There was little doubt that they were all close to death. It was also clear that all of them, including Barzillai Ray, the orphaned son of a noted island cooper, were in favor of Ramsdell's proposal. As he had two times before-after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream and the sinking of the Essex-Pollard acquiesced to the majority. He agreed to cast lots. If suffering had turned Chase into a compassionate yet forceful leader, Pollard's confidence had been eroded even further by events that reduced him to the most desperate extreme a man can ever know.

They cut up a scrap of paper and placed the pieces in a hat. The lot fell to Owen Coffin. “Mylad,mylad!”Pollardcriedout. “[I]f you don't like your lot, I'll shoot the first man that touches you.” Then the captain offered to take the lot himself. “Who can doubt but that Pollard would rather have met the death a thousand times,” Nickerson wrote. “None that knew him, will ever doubt.”

But Coffin had already resigned himself to his fate. “I like it as well as any other,” he said softly.

Lots were drawn again to see who would shoot the boy. It fell to Coffin's friend, Charles Ramsdell.

Even though the lottery had originally been his idea, Ramsdell now refused to follow it through. “For a long time,” Nickerson wrote, “he declared that he could never do it, but finally had to submit.” Before he died, Coffin spoke a parting message to his mother, which Pollard promised to deliver if he should make it back to Nantucket. Then Coffin asked for a few moments of silence. After reassuring the others that “the lots had been fairly drawn,” he lay his head down on the boat's gunwale. “He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would later recall, “and nothing of him left.”

CHASE AND HIS MEN lay in the bottom of their boat in a cold drizzle. All they had to shield them from the rain was a piece of tattered, water-soaked canvas. “Even had it been dry,” Nickerson wrote, “ [it] would have been but a poor apology for covering.”

On January 28,1821, the breeze finally shifted into the west. But it brought them little comfort. “It had nearly become indifferent to us,” Chase wrote, “from what quarter it blew.” They now had too far to go and too few provisions to have any hope of reaching land. Their only chance was to be sighted by a ship. “[I]t was this narrow hope alone,” Chase remembered, “that prevented me from lying down at once to die.”

They had fourteen days of hardtack left, but that assumed they could live two more weeks on only an ounce and a half a day. “We were so feeble,” Nicker son wrote, “that we could scarcely crawl about the boat upon our hands and knees.” Chase realized that if he didn't increase their daily portion-of bread, they all might be dead in as few as five days. It was time to abandon the strict rationing regime that had brought them this far and let the men eat “as pinching necessity demanded.”

Success in a long-term survival situation requires that a person display an “active-passive” approach to the gradual and agonizing unfolding of events. “The key factor... [is] the realization that passivity is itself a deliberate and 'active' act,” the survival psychologist John Leach writes. “There is strength in passivity.” After more than two months of regimenting every aspect of his men's lives, Chase intuitively understood this-that it was now time to give “ourselves wholly up to the guidance and disposal of our Creator.” They would eat as much bread as they needed to stave off death and see where the westerly wind took them.

By February 6 they were still alive, but just barely. “Our sufferings were now drawing to a close,” the first mate wrote. “ [A] terrible death appeared shortly to await us.” The slight increase in food intake had brought a return to their hunger pangs, which were now “violent and outrageous.” They found it difficult to talk and think clearly. Dreams of food and drink continued to torment them. “ [O]ften did our fevered minds wander to the side of some richly supplied table,” Nickerson remembered. His fantasies always ended the same way-with him “crying at the disappointment.”

That night, rain squalls forced them to shorten sail. The off-islander Isaac Cole was on watch, and rather than awaken his companions, he attempted to lower the jib himself. But it proved too much for him. Chase and Nickerson awoke the next morning to find Cole despondent in the bilge of the boat. He declared that “all was dark in his mind, not a single ray of hope was left for him to dwell upon.” Like Richard Peterson before him, he had given up, asserting that “it was folly and madness to be struggling against what appeared so palpably to be our fixed and settled destiny.”

Even, though he barely had the strength to articulate the words, Chase did his best to change Cole's mind. “I remonstrated with him as effectually as the weakness both of my body and understanding would allow of.” Suddenly Cole sat up and crawled to the bow and hoisted the jib he had lowered, at such cost, the night before. He cried out that he would not give up and that he would live as long as any of them. “ [T]his effort was,” Chase wrote, “but the hectic fever of the moment.” Cole soon returned to the bottom of the boat, where he lay despairing for the rest of the day and through the night. But Cole would not be permitted the dignity of a quiet and peaceful death.

On the morning of February 8, the seventy-ninth day since leaving the Essex, Cole began to rant incoherently, presenting to his frightened crew members “a most miserable spectacle of madness.” Twitching spasmodically, he sat up and called for a napkin and water, then fell down to the bottom of the boat as if struck dead, only to pop up again like a possessed jack-in-the-box. By ten o'clock he could no longer speak. Chase and the others placed him on a board they had laid across the seats and covered him with a few pieces of clothing.

For the next six hours, Cole whimpered and moaned in pain, finally falling into “the most horrid and frightful convulsions” Chase had ever seen. In addition to dehydration and hypernatremia (an excess amount of salt), he may have been suffering from a lack of magnesium, a mineral deficiency that, when extreme, can cause bizarre and violent behavior. By four o'clock in the afternoon, Isaac Cole was dead.

It had been forty-three days since they'd left Henderson Island, seventy-eight days since they'd last seen the Essex, but no one suggested-at least that afternoon-that they use Cole's body for food. All night the corpse lay beside them, each man keeping his thoughts to himself.

When the crew of the Peggy shot and killed a black slave in 1765, one of the men refused to wait for the meat to be cooked. “ [B] eing ravenously impatient for food,” the sailor plunged his hand into the slave's eviscerated body and plucked out the liver and ate it raw. “The unhappy man paid dear for such an extravagant impatience,” Captain Harrison wrote, “for in three days after he died raving mad.” Instead of eating that sailor's body, the crew, “being fearful of sharing his fate,” threw it overboard. No one dared to consume the flesh of a man who had died insane.

The next morning, February 9, Lawrence and Nickerson began making preparations for burying Cole's remains. Chase stopped them. All night he had wrestled with the question of what they should do. With only three days of hardtack left, he knew, it was quite possible that they might be reduced to casting lots. Better to eat a dead shipmate-even a tainted shipmate-than be forced to kill a man.