In the Heart of the Sea

across what Nantucketers called a shoal of sperm whales. Woe to the crew that was not ready when a whale was sighted.
    But for a whale to be sighted, a lookout had to be positioned aloft—not a pleasing prospect for a crew of seasick green hands. Every man was expected to climb to the head of the mainmast and spend two hours in search of whales. Some of the men were so weak from vomiting that they doubted they had the strength to hold on to a pitching spar for two hours. One of them, Nickerson said, even went so far as to protest that it was “altogether absurd and unreasonable” to expect them to look for whales, and that he, for one, “should not go, and he hoped the captain would not expect it of him.”
    The fact that this unnamed sailor specifically mentioned the captain instead of the first mate suggests that he was Pollard’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Owen Coffin. Miserable and genuinely fearful for his life, Coffin may have made a desperate, ill-advised appeal to his kinsman for a reprieve from the first mate’s discipline. But it was futile. According to Nickerson, whose narrative is not without irony, there followed a few “soft words” from the officers, along with “some little challenging of their spirits,” and it wasn’t long before all the green hands had taken a turn at the masthead.

    LIKE a skier traversing the face of a mountain, a Nantucket whaleship took an indirect route toward Cape Horn, a course determined by the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean. First, pushed by the westerlies, the ship sailed south and east toward Europe and Africa. There she picked up winds called the northeast trades, which took her back across the ocean again, in the direction of South America. After crossing the equator in an often airless region known as the doldrums, she worked her way south and west through the southeast trades into an area of variable winds. Then she encountered the band of westerlies that could make rounding the Horn so difficult.
    On the first leg of this southern slide down the Atlantic, there were provisioning stops at the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, where vegetables and livestock could be purchased for much less than they cost on Nantucket. These stops also gave the whalemen the opportunity to ship back any oil they might have obtained during their cruise across the Atlantic.
    On August 15, three days out of Nantucket, the Essex was making good time toward the Azores, with the wind out of the southwest, coming directly over her starboard side, or beam. Having left Nantucket late in the season, the officers hoped to make up lost time. As usual, three topgallant sails were pulling from the upper yards, but on this day the Essex also carried at least one studding sail, a rectangle of canvas mounted on a special spar temporarily fitted to the end of the fore topsail yard.
    Whaleships rarely set their studding sails, especially when they were in a region where whales might be sighted. Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry. Use of the studding sails meant that a captain wanted to wring the last possible quarter knot of speed from his ship. The sails were difficult to set and even harder to take down, especially with an inexperienced crew. Since the sails’ booms projected out beyond the yards, there was a danger of dipping them into the water if the ship should begin to roll from side to side. For a whaleship full of green hands to approach the often tempestuous waters of the Gulf Stream with her studding sails flying indicated an aggressive, if not foolhardy, attitude on the part of her commander.
    With the extra sail area catching the wind, the Essex was moving well, probably at six to eight knots. The lookout spotted a ship ahead. Pollard ordered the helmsman to steer for her, and soon the Essex had caught up to what proved to be the whaleship Midas, five days out of New Bedford. Captain Pollard and the captain of the Midas exchanged shouted pleasantries, along with estimates of their longitude, and the Essex was soon pulling ahead, her entire crew undoubtedly enjoying the fact that their ship had proved to be what Nickerson called “the fastest sailor of the two.”
    Later that day, the weather began to deteriorate. Clouds moved into the sky, and it grew suspiciously dark to the southwest. “The sea became very rough,” Nickerson remembered, “which caused the