In the Heart of the Sea

Small Craft American Practical Navigator includes a table that puts the theoretical maximum of waves with unlimited fetch in Force 9 (41-47 knots) at 40 feet (p. 312). William Van Dorn’s Oceanography and Seamanship also includes a useful table that indicates the rate of sea state growth as a function of wind speed and duration (p. 189).
    John Leach speaks of the “perceptual narrowing” that occurs in the aftermath of a disaster (p. 124), a factor that undoubtedly contributed to the Essex survivors’ unswerving commitment to their original plan, even though heading for the Society Islands remained a possibility throughout the first month after the sinking.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Centering Down
    The best accounts of the sufferings of the people aboard the Medusa raft are from two of the survivors, J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard, in Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal; see also Alexander McKee’s Death Raft. W. J. McGee’s analysis of the sufferings of Pablo Valencia in the southwestern Arizona desert appears in his now famous article, “Desert Thirst as Disease.”
    My description of gooseneck barnacles is based on information provided by James Carlton, Director of the Williams-Mystic Program at Mystic Seaport (personal communication, October 1998). For a description of how the crustaceans are commonly eaten, see the Epicurious Dictionary ( http://www2.condenet.com ). My thanks to James McKenna on the faculty of the Williams-Mystic Program for providing me with detailed information on why some portions of the Pacific support less life than others (personal communication, March 23, 1999). M. F. Maury’s chart indicating the “Desolate Region” appears in plate five of his Wind and Current Charts.
    Willits Ansel, in The Whaleboat, tells how to clench a nail (pp. 88- 89). W. Jeffrey Bolster discusses the “blacks’ spiritual leadership” aboard a ship in Black Jacks (p. 125); he also recounts the story of the black cook’s praying for the deliverance of a whaleship. My description of how Quakers “centered down” is based on Arthur Worrall’s Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (pp. 91-95). For an excellent summary of the effects of starvation on disaster victims, see John Leach’s Survival Psychology (pp. 87-99). Throughout their narratives, Chase and Nickerson occasionally contradict themselves concerning the amount of water and, especially, bread rations. In this and other chapters I have assumed that the downward progression of their daily rations of bread was from six ounces to three ounces and, finally (after leaving Henderson Island), to one and a half ounces, while the daily water ration remained at half a pint.

CHAPTER NINE: The Island
    For an account of the Nantucketer Mayhew Folger’s “discovery” of Pitcairn Island, see Greg Dening’s Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language (pp. 307- 38) and Walter Hayes’s The Captain from Nantucket and the Mutiny on the Bounty (pp. 41-47). To this day, Pitcairners rely on miro and tau wood harvested at Henderson to produce the wood carvings they sell to tourists; see Dea Birkett’s Serpent in Paradise for a description of a modern-day wood-collecting voyage from Pitcairn to Henderson (pp. 81-96). From 1991 to 1992, a team of scientists under the aegis of the Sir Peter Scott Commemorative Expedition to the Pitcairn Islands set up abase camp on the north beach of Henderson Island—almost exactly where the Essex survivors landed more than 170 years earlier. The scientists flew to Tahiti, then sailed the two thousand miles to Henderson on a chartered yacht. Supplies of food and water were shipped in every three months from Auckland, New Zealand. I have relied heavily on the book the expedition produced, The Pitcairn Islands: Biogeography, Ecology and Prehistory, edited by Tim Benton and Tom Spencer, for information about Henderson Island.
    The presence of a “fresh water lens” beneath a coral island is discussed in William Thomas’s “The Variety of Physical Environments Among Pacific Islands” in Man’s Place in the Island Ecosystem: A Symposium, edited by F. R. Fosberg (pp. 26-27). Thomas Heffernan cites Robert McLoughlin’s account of the medical examination of the skeletons on Henderson Island in Stove by a Whale (pp. 84-85). The behavior between the man-of-war hawks and tropic birds can still be observed on Henderson Island. See J. A. Vickery and M. De L. Brooke’s “The Kleptoparastic Interactions Between Great Frigatebirds and Masked Boobies on