In the Heart of the Sea

navigational instruments, medicine, rum, gin, lumber, and so on. In addition to the three newly painted whaleboats that were suspended from the ship’s davits, there were at least two spare boats: one stored upside down on a rack over the quarterdeck, another mounted on spare spars that projected over the stern.
    By the time the men were done loading the Essex six days later—their labors briefly interrupted by a tremendous shower of rain duly noted by Obed Macy on August 9—the ship was almost as heavily laden as it would be with whale oil on her return to Nantucket. Explained one Nantucketer, “[T]he gradual consumption of provisions and stores keeps pace with the gradual accumulation of oil . . . , and a whaleship is always full, or nearly so, all the voyage.”
    Something, however, was still missing: the men needed to fill the seven empty berths in the Essex ’s forecastle. At some point, Gideon Folger put out the call to an agent in Boston for as many black sailors as the agent could find.

    ALTHOUGH he wasn’t black, Addison Pratt came to Nantucket under circumstances similar to the ones that brought seven African Americans to the island and to service on the Essex. In 1820, Pratt found himself in Boston, looking for a ship:
    I soon commenced hunting for a voyage, but it was dull times with commerce as seamen’s wages were but ten dollars per month, and there were more sailors than ships in port, and I found it dull times for green hands. But after looking around for a few days I heard there were hands wanted to go on a whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. I made no delay, but hastened to the office and put down my name and received twelve dollars of advance money, which I laid out in sea clothes. . . . Six more hands were shipped for the same vessel, and we were all sent on board of a packet bound to Nantucket.
    As Pratt’s account suggests, a whaling voyage was the lowest rung on the maritime ladder for a seaman. Nantucketers like Thomas Nickerson and his friends might look to their first voyage as a necessary step in the beginning of a long and profitable career. But for the men who were typically rounded up by shipping agents in cities such as Boston, it was a different story. Instead of the beginning of something, shipping out on a whaling voyage was often a last and desperate resort.
    The seven black sailors who agreed to sign on for a voyage aboard the Essex —Samuel Reed, Richard Peterson, Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, William Bond, and Henry De Witt—had even fewer choices than Addison Pratt would in 1820. None of their names appear in Boston or New York directories from this period, indicating that they were not landowners. Whether or not they called Boston home, most of them had probably spent more than a few nights in the boardinghouses in the waterfront area of the North End of the city—a place notorious as a gathering place for itinerant seamen, black and white, looking for a berth.
    As they boarded the packet for Nantucket, the seven African Americans knew at least one thing: they might not be paid well for their time aboard a Nantucket whaler, but they were assured of being paid no less than a white person with the same qualifications. Since the time when Native Americans had made up the majority of Nantucket’s labor force, the island’s shipowners had always paid men according to their rank, not their color. Some of this had to do with the Quakers’ antislavery leanings, but much of it also had to do with the harsh realities of shipboard life. In a tight spot, a captain didn’t care if a seaman was white or black; he just wanted to know he could count on the man to complete his appointed task.
    Still, black sailors who were delivered to the island as green hands were never regarded as equals by Nantucketers. In 1807, a visitor to the island reported:
    [T]he Indians having disappeared, Negroes are now substituted in their place. Seamen of color are more submissive than the whites; but as they are more addicted to frolicking, it is difficult to get them aboard the ship, when it is about to sail, and to keep them aboard, after it has arrived. The Negroes, though they are to be prized for their habits of obedience, are not as intelligent as the Indians; and none of them attain the rank of [boatsteerer or mate].
    It wasn’t lofty social ideals that brought black sailors to this Quaker island, but rather the whale fishery’s insatiable and often exploitative