In the Heart of the Sea

provides a convincing portrayal of both the ordeal and the community of Nantucket.
    The NHA’s collections contain a myriad of documents relating to the Essex. In addition to Obed Macy’s “wharf book,” in which he recorded how much the oil was sold for after the ship’s return in April 1819 and how the money was divided among the owners and crew, there are documents detailing the leftover provisions that were sold at auction that month, along with costs associated with repairs performed in South America. From documents in the NHA’S Edouard Stackpole collection, it is possible to recreate, in part, the makeup of the crews aboard the Essex prior to her last voyage.
    I would also like to direct the reader’s attention to the works of two underappreciated whalemen-turned-authors. Because he was often critical of the Quaker whalemen of Nantucket, William Comstock has been virtually ignored by island historians. Yet his A Voyage to the Pacific, Descriptive of the Customs, Usages, and Sufferings on Board of Nantucket Whale-Ships and Life of Samuel Comstock (William’s brother and infamous leader of the bloody Globe mutiny) contain some of the best existing accounts of whaling in the early nineteenth century. William Hussey Macy was one of the most insightful and articulate whalemen Nantucket ever produced. Unfortunately, Macy’s book, There She Blows!, has been forgotten, even though several subsequent and widely read authors relied upon it for information. Originally promoted as a book for children, Macy’s work is much more than that, providing a detailed and vivid account of a boy’s introduction to both the town of Nantucket and life aboard a whaler.

PREFACE: February 23, 1821
    My account of the rescue of the second Essex whaleboat is based largely on the description provided in Charles Murphey’s 220-stanza poem published in 1877, a copy of which is at the NHA. Murphey was the third mate of the Dauphin and tells how the boat was sighted to leeward before the Dauphin bore down to determine its identity. Commodore Charles Goodwin Ridgely’s journal records that the two Essex survivors were “in a most wretched state, they were unable to move when found sucking the bones of their dead Mess mates, which they were loath to part with” (cited in Heffernan, p. 99). For an account of the discovery of Thomas Nickerson’s manuscript, see Edouard Stackpole’s foreword in the edition of the narrative published by the NHA in 1984 (p. 7) and Bruce Chadwick’s “The Sinking of the Essex ” in Sail. A brief biography of Leon Lewis is in volume 2 of Albert Johannsen’s The House of Beadle and Adams (pp. 183-86). Charles Philbrick’s poem about the Essex, “A Travail Past,” is in Nobody Laughs, Nobody Cries (pp. 111-27).

CHAPTER ONE: Nantucket
    Thomas Nickerson’s remarks are from his original holograph manuscript entitled The Loss of the Ship “Essex” Sunk by a Whale (NHA Collection 106, Folder 1). In some instances, the spelling and punctuation have been adjusted to make Nickerson’s prose more accessible to a modern-day audience.
    According to Walter Folger, Jr., a part-owner of the Essex, there were a total of seventy-seven “ships and vessels employed in the whale fishery in 1819 from Nantucket” in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with seventy-five ships in the Pacific Ocean alone in 1820 (NHA Collection 118, Folder 71). In “A Journal of the most remarkable events commenced and kept by Obed Macy” (NHA Collection 96, Journal 3, Nov. 13, 1814-April 27, 1822), Macy (who acted as the town’s census taker in August 1820) records that 7,266 people lived on the island.
    Josiah Quincy compares Nantucket to Salem in 1801 (Crosby, p. 114). Joseph Sansom details the appearance of the Nantucket waterfront in 1811 (Crosby, p. 140); another good description of the wharves is found in William H. Macy’s There She Blows! (pp. 12-15, 19-21). William Comstock’s Voyage to the Pacific (pp. 6-7) describes a voyage during the same time frame as the Essex. The account of the young Nantucket boys on the waterfront is from Macy (p. 20).
    The Essex ’s specifications are spelled out in her original 1799 register, describing her as having “two decks and three masts and that her length is eighty seven feet, seven inches her breadth twenty five feet her depth twelve feet six inches and that she measures two hundred thirty eight tons; and seventy two ninety fifths that she is a square sterned ship has no