In the Heart of the Sea

weapon.
    Suddenly the whale sank, then turned and surfaced only yards in front of the ship. DeBlois hurled the lance, but it was too late. The whale’s massive head struck the bow of the ship, knocking DeBlois off his feet. Convinced that the Ann Alexander had been stove, he ran below to check for damage, but all proved tight.
    DeBlois ordered his men to lower another boat. The mate objected, insisting that to do so would be suicide. Since it was already close to dusk, DeBlois reluctantly decided to wait until morning. “Just as I gave these orders,” the captain remembered, “I caught a glimpse of a shadow as it seemed to me.” It was the whale hurtling through the water toward the Ann Alexander. It struck the ship “a terrible blow,” DeBlois wrote, “that shook her from stem to stern.”
    Even before he went below to inspect the damage, he could hear water pouring into the hold. The captain rushed to his cabin to get the navigational instruments they would need in the whaleboats. As the mates readied the two remaining boats, DeBlois went below one more time, but the cabin was so full of water that he was forced to swim to safety. By the time he returned to the deck, both whaleboats had rowed clear of the ship. He leaped from the railing and swam to the mate’s boat.
    Almost immediately his men began, in DeBlois’s words, “[to] upbraid me, saying, ‘O Captain, you ran too much risk of our lives!’
    “‘Men,’ I replied, ‘for God’s sake, don’t find fault with me! You were as anxious as I to catch that whale, and I hadn’t the least idea that anything like this would happen.’”
    The next morning they returned to the wreck. As soon as DeBlois scrambled up the side, he saw “the prints of the [whale’s] teeth on the copper.. . . The hole was just the size of the whale’s head.” As DeBlois cut away the masts to right the ship, the ship’s bell continued to clang with the rhythmic heave of the sea. “[A] more mournful sound never fell on my ears,” he remembered. “It was as though it was tolling for our deaths.”
    The ship was almost completely submerged, and the waves broke over the captain’s head. Eventually he was joined by the mate, and the two of them attempted to cut through the deck and locate some provisions and fresh water. By noon, about half the crew of twenty-four had found the courage to climb aboard the wreck and search for food. Several of the men had begun to grumble that they should immediately set sail for the Marquesas, two thousand miles to the west. DeBlois told the crew to assemble at the rail of the ship, where he asked “if they wanted me to advise them.” A majority of the men nodded their heads. Although he knew it wasn’t what they wanted to hear, he told them that there weren’t enough provisions to reach the Marquesas. Instead, they should sail their boats (which possessed centerboards) north toward the equator, where they might be spotted by a ship bound for California. Begrudgingly, the men agreed. Before they left, DeBlois took up a nail and scratched a message into the ship’s taffrail: “Save us—we poor souls have gone in two boats to the north on the wind.”
    The mate had twelve men in his boat, the captain thirteen. The crew wanted to stay together, but once again DeBlois overruled them. “‘No’ says I, ‘my object is to have one boat go ahead, if it sails faster, and the other follow in the same course, so that if the first boat is picked up, say, a hundred miles ahead, their rescuers can bear down to the other boat.’
    “Our parting was a solemn sight,” he wrote, “if ever there was one in this world. We never expected to meet again on earth, and the strong men who had braved all sorts of dangers, broke down and wept like children.” The mate’s boat soon surged ahead. It wasn’t long before DeBlois’s men “became clamorous for food.” They had had nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. But their captain felt it was too early to begin eating what little food they had. “My mind was filled with all the stories I had ever heard of shipwrecks,” he remembered, “where the famishing men had been often driven to eating their shipmates’ bodies.” He thought, of course, of the Essex and how some of the men had drawn lots. “Pictures of this sort were enough to drive one wild,” he wrote, “when he felt that the same ordeal was before him.”
    At dusk, DeBlois stood up on the stern of his whaleboat for one