In the Heart of the Sea

“Disaster: Effects on Mental and Physical State” (pp. 445-46). Ancel Keys et al. discuss what they call the “edema problem” in The Biology of Human Starvation (pp. 935-1014).
    Robert Leach provided me with the information concerning Benjamin Lawrence’s Quaker upbringing (personal communication, May 22, 1998). Josiah Quincy wrote of his conversation with the financially humbled Captain Lawrence (Benjamin’s grandfather) in 1801, recording: “Lawrence had seen better days, and had been upon a level in point of property, with the principal inhabitants of the island. But misfortunes had beset his old age, and he was just preparing to remove his family to Alexandria” (Crosby, p. 119). As Leach reveals, Benjamin’s father died during a voyage to Alexandria in 1809.
    Concerning the sailing speed of a whaleboat, Willits Ansel writes, in The Whaleboat: “[F]our to six knots was a good average for a boat beating or running over a period of time on a number of headings” (p. 17). In 1765 the crew of the Peggy watched helplessly as the captain of a potential rescue ship ordered his men to sail away from the disabled craft (Wharton, p. 265). As Edward Leslie writes in Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: “[R]escuing castaways entailed risks and offered no tangible rewards; indeed, taking survivors on board would deplete already limited supplies of food and water” (p. 218). According to Beth Tornovish, tapioca pudding is “a soft food that would be easy for these starving men to digest. It is high in calories and protein . . . [and] high-protein, high-calorie foods are recommended to postoperative surgical patients to promote healing and regain nutrient losses experienced prior to and during surgery” (personal communication, March 28, 1999).
    Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner discuss techniques for extracting marrow from human bones in Man Corn (pp. 33-38). MacDonald Critchley, in Shipwreck Survivors: A Medical Study, writes of deliriums among castaways that are “shared in . . . actual content . . . , leading to a sort of collective confabulation” (p. 81). Charles Murphey, third mate on the Dauphin, tells how Pollard’s boat was discovered in his 220-stanza poem published in 1877; Murphey also provides a crew list that indicates the Native Americans who were aboard the Dauphin. For an account of the Indian legend of how the giant Maushop followed a giant eagle to Nantucket, see my Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island (p. 35). Melville retells a version of this legend in Chapter 14 of Moby-Dick. Commodore Charles Ridgely of the Constellation recorded the account of how Pollard and Ramsdell were found sucking the bones of their shipmates (Heffernan, p. 99). As Heffernan points out, Ridgely would have heard this account from the Nantucketer Obed Starbuck, first mate of the Hero (p. 101). A story in the Sydney Gazette (June 9, 1821) claimed that “the fingers, and other fragments of their deceased companions, were in the pockets of the Capt. and boy when taken on board the whaler.” An incomplete photocopy of Aaron Paddack’s letter describing Pollard’s account of the Essex disaster is in NHA Collection 15, Folder 57. In the letter, Paddack writes:“Captain Pollard, though very low when first taken up has immediately revived I regret to say that young Ramsdell has appeared to fail since taken up.” Claude Rawson, the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University, spoke to me about the tendency of those who have been reduced to survival-cannibalism to speak openly about the experience—often to the horror of their listeners (personal communication, November 13, 1998). The loquacity of the sixteen survivors of an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972 made possible Piers Paul Read’s now famous account of sur vival-cannibalism, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Homecoming
    In Stove by a Whale Thomas Heffernan provides a detailed account of the political situation in Chile at the time of the Essex survivors’ arrival in Valparaiso (pp. 89-91). The NHA Essex blue file contains a transcript from the National Archives in Chile of the February 25 entry describing the ordeal of Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson. Nickerson speaks of the acting American consul Henry Hill’s efforts on their behalf. Commodore Ridgely’s account of the survivors’ appearance and their treatment by Dr. Osborn is cited by Heffernan (pp. 100-1). Ridgely claims that the