In the Heart of the Sea

a whaleship about the size of the Essex, into the Pacific. Pollard and Chase had done it at least three times; for Pollard it may have been his fourth or even fifth time. Still, Cape Horn was nothing any captain took for granted, certainly not one who, like Pollard, had almost lost his ship in the relatively benign Gulf Stream.
    Soon after watching the mirage island vanish before them, the men of the Essex saw something so terrible that they could only hope their eyes were deceiving them once again. But it was all too real: from the southwest a line of ink-black clouds was hurtling in their direction. In an instant the squall slammed into the ship with the force of a cannon shot. In the shrieking darkness, the crew labored to shorten sail. Under a close-reefed maintopsail and storm staysails, the Essex performed surprisingly well in the mountainous seas. “[T]he ship rode over them as buoyantly as a seagull,” Nickerson claimed, “without taking onboard one bucket of water.”
    But now, with the wind out of the southwest, there was the danger of being driven against the jagged rocks of the Horn. The days became weeks as the ship struggled against the wind and waves in near-freezing temperatures. In these high latitudes the light never entirely left the night sky. Without the usual sequence of light and dark, the passage stretched into a dreary, seemingly unending test of a whaleman’s sanity.
    It took more than a month for the Essex to round Cape Horn. Not until January of the new year, 1820, did the lookout sight the island of St. Mary’s, a gathering spot for whalers off the coast of Chile. To the south of the island in the bay of Arauco they found several Nantucket vessels, including the Chili, the same ship with which they had left the island five months earlier.
    The news from the west coast of South America was not good. For one thing, the political situation in Chile and Peru was extremely volatile. In recent years towns up and down the coast had been ravaged by fighting between the Patriots, who hoped to wrest control of South America from Spain, and the Royalists, whose interests were still linked to the mother country. Although the Patriot forces, assisted by the swashbuckling British naval hero Lord Cochrane, appeared in the ascendancy, fighting was still going on, particularly in Peru. Caution was the watchword when provisioning on this coast.
    For most vessels it had been a miserable whaling season. While the scarcity of whales kept up the price of oil back home on Nantucket, these were tough times for whalemen in the Pacific. After driving his crew to fill his ship, the Independence, Captain George Swain had returned to Nantucket in November and predicted, “No other ship will ever fill with sperm oil in the South Seas.” Obed Macy feared Captain Swain might be right: “Some new place must be found where the whales are more numerous,” he told his journal, “or the business will not be worth pursuing.” Praying that they might elude these grim forecasts, the crew of the Essex headed out to sea.
    After several luckless months off the Chilean coast, punctuated by a provisioning stop at Talcahuano, the Essex began to meet with some success off Peru. In just two months, Pollard and his men boiled down 450 barrels of oil, the equivalent of about eleven whales. This meant that they were killing, on average, a whale every five days, a pace that soon exhausted the crew.
    The weather only added to their labors. High winds and rugged seas made every aspect of whaling doubly onerous. Instead of providing a stable platform on which to cut up the blubber and boil the oil, the Essex pitched back and forth in the waves. The large seas made it next to impossible to lower and raise the whaleboats safely. “Our boats were very much injured in hoisting them from the water,” Nickerson remembered, “and were on more than one occasion dashed in pieces by the heavy rolling of the ship.” The much-abused boats were constantly in a state of repair.
    As the number of casks of oil in the hold increased, the green hands became accustomed to the brutal business of whaling. The repetitious nature of the work—a whaler was, after all, a factory ship—tended to desensitize the men to the awesome wonder of the whale. Instead of seeing their prey as a fifty- to sixty-ton creature whose brain was close to six times the size of their own (and, what perhaps should have been even more impressive in the all-male world of