In the Heart of the Sea

Sanford’s account of a silent reception to the arrival of Chase and company, it was Pollard’s return that elicited this response. The description of a Nantucketer’s reaction to the arrival of a whaleship is from the Nantucket Inquirer (May 14, 1842).
    Lance Davis et al. speak of the greater responsibilities and pay of a whaling captain compared to a merchant captain ( In Pursuit of Leviathan, pp. 175-85). Amasa Delano’s memories of his return after an unsuccessful voyage are in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels (pp. 252-53). Edouard Stackpole writes of Owen Coffin’s grandfather Hezekiah and his involvement in the Boston Tea Party in Whales and Destiny (p. 38). Robert Leach provided me with information regarding the Coffin family and the Friends Meeting (personal communication, May 20, 1998). Thomas Nickerson’s account of Nancy Coffin’s response to George Pollard is in his letter to Leon Lewis.
    Piers Paul Read speaks of the Montevideo Archbishop’s judgment of the Andes survivors in Alive! (p. 308). Another Catholic official did insist, however, that, contrary to the claims of one of the Andes survivors, the eating of human flesh under these circumstances was not equivalent to Holy Communion (p. 309). Documents relating to the rise of Quakerism on Nantucket mention a religious discussion that makes an intriguing reference to cannibalism and communion. In the spring of 1698, several years before Quakerism took hold on the island, an itinerant Friend named Thomas Chalkley visited Nantucket and recorded his conversation with one of the community’s first settlers, Stephen Hussey. Hussey had once lived in the Barbados, where he had heard a Quaker claim that “we must eat the spiritual flesh, and drink the spiritual blood of Christ.” Hussey asked, “Is it not a contradiction in nature, that flesh and blood should be spiritual?” When Chalkley pointed out that Christ had been speaking figuratively when he told the apostles, “Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood ye have no life in you,” Hussey indignantly replied, “I don’t think they were to gnaw it from his arms and shoulders” (Starbuck, History of Nantucket, p. 518). One can only wonder how Chalkley and Hussey would have responded to the all-too-literal story of the Essex. Claude Rawson refers to cannibalism as a “cultural embarrassment” in a review of Brian Simpson’s Cannibalism and the Common Law in the London Review of Books (January 24, 1985, p. 21). Concerning survivors who have resorted to cannibalism, John Leach writes, “If it can be accepted, justified or in cases rationalized, then the act of enforced cannibalism can be accommodated with little or no psychological dysfunction” ( Survival Psychology, p. 98).
    Thomas Heffernan has pointed out the similarities between Chase’s account of what happened on Pollard’s and Joy’s boat and what is described in Aaron Paddack’s letter ( Stove By a Whale, p. 231). Herman Melville wrote about Owen Chase’s authorship of his narrative in the back pages of his own copy of the book (see Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, p. 984). Yet another aspect of the disaster not mentioned by Chase is whether he ever followed Richard Peterson’s dying wishes and contacted the sailor’s widow in New York. The family of William Coffin, Jr., had something of a tradition of writing controversial publications. Five years earlier, his father, who twenty years before had been wrongly accused by the island’s Quaker hierarchy of robbing the Nantucket Bank, wrote an eloquent defense that proved the crime had been committed by off-islanders; see my Away Off Shore (pp. 156-59). I also speak of William Coffin, Jr.’s qualifications as ghostwriter of Chase’s narrative in Away Off Shore (pp. 158, 249). The statement regarding William Coffin’s “enthusiastic love of literature” appeared in an obituary in the Nantucket Inquirer (May 2, 1838). An announcement concerning the publication of Chase’s narrative appeared in the Inquirer (November 22, 1821).
    Melville recorded having heard of a narrative by Captain Pollard in the back pages of his copy of Chase’s book (Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, p. 985). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remarks concerning the Nantucketers’ sensitivity to “everything that dishonors the island” appears in his 1847 journal entries about the island (p. 63). In 1822, an anonymous letter would appear in a Boston paper questioning the religious character of the