In the Heart of the Sea (25 page)

“I addressed them,” Chase wrote, “on the painful subject of keeping the body for food.” Lawrence and Nickerson raised no objections and, fearful that the meat had already begun to spoil, “ [we] set to work as fast as we were able.”

After separating the limbs from the body and removing the heart, they sewed up what remained of Cole's body “as decently” as they could, before they committed it to the sea. Then they began to eat. Even before lighting a fire, the men “eagerly devoured” the heart, then ate “sparingly of afewpieces of the flesh.” They cut the rest of the meat into thin strips-some of which they roasted on the fire, while the others were laid out to dry in the sun.

Chase insisted that he had “no language to paint the anguish of our souls in this dreadful dilemma.” Making it all the worse was the thought that any one of the remaining three men might be next. “We knew not then,” the first mate wrote, “to whose lot it would fall next, either to die or be shot, and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.”

The next morning they discovered that the strips of flesh had turned a rancid green. They immediately cooked the strips, which provided them with enough meat to last another six or seven days, allowing them to save what little bread they had left for what Chase called “the last moment of our trial.”

In captain Pollard's boat, on February 11, only five days after the execution of Owen Coffin, Barzillai Ray died. Ray, whose biblical first name means “made of iron, most firm and true,” was nineteen years old. It was the seventh death George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell had witnessed in the month and a half since departing Henderson Island.

Psychologists studying the phenomenon of battle fatigue during “World War II discovered that no soldiers-regardless of how strong their emotional makeup might be-were able to function if their unit experienced losses of 75 percent or more. Pollard and Ramsdell were suffering from a double burden; not only had they seen seven of nine men die (and even killed one of them), but they had been forced to eat their bodies. Like Pip, the black sailor in Moby-Dick who loses his mind after several hours of treading water on a boundless sea, Pollard and Ramsdell had been “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro.” Now they were alone, with only the corpse of Barzillai Ray and the bones of Coffin and Reed to sustain them.

Three days later, on February 14, the eighty-fifth day since leaving the wreck, Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson ate the last of Isaac Cole. A week of living off human flesh, combined with their earlier decision to increase their daily ration of hardtack, had strengthened them to the point where they could once again manage the steering oar. But if they were stronger, they were also in a great deal of pain. As if the boils that covered their skin weren't enough, their arms and legs started to swell shockingly. Known as edema, this disfiguring accumulation of fluid is a common symptom of starvation.

Several days of westerly winds had brought them to within three hundred miles of the islands of Masafuera and Juan Fernandez. If they averaged sixty miles a day, they might reach safety in another five days. Unfortunately, they had only three days of hardtack left.

“Matters were now with us at their height,” Chase wrote. “[A]ll hope was cast upon the breeze; and we tremblingly and fearfully awaited its progress, and the dreadful development of our destiny.” Surrendering all prospects, the men were convinced that after two and a half months of suffering they were about to die nearly within sight of salvation.

That night Owen Chase lay down to sleep, “almost indifferent whether I should ever see the light again.” He dreamed he saw a ship, just a few miles away, and even though he “strained every nerve to get to her,” she sailed off into the distance, never to return. Chase awoke “almost overpowered with the frenzy I had caught in my slumbers, and stung with the cruelties of a diseased and disappointed imagination.”

The next afternoon, Chase saw a thick cloud to the northeast-a sure sign of land. It must be the island of Masafuera-at least that was what Chase told Lawrence and Nickerson. In two days, he assured them, they would be on dry land. At first, his companions were reluctant to believe him. Gradually, however, after “repeated assurances of the favorable appearances of things” on the part of Chase, “their spirits acquired even a degree of elasticity that was truly astonishing.” The wind remained favorable all night, and with their sails trimmed perfectly and a man tending the steering oar, their little boat made the best time of the voyage.

The next morning the cloud still loomed ahead. The end of their ordeal was apparently only days away. But for fifteen-year-old Thomas Nickerson, the strain of anticipation had become too much. After bailing out the boat, he lay down, drew the mildewed piece of canvas over him like a shroud, and told his fellow crew members that “he wished to die immediately.”

“I saw that he had given up,” Chase wrote, “and I attempted to speak a few words of comfort and encouragement to him.” But all the arguments that had served the first mate so well failed to penetrate Nickerson's inner gloom. “A fixed look of settled and forsaken despondency came over his face,” Chase wrote. “[H]e lay for some time silent, sullen, and sorrowful-and I felt at once... that the coldness of death was fast gathering upon him.”

It was obvious to Chase that some form of dementia had seized the boy. Having watched Isaac Cole slip into a similar madness, Chase could not help but wonder if all of them were about to succumb to the temptations of despair. “[T]here was a sudden and unaccountable earnestness in his manner,” he wrote, “that alarmed me, and made me fear that I myself might unexpectedly be overtaken by a like weakness, or dizziness of nature, that would bereave me at once of both reason and life.” Whether or not it had been communicated to him through Cole's diseased flesh, Chase also felt the stirrings of a death wish as dark and palpable as the pillarlike cloud ahead.

At seven o'clock the next morning, February 18, Chase was sleeping in the bottom of the boat. Benjamin Lawrence was standing at the steering oar. Throughout the ordeal, the twenty-one-year-old boatsteerer had demonstrated remarkable fortitude. He was the one who, two months earlier, had volunteered to swim underneath the boat to repair a sprung plank. As Lawrence had watched Peterson, Cole, and now Nicker son lose their grip on life, he had clung, as best he could, to hope.

It was something his careworn family had become good at. His grandfather, George Lawrence, had married Judith Coffin, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. For many years the Lawrences had been part of the island's Quaker elite, but by the time Benjamin came into the world, his grandfather had suffered several financial reversals. The proud old man decided to move to Alexandria, Virginia, where, he told an acquaintance, he could “descend into a humble sphere among strangers, rather than... remain in a place where every object reminded him of his lost prosperity.” When Benjamin was ten years old, his father died during a voyage to Alexandria, leaving his wife with seven children to support.

Safe in Lawrence's pocket was the piece of twine he had been working on ever since they'd left the wreck. It was now close to twelve inches long. He leaned into the steering oar and scanned the horizon.

“There's a sail! “he cried.

Chase immediately scrambled to his feet. Just visible over the horizon was the speck of pale brown that Lawrence had taken for a sail. Chase stared for several suspenseful moments, gradually realizing that, yes, it was a sail-the topgallant of a ship, about seven miles away.

“I do not believe it is possible,” Chase wrote, “to form a just conception of the pure, strong feelings, and the unmingled emotions of joy and gratitude, that took possession of my mind on this occasion.”

Soon even Nickerson was up on his feet and gazing excitedly ahead.

Now the question was whether they could catch up to the much larger vessel. The ship was several miles to leeward, which was an advantage for the smaller vessel, and heading slightly north of their position, which meant that it might intercept their line of sail. Could their whaleboat reach that crossing point at approximately the same time the ship did? Chase could only pray that his nightmare of the missed rescue ship would not prove true. “I felt at the moment,” Chase wrote, “a violent and unaccountable impulse to fly directly towards her.”

For the next three hours they were in a desperate race. Their battered old whaleboat skimmed lightly over the waves at between four and six knots in the northwesterly breeze. Up ahead, the ship's sail plan continued to emerge from the distant horizon, revealing, with excruciating slowness, not only the topgallant sails but the topsails beneath and, finally, the mainsail and foresail. Yes, they assured themselves, they were catching up to the ship.

There was no lookout at the vessel's masthead, but eventually someone on deck saw them approaching to windward and behind. Chase and his men watched in tense fascination as the antlike figures bustled about the ship, shortening sail. Gradually the whaleboat closed the distance, and the hull of the merchantman rose up out of the sea, looming larger and larger ahead of them until Chase could read her quarterboard. She was the Indian from London.

Chase heard a shout and through glazed, reddened eyes saw a figure at the quarterdeck rail with a trumpet, a hailing device resembling a megaphone. It was an officer of the Indian, asking who they were. Chase summoned all his strength to make himself heard, but his desiccated tongue stumbled over the words: “Essex... whaleship... Nantucket.”

The narratives of shipwreck survivors are filled with accounts of captains refusing to take castaways aboard. In some instances the officers were reluctant to share their already low supply of provisions; in others they were fearful the survivors might be suffering from communicable diseases. But as soon as Chase explained that they were from a wreck, the Indian's captain immediately insisted that they come alongside.

When Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson attempted to climb aboard, they discovered that they didn't have the strength. The three men stared up at the crew, their eyes wide and huge within the dark hollows of their skulls. Their raw, ulcerated skin hung from their skeletons like noxious rags. As he looked down from the quarterdeck, Captain William Crozier was moved to tears at what Chase called “the most deplorable and affecting picture of suffering and misery.”

The English sailors lifted the men from their boat and carried them to the captain's cabin. Crozier ordered the cook to serve them their first taste of civilized food-tapioca pudding. Made from the root of the cassava plant, tapioca is a high-calorie, easy-to-digest food rich in the proteins and carbohydrates that their bodies craved.

Rescue came at latitude 33°45' south, longitude 81°03' west. It was the eighty-ninth day since Chase and his men had left the Essex, and at noon they came within sight of Masafuera. Chase had succeeded in navigating them across a 2,500-mile stretch of ocean with astonishing accuracy. Even though they had sometimes been so weak that they could not steer their boat, they had somehow managed to sail almost to within sight of their intended destination. In just a few days the Indian would be in the Chilean port of Valparaiso.

Trailing behind on a towline was the whaleboat that had served the Nantucketers so well. Captain Crozier hoped to sell the old boat in Valparaiso and establish a fund for the men's relief. But the next night the weather blew up to a gale, and the boat, empty of men for the first time in three months, was lost.

Three hundred miles to the south, Pollard and Ramsdell sailed on. For the next five days they pushed east, until by February 23, the ninety-fourth day since leaving the wreck, they were approaching the island of St. Mary's just off the Chilean coast. Over a year before, this had been the Essex's first landfall after rounding Cape Horn. Pollard and Ramsdell were on the verge of completing an irregular circle with a diameter of more than three thousand miles.

It had been twelve days since the death of Barzillai Ray. They had long since eaten the last scrap of his flesh. The two famished men now cracked open the bones of their shipmates-beating them against the stone on the bottom of the boat and smashing them with the boat's hatchet-and ate the marrow, which contained the fat their bodies so desperately needed.

Pollard would later remember these as “days of horror and despair.” Both of them were so weak that they could barely lift their hands. They were drifting in and out of consciousness. It is not uncommon for castaways who have been many days at sea and suffered both physically and emotionally to lapse into what has been called “a sort of collective confabulation,” in which the survivors exist in a shared fantasy world. Delusions may include comforting scenes from home-perhaps, in the case of Pollard and Ramsdell, a sunny June day on the Nantucket Commons during the sheepshearing festival. Survivors may find themselves in conversation with deceased shipmates and family members as they lose all sense of time.

For Pollard and Ramsdell, it was the bones-gifts from the men they had known and loved-that became their obsession. They stuffed their pockets with finger bones; they sucked the sweet marrow from the splintered ribs and thighs. And they sailed on, the compass card wavering toward east.

Suddenly they heard a sound: men shouting and then silence as shadows fell across them and then the rustle of wind in sails and the creaking of spars and rigging. They looked up, and there were faces.

Of the Dauphin's twenty-one-man crew, at least three-Dimon Peters, Asnonkeets, and Joseph Squibb-were Wampanoags from Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. As children they had been taught a legend about the discovery of Nantucket that told of how, long before the arrival of the Europeans, a huge eagle appeared over a village on Cape Cod. The eagle would swoop down out of the sky and carry off children in its talons, then disappear over the waters to the south. Finally the villagers asked a benevolent giant named Maushop to find out where the eagle was taking their children. Maushop set off to the south, wading through the water until he came to an island he had never seen before. After searching all over the island, he found the bones of the children piled high beneath a large tree.