In the Heart of the Sea

description of taking in studding sails (pp. 82-83); he also has a section entitled “A Ship on Her Beam Ends” (pp. 96-97). Benjamin Franklin’s chart of the Gulf Stream is in Everett Crosby’s Nantucket in Print (pp. 88-89). According to Harland, when shortening sail, “[t]he most lofty, and the most cumbersome sail was got off first, ideally before the squall hit. Studdingsails (particularly topgallant and lower) . . . were particularly at risk if the ship were caught unprepared” (p. 222). The naval saying concerning squalls is in Harland (p. 221), as are the other quoted sources.
    Harland discusses what happens as a heeling ship approaches the point of no return. “[W]ith greater angles, the righting arm increases rapidly with the angle up to about 45 degrees, after which it decreases and at a certain critical angle, disappears” (p. 43). In his nautical dictionary Falconer provides this definition of “beam-ends”: “A ship is said to be on her beam-ends when she inclines very much on one side, so that her beams approach to a vertical position; hence also a person lying down is said to be on his beam-ends.” Addison Pratt tells of a knockdown off Cape Horn: “[W]e were knocked down upon our beam-ends by a heavy squall of wind. All hands were called to reduce sail, as the decks . . . were nearly perpendicular, the leescuppers being knee deep under water. All the way we could get fore and aft was by holding onto the weather rail, the vessel was pitching heavily and the night being very dark” (p. 17). My thanks to Chuck Gieg, who shared with me his personal experience of a knockdown on the training ship Albatross in the 1960s (the basis for the movie White Squall ). Harland discusses the perils of a ship sailing backward (pp. 70, 222).

CHAPTER THREE: First Blood
    The American Consul at Maio in the Cape Verde Islands may have known the Essex ’s second mate. Both Ferdinand Gardner and Matthew Joy were from Nantucket families that had moved to Hudson, New York, the improbable location of a Nantucket-spawned whaling port started in the aftermath of the Revolution.
    My description of a whale hunt is based on many accounts, but primarily those provided by William H. Macy, Clifford Ashley, Willits Ansel in The Whaleboat, and the remarkable amount of information assembled in the “Whaleboat Handbook” used by the Mystic Seaport Whaleboat demonstration staff. My thanks to Mary K. Bercaw for making the handbook available to me. The description of how the sighting of a whale “enlivened” the crew is from Charles Nordhoff ’s Whaling and Fishing (p. 100). Ansel speaks of the roles of the different oarsmen (p. 26) and the relative speeds of a whaleboat and a sperm whale (pp. 16- 17). Ashley tells of whaleboat crews bent on “whaling for glory”: “They raced and jockeyed for position, and in a close finish, with boats jammed together at the flank of a whale, have been known deliberately to foul one another; to dart harpoons across each other’s boats, imperiling both the boats and the lives of all concerned, and then to ride blithely off, fast to the whale, waving their hands or thumbing noses to their unfortunate comrades struggling in the water” (p. 110). Comstock recounts the mate’s exhortation to his whaleboat crew in Voyage to the Pacific (pp. 23-24). In “Behavior of the Sperm Whale,” Caldwell, Caldwell, and Rice record a whaleman’s observation that the spout of a whale smelled “fetid” and stung a man’s skin (p. 699). Ansel relates Charles Beetle’s account of a novice boatsteerer fainting at the prospect of harpooning a whale (p. 21).
    According to Clifford Ashley, who shipped out on a whaling voyage in the early twentieth century, sperm whales were capable of dragging whaleboats along at bursts of up to twenty-five miles per hour. He adds, “I have been in motor speed boats at better than forty-five miles per hour, and found it a tame performance after a ‘Nantucket Sleighride’” (p. 80).
    Francis Olmsted describes the use of a spade to cripple a fleeing sperm whale (p. 22). The lance had a line attached to the end of it, enabling the mate to retrieve it after every throw (Ashley, p. 87). Caldwell et al. speak of dying whales vomiting “pieces of squid the size of whale-boats” (p. 700). Enoch Cloud’s horrified response to the death of a whale occurred during a voyage in the 1850s and is in Enoch’s Voyage (p. 53). Ansel speaks of dead whales being towed back to the