In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’

But there was no fooling their surrogate hunting dog. “[They were] afraid some beast of prey would devour them,” Nickerson wrote, “and that I could not find my way back, being too young to tell their anxious wives what became of them.” On a subsequent voyage to the region, Nickerson would discover the source of the sounds that had struck such terror in the hearts of these two whaling captains: a harmless bird smaller than a chickadee.

Something happened in Atacames that profoundly influenced the morale of the crew. Henry Dewitt, one of the Essex’s African American sailors, deserted.

Dewitt’s act came as no great surprise. Sailors fled from whaleships all the time. Once a green hand realized how little money he was likely to make at the end of a voyage, he had no incentive to stay on if he had better options. However, the timing of the desertion could not have been worse for Captain Pollard. Since each whaleboat required a six-man crew, this now left only two shipkeepers whenever whales were being hunted. Two men could not safely manage a square-rigged ship the size of the Essex. If a storm should kick up, they would find it almost impossible to shorten sail. Yet Pollard, in a hurry to reach the Offshore Ground by November, had no alternative but to set out to sea shorthanded. Down a crew member and a whaleboat, the Essex was about to head out farther off the coast of South America than she had ever sailed before.

On October 2, the Essex set a course for the Galapagos Islands, approximately six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador. Referred to as the “Galleypaguses” by some seamen, these islands were also known as the Encantadas, Spanish for “enchanted” or “bewitched.” The strong and unpredictable currents that boiled in and around these volcanic outcroppings sometimes created the illusion that the islands were actually moving.

Even before the discovery of the Offshore Ground, the Galapagos had been a popular provisioning stop for whalers. Safely removed from the mainland, they provided a welcome refuge from the political turmoil in South America. They were also located in a region frequented by sperm whales. As early as 1793, just two years after the Beaver first rounded the Horn, Captain James Colnett, on a British exploratory voyage to investigate the potential for whaling in the Pacific, visited the Galapagos. What he found was part sperm-whale boudoir, part nursery. He and his crew witnessed something almost never seen by man: sperm whales copulating—the bull swimming upside down and beneath the female. They also spied vast numbers of baby whales, “not larger than a small porpoise.” Colnett wrote, “I am disposed to believe that we were now at the general rendezvous of the spermaceti whales from the coasts of Mexico, Peru, and the Gulf of Panama, who come here to calve.” He noted that of all the whales they killed, they found only one male.

Colnett’s observations are in keeping with the results of the latest research on the sperm whales of the Galapagos. One of the world’s premier sperm-whale experts, Hal Whitehead, began observing whales in this area in 1985. Using a cruising sailboat equipped with sophisticated technological gadgetry, Whitehead has monitored whales in the same waters plied by the Essex 180 years ago. He has found that the typical pod of whales, which ranges between three and twenty or so individuals, is comprised almost exclusively of interrelated adult females and immature whales. Adult males made up only 2 percent of the whales he observed.

The females work cooperatively in taking care of their young. The calves are passed from whale to whale so that an adult is always standing guard when the mother is feeding on squid thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. As an older whale raises its flukes at the start of a long dive, the calf will swim to another nearby adult.

Young males leave the family unit at around six years of age and make their way to the cooler waters of the high latitudes. Here they live singly or with other males, not returning to the warm waters of their birth until their late twenties. Even then, a male’s return is fairly fitful and inconclusive; he spends only eight or so hours with any one group, sometimes mating but never establishing any strong attachments, before making his way back to the high latitudes. He may live for sixty or seventy years.

The sperm whales’ network of female-based family units resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.