In the Heart of the Sea

therefore a smooth-sided boat, to glide more silently upon the unsuspecting animal, was adopted” (p. 61).
    Ashley records the location of the Offshore Ground as latitude 5°to 10° south, longitude 105° to 125° west (p. 41). Thomas Heffernan has identified at least seven whaleships that were in the neighborhood of the Essex at the sinking: three from Nantucket (the Governor Strong, the Thomas, and the Globe ); three from New Bedford (the Balaena, the Persia, the Golconda ); and one from England (the Coquette) (p. 77).
    For information on hardtack, see Sandra Oliver’s Saltwater Foodways (p. 107). The nutritional content of the hardtack rations and Galapagos tortoises, as well as the estimate of how much weight the men would lose over the course of sixty days, were determined with the help of Beth Tornovish and Dr. Timothy Lepore on Nantucket. Statistics relating to the body’s water needs come from Understanding Normal and Clinical Nutrition, by Eleanor Whitney et al. (pp. 272-75). As a point of comparison, Captain Bligh set his men’s initial daily rations at one ounce of bread (as opposed to six ounces for the men of the Essex ) and a quarterpint (compared to a half pint) of water (Bounty ’s Launch, p. 36). Francis Olmstead observed that many of the crew aboard the whaleship on which he sailed had “laid in from fifty to seventy pounds of tobacco as their solace for the voyage, and will probably have to obtain a fresh supply from the captain before they return home” (pp. 83-84).
    Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser speak of the effects of a “tormenting memory” and cite William James’s reference to the San Francisco earthquake in “Disaster: Effects on Mental and Physical State” (pp. 443-44). Hilde Bluhm in “How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps” speaks of the importance of self-expression in promoting psychic survival (p. 10). John Leach, in Survival Psychology, refers to activities such as Lawrence’s creation of a piece of twine as “tasking,” which he defines as “the breaking down of the person’s aim or purpose into simple tasks so that life can be handled one step at a time” (p. 152); he refers to one subject who dealt with a particularly long-term situation by making himself “a rudimentary set of golf clubs and wooden balls” (p. 153).
    My discussion of navigation is based in large part on J. B. Hewson’s A History of the Practice of Navigation, especially his chapter on navigation by latitude and dead reckoning (pp. 178-225). Francis Olmsted in Incidents of a Whaling Voyage also provides an interesting account of navigation on a whaleship (pp. 43-44). My thanks to Donald Treworgy of Mystic Seaport for sharing his expertise with me; according to Treworgy in a personal communication: “If Pollard of the Essex did not learn to work a lunar until the next voyage, it seems very unlikely that he would have had a chronometer for doing a time sight in 1819. Marine chronometers in 1819 were still handmade, costly and not always reliable.” According to Obed Macy, who speaks of Nantucket’s whaling captains’ being “lunarians” in his History, by the 1830s the island’s whaleships were “generally furnished with chronometers” (p. 218). On Captain Bligh’s remarkable feat of navigation in an open boat, see Bounty ’s Launch (pp. 24, 60-61).
    In his History Obed Macy tells how the crew of the Union tied their two whaleboats together (p. 233). In Survive the Savage Sea, Dougal Robertson recounts how his wooden sailing yacht was rammed repeatedly and sunk by several killer whales. Robert Pitman and Susan Chivers describe how a pod of killer whales attacked and killed a sperm whale in “Terror in Black and White,” Natural History, December 1998 (pp. 26- 28). The description of Chase’s dissection of a tortoise is based, in part, on Dougal Robertson’s detailed account of cutting up a green turtle (p. 109).
    Chase calls the conditions they experienced on December 8 as a “perfect gale.” Dean King’s A Sea of Words defines gale as a “wind of an intensity between that of a strong breeze and a storm. In the 19th century, it was more precisely defined as blowing at a speed of between 28 and 55 nautical miles per hour. In a gale, the waves are high with crests that break into spindrift, while in a strong gale the crests topple and roll and dense streaks of foam blow in the wind” (p. 202). Richard Hubbard’s Boater’s Bowditch: The