In the Heart of the Sea

final look before darkness came on. In the distance, ahead of the mate’s boat, he saw the sail of a ship. “I tried to sing out, ‘Sail ho,’” he recalled, “but I couldn’t speak a word.” By nightfall all of the crew were safely aboard the whaleship Nantucket.
    Five months later, the crew of the Rebecca Simms succeeded in killing the whale that sank the Ann Alexander. By then the bull appeared “old, tired, and diseased.” Its sides were shaggy with twisted harpoons and lances; huge splinters were found embedded in its head. The whale yielded between seventy and eighty barrels of oil.
    When Herman Melville received word of the sinking of the Ann Alexander, he could not help but wonder if the writing of his Essex -based novel had mystically conjured up the reappearance of a shipramming whale. “Ye Gods!” he wrote a friend. “What a Commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. . . . I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”
     
    NANTUCKET, once the whaling capital of the world, was all but a ghost town by the time the last survivors of the Essex disaster began to pass away. Charles Ramsdell was the first of the Nantucketers to die, in 1866. Throughout his life he was known for his reticence concerning the Essex, in part, one islander surmised, because of his role as Owen Coffin’s executioner.
    Old age was not kind to Owen Chase. His memory of his sufferings in an open boat never left him, and late in life he began hiding food in the attic of his house on Orange Street. By 1868 Chase was judged “insane.” The headaches that had plagued him ever since the ordeal had become unbearable. Clutching an attendant’s hand, he would sob, “Oh my head, my head.” Death brought an end to Chase’s suffering in 1869.
    George Pollard followed his former first mate the next year. The obituary was careful to note that Pollard had been known on the island as something more than the captain of the Essex: “For more than forty years he has resided permanently among us; and leaves a record of a good and worthy man as his legacy.”
    In the 1870s, Thomas Nickerson returned to Nantucket and moved into a house on North Water Street, not far from where his parents were buried in the Old North Burial Ground. Instead of whales, Nantucketers were now after summer visitors, and Nickerson developed a reputation as one of the island’s foremost boardinghouse keepers. One of his guests was the writer Leon Lewis, who, after hearing Nickerson tell about the Essex, proposed that they collaborate on a book about the disaster.
    Nickerson had talked with Charles Ramsdell about his experiences in the whaleboat with Pollard; he had also spoken with Seth Weeks on Cape Cod about his time on Henderson Island. As a consequence, Nickerson’s narrative provides information that was unavailable to Chase. He also includes important details about the voyage prior to the whale attack. But Nickerson, like Chase before him, was not above adjusting his account to suit his own purposes. Not wanting to be remembered as a cannibal, he claims that the men in Chase’s boat did not eat the body of Isaac Cole. Instead, he insists, it was the extra bread made available to them by the deaths of Cole and Peterson that “enabled us to exist until relieved.” He also chose not to recount how, toward the end of the ordeal, he suddenly decided it was his turn to die.
    In April 1879, Nickerson’s last surviving crew member in the first mate’s boat, Benjamin Lawrence, died. All his life, Lawrence had kept the piece of twine he’d made while in the whaleboat. At some point it was passed on to Alexander Starbuck, the Nantucketer who had taken over Obed Macy’s role as the island’s historian. In 1914, Starbuck would donate the piece of twine, wound four times into a tiny coil and mounted in a frame, to the Nantucket Historical Association. Written within the circle of twine was the inscription “They were in the Boat 93 Days.”
    Eighteen years earlier, in 1896, the Nantucket Historical Association had received another donation associated with the Essex. Sometime after the ship sank in November 1820, a small chest, ten by twenty inches, was found floating in the vicinity of the wreck. Leather-bound and studded with brass nails, it may have been used by Captain Pollard to store the ship’s papers. It was picked up by the crew of a passing ship and sold to John Taber, a whaleman then on his way home to Providence, Rhode Island. In 1896,