In the Heart of the Sea

Hendricks’s boats after their separation from Chase. Since Paddack wrote his letter on the night of Pollard’s rescue after listening to the captain’s own account, I have taken it to be a more reliable source concerning the sequence of events on these two boats.
    The reference to survival cannibalism at sea being so widespread in the nineteenth century is from Brian Simpson’s Cannibalism and the Common Law (p. 121). The second canto of Byron’s Don Juan, published in the summer of 1819, illustrates the attitudes and assumptions of the time:
    LXVI
    ’Tis thus with people in an open boat,
They live upon the love of life, and bear
More than can be believed, or even thought,
And stand like rocks the tempest’s wear and tear;
And hardship still has been the sailor’s lot,
Since Noah’s ark went cruising here and there. . . .
     
    LXVII
    But Man is a carnivorous production,
And must have meals, at least one meal a day;
He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction,
But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey;
Although his anatomical construction
Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way,
Your laboring people think beyond all question,
Beef, veal, and mutton, better for digestion.
     
    LXVIII
    And thus it was with our hapless crew . . .
    The most comprehensive treatment of the Nottingham Galley is contained in a scholarly edition of Kenneth Roberts’s novel Boon Island. I have used Captain Dean’s earliest edition of his narrative published in 1711, reprinted in Donald Wharton’s In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives, 1610-1766 (pp. 153- 55). Edward Leslie’s Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors contains an excellent discussion of the Nottingham Galley wreck, along with other famous incidences of maritime cannibalism, including the Essex disaster. Also see chapter five, “The Custom of the Sea,” in Simpson’s Cannibalism and the Common Law (pp. 95-145).
    Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner’s Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest provides a detailed analysis of how much meat an average human would provide (pp. 34- 35), as does Stanley Garn and Walter Block’s “The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism,” in American Anthropologist (p. 106). In The Biology of Human Starvation, Ancel Keys et al. cite autopsies of starvation victims in which “adipose tissues contained no cells with fat globules” (p. 170); they also cite information on the percentage weight losses of the organs of starvation victims (p. 190). My thanks to Beth Tornovish and Tim Lepore for their estimates of the amount of meat and calories the Essex starvation victims would have provided. For a modern-day survivalist’s guide to cannibalism (complete with a diagram of a human body indicating the preferred cuts of meat and even a list of recipes), see Shiguro Takada’s Contingency Cannibalism: Superhard-core Survivalism’s Dirty Little Secret.
    According to P. Deurenberg et al., in “Body Mass Index and Percent Body Fat: A Meta Analysis Among Different Ethnic Groups,” in the International Journal of Obesity, “Blacks have lower body fat for the same Body Mass Index (BMI) compared to Caucasians” (pp. 1168-69). For accounts of the Donner Party and the increased survival rates of the women relative to the men, see George Stewart’s Ordeal by Hunger and Joseph King’s Winter of Entrapment. Another example of women outlasting men in a starvation situation is found in Ann Saunders’s account of her ordeal after the ship on which she was a passenger (along with only one other woman) became disabled on its way from New Brunswick to Liverpool in 1826. After twenty-two days in the rigging of the waterlogged ship, the six survivors (all of whom resorted to cannibalism) included the two women passengers. In addition to a physiological advantage, Pollard’s age may have given him an attitudinal edge when it came to long-term survival. According to John Leach, “Those under twenty-five suffer because they have not yet learned to conserve energies. They have difficulty pacing themselves for the long haul. . . . [P]assivity does not come naturally to youth” ( Survival Psychology, p. 172).
    Both Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance (pp. 205-9) and John Leach in Survival Psychology speak of Shackleton’s unique ability to embody different leadership styles. According to Leach, Shackleton was “a rare man who was capable of both