In the Heart of the Sea

sailors aboard the Constellation originally offered to donate an entire month’s pay to the treatment of the Essex survivors (which would have totaled between two and three thousand dollars), but realizing that American and English residents of Valparaiso had also created a fund, Ridgely limited his men to a dollar each (Heffernan, p. 100).
    Ancel Keys et al. tell of the painful process by which the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment regained the weight they had lost in The Biology of Human Starvation (p. 828). Captain Harrison’s account of the difficulties he had in regaining use of his digestive tract are described in his narrative of the Peggy disaster (Wharton, p. 275). Nickerson provides a detailed account of the troubles the Hero ran into off St. Mary’s Island; also see my Away Off Shore (pp. 161-62). My description of how Pollard and Ramsdell made their way to Valparaiso is indebted to Heffernan’s Stove by a Whale (pp. 95-109), as is my account of the rescue of the three men on Henderson Island (pp. 109-15). Brian Simpson writes of “gastronomic incest” in Cannibalism and the Common Law (p. 141).
    Chappel tells of their travails on Henderson in a pamphlet titled “Loss of the Essex, ” reprinted in Heffernan (pp. 218-24). Nickerson talked to Seth Weeks about his time on the island, and Weeks confirmed that the freshwater spring never again appeared above the tide line. According to the oceanographer James McKenna, it is more than likely that an exceptionally high (and low) spring tide, combined with other factors such as the phase of the moon and variations in the orbital patterns of the sun and moon, were what gave the Essex crew temporary access to the spring in late December of 1820 (personal communication, May 10, 1999). Captain Beechey writes of the missing Essex boat: “The third [boat] was never heard of; but it is not improbable that the wreck of a boat and four skeletons which were seen on Ducie’s Island by a merchant vessel were her remains and that of her crew” (in Narrative, vol. 1, pp. 59-61). Heffernan, who cites the Beechey reference, doubts that the whaleboat referred to could have belonged to the Essex ( Stove by a Whale, p. 88).
    Obed Macy’s account of what happened on Nantucket during the winter and spring of 1821 are in the third volume of his journals in NHA Collection 96. Frederick Sanford’s description of the letter regarding the Essex survivors being read “in front of the post-office in a public way” is in a brief article titled “Whale Stories” that apparently appeared in an off-island newspaper in or around 1872. An undated copy of the article is on file at the NHA; my thanks to Elizabeth Oldham for bringing the story to my attention. Sanford also includes a somewhat overheated account of the whale attack: “[A] large whale (sperm) came upon the ship, and with such violence as to make her heel and shake like an aspen leaf. The whale glanced off to windward and when two miles to windward turned and came down upon the ship and struck her a most deadly blow on the bows which caused her to heel over and to fill and sink!”
    The New Bedford Mercury (June 15, 1821) includes two stories about the Essex. The first comes from a Captain Wood, of the Triton, who had heard about the disaster from Captain Paddack of the Diana and reports that Pollard and Ramsdell had been picked up by the Dauphin; the second story tells of a letter just received from Nantucket reporting on the arrival of the Eagle with Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell as passengers. Nantucket’s own paper, the Inquirer, did not begin publication until June 23, 1821, almost two weeks after the arrival of the first group of Essex survivors. The letter describing Chase’s inability to speak about the disaster is dated June 17, 1821 and is the possession of Rosemary Heaman, a descendant of Barnabas Sears, to whom the letter was addressed. My thanks to Mrs. Heaman for bringing the letter to my attention. Mention of Pollard’s reception is limited to a single sentence: “Capt. Pollard, late Master of the ship Essex, arrived here in the Two Brothers, last Sunday” (August 9, 1821). Frederick Sanford’s account of Pollard’s arrival is in Gustav Kobbé’s “The Perils and Romance of Whaling,” The Century Magazine, August 1890 (p. 521); he also writes of Pollard’s return to Nantucket in the Inquirer (March 28, 1879). Although many writers have mistakenly attributed