In the Heart of the Sea

into the same ships in which they had once pursued the mighty sperm whale. The Golden Gate became the burial ground of countless Nantucket whaleships, abandoned by their crews and left to rot on the mudflats.
    Long before Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, Nantucket’s economic fate had been determined. Over the next twenty years, the island’s population would shrink from ten thousand to three thousand. “Nantucket now has a ‘body-o’-death’ appearance such as few New England towns possess,” one visitor wrote. “The houses stand around in faded gentility style—the inhabitants have a dreamy look, as though they live in the memories of the past.” Even though whaling would continue out of New Bedford into the 1920s, the island whose name had once been synonymous with the fishery had ceased to be an active whaling port only forty years after the departure of the Essex. On November 16, 1869, Nantucket’s last whaling vessel, the Oak, left the harbor, never to return.
     
    THE world’s sperm-whale population proved remarkably resilient in the face of what Melville called “so remorseless a havoc.” It is estimated that the Nantucketers and their Yankee whale-killing brethren harvested more than 225,000 sperm whales between 1804 and 1876. In 1837, the best year in the century for killing whales, 6,767 sperm whales were taken by American whalemen. (As a disturbing point of comparison, in 1964, the peak year of modern whaling, 29,255 sperm whales were killed.) Some researchers believe that by the 1860s whalemen may have reduced the world’s sperm-whale population by as much as 75 percent; others claim that it was diminished by only 8 to 18 percent. Whatever figure is closer to the truth, sperm whales have done better than other large cetaceans hunted by man. Today there are between one and a half to two million sperm whales, making them the most abundant of the world’s great whales.
    As late as 1845, whalemen were confident that the sperm whale stocks were in no danger of diminishing. They did comment, however, on how the behavior of the whales had changed. “They have indeed become wilder,” one observer wrote, “or as some of the whalers express it, ‘more scary,’ and, in consequence, not so easy to capture.” Like the whale that had attacked the Essex, an increasing number of sperm whales were fighting back.
    In 1835 the crew of the English whaleship Pusie Hall were forced into full retreat by what they termed a “fighting whale.” After driving away four whaleboats, the whale pursued them back to the ship. The men hurled several lances at the whale “before it could be induced to retire.” In 1836, the Lydia, a Nantucket whaleship, was struck and sunk by a sperm whale, as was the Two Generals a few years later. In 1850, the Pocahontas, out of Martha’s Vineyard, was rammed by a whale but was able to reach port for repairs. Then, in 1851, the year that Moby-Dick was published, a whaleship was attacked by a sperm whale in the same waters where the Essex had been sunk thirty-one years before.
     
    THE Ann Alexander, a whaleship out of New Bedford, was under the command of one of the fishiest captains in the Pacific, John DeBlois. In a letter to the ship’s owner, DeBlois boasted that he had succeeded in killing every whale he had ever fastened to. But in August of 1851, just to the south of the equator and about five hundred miles east of the Galapagos, Captain DeBlois met his match.
    It was a large solitary bull, what DeBlois called “a noble fellow!” Two boats were lowered, and the fight was on. Almost immediately the whale rushed after the mate’s boat. “[I]n an instant [the boat] was crushed like so much paper in his mighty jaws,” DeBlois wrote. After rescuing the first mate’s crew, DeBlois was joined by the second mate in another whaleboat. They divided the men among them and resumed the chase. Almost immediately, however, the whale attacked the mate’s boat and immediately destroyed it. DeBlois was forced to stop the pursuit, pick up the scattered crew, and return to the Ann Alexander.
    By this point, DeBlois recounted, “my blood was up, and I was fully determined to have that whale, cost what it might.” As he stood at the ship’s bow with a lance in his hand, the captain told the helmsman where to steer. The whale was, DeBlois wrote, an “artful beast,” allowing them to gain, only to hurry ahead before the captain could throw his