In the Heart of the Sea

wide-brimmed hats, the women in long dresses and meticulously crafted bonnets. But factors besides Quakerism and a common heritage also drove the Nantucket psyche—in particular, an obsession with the whale. No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.
    The imprinting of a young Nantucketer began at the earliest age. The first words a baby was taught included the language of the chase—“townor,” for instance, a Wampanoag word meaning that the whale has been sighted for a second time. Bedtime stories told of killing whales and eluding cannibals in the Pacific. One mother approvingly recounted how her nine-year-old son attached a fork to the end of a ball of darning cotton and then proceeded to harpoon the family cat. The mother happened into the room just as the terrified pet attempted to escape, and unsure of what she had found herself in the middle of, she picked up the cotton ball. Like a veteran boatsteerer, the boy shouted, “Pay out, mother! Pay out! There she sounds through the window!”
    There was rumored to be a secret society of young women on the island whose members pledged to marry only men who had already killed a whale. To help these young women identify them as hunters, boatsteerers wore chockpins (small oak pins used to keep the harpoon line in the bow groove of a whaleboat) on their lapels. Boatsteerers, superb athletes with prospects of lucrative captaincies, were considered the most eligible of Nantucket bachelors.
    Instead of toasting a person’s health, a Nantucketer offered invocations of a darker sort:
    Death to the living,
Long life to the killers,
Success to sailors’ wives
And greasy luck to whalers.
    Despite the bravado of this little ditty, death was a fact of life with which all Nantucketers were thoroughly familiar. In 1810 there were forty-seven fatherless children on Nantucket, while almost a quarter of the women over the age of twenty-three (the average age of marriage) had been widowed by the sea.
    In old age, Nickerson still visited the graves of his parents in the Old North Burial Ground. In 1819, during the last few weeks before his departure aboard the Essex, he undoubtedly made his way to this fenced-in patch of sun-scorched grass and walked among its canted stones. Nickerson’s father had been the first of the parents to die, on November 9, 1806, at the age of thirty-three. His gravestone read:
    Crush’d as the moth beneath thy hand
We moulder to the dust
Our feeble powers can ne’er withstand
And all our beauty’s lost.
    Nickerson’s mother, who had borne five children, died less than a month later at the age of twenty-eight. Her oldest living daughter was eight years old; her only son was not yet two. Her inscription read:
    This mortal life decays apace
How soon the bubble’s broke
Adam and all his numerous race
Are Vanity and Smoke.
    Nickerson, who was raised by his grandparents, wasn’t the only orphan aboard the Essex. His friend Barzillai Ray had also lost both his parents. Owen Coffin and Charles Ramsdell had each lost a father. This may have been their closest bond: each of them, like so many Nantucketers, was a fatherless child for whom a ship’s officer would be much more than a demanding taskmaster; he would be, quite possibly, the first male authority figure the boys had ever known.
     
    PERHAPS no community before or since has been so divided by its commitment to work. For a whaleman and his family, it was a punishing regimen: two to three years away, three to four months at home. With their men gone for so long, Nantucket’s women were obliged not only to raise the children but also to run many of the island’s businesses. It was largely the women who maintained the complex web of personal and commercial relationships that kept the community functioning. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, whose classic Letters from an American Farmer describes his lengthy stay on the island a few years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, suggested that the Nantucket women’s “prudence and good management . . . justly entitles them to a rank superior to that of other wives.”
    Quakerism contributed to the women’s strength. In its emphasis on the spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes, the religion fostered an attitude that was in keeping with what all Nantucketers saw plainly demonstrated