In the Heart of the Sea

cable, or hove short, it was time for crew members who had been positioned aloft to loosen the sails from their ties. Pollard then ordered Chase (whom, in accordance with custom, he always addressed as “Mr. Chase”) to heave up the anchor and to let him know when it was aweigh. Now the real work began—a process, given the rawness of the Essex ’s crew, that probably took an excruciatingly long time to perform: inching the huge, mud-dripping anchor up to the bow. Eventually, however, the anchor was lashed to the bulwarks, with the ring at the end of its shank secured to a projecting timber known as a cathead.
    Now Pollard’s and Chase’s public agony began in earnest. There were additional sails to be set in the gradually building southwesterly breeze. A crack crew would have had all the canvas flying in an instant. In the Essex ’s case, it wasn’t until they had sailed completely around Great Point—more than nine miles from where they’d weighed anchor—that the upper, or topgallant, sails were, according to Nickerson, “set and all sails trimmed in the breeze.” All the while, Pollard and his officers knew that the town’s spyglasses had been following them for each and every awful moment.
    As cabin boy, Nickerson had to sweep the decks and coil any stray lines. When he paused for a few seconds to watch his beloved island fade from view behind them, he was accosted by the first mate, who in addition to cuffing him about the ears, snarled, “You boy, Tom, bring back your broom here and sweep clean. The next time I have to speak to you, your hide shall pay for it, my lad!”
    Nickerson and his Nantucket friends may have thought they knew Chase prior to their departure, but they now realized that, as another young Nantucketer had discovered, “at sea, things appear different.” The mate of a Nantucket whaleship routinely underwent an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he left his island home, stepping out of his mild Quaker skin to become a vociferous martinet. “You will often hear a Nantucket mother boast that her son ‘who is met of a ship is a real spit-fire, ’” William Comstock wrote, “meaning that he is a cruel tyrant, which on that island is considered the very acme of human perfection.”
    And so Nickerson saw Owen Chase change from a perfectly reasonable young man with a new wife named Peggy to a bully who had no qualms about using force to obtain obedience and who swore in a manner that shocked these boys who had been brought up, for the most part, by their mothers and grandmothers. “[A]lthough but a few hours before I had been so eager to go [on] this voyage,” Nickerson remembered, “there [now] seemed a sudden gloom to spread over me. A not very pleasing prospect [was] truly before me, that of a long voyage and a hard overseer. This to a boy of my years who had never been used to hear such language or threats before.”
    It was more than a realization that the whaling life might be harsher than he had been led to believe. Now that the island had slipped over the horizon, Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: “Then it was that I, for the first time, realized that I was alone upon a wide and an unfeeling world . . . without one relative or friend to bestow one kind word upon me.” Not till then did Nickerson begin to appreciate “the full sacrifice that I had made.”
     
    THAT evening the men were divided into two shifts, or watches. With the exception of the “idlers”—those such as the cook, steward, and cooper (or barrel maker), who worked in the day and slept at night—all the men served alternating four-hour stints on deck. Like children picking teams on a playground, the mate and second mate took turns choosing the men who would serve in their watches. “[T]he first step taken by the officers,” said William Comstock, “is, to discover who are natives of the island, and who are strangers. The honor of being a Roman citizen was not, in days of yore, so enviable a distinction, as it is on board one of these ships, to be a native of that sand bank, yclept Nantucket.” Once the Nantucketers had all been picked (with Nickerson taken by Chase), the mates chose among the Cape Codders and the blacks.
    Next came the choice of oarsmen for the whaleboats, a contest that involved both mates and also Captain Pollard, who headed up his own boat. Since