In the Heart of the Sea

honorable and important.” This maybe, once again, a case of the ghostwriter’s confusing the assigned roles in a whaleboat, but for the purposes of this narrative I have taken it to be Chase’s description of the role he created for himself on his whaleboat: a mate who threw both the harpoon and the lance and directed the boatsteerer from the bow.
    D. W. Rice in “Sperm Whale” (pp. 203-4) describes a sperm whale’s diving habits and mentions the whaler’s rule of thumb for judging how long a sperm whale would be underwater. Obed Macy tells of the sinking of the Union in his History (pp. 230-35). Chase and Nickerson have very different versions of what happened after the first whale attack. Chase claims that the ship began to sink almost immediately. Nickerson makes no mention of the Essex taking on water after the first collision and is careful to point out that Chase had the opportunity to lance the whale after the first attack, something Chase chose not to mention. I have decided to side with Nickerson, who clearly felt compelled to correct the first mate’s account in his own narrative. Both Chase (p. 31) and Herman Melville in “The Battering Ram” chapter of Moby-Dick discuss how a sperm whale is well adapted for attacking a ship head-on. An article in the Sydney Gazette, apparently based on information provided by the three Essex survivors who elected to stay on Henderson Island and were later taken to Australia, states: “The vessel was going at the rate of 5 knots, but such was the force when [the whale] struck the ship, which was under the cat-head, that the vessel had stern-way, at the rate of 3 or 4 knots; the consequence was, that the sea rushed into the cabin windows, every man on deck was knocked down, and worse than all, the bows were stove completely in” (Heffernan, p. 240). A pamphlet written after the disaster by the boatsteerer Thomas Chappel also refers to the ship being driven backward; Chappel claims the whale “knocked off a great part of the false keel” when it bumped the ship with its back (Heffernan, p. 218). Although neither account mentions the whale’s tail still moving after the second impact—in effect pushing the ship backward after the collision had stopped the ship—this appears to be the only way to reconcile Chase’s relatively low estimate of the whale’s speed at impact (six knots) with the other accounts of the ship being driven backward.
    Hal Whitehead discusses how whalers would seek out bulls in “The Behavior of Mature Sperm Whales on the Galapagos Islands Breeding Grounds” (p. 696). Concerning the size reached by large bull sperm whales, Alexander Starbuck writes in his History of the American Whale Fishery, “Sperm whales which yield 100 barrels are considered very large, but this yield is occasionally exceeded” (p. 155). He then quotes Davis’s Nimrod of the Sea, in which a whale of ninety feet that yielded 137 barrels is mentioned ; Davis also claimed that a New Bedford whaler took a sperm whale on the Offshore Ground that produced 145 barrels of oil. Starbuck asserts that in 1876 the bark Wave out of New Bedford took a sperm whale that yielded 162 barrels and 5 gallons of oil (p. 155). Clearly an eighty-five-foot bull sperm whale is within the realm of possibility.
    For a detailed discussion of the brain size and intelligence of sperm whales, see Carl Zimmer’s At the Water’s Edge (pp. 219-26). Richard Ellis, in Men and Whales, also speaks eloquently about a sperm whale’s brain (p. 29). Hal Whitehead and Linda Weilgart in “Moby’s Click” talk about how whales use clicks both for echolocation and communication; they tell of sperm whales being known as “carpenter fish” (p. 64). Linda Weilgart, Hal Whitehead, and Katherine Payne write about the remarkable similarities between sperm whales and elephants in “A Colossal Convergence.” The description of the battle between the two bull sperm whales is in Caldwell et al. (pp. 692-93). In Henry Carlisle’s novel The Jonah Man, Pollard theorizes that the whale heard Chase’s hammering through the air: “Carried on the easterly wind, the clatter of hammers could be heard more than a mile to westward” (p. 106). But, as Whitehead confirms in a personal e-mail communication, the sperm whale would have most likely heard the hammering through the water, the medium to which its ears were best adapted and which transmits sounds with a much greater efficiency than air. In fact, the whale