In the Heart of the Sea

the fishery, whose penis was as long as they were tall), the whalemen preferred to think of it as what one commentator called “a self-propelled tub of high-income lard.” Whales were described by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a fifty-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the mammal’s habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whose constituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it—the tons of meat, bone, and guts—was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century.
    Even the most repugnant aspects of whaling became easier for the green hands to take as they grew to appreciate that each was just part of a process, like mining for gold or growing crops, designed to make them money. That was why veteran whalemen had a special fondness for trying out the blubber, the final step in the transformation of a living, breathing sperm whale into cold, hard cash. “It is horrible,” the writer Charles Nordhoff admitted. “Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights.”
    It was more than just the money. Each whale, each cask of oil, brought the Nantucketer closer to returning home to his loved ones. And it was when they were trying out the whale that the whalemen typically grew the most nostalgic for home. “Wives and children are remembered with new affection at such moments,” claimed William H. Macy, “and each feels nearer home and friends at each recurring sound of the light-driven bung, and the inspiring cry, ‘Away cask!’ Truly is it remarked by old whalemen that the most delightful parts of the voyage are ‘Boiling’ and arriving home.”
    It was during this busy and exhausting two-month stretch off Peru that the crew of the Essex received what was for a whaleman the ultimate motivator: letters from home.
    Toward the end of May, the Essex spoke, or hailed, the Aurora, the brand-new ship fitted out by Gideon Folger and Sons for Daniel Russell, formerly the captain of the Essex. The Aurora had left Nantucket on the day after Christmas, bringing with her news that was only five months old—a blink of an eye in the time frame of a whaleman. When the Aurora left Nantucket, the price of whale oil was at an all-time high; people were still talking about the fire in Rhoda Harris’s schoolroom in the black section of town, known as New Guinea; and they were catching codfish (two hundred to a boat) off the Nantucket village of Siasconset.
    But of most interest to the men was the pouch of mail, along with several newspapers, that Daniel Russell handed over to Captain Pollard. After the officers had selected their letters, the bag was sent forward to the crew. “It was amusing to watch those of our lads who had been disappointed and found no letters for them,” Nickerson recalled. “They would follow us around the decks and whilst we were reading our letters would seat themselves beside us, as though our letters could be of service to them.” Despairing of finding out anything about their own families, the unlucky ones sought solace in what Nickerson called “the careless folds of a newspaper.” For his part, Nickerson would reread the newspapers so many times that he would soon have their contents memorized.
    The meeting between the Aurora and the Essex provided Pollard with the chance to speak with his former commander, the thirty-four-year-old Daniel Russell. The Aurora was a much larger, state-of-the-art ship and would return to Nantucket two years later, full of oil. Later it would be said that when Captain Russell had left the Essex to assume command of the Aurora, he had taken his old ship’s luck with him.
     
    ONE of the topics Pollard and Russell discussed was the recent discovery of a new whaling ground. As if to refute Captain Swain’s dour prediction that the Pacific Ocean had been fished out of sperm whales, Captain George Washington Gardner of the Globe had headed farther out to sea in 1818 than any other Nantucket whaleship had so far dared to go. More than a thousand miles off the coast of Peru he hit the