In the Heart of the Sea (26 page)

On the morning of February 23, the crew of the Dauphin made a similar discovery. Looking down from a restless forest of spars and sails, they saw two men in awhaleboat filled with bones.

The men were not much more than skeletons themselves, and the story that would be passed from ship to ship in the months ahead was that they were “found sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.” The Dauphin's captain, Zimri Coffin, ordered his men to lower a boat and bring the two survivors

aboard. Like Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson before them, Pollard and Ramsdell were too weak to stand and had to be lifted up to the whaleship's deck. Both men were, in the words of a witness, “very low” when first brought aboard. But after being given some food, Pollard made an astonishing recovery.

At around five o'clock that evening, the Dauphin spoke the whaleship Diana from New York. The Diana's captain, Aaron Paddack, toward the end of a successful voyage, joined Captain Coffin for dinner. Also joining them was Captain George Pollard, Jr., formerly of the Essex.

Like many survivors, Pollard was animated by a fierce and desperate compulsion to tell his story. Just as the gaunt, wild-eyed Ancient Mariner of Coleridge's poem poured forth each harrowing detail to the Wedding Guest, so did Pollard tell them everything: how his ship had been attacked “in a most deliberate manner” by a large sperm whale; how they had headed south in the whaleboats; how his boat had been attacked once again, this time by “an unknown fish”; and how they had found an island where a “ few fowl and fish was the only sustenance.” He told them that three men still remained on the island. He told of how the rest of them had set out for Easter Island and how Matthew Joy had been the first to die. He told of how Chase's boat had become separated from them in the night and how, in rapid succession, four black men “became food for the remainder.” Then he told how, after separating from the second mate's boat, he and his crew “were reduced to the deplorable necessity of casting lots.” He told of how the lot fell to Owen Coffin, “who with composure and resignation submitted to his fate.” Lastly he told of the death of Barzillai Ray, and how Ray's corpse had kept both him and Ramsdell alive.

Later that night, once he had returned to the Diana, Captain Paddack wrote it all down, calling Pollard's account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.” The question now became one of how the survivors would fare in the dark shadow of their story.

ON FEBRUARY 25, 1821, Chase, Lawrence, andNickerson arrived in Valparaiso, Chile's largest port, set on a steep hill facing north across a wide bay. At any other time the story of the Essex would have captivated the city. But in February and March of that year, the citizens of Valparaiso were tensely awaiting news from the north. Revolutionary forces, having already secured Chile's independence from Spain, were bearing down on Royalists in Lima. It was Peru, not a few American castaways, that demanded Valparaiso's attention, allowing the Essex survivors to recuperate in relative privacy.

From the beginning Chase and his men spoke openly about having resorted to cannibalism. On the day of the Nantucketers' arrival, the keeper of the port's official log of incoming and outgoing vessels matter-of-factly reported that the captain of the Indian had picked up three men who “survived with a little water and crackers... and with a shipmate that died and that they ate in the term of eight days.”

The U.S. frigate Constellation was anchored at Valparaiso, and the acting American consul, Henry Hill, arranged to have Chase. Lawrence, and Nickerson taken to it. Even though it had been a week since their rescue, the survivors still presented an affecting sight. “[T]heir appearance...was truly distressing,” wrote Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, “bones working through their skins, their legs and feet much smaller and the whole surface of their bodies one entire ulcer.” Ridgely placed the three men under the care of his surgeon, Dr. Leonard Osborn, who supervised their recovery in the frigate's sickbay deep in the forward part of the third deck. It may have been hot and airless, but for three men who had spent eighty-nine consecutive days beneath the open sky, it was a wonderful comfort.

The crew of the Constellation was so profoundly moved by the sufferings of Chase and his men that each sailor donated a dollar toward their assistance. When this was combined with money collected from the American and British residents of Valparaiso, the Essex survivors had more than $500 to help defray the costs of their convalescence.

But the men's sufferings were not yet over. As the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment discovered in 1945, the recovery period was a torturous part of the ordeal. After three months, the Minnesota volunteers still had not returned to their normal weights, even though some were consuming more than five thousand calories a day. They would eat until their stomachs could not take any more, yet they still felt hungry. Many would continue to eat between meals. It wasn't until after six months of “supernormal eating” that they had regained the bodies they had once possessed.

The Essex survivors were in much worse shape than the volunteers in the Minnesota experiment. After three months of abuse, their digestive systems had a difficult time handling the intake of increased quantities of food-a problem shared by Captain David Harrison of the Peggy in 1765. Upon his rescue, Harrison was given some chicken broth. It had been thirty-seven days since he'd last had a bowel movement, and soon after drinking some of the broth, he was wracked by excruciating abdominal pain. “I was ... at last relieved,” Harrison wrote, “by the discharge of acallous lump about the size of a hen's egg, and enjoyed a tranquillity of body, notwithstanding all my disorders, with which I was utterly unacquainted for some preceding weeks.”

The day after their arrival in Valparaiso, Chase and his men received a visit from the governor, who had heard rumors that, instead of being the survivors of a wreck, the first mate and his men had killed the Essex's captain in a bloody mutiny. “For there was a whispering abroad,” Nickerson wrote, “that foul play had been used by us.” The governor was reassured enough by Chase's story that he allowed the Nantucketers to go freely about the city as soon as they were able.

A week and a half later, on March 9, the Nantucket whaleship Hero arrived in Valparaiso. While cutting in a whale off St. Mary's Island, she'd been attacked by Spanish pirates. The Spaniards imprisoned the captain and the cabin boy on shore, then locked the rest of the crewbe-lowdecks and began to ransack the ship. When an unknown vessel appeared in the harbor, the pirates returned briefly to shore, allowing first mate Obed Starbuck to burst open the cabin door and retake the ship. Starbuck ordered his men to set sail, and although the pirates came to within yards of catching up to the fleeing whaleship, the Nantucketers were able to reach safety.

As dramatic as that report was, the Hero bore even more sensational news. With mate Starbuck acting as skipper, the Hero had encountered three whaleships sailing together as an informal group-the Dauphin, the Diana, and the Two Brothers. Captain Zimri Coffin of the Dauphin told Starbuck that he had the captain of the Essex and another crew member aboard. Shortly afterward, Pollard and Ramsdell were transferred to the Two Brothers, which was headed for Valparaiso.

It arrived on March 17. The five survivors had last seen one another on the night of January 12, when their boats had become separated in a howling gale more than two thousand miles out to sea. Since then, two of Chase's crew had died, four of Pollard's, and three of Joy's (then under Hendricks's leadership) before the second mate's boat and the three remaining men disappeared. Only Nantucketers had emerged from Pollard's and Chase's whaleboats alive.

They had all suffered terribly, but it was Pollard and Ramsdell-found clutching the bones of their dead companions-who had come the closest to complete psychic disintegration. Of the anguish each of these two experienced, Pollard's was perhaps the greater. Ayear and a half earlier, his aunt had entrusted him with the care and protection of her oldest son, Owen. Pollard had not only presided over his cousin's execution but had eaten his flesh, thus participating in what one historian of cannibalism at seahas called the taboo of “gastronomic incest.”

Pollard had demonstrated remarkable stamina immediately after his rescue, but his urgent need to tell his tale had almost killed him. Soon after that first night, he suffered a relapse. When Captain William Coffin of the Nan tucket whaleship Eagle offered the Essex survivors passage home, Pollard was judged to be too weak for a voyage around Cape Horn. On March 23, Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell bid farewell to their captain and left for Nantucket. In May, after two months of recuperation and solitary reflection, Pollard followed them in the whaleship Two Brothers.

In the meantime, Commodore Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, had made arrangements for the rescue of Chappel, Weeks, and Wright from (as he was told) Ducie Island. Recently arrived in Valparaiso was the Surry, a trading vessel from Australia being loaded with fifteen thousand bushels of wheat. Her captain, Thomas Raine, agreed to stop at Ducie on his way back to Sydney and pick up the three Essex crew members, assuming, of course, they were still alive.

The Surry left South America on March 10. Captain Raine and his crew arrived at Ducie Island less than a month later, only to find the tiny coral atoll uninhabited. The shore was so thick with nesting birds it was impossible to walk without stepping on eggs. Raine decided that no one had visited this necklace of coral in a very long time.

He studied his navigational guide and wondered if the Essex officers might have mistaken an island seventy miles to the west for Ducie. A few days later, on April 9, Henderson Island came within view. They approached it from the east, then began to follow the coastline to the north. Upon rounding a rocky headland they found a “ spacious bay” to the west. Raine ordered one of his men to fire a gun.

At that moment, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright had just sat down to eat a tropic bird. Except for some berries and shellfish, birds and eggs were the only food left on Henderson. The landcrabs had disappeared. A few months before, the men had succeeded in catching five green turtles, but by the time they had eaten just one of the turtles, the meat on the other four had spoiled. Over the last four months, the tropic birds had proved exceptionally difficult to find, so the bird they had now was, for them, a bountiful feast. But food was not their gravest concern. What they still needed most was water.

From the day after their seventeen shipmates left for Easter Island, the spring of freshwater never again emerged above the tide line. At low tide they could see freshwater bubbling up to the ocean's surface from the rock, but for the rest of their time on Henderson the spring always remained covered by saltwater.

In desperation, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright dug a series of wells but were unable to reach groundwater. When it rained they would greedily collect the water that accumulated in the hollows of nearby rocks. Dehydration caused their tongues to swell and their lips to crack. After a five-day stretch without water, they reluctantly sucked the blood of a tropic bird but found themselves “much disordered” by it. While searching the crevices and caves for water, they discovered the remains, of the eight unidentified castaways, whose fate they feared would soon be their own. The skeletons lay side by side as if the people had decided to lie down and quietly die together. For Chappel, who had once been the wildest and least responsible of the Essex's crew, it was a sight that helped change his life. From that day forward, he would look to God. “I found religion not only useful,” he later wrote, “but absolutely necessary to enable me to bear up under these severe trials.”

When Chappel, Weeks, and Wright, crouched around their tropicbird feast, heard a distant booming, they assumed it was thunder, but one of the men decided to walk down to the beach and have a look. Later he would tell what had happened as soon as he saw the ship: “The poor fellow,” one of the Surry's crew members reported, “was so overpowered with the emotions such a sight excited in his breast, he could not go to tell his companions the joyful news.” Finally, however, they, too, grew curious and joined him at the beach.

A high surf was breaking on the ledge of coral surrounding the island. Several times the crew of the Surry attempted to land a boat, but the conditions proved too dangerous. The three desperate men stood on the beach, increasingly fearful that their rescuers would decide to abandon them. Finally Chappel, the strongest of the three and the only one who knew how to swim, dove into the sea. His arms were skin and bone but with the adrenaline coursing through him, he reached the launch and was pulled aboard.

The Surry's crew discussed what to do next. They might have to return the following day for the other two men. But Chappel refused to abandon his two shipmates even temporarily. With a rope tied around his waist, he dove into the water and swam back over the coral to the beach. One at a time, the three of them were pulled out to the boat. They suffered many cuts and bruises from the reef, but all made it to the Surry alive.

Captain Raine judged that the three of them would have been dead after another month on the island. Their clothes were mere rags; between them they had only a single pair of pants. Somehow one of them had been able to save his seaman's certificate, on which he had kept a record of their days spent on Henderson. They told Raine that Captain Pollard had left several letters in a box nailed to a tree, and the next day Raine was able to land on the island and retrieve the letters.

the only Essex crew members not accounted for were the three men-Obed Hendricks, Joseph West, and William Bond-in the second mate's boat, which separated from Pollard's on the night of January 29. Months later, long after Captain Raine had searched Ducie Island, the atoll to the east of Henderson, another ship touched down there. The crew discovered a whaleboat washed up on the brittle shore, with four skeletons inside. In 1825 the British navy captain Frederick William Beechey, who visited both Ducie and Henderson Islands, made the connection between this ghostly vessel of bones and the lost Essex boat. If this was indeed the second mate's whaleboat and the skeletons belonged to Hendricks, West, Bond, and perhaps Isaiah Sheppard, the last of the crew to die before the separation from Pollard, then it had drifted for more than a thousand miles, finally coming to restwithin a day's sail of where it had started on December 27,1820.