In the Heart of the Sea

“Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels” contains an excellent synopsis of early-nineteenth-century accounts of Marquesan cannibalism and homosexuality (p. 30). For a discussion of the kinds of stories about native cannibalism that were told by the seamen of the era, see Gananath Obeyesekere’s “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Figi: Seamen’s Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. There was also a disturbing racial aspect to the rumors of cannibalism that sailors swapped in the forecastles of whaleships. A Maori chief from New Zealand who had been brought to London in 1818 insisted that “black men had a much more agreeable flavor than white” (in Tannahill’s Flesh and Blood, p. 151). Suggesting that this was accepted as a fact among Nantucket whalemen was the experience of Captain Benjamin Worth off the coast of New Zealand in 1805. Worth told of how when a gale threatened to drive his ship ashore, the blacks in the crew begged him to do everything he could to make for open ocean since “the natives preferred Negro flesh to that of the white man” (in Stackpole’s The Sea-Hunters, pp. 399-400). The officers of the Essex were between voyages when the stories about the peaceful state of the natives of Nukahivah appeared in the New Bedford Mercury (April 28, 1819). Melville’s statement about the Essex crew’s decision “to gain a civilized harbor” is part of the comments he wrote in the back pages of his own copy of Chase’s narrative, a transcript of which is included in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (pp. 978-95). Ernest Dodge in Islands and Empires speaks of the gigantic royal mission chapel in Tahiti, built in 1819, the same year the Essex left Nantucket (p. 91).
    Obed Macy’s remarks about the Nantucketers’ intimate knowledge of the sea is in his History (p. 213). Such was not, apparently, the case when it came to the landmasses of the world. William Comstock recounts an incident that reveals just how geographically ignorant a Nantucketer could be. At one point the officer of a Nantucket whaleship “very honestly desired to be informed whether England was on the continent, or ‘stood alone by itself,’ and on being answered by another officer that it was in the County of Great Britain, wanted to know how far it was from London” ( The Life of Samuel Comstock, p. 57). If a whaleman could be this vague about an island with which Nantucket had always had a close commercial connection, it is little wonder that the men of the Essex were without any information concerning the islands of the Central Pacific. For a detailed drawing of the launch Captain Bligh and his men sailed to the island of Timor, see A. Richard Mansir’s edition of Bligh’s The Journal of Bounty ’s Launch.
    Leach in Survival Psychology discusses the differences between authoritarian and social leaders (p. 140), while Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance: Survival at the Extremes speaks of the different personality types required in what he calls the escape and survival periods following a disaster (pp. 210-11). The analysis of a career first mate versus a “fishy” man is based on William H. Macy’s words about the first mate Grafton, whom Macy describes as a “man of rather thoughtful cast of mind, of much intelligence, and possessed of an extensive stock of information upon many subjects, with a habit of generalizing and a clearness of expression which rendered him an agreeable companion to all with whom he came in contact. Though a good whaleman, Grafton [the first mate] was not what is known to the connoisseur as a ‘fishy man’” (pp. 44-45). John Leach in Survival Psychology writes about the importance family connections take on during a disaster (p. 156), as well as the relationship of strong leadership to survival (p. 139).

CHAPTER SEVEN: At Sea
    See Ronnberg’s To Build a Whaleboat for an excellent analysis of the difficulties of sailing an early-nineteenth-century whaleboat (pp. 1- 4). Concerning the sound made by a clinker-style whaleboat, Clifford Ashley writes in The Yankee Whaler: “[T]he name [of clinker] was formed in imitation of the sound made by the boat while going through water. I have frequently noted this in a clinker-built tender. As the whale grew wary [later in the nineteenth century], the noise was found objectionable, and