In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’
At night the deck of the Essex looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno. “A trying-out scene has something peculiarly wild and savage in it,” stated a green hand from Kentucky, “a kind of indescribable uncouthness, which renders it difficult to describe with anything like accuracy. There is a murderous appearance about the blood-stained decks, and the huge masses of flesh and blubber lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened by the red, fierce glare of the fires.” It was a scene that perfectly suited Melville’s sinister artistic purposes in Moby-Dick. “[The] darkness was licked up by the fierce flames,” Ishmael tells us, “which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful act.”
Trying out a whale could take as long as three days. Special try watches were set, lasting between five and six hours, and affording the men scant sleep. Experienced whalemen knew enough to sleep in their trying-out clothes (usually an old short-sleeved shirt and a worn pair of woolen drawers), postponing any attempts at cleaning themselves until the casks of oil had been stored in the hold and the ship had been thoroughly scrubbed down. Nickerson and his friends, however, were so revolted by the noisome mixture of oil, blood, and smoke covering their skin and clothes that they changed after every watch. By the time the first whale had been tried out, they had ruined nearly every piece of clothing stored in their sea chests.
This forced them to purchase additional clothing from the ship’s slop chest—the nautical equivalent of the company store—at outrageous prices. Nickerson estimated that if the Essex ever made it back to Nantucket, he and his fellow green hands would owe the ship’s owners close to 90 percent of their total earnings from the voyage. Instead of warning the teenagers about the potential perils of dipping into the slop chest, the ship’s officers were content to let them learn the economics of whaling life the hard way. Nickerson’s judgment: “This should not have been.”
ONE night, not far from the Falkland Islands, the men were up in the rigging, reefing the topsails, when they heard a scream: a sharp, shrill shriek of terror coming from alongside the ship. Someone had apparently fallen overboard.
The officer of the watch was about to give the order to heave to when a second scream was heard. And then, perhaps with a nervous laugh, someone realized that it wasn’t a man but a penguin, bobbing beside the ship, piercing the night with its all-too-human cries. Penguins! They must be nearing Antarctica.
The next day the wind vanished, leaving the Essex to languish in a complete calm. Seals played about the ship, “plunging and swimming as though they desired our attention,” Nickerson remembered. There were several varieties of penguins, along with gulls and gannets pinwheeling in the sky—a sure sign that the Essex was approaching land.
While the seals and birds may have provided a distraction, morale about the Essex had reached a nadir. So far it had been a slow and unprofitable slog toward Cape Horn. With the knockdown several days out from Nantucket setting the unfortunate tone of the voyage, they had been more than four months at sea and had only a single whale to show for it. If the voyage continued in this fashion, the Essex would have to be out a good deal longer than two years if she were to return with a full cargo of oil. With the temperatures dropping and the legendary dangers of the Horn looming ahead of them, tensions aboard the Essex were reaching the breaking point.
Richard Henry Dana experienced firsthand how the morale of a ship’s crew could deteriorate to the extent that even the slightest incident might be perceived as a horrendous, unbearable injustice:
[A] thousand little things, daily and almost hourly occurring, which no one who has not himself been on a long and tedious voyage can conceive of or properly appreciate—little wars and rumors of wars,—reports of things said in the cabin,—misun-derstanding of words and looks,—apparent abuses,—brought us into a state in which everything seemed to go wrong.
Aboard the Essex, the crew’s discontent focused on the issue of food. At no time were the differences that existed between the officers and the men more pronounced than at mealtimes. In the cabin, the officers ate much as they did back home on Nantucket—on plates, with forks, knives, and spoons, and with plenty of vegetables (as long as they lasted) to add to the ship’s fare of salt beef and salt pork. If there was fresh meat available—as from those thirty Maio hogs—the officers were the ones who enjoyed most of it. As an alternative to hardtack (biscuits with the consistency of dried plaster), the steward regularly provided the officers with freshly baked bread.
The men in the forecastle and steerage enjoyed an entirely different dining experience. Instead of sitting at a table to eat, they sat on their sea chests around a large wooden tub, known as a kid, containing a hunk of pork or beef. Referred to as horse or junk, the meat was so salty that when the cook placed it in a barrel of saltwater for a day (to render it soft enough to chew), the meat’s salt content was actually lowered. The sailors were required to supply their own utensils, usually a sheath knife and a spoon, plus a tin cup for tea or coffee.
Rather than the heaping portions provided to the officers, those before the mast were given only a negligible amount of this less-than-nutritious fare, their daily diet of hardtack and salt beef occasionally augmented with a little “duff,” a flour pudding or dumpling boiled in a cloth bag. It has been estimated that sailors in the latter part of the nineteenth century were consuming around 3,800 calories a day. It is unlikely that the men in the forecastle of a whaler in 1819 consumed even close to that amount. Complained one green hand on a Nantucket whaler, “Alas, alas, the day that I came a-whaling. For what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but in the meantime starveth to death?”
One day soon after passing the Falkland Islands, the men went below to find in the kid a ration of meat even paltrier than usual. An impromptu meeting was held. It was decided that no one would touch the meat until the kid had been shown to Captain Pollard and a complaint officially filed. The sailors took their stations on the forward portion of the deck while one of the men, the tub of beef on his shoulder, made his way aft toward the cabin gangway. Nickerson, who had been assigned to tar the netting of the main staysail, was well above the deck and had a good view of the ensuing confrontation.
The kid was no sooner set down than Captain Pollard came up onto the quarterdeck. Pollard glanced at the tub of beef, and Nickerson watched as his complexion seemed to shift from red, to blue, to almost black. Food was a difficult and sensitive issue for Captain Pollard. As he knew better than anyone, the Essex had been woefully underprovisioned by the parsimonious owners. If there was any hope of providing for the men in the several years ahead, he had to limit their provisions now. He may not have felt good about it, but he had no alternative.
In bringing the kid aft, the men had dared to violate the sacred space of the quarterdeck, normally reserved for the officers. Even if the crew’s anger might be justified, this was a challenge to the ship’s authority that no self-respecting captain could tolerate. It was a critical moment for a commander who desperately needed to shake his crew out of a corrosive and potentially disastrous malaise.
Casting aside his normal reticence, Pollard roared out, “Who brought this kid aft? Come here, you damned scoundrels, and tell me!”
No one dared speak. The men sheepishly made their way toward the quarterdeck as a group, each trying to hide himself behind the others. It was just the display of timidity this first-time captain needed.
Pollard paced the quarterdeck in a fury, working a quid of tobacco in his mouth and spitting on the deck, all the while muttering, “You’ll throw your kid in my face, you damned scoundrels, will you?”
Finally, he made his way to the forward part of the quarterdeck, pulled off his jacket and hat, and stamped on them. “You scoundrels,” he snarled, “have not I given you all the ship could afford? Have not I treated you like men? Have you had plenty to eat and drink? What in hell do you want more? Do you wish me to coax you to eat? Or shall I chew your food for you?”
The men stood there dumbfounded. Pollard’s eyes strayed up into the rigging where Nickerson sat with his tar brush. Pointing a finger at him, the captain bellowed, “Come down here, you young rascal. I’ll kill the whole bunch of you together and then bang up northwest and go home.”
Not having any idea what the captain meant by “banging up northwest,” Nickerson slunk down to the deck, fully expecting to be, if not killed, at least flogged. But much to everyone’s relief, Pollard dismissed all hands, saying, “If I hear any more from you about provisions, I’ll tie the whole of you up together and whip it out of you.”
As the crew dispersed, Pollard could be heard growling what became known among the men as his “soliloquy,” which they parodied in a bit of doggerel that Nickerson still remembered fifty-seven years later:
Thirty hogs in the Isle of May
Duff every other day
Butter and cheese as much as you could sway
And now you want more beef, damn you.
Pollard’s behavior was fairly typical of Nantucket whaling captains, who were famous for oscillating wildly between tight-lipped reserve and incandescent rage. Pollard was, according to Nickerson, “generally very kind where he could be so…[This] display of violence was only one of his freaks and passed off with the setting sun. The next morning found him as kind as before.”
Yet everything aboard the Essex had changed. Captain Pollard had proved he had the backbone to put the men in their place. From that day forward, no one ever complained about provisions.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Lees of Fire
AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING on November 25, 1819, the lookout cried, “Land ho!” In the distance, what appeared to be an island of rock towered high above the water. Without hesitation, Captain Pollard pronounced it to be Staten Island, off the eastern tip of Cape Horn. The crew was staring at this legendary sphinxlike sight when suddenly it dissolved in the hazy air. It had been nothing but a fog bank.
The dangers of the Horn were proverbial. In 1788 Captain William Bligh and the crew of the Bounty had attempted to round this menacing promontory. After a solid month of sleet-filled headwinds and horrendous seas that threatened to break up the ship, Bligh decided that the only sensible way to reach the Pacific was to go the other way, so he turned the Bounty around and headed for Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-five years later, during the War of 1812, a much larger vessel, also named the Essex, an American naval frigate commanded by Captain David Porter, rounded the Horn. Porter and his men would eventually become famous for their heroics against a superior British force in the Pacific, but Cape Horn put a fright into the otherwise fearless mariner. “[O]ur sufferings (short as has been our passage) have been so great that I would advise those bound into the Pacific, never to attempt the passage of Cape Horn, if they can get there by another route.”
The whalemen of Nantucket had a different attitude toward the Horn. They’d been rounding it regularly ever since 1791, when Captain Paul Worth steered the Beaver, a whaleship about the size of the Essex, into the Pacific. Pollard and Chase had done it at least three times; for Pollard it may have been his fourth or even fifth time. Still, Cape Horn was nothing any captain took for granted, certainly not one who, like Pollard, had almost lost his ship in the relatively benign Gulf Stream.
Soon after watching the mirage island vanish before them, the men of the Essex saw something so terrible that they could only hope their eyes were deceiving them once again. But it was all too real: from the southwest a line of ink-black clouds was hurtling in their direction. In an instant the squall slammed into the ship with the force of a cannon shot. In the shrieking darkness, the crew labored to shorten sail. Under a close-reefed maintopsail and storm staysails, the Essex performed surprisingly well in the mountainous seas. “[T]he ship rode over them as buoyantly as a seagull,” Nickerson claimed, “without taking onboard one bucket of water.”
But now, with the wind out of the southwest, there was the danger of being driven against the jagged rocks of the Horn. The days became weeks as the ship struggled against the wind and waves in nearfreezing temperatures. In these high latitudes the light never entirely left the night sky. Without the usual sequence of light and dark, the passage stretched into a dreary, seemingly unending test of a whaleman’s sanity.
It took more than a month for the Essex to round Cape Horn. Not until January of the new year, 1820, did the lookout sight the island of St. Mary’s, a gathering spot for whalers off the coast of Chile. To the south of the island in the bay of Arauco they found several Nantucket vessels, including the Chili, the same ship with which they had left the island five months earlier.
The news from the west coast of South America was not good. For one thing, the political situation in Chile and Peru was extremely volatile. In recent years towns up and down the coast had been ravaged by fighting between the Patriots, who hoped to wrest control of South America from Spain, and the Royalists, whose interests were still linked to the mother country. Although the Patriot forces, assisted by the swashbuckling British naval hero Lord Cochrane, appeared in the ascendancy, fighting was still going on, particularly in Peru. Caution was the watchword when provisioning on this coast.
For most vessels it had been a miserable whaling season. While the scarcity of whales kept up the price of oil back home on Nantucket, these were tough times for whalemen in the Pacific. After driving his crew to fill his ship, the Independence, Captain George Swain had returned to Nantucket in November and predicted, “No other ship will ever fill with sperm oil in the South Seas.” Obed Macy feared Captain Swain might be right: “Some new place must be found where the whales are more numerous,” he told his journal, “or the business will not be worth pursuing.” Praying that they might elude these grim forecasts, the crew of the Essex headed out to sea.
After several luckless months off the Chilean coast, punctuated by a provisioning stop at Talcahuano, the Essex began to meet with some success off Peru. In just two months, Pollard and his men boiled down 450 barrels of oil, the equivalent of about eleven whales. This meant that they were killing, on average, a whale every five days, a pace that soon exhausted the crew.
The weather only added to their labors. High winds and rugged seas made every aspect of whaling doubly onerous. Instead of providing a stable platform on which to cut up the blubber and boil the oil, the Essex pitched back and forth in the waves. The large seas made it next to impossible to lower and raise the whaleboats safely. “Our boats were very much injured in hoisting them from the water,” Nickerson remembered, “and were on more than one occasion dashed in pieces by the heavy rolling of the ship.” The much-abused boats were constantly in a state of repair.
As the number of casks of oil in the hold increased, the green hands became accustomed to the brutal business of whaling. The repetitious nature of the work—a whaler was, after all, a factory ship—tended to desensitize the men to the awesome wonder of the whale. Instead of seeing their prey as a fifty- to sixty-ton creature whose brain was close to six times the size of their own (and, what perhaps should have been even more impressive in the all-male world of the fishery, whose penis was as long as they were tall), the whalemen preferred to think of it as what one commentator called “a self-propelled tub of high-income lard.” Whales were described by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a fifty-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the mammal’s habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whose constituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it—the tons of meat, bone, and guts—was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century.
Even the most repugnant aspects of whaling became easier for the green hands to take as they grew to appreciate that each was just part of a process, like mining for gold or growing crops, designed to make them money. That was why veteran whalemen had a special fondness for trying out the blubber, the final step in the transformation of a living, breathing sperm whale into cold, hard cash. “It is horrible,” the writer Charles Nordhoff admitted. “Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights.”
It was more than just the money. Each whale, each cask of oil, brought the Nantucketer closer to returning home to his loved ones. And it was when they were trying out the whale that the whalemen typically grew the most nostalgic for home. “Wives and children are remembered with new affection at such moments,” claimed William H. Macy, “and each feels nearer home and friends at each recurring sound of the light-driven bung, and the inspiring cry, ‘Away cask!’ Truly is it remarked by old whalemen that the most delightful parts of the voyage are ‘Boiling’ and arriving home.”
It was during this busy and exhausting two-month stretch off Peru that the crew of the Essex received what was for a whaleman the ultimate motivator: letters from home.
Toward the end of May, the Essex spoke, or hailed, the Aurora, the brand-new ship fitted out by Gideon Folger and Sons for Daniel Russell, formerly the captain of the Essex. The Aurora had left Nantucket on the day after Christmas, bringing with her news that was only five months old—a blink of an eye in the time frame of a whaleman. When the Aurora left Nantucket, the price of whale oil was at an all-time high; people were still talking about the fire in Rhoda Harris’s schoolroom in the black section of town, known as New Guinea; and they were catching codfish (two hundred to a boat) off the Nantucket village of Siasconset.
But of most interest to the men was the pouch of mail, along with several newspapers, that Daniel Russell handed over to Captain Pollard. After the officers had selected their letters, the bag was sent forward to the crew. “It was amusing to watch those of our lads who had been disappointed and found no letters for them,” Nickerson recalled. “They would follow us around the decks and whilst we were reading our letters would seat themselves beside us, as though our letters could be of service to them.” Despairing of finding out anything about their own families, the unlucky ones sought solace in what Nickerson called “the careless folds of a newspaper.” For his part, Nickerson would reread the newspapers so many times that he would soon have their contents memorized.
The meeting between the Aurora and the Essex provided Pollard with the chance to speak with his former commander, the thirty-four-year-old Daniel Russell. The Aurora was a much larger, state-of-the-art ship and would return to Nantucket two years later, full of oil. Later it would be said that when Captain Russell had left the Essex to assume command of the Aurora, he had taken his old ship’s luck with him.
ONE of the topics Pollard and Russell discussed was the recent discovery of a new whaling ground. As if to refute Captain Swain’s dour prediction that the Pacific Ocean had been fished out of sperm whales, Captain George Washington Gardner of the Globe had headed farther out to sea in 1818 than any other Nantucket whaleship had so far dared to go. More than a thousand miles off the coast of Peru he hit the mother lode, an expanse of ocean full of sperm whales. He returned home to Nantucket in May of 1820 with more than two thousand barrels of oil.
Gardner’s discovery became known as the Offshore Ground. During the spring and summer of 1820, it was the talk of the whale fishery. Understanding that whales appeared in the Offshore Ground in November, Pollard resolved to make one final provisioning stop in South America, where he’d secure plenty of fruits, vegetables, and water; then, after touching at the Galapagos Islands, where he would pick up a load of giant tortoises (which were prized for their meat), he would head out for this distant section of ocean.
Sometime in September the Essex called at Atacames, a little village of approximately three hundred Spaniards and Indians in Ecuador, just north of the equator. Anchored beside them they found a ghost ship, the whaler George from London, England. Every member of the George’s crew, save for Captain Benneford and two others, had come down with a life-threatening case of scurvy after a long time at sea. Their condition was so serious that Benneford rented a house on shore and transformed it into a hospital for his men. Here was ample evidence of the dangers of venturing for extended periods out into the open Pacific.
Although poor, Atacames (called Tacames by the whalemen) was a beautiful town that for some sailors seemed a kind of Garden of Eden. “I could not but admire the exuberant growth of every thing belonging to the vegetable kingdom,” recalled Francis Olmsted, whose ship put in at Atacames in the 1830s. “The most delicious pineapples spread out before us, while the coconut tree, the plaintain and the banana waved their broad leaves gracefully in the breeze. Here were oranges, limes and other fruits lying scattered around in neglected profusion. The fig trees had also begun to put forth, and the indigo plant grew spontaneously like the most common weed.”
There were, however, monsters lurking in the dense jungle surrounding the town, including jaguars. To guard against such predators, as well as against mosquitoes and sand fleas, the villagers lived in thatch-roofed bamboo huts raised up on stakes as much as twenty feet above the ground.
Atacames was known for its game birds. Soon after the Nantucket whaleship Lucy Adams also dropped anchor, Pollard set out with her captain, thirty-seven-year-old Shubael Hussey, on what Nickerson described as a turkey-hunting expedition. In preparation for this all-day affair, the cooks of the two vessels baked pies and other delicacies for the hunting party to take with them into the wilderness.
The hunters lacked a way to flush out the game. “I being the youngest boy onboard,” Nickerson remembered, “was chosen to make up the company in place of a hunter’s dog.” And so they were off, “over the meadows and through the woods toward the hunting grounds.”
About three hours out, they heard “the most dismal howling that can be imagined.” Doing their best to ignore the cries, the two captains pushed on until it became clear that they were rapidly approaching the source of the disturbing sound. What could it be, Nickerson wondered, a blood-thirsty jaguar? But no one said a word. Finally, the two noble whale hunters stopped and “looked at each other a few moments as though they wished to say something which each was ashamed to open first.” As if on cue, they turned around and began walking back to town, casually remarking that it was too hot an afternoon to hunt and that they would return on a cooler day.