In the Heart of the Sea (6 page)

Nickerson and his Nantucket friends may have thought they knew Chase prior to their departure, but they now realized that, as another young Nantucketer had discovered, “at sea, things appear different.” The mate of a Nantucket whaleship routinely underwent an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he left his island home, stepping out of his mild Quaker skin to become a vociferous martinet. “You will often hear a Nantucket mother boast that her son 'who is met of a ship is a real spit-fire,'“ William Gomstock wrote, “meaning that he is a cruel tyrant, which on that island is considered the very acme of human perfection.”

And so Nickerson saw Owen Chase change from a perfectly reasonable young man with a new wife named Peggy to a bully who had no qualms about using force to obtain obedience and who swore in a manner that shocked these boys who had been brought up, for the most part, by their mothers and grandmothers. “ [Although but a few hours before I had been so eager to go [on] this voyage,” Nickerson remembered, “there [now] seemed a sudden gloom to spread over me. A not very pleasing prospect [was] truly before me, that of a long voyage and a hard overseer. This to a boy of my years who had never been used to hear such language or threats before.”

It was more than a realization that the whaling life might be harsher than he had been led to believe. Now that the island had slipped over the horizon, Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: “Then it was that I, for the first time, realized that I was alone upon a wide and an unfeeling world... without one relative or friend to bestow one kind word upon me.” Not till then did Nickerson begin to appreciate “the full sacrifice that I had made.”

that evening the men were divided into two shifts, or watches. With the exception of the “idlers”-those such as the cook, steward, and cooper (or barrel maker), who worked in the day and slept at night-all the men served alternating four-hour stints on deck. Like children picking teams on a playground, the mate and second mate took turns choosing the men who would serve in their watches. “[T]he first step taken by the officers,” said William Comstock, “is, to discoverwho are natives of the island, and who are strangers. The honor of being a Roman citizen was not, in days of yore, so enviable a distinction, as it is on board one of these ships, to be a native of that sand bank, yclept Nantucket.” Once the Nantucketers had all been picked (with Nickerson taken by Chase), the mates chose among the Cape Codders and the blacks.

Next came the choice of oarsmen for the whaleboats, a contest that involved both mates and also Captain Pollard, who headed up his own boat. Since these were the men with whom a mate or a captain was going into battle, he took the selection of the whaleboat crew very seriously. “[T]here was much competition among the officers,” a whaleman remembered, “and evidently some anxiety, with a little ill-concealed jealousy of feeling.”

Once again, each officer attempted to man his boat with as many fellow Nantucketers as he could. Nickerson found himself on Chase's boat, with the Nantucketer Benjamin Lawrence as aboatsteerer. Nickerson's friend (and the captain's cousin) Owen Coffin was assigned to Pollard's boat along with several other Nantucketers. Matthew Joy, who as second mate was the lowest-ranking officer, was left without a single islander on his boat. The three remaining men not chosen as oarsmen became the Essex's shipkeepers. It was their duty to handle the Essex when whales were being hunted.

The first day of a whaling voyage included yet another ritual-the captain's speech to the crew. The tradition was said to date back to when Noah first closed the doors of the ark, and was the way the captain officially introduced himself. It was a performance that all aboard the ship-officers and green hands alike-attended with great interest.

As soon as Pollard began to speak, Nickerson was impressed by the difference between the captain and the first mate. Instead of shouting and cursing at the men, Pollard spoke “without overbearing display or ungentleman-like language.” He simply stated that the success of the voyage would depend on the crew and that the officers should be strictly obeyed. Any sailor who willfully disregarded an order, Pollard told them, would have to answer not just to the officers but to him. He then dismissed the men with the words “Set the watch, Mr. Chase.”

the men of the Essex ate and slept in three different areas: the captain's and mates' cabins, in the aft portion of the ship; steerage, where the boatsteerers and young Nantucketers lived, just forward of the officers; and the forecastle-the cramped, poorly lit quarters in the extreme forward part of the vessel, separated from steerage by the blubber room. The divide between the forecastle and the other living quarters was not just physical but also racial. According to Addison Pratt, a green hand on a Nantucket ship in 1820, the forecastle was “filled with darkies” while the white sailors who weren't officers lived in steerage. Reflecting the prejudices typical of a Nantucket whaleman, Thomas Nickerson considered himself “fortunate indeed to escape being so closely penned up with so large a number of blacks” in the Essex's forecastle.

But the forecastle had its merits. Its isolation (the only way to enter it was from a hatchway in the deck) meant that its occupants could create their own world. When he sailed on a merchant voyage in the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, preferred the camaraderie of the forecastle to steerage, where “[y]ou are immediately under the eye of the officers, cannot dance, sing, play, smoke, make a noise, or growl [i.e., complain], or take an other sailor's pleasure.” In the forecastle the African American sailors indulged in the ancient seafaring tradition of “yarning”-swapping stories about passages, shipmates, and wrecks, along with other tales of the sea. They danced and sang songs, often accompanied by a fiddle; they prayed to their God; and, in keeping with yet another oceangoing tradition, they second-guessed the captain and his officers.

by the following morning, many of the green hands found themselves in the throes of seasickness, “rolling and tumbling about the decks almost ready ... to die or be cast in to the sea,” Nickerson remembered. Nantucketers had what they considered a sure-fire cure for seasickness, a treatment that more delicate mortals might have considered even worse than the malady. The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.

Chase was not about to coddle his queasy crew. That morning at eight bells sharp, he ordered all hands to clear the decks and prepare the ship for whaling. Even though the whale population in the waters to the southeast of the island along the edges of the Gulf Stream had been greatly diminished over the years, it was still quite possible to come across what Nantucketers called a shoal of sperm whales. Woe to the crew that was not ready when a whale was sighted.

But for a whale to be sighted, a lookout had to be positioned aloft-not a pleasing prospect for a crew of seasick green hands. Every man was expected to climb to the head of the mainmast and spend two hours in search of whales. Some of the men were so weak from vomiting that they doubted they had the strength to hold on to a pitching spar for two hours. One of them, Nickerson said, even went so far as to protest that it was “altogether absurd and unreasonable” to expect them to look for whales, and that he, for one, “should not go, and he hoped the captain would not expect it of him.”

The fact that this unnamed sailor specifically mentioned the captain instead of the first mate suggests that he was Pollard's cousin, seventeen-year-old Owen Coffin. Miserable and genuinely fearful for his life, Coffin may have made a desperate, ill-advised appeal to his kinsman for a reprieve from the first mate's discipline. But it was futile. According to Nickerson, whose narrative is not without irony, there followed a few “soft words” from the officers, along with “some little challenging of their spirits,” and it wasn't long before all the green hands had taken a turn at the masthead.

like a skier traversing the face of a mountain, a Nantucket whaleship took an indirect route toward Cape Horn, a course determined by the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean. First, pushed by the westerlies, the ship sailed south and east toward Europe and Africa. There she picked up winds called the northeast trades, which took her back across the ocean again, in the direction of South America. After crossing the equator in an often airless region known as the doldrums, she worked her way south and west through the southeast trades into an area of variable winds. Then she encountered the band of westerlies that could make rounding the Horn so difficult.

On the first leg of this southern slide down the Atlantic, there were provisioning stops at the Azores and Gape Verde Islands, where vegetables and livestock could be purchased for much less than they cost on Nantucket. These stops also gave the whalemen the opportunity to ship back any oil they might have obtained during their cruise across the Atlantic.

On August 15, three days out of Nantucket, the Essex was making good time toward the Azores, with the wind out of the southwest, coming directly over her starboard side, or beam. Having left Nantucket late in the season, the officers hoped to make up lost time. As usual, three topgallant sails were pulling from the upper yards, but on this day the Essex also carried at least one studding sail, a rectangle of canvas mounted on a special spar temporarily fitted to the end of the fore topsail yard.

Whaleships rarely set their studding sails, especially when they were in a region where whales might be sighted. Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry. Use of the studding sails meant that a captain wanted to wring the last possible quarter knot of speed from his ship. The sails were difficult to set and even harder to take down, especially with an inexperienced crew. Since the sails' booms projected out beyond the yards, there was a danger of dipping them into the water if the ship should begin to roll from side to side. For a whaleship full of green hands to approach the often tempestuous waters of the Gulf Stream with her studding sails frying indicated an aggressive, if not foolhardy, attitude on the part of her commander.

With the extra sail area catching the wind, the Essex was moving well, probably at six to eight knots. The lookout spotted a ship ahead. Pollard ordered the helmsman to steer for her, and soon the Essex had caught up to what proved to be the whaleship Midas, five days out of New Bedford. Captain Pollard and the captain of the Midas exchanged shouted pleasantries, along with estimates of their longitude, and the Essex was soon pulling ahead, her entire crew undoubtedly enjoying the fact that their ship had proved to be what Nickerson called “the fastest sailor of the two.”

Later that day, the weather began to deteriorate. Clouds moved into the sky, and it grew suspiciously dark to the southwest. “The sea became very rough,” Nickerson remembered, “which caused the ship to roll and tumble heavily.” A storm seemed imminent, but the Essex “continued to carry a press of sail throughout the night and [the officers] had no cause to disturb the hands except for their respective watches.”

By the next morning they were in the Gulf Stream, and it was raining steadily. Nantucketers knew this eerily warm ocean current better than perhaps any other group of mariners. In the eighteenth century they had hunted sperm whales along its margins from Carolina to Bermuda. In 1786, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother, Abiah Folger, had been born on Nantucket, had used knowledge gleaned from his Nantucket “cousin,” whaling captain Timothy Folger, to create the first chart of the Gulf Stream.

Many considerations, both nautical and psychological, went into a decision to shorten sail. No captain wanted to be needlessly timid, yet taking unnecessary risks, especially at the beginning of a voyage that might last as long as three years, was unwise. At some point the conditions became so rough that Pollard elected to take in the fore and mizzen topgallant sails yet to leave flying the main topgallant and also the studding sails, usually the first sails taken down in worsening weather. Pollard may have wanted to see how the Essex performed when pushed to the limit. They sailed on, refusing to back down.

according to Chase, they could see it coming: a large black cloud rushing toward them from the southwest. Now was surely the time to shorten sail. But once again they waited, deciding the cloud was an inconsequential gust. They would ride it out. As Chase would later admit, they “miscalculated altogether as to the strength and violence of it.”

In delaying, even for a second, shortening sail in the face of an approaching squall, Pollard was now flaunting his disregard of traditional seafaring wisdom. The officers of the British Navy had a maxim: “never to be overtaken unprepared by [a squall], as never to be surprised by an enemy.” It was said that the sharper and more defined the storm cloud, the worse the wind; thunder and lightning were also bad signs. When jagged streaks of lightning began to crackle out of the forbidding black sky and thunder boomed, Pollard finally began to issue orders. But it was too late.

In the face of an approaching squall, there were two options: either to point the ship into the oncoming wind, to relieve the pressure on the sails by letting them luff, or to turn almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction, away .from the wind, and let the storm blow the ship with it. This relieved the pressure on the forward sails as they became .partially becalmed in the shelter of the after ones. In the merchant service, in which ships were typically undermanned, some captains favored heading into the wind-what they called luffing through a squall-in part because heading up is the natural tendency of a sailing ship in a gust. Most captains, however, favored turning away from the wind-a strategy that required them to anticipate the arrival of the squall as the crew shortened the upper and aft sails. To attempt to bear away from the wind in the last few seconds before being struck by a squall was held to show “ a poor appreciation of the squall, or a lack of watchfulness.”