In the Heart of the Sea

Taber’s daughter, who had since moved to Garrettsville, Ohio, decided that the chest rightfully belonged on Nantucket and donated the artifact to the historical association.
    It was all that remained of the whaleship Essex —a battered box and a ragged piece of string.

EPILOGUE
    Bones
    E ARLY ON THE MORNING of December 30, 1997, Edie Ray, coordinator of the Nantucket Marine Mammal Stranding Team, received a telephone call. A whale had washed up on the eastern extreme of the island at Siasconset, just off a low plain of sand known as Codfish Park. A spout was puffing from the top of the whale’s head: it was still alive. Soon Ray was in her car and headed down Milestone Road, a straight, seven-mile spine of asphalt that connects Nantucket town to the eastern brim of the island. It was bitterly cold and blowing a gale, and the car was slammed by the icy blasts of wind.
    Ray knew the surf would be ugly at Codfish Park. In the last decade, winter storms had eroded nearly fifty yards from this end of the island. Waves with a fetch that reached all the way to Portugal, three thousand miles to the east, regularly thundered onto the beach, and in just six years, sixteen houses had either been moved, torn down, or washed away by the sea. This time, however, the waves had brought something with them.
    Ray soon saw the whale, a huge black hulk, off the northern edge of Codfish Park. It was a sperm whale, a cetacean almost never seen in these waters, stranded on a shoal about 150 yards off the beach. Its block-shaped head was pointed toward shore, and it was being pummeled by the waves, its tail flopping forward with each hit. The high surf was making it difficult for the whale to breathe.
    It would be later determined that, long before the whale washed up on Nantucket, it had broken several ribs in a collision, either with a ship or another whale. Sick, weak, and disoriented, this forty-six-foot adult male—half the length of the whale that sank the Essex —did not have the strength to fight free of the breakers. For Ray it was a distressing sight. She had been trained to assist stranded mammals, including pilot whales and seals, and she and her fellow team members were now powerless to help this giant creature.
    Word began to spread throughout the island that a live sperm whale had washed up on Codfish Park. By the afternoon, a crowd had assembled, despite the frigid winter weather. Many onlookers were upset that nothing was being done to assist the whale. Lacerations were now visible around its mouth and eyes, and blood clouded the water. Ray and others explained that the severe surf and the whale’s size made it impossible to do anything but watch.
    By the afternoon, staff members from the New England Aquarium, which monitors whale strandings along the region’s 2,500 miles of coast, had flown in from Boston. As the tide rose, the whale was able to free itself from the shoal, only to be washed back by the waves. Each time it swam free, the rip swept the whale south, and the crowd, often cheering it on, followed it along the beach. Just before sunset, the whale finally escaped the breakers and swam out into open water. Ray and several New England Aquarium people rushed to her car and drove out to Tom Never’s Head, a bluff to the south, toward which the whale was last seen swimming. They glimpsed it several times but finally lost sight of it in the fading light.
    The next morning, December 31, the whale was found washed up on Low Beach, between Codfish Park and Tom Never’s Head. The wind had eased to the point that Stranding Team members and aquarium staffers could now approach the whale, which was still alive, but just barely. By noon it was dead.
    The Nantucket Whaling Museum, housed in a former sperm candle factory, already had one of the world’s greatest collections of whaling equipment, scrimshaw, and artifacts from the South Seas. It even had the skeleton of a finback whale that had washed up in the 1960s. To add the skeleton of a sperm whale—the species upon which the island’s fame had been founded—would provide the museum with the ultimate draw. More important, a sperm-whale skeleton would allow Nantucketers to appreciate firsthand the might and grace of the whale, to pay homage to the creature their forefathers had once dedicated their lives to killing.
    On January 2, a team of scientists, many from the New England Aquarium, began a necropsy—measuring and photographing the carcass and collecting