In the Heart of the Sea

that attacked the Essex would have also heard the chaos being wreaked by Pollard and Joy in the shoal of sperm whales several miles to leeward. While this might seem to corroborate Chase’s belief that the whale was “fired with revenge for their sufferings,” Whitehead points out that “it is important to understand that we now know that relationships between large male sperm whales and groups of females are brief and impermanent. Thus . . . it is very unlikely that the male had any attachment to the females being killed” (personal communication, August 5, 1998).
    Whitehead theorizes that the whale may have first struck the Essex by mistake and that “this contact greatly disturbed the animal, resulting in the second event, which does read like an ‘attack’” (personal communication, August 5, 1998). Many whalemen in the nineteenth century apparently agreed with Whitehead. According to a remark concerning the Essex (from the North American Review ) cited by Francis Olmsted in Incidents of a Whaling Voyage: “But no other instance is known, in which the mischief is supposed to have been malignantly designed by the assailant [the whale], and most experienced whalers believe that even in this case, the attack was not intentional” (p. 145). Other whalemen, however, thought differently. An old Nantucket captain in William H. Macy’s There She Blows! states: “We have all heard of the Essex affair. . . . I remember it well, for I was cruising on Chili at that time in the Plutarch, and from the statements of the survivors, it is plain enough that the whale went to work deliberately and with malice prepense, as the lawyers would say, to destroy the ship” (p. 133).
    My description of how the Essex was constructed is based on several sources. John Currier in “Historical Sketch of Ship Building on the Merrimac River” claims that ships constructed in Amesbury at the time of the Essex were “built almost entirely of oak; their decks alone being of native white pine. The ribs, planking, ceiling, beams and knees were cut from oak timber, floated down the river or drawn by ox teams from within a radius often or fifteen miles” (p. 34). My thanks to Roger Hambidge and Ted Kaye of Mystic Seaport for directing me to a specifications list of the whaleship Hector in Albert Cook Church’s Whale Ships and Whaling (pp. 174-79). Thanks also to Mark Starr at the Shipyard Documentation Office of Mystic Seaport for providing me with the specifications of the Charles W. Morgan. I also relied on Reginald Hegarty’s Birth of a Whaleship.
    My thanks to Professor Ted Ducas of the Physics Department at Wellesley College for speaking to me about the physics of whales in general and the wreck of the Essex in particular. My thanks also to Peter Smith, a naval architect at Hinckley Yachts, who calculated the potential forces involved in a collision between an 80-ton whale and a 238-ton ship, and the strength of a whaleship’s construction (personal communications, December 18 and 23, 1998).

CHAPTER SIX: The Plan
    In Survival Psychology, John Leach writes of the apathy that commonly affects survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, known as the “recoil period” (pp. 24-37, 129-134). In “Disaster: Effects of Mental and Physical State,” Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser discuss the reluctance of survivors to leave the scene of a disaster (p. 444). Concerning whaleboats in the early nineteenth century, Erik Ronnberg, Jr., states, “Depictions of boats from this period—in the form of paintings, lithographs, and logbook sketches—make it clear that rowing was the usual if not exclusive form of propulsion. Those sources that do show whaleboats under sail indicate that the sprit rig was most favored and the boats were guided with a steering oar with no rudder in evidence. This compounded by the lack of a centerboard, would have severely handicapped the boats’ abilities to sail to windward; indeed, this rig and steering configuration would be efficient only in the pursuit of whales downwind” ( To Build a Whaleboat, p.1). As Ronnberg also points out, these early boats were of clinker or lapstrake construction, not the batten-seam construction that typified boats in later years. Instead of being white (as were almost all whaleboats by the middle of the nineteenth century), the Essex boats were probably quite colorful—perhaps dark blue and red, the color of the ship’s flag; see Ansel (p. 95).
    Caleb Crain’s