In the Heart of the Sea

Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
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Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
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    Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
     
    First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
     

     
Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2000
    All rights reserved
     
    Grateful acknowledgment is made for permissions to reprint excerpts from
Lord Weary’s Castle by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1946 and renewed 1974
by Robert Lowell.
     
    eISBN : 978-1-101-22157-0
    1. Essex (Whaleship) 2. Shipwrecks—Pacific Ocean. I. Title.
G530.E76 2000
910′.9164—dc21 99-053740
     
    Frontispiece, images on title page and chapter openings,
and tailpiece by David Lazarus
Ship diagrams on pages xviii and 35 © 2000 L. F. Tantillo
Maps on pages 46-47 and 179 by Jeffrey L. Ward
     

     
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And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against thee: Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as a heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.
    —EXODUS 15:7-8
     
     
    This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale
Who spewed Nantucket bones in the thrashed swell. . . .
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
    —ROBERT LOWELL,
“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”

PREFACE
    February 23, 1821
    L IKE A GIANT BIRD of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.
    Harvesting sperm whales—the largest toothed whales in existence—was no easy matter. Six men would set out from the ship in a small boat, row up to their quarry, harpoon it, then attempt to stab it to death with a lance. The sixty-ton creature could destroy the whaleboat with a flick of its tail, throwing the men into the cold ocean water, often miles from the ship.
    Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the high-grade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age. That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined.
    For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island called Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the coast of southern New England. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucket’s whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call “Quakers with a vengeance.”
    It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, just a few months into what would be a three-year voyage, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. And on that February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusual—a boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The ship’s captain, the thirty-seven-year-old Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft with keen curiosity.
    He soon realized that it was a whaleboat—double-ended and about twenty-five feet long—but a whaleboat unlike any he had ever seen. The boat’s sides had been built up by about half a foot. Two makeshift masts had been rigged, transforming the rowing vessel into a rudimentary schooner. The sails—stiff with salt and bleached by the sun—had clearly pulled the boat along for many, many miles. Coffin could see no one at the steering oar. He turned to the man at the Dauphin ’s wheel and ordered, “Hard up the helm.”
    Under Coffin’s watchful eye, the helmsman brought the ship as close as possible to the derelict craft. Even