In the Heart of the Sea

Henderson Island, South Pacific” in The Condor. Although a great frigatebird is another name for a man-of-war hawk, a masked booby is a different species from a tropic bird, the kind of bird Nickerson claimed to have seen on Henderson.
    T. G. Benton and T. Spencer describe how flora and fauna spread throughout the Pacific Islands in “Biogeographic Processes at the Limits of the Indo-West Pacific Province” in The Pitcairn Islands (pp. 243- 44). My account of human habitation on Henderson is indebted to T. Spencer and T. G. Benton’s “Man’s Impact on the Pitcairn Islands” (pp. 375-76) and Marshall Weisler’s “Henderson Island Prehistory: Colonization and Extinction on a Remote Polynesian Island,” also in The Pitcairn Islands (pp. 377-404). In “Obesity in Samoans and a Perspective on Its Etiology in Polynesians,” in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Stephen McGarvey writes:
    Polynesian settlement required long ocean voyages into prevailing trade winds and unknown waters. The sailors on these early voyages of indeterminate length and unclear destinations may have experienced a significant risk of starvation and death when on-board food supplies dwindled and ceased. Overweight individuals and/or those with efficient metabolisms, presumably mediated by hyperinsulinemia, may have better survived such voyages because of their large store of energy reserves in the form of adipose tissue. . . . Surviving sailors of these discovery voyages and, thus, the first settlers may have been those able to use and store food energy efficiently, perhaps via thrifty-genotype mechanisms. (p. 1592S)
    McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern-day Samoans are characterized by “massive adiposity and high prevalence of obesity.” See also his article “The Thrifty Gene Concept and Adiposity Studies in Biological Anthropology.” When it comes to the men in the Essex whaleboats, McGarvey postulates in a personal communication (May 11, 1999) that the health and nutrition of the men before the whale attack, not any racial or genetic predisposition, were the primary factors influencing their ability to survive. The statistics concerning the relative life spans of black and white infants are from Barbara M. Dixon’s Good Health for African Americans (p. 27).
    Pollard’s public letter left on Henderson was quoted from in the Sydney Gazette (June 9, 1821). Other accounts claim that Owen Chase also left a letter; one source says it was addressed to his wife, another to his brother. As extra protection, Pollard placed the letters in a small lead case before putting them in a wooden box nailed to the tree.

CHAPTER TEN: The Whisper of Necessity
    Statistical information on wind directions in trade-wind zones comes from William Thomas’s “The Variety of Physical Environments Among Pacific Islands,” in Man’s Place in the Island Ecosystem, edited by F. R. Fosberg (p. 31). My thanks to the Nantucket Quaker expert Robert Leach for providing me with information on Matthew Joy’s background (personal communication, May 28, 1998). According to Aaron Paddack’s letter (based on Pollard’s account and at the NHA): “Matthew P. Joy (second officer) died through debility & costiveness.”
    The findings of the Minnesota starvation experiment are contained in the two-volume Biology of Human Starvation, by Ancel Keys et al. A readable summary and analysis of the findings are contained in Harold Guetzkow and Paul Bowman’s Men and Hunger: A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers, a guide still in use today. The term “stomach masturbation” is referred to by Hilde Bluhm in “How Did They Survive?” (p. 20). Guetzkow and Bowman speak of starvation and “socalled American characteristics” in Men and Hunger (p. 9).
    One example of the claims made for dehydration and starvation as a “natural and quite tolerable” way to die can be found on the Web site http://www.asap-care.com/fluids.htm : “Dehydration and starvation have proven to be very tolerable while dying. This is easy to understand because people have been dying comfortably for thousands of years without artificial tube feedings and fluid supports. . . . [These] are natural events that should be allowed to occur when death is imminent, not fought relentlessly and avoided at any and all costs.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Games of Chance
    Chase’s narrative and Aaron Paddack’s letter disagree slightly concerning the timing of events on Pollard’s and