In the Heart of the Sea

journal of a voyage on the ship Maria, 1832- 1836, on microfilm at the NHA. In the same poem Murphey tells of being “With girls o’er mill hills promenading.” The Nantucketer William Coffin, father of the man who probably ghostwrote Owen Chase’s narrative of the Essex, spoke of how rarely he strayed from town in 1793 (NHA Collection 150, Folder 78).
    Walter Folger tells of Nantucket children learning Wampanoag whaling phrases “as soon as they can talk” (Crosby, p. 97); the anecdote about the boy harpooning the family cat is in William F. Macy’s Scrap-Basket (p. 23); on Nantucket’s secret women’s society, see Joseph Hart’s Miriam Coffin, where he states, “The daughter of a whale-fisherman loses caste, and degrades herself in the eyes of her acquaintance, if she unites her destiny to a landsman” (p. 251). Although the poem that begins “Death to the living” had been in common use long before, it appears in a sequence of toasts delivered at a banquet in celebration of the voyage of the Loper in 1830 ( Nantucket Inquirer, September 25). The statistics concerning widows and fatherless children appear in Edward Byers’s Nation of Nantucket (p. 257). The gravestone inscriptions for Nickerson’s parents are recorded in NHA Collection 115, Box II. All genealogical information concerning the Nantucket crew members of the Essex comes from the NHA’s newly computerized Eliza Barney Genealogy; information about the Nickersons is from The Nickerson Family (Nickerson Family Association, 1974).
    In his Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecoeur speaks of Nantucket’s “superior wives” and their “incessant visiting” (p. 157), as well as their use of opium (p. 160) and the effects of marriage (p. 158). Lucretia Mott’s comments concerning the socializing of husbands and wives on Nantucket is in Margaret Hope Bacon’s Valiant Friend (p. 17). Eliza Brock’s journal containing the “Nantucket Girl’s Song” is at the NHA; she kept the journal while on a whaling voyage with her husband from May 1853 to 1856. I discuss the validity of Crèvecoeur’s remarks about opium use in “The Nantucket Sequence in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer ” in the New England Quarterly. For a discussion of he’s-at-homes, see my Away Off Shore (p. 257); for an account of the discovery of a he’s-at-home on Nantucket, see Thomas Congdon’s “Mrs. Coffin’s Consolation” in Forbes FYI.
    Crèvecoeur records, “I was much surprised at the disagreeable smell which struck me in many parts of the town; it is caused by the whale oil and is unavoidable; the neatness peculiar to these people can neither remove or prevent it” (p. 111). The smell apparently emanated from right-whale oil as opposed to sperm oil; see Clifford Ashley’s The Yankee Whaler (p. 56). Owen Chase in his narrative of the Essex disaster claims that the upperworks of the Essex were entirely overhauled prior to her leaving in the summer of 1819. William H. Macy describes ships being coppered in Nantucket Harbor (p. 14). On the life span of a whaleship, see In Pursuit of Leviathan by Davis et al. (p. 240). Roger Hambidge, shipwright at Mystic Seaport, spoke to me about the phenomenon of iron sickness in whaleships and stated that twenty years was about the average life of a ship, a statement corroborated by the statistical analysis in Davis et al. (p. 231). Obed Macy’s concerns about the condition of whaleships is in a January 1822 entry in his journal. A listing of Nantucket vessels and their owners in 1820 has Gideon Folger and Sons as owning both the Essex and the Aurora (NHA Collection 335, Folder 976).
    William Comstock makes the derogatory remark concerning Nantucket Quakers in The Life of Samuel Comstock (pp. 39-40), where he also speaks of the owners’ tendency to underprovision their ships (p. 73). Davis et al. have calculated the return on investment shipping agents typically received in New Bedford ( In Pursuit of Leviathan, p. 411); Nantucket owners in the boom year of 1819 were undoubtedly reaping a similar, if not higher, profit. The description of poor economic times on the mainland is in the New Bedford Mercury (June 4, 1819), which quotes from an article in the Baltimore Federal Republican. The comings and goings of the Nantucket whaling fleet can be traced in Alexander Starbuck’s History of Nantucket (pp. 428-33).
    William H. Macy speaks of the “grand plaza of Nantucket” (p. 15) and how the island’s