In the Heart of the Sea

while.
    Leaving the island was difficult aboard any whaleship, since most of the crew had no idea of what they were doing. It could be an agony of embarrassment for a captain, as the green hands bumbled their way around the deck or clung white-knuckled to the spars. The whole affair was carried out in the knowledge that the town’s old salts and, of course, the owners were watching and criticizing from the shade of the windmills up on Mill Hill.
    With, perhaps, a nervous glance townward, Captain George Pollard gave the order to prepare the ship for weighing the anchors.
     
    A WHALESHIP , even a small and old whaleship, was a complex and sophisticated piece of equipment. The Essex had three masts and a bowsprit. To the mast were fastened a multitude of horizontal spars known as yards, from which the rectangular sails were set. There was so much cordage, dedicated to either supporting the spars or controlling the sails (more than twenty in number), that, from the perspective of a green hand staring up from the deck, the Essex looked like the web of a giant rope-spinning spider.
    That each one of these pieces of rope had a name was plainly laughable to a green hand. How could anyone, even after a three-year voyage, pretend to have any idea of what went where? For young Nantucketers such as Nickerson and his friends, it was particularly devastating since they had begun this adventure assuming they knew much more than they apparently did. “[A]ll was bustle, confusion and awkwardness, that is, on the part of the crew,” Nickerson remembered. “The officers were smart active men and were no doubt . . . piqued at having such a display of awkwardness in full view of their native town.”
    Since he was required by custom to remain stationed at the quarterdeck, Pollard was all but powerless before this clumsy display. Doing his best to apply some method to the madness was the first mate, Owen Chase, stationed in the forward part of the deck. It was his duty to implement Pollard’s orders, and he shouted and cajoled the men as if every hesitation or mistake on their part were a personal insult.
    Pollard and Chase had been together aboard the Essex since 1815, when Chase, at eighteen, had signed on as a common sailor. Chase had moved quickly through the ranks. By the next voyage he was a boat-steerer, and now, at only twenty-two, he was the first mate. (Matthew Joy, the Essex ’s second mate, was four years older than Chase.) If all went well during this voyage, Chase would have a good chance of becoming a captain before he was twenty-five.
    At five feet ten, Chase was tall for the early nineteenth century; he towered over Captain Pollard, a small man with a tendency toward stoutness. While Pollard’s father was also a captain, Chase’s father was a farmer. Perhaps because his father was a farmer on an island where seagoing men got all the glory, Chase was fired with more than the usual amount of ambition and, as he started his third voyage, he made no secret of his impatience to become a captain. “Two voyages are generally considered sufficient to qualify an active and intelligent young man for command,” he would write, “in which time, he learns from experience, and the examples which are set him, all that is necessary to be known.” He was six years younger than Captain Pollard, but Chase felt he had already mastered everything he needed to know to perform Pollard’s job. The first mate’s cocksure attitude would make it difficult for Pollard, a first-time captain just emerging from the long shadow of a respected predecessor, to assert his own style of command.
    As the crew assembled spare hawsers and rope in preparation for weighing the anchor, Chase made sure everything was secured about the deck. Then he ordered the men to the windlass, a long, horizontally mounted wooden cylinder with a double row of holes at each end. Positioned just forward of the forecastle hatch, the windlass provided the mechanical advantage required to do the heavy lifting aboard the ship. Eight men were stationed at the two ends, four aft, four forward, each holding a wooden handspike.
    Working the windlass in a coordinated fashion was as challenging as it was backbreaking. “To perform this the sailors must . . . give a sudden jerk at the same instant,” went one account, “in which movement they are regulated by a sort of song or howl pronounced by one of their number.”
    Once the men had pulled the slack out of the anchor