In the Heart of the Sea

Bay, which almost seemed to glow at night, the officers supervised the Essex ’s repair. In the well-protected anchorage, the Essex was “hove down”—heeled over on her side to expose the problem area. Six years later, Captain Seth Coffin would use the same procedure in repairing a leak in the Aurora, the ship originally commanded by Daniel Russell on her maiden voyage. Coffin was disturbed to find that the bottom of this far-from-old vessel was “eaten to a honeycomb” and attempted to stanch the leak with a mixture of chalk and slush, a greasy material used to lubricate the ship’s spars. The much older Essex may have had similar problems below the waterline.
    Nickerson’s attention was soon directed to Hood Island. “The rocks appear very much burned,” he remembered, “and where there is soil it wears mostly the appearance of very dry snuff.” Since Hood’s surface was covered with loose gravel and boulders, the simple act of walking was difficult, and the volcanic rocks rang metallically underfoot.
    Herman Melville was profoundly affected by the Galapagos in the 1840s, ultimately writing a series of sketches entitled “The Encantadas.” For Melville, there was something terrifyingly nonhuman about these islands. He described them as a place where “change never comes” and spoke of their “emphatic uninhabitableness”:
    Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them. The showers refresh the deserts, but in these isles, rain never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. “Have mercy upon me,” the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, “and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.”
    To sea travelers, one great attraction of the Galapagos was their tortoises. The naturalist Charles Darwin visited these islands in 1835 aboard the Beagle and noted that the tortoises on each island, like his famous finches, varied markedly from one another—the tortoises in the coloring and shape of their shells. The creatures were interesting in another way to U.S. Navy captain David Porter. His frigate Essex visited the islands in 1813 and carried off a vast number of tortoises—an estimated four tons—to feed his crew on their voyage to the Marquesas.
    By the time the whaleship Essex ventured to these islands seven years later, sailors had devised a well-established procedure for what they called turpining. Equipped with canvas harnesses, the seamen fanned out over the island, often following the deeply rutted tortoise tracks that crisscrossed the rocky surface, hoping these would lead them to their prey. The tortoises averaged about eighty pounds, but it wasn’t unusual to find one that weighed four hundred pounds or more. If a sailor came across a tortoise that was too big for one person to carry, he’d call for help by crying out, “Townho! ”—a corruption of the Wampanoag whaling word “townor.” In most cases, however, it was just one man per tortoise. After flipping the tortoise on its back and pinning it down with a large rock, which kept the creature from retracting its feet, the whaleman secured the ends of his canvas harness to the tortoise’s legs, then swung the animal onto his back. Walking for several miles over the uneven surface of Hood Island in 105-degree temperatures with an eighty-pound tortoise strapped to one’s back was not easy, particularly since each man was expected to bring back three tortoises a day to the ship. As far as Nickerson was concerned, turpining was the most difficult and exhausting form of work he’d ever known, especially given the tortoise’s “constant uneasiness” while strapped to a seaman’s sweat-soaked back.
    During their stay at Hood Island, Benjamin Lawrence, Owen Chase’s boatsteerer, ran into trouble. He found a tortoise and set out in what he thought was the direction of the ship, belatedly realizing he’d gone in precisely the opposite direction. Eventually, he abandoned his tortoise and made his way down to the burning sands of the beach and began to backtrack toward the ship.
    By the middle of the afternoon, the Essex was still not in sight and Lawrence was feeling the torments of severe thirst. He came across another tortoise and proceeded to cut off the