In the Heart of the Sea

still a blackened wasteland. “Wherever the fire raged neither trees, shrubbery, nor grass have since appeared,” he reported. Charles would be one of the first islands in the Galapagos to lose its tortoise population. Although the crew of the Essex had already done its part in diminishing the world’s sperm-whale population, it was here on this tiny volcanic island that they contributed to the eradication of a species.
    When they weighed anchor the next morning, Charles remained an inferno. That night, after a day of sailing west along the equator, they could still see it burning against the horizon. Backlit by the red glow of a dying island, the twenty men of the Essex ventured into the farthest reaches of the Pacific, looking for another whale to kill.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Attack

    E VEN TODAY, in an age of instantaneous communication and high-speed transportation, the scale of the Pacific is difficult to grasp. Sailing due west from Panama, it is 11,000 miles to the Malay Peninsula—almost four times the distance Columbus sailed to the New World—and it is 9,600 miles from the Bering Strait to Antarctica. The Pacific is also deep. Hidden beneath its blue surface are some of the planet’s most spectacular mountain ranges, with canyons that plunge more than six miles into the watery blackness. Geologically, the volcano-rimmed Pacific is the most active part of the world. Islands rise up; islands disappear. Herman Melville called this sixty-four-million-square-mile ocean the “tide-beating heart of the earth.”
    By November 16, 1820, the Essex had sailed more than a thousand miles west of the Galapagos, following the equator as if it were an invisible lifeline leading the ship ever farther into the largest ocean in the world. Nantucket whalemen were familiar with at least part of the Pacific. Over the last three decades the coast of South America had become their own backyard. They also knew the western edge of the Pacific quite well. By the early part of the century, English whalers, most of them captained by Nantucketers, were regularly rounding the Cape of Good Hope and taking whales in the vicinity of Australia and New Zealand. In 1815, Hezekiah Coffin, the father of Pollard’s young cousin Owen, had died during a provisioning stop in the fever-plagued islands off Timor, between Java and New Guinea.
    Lying between the island of Timor and the west coast of South America is the Central Pacific, what Owen Chase called “an almost untraversed ocean.” The longitudes and latitudes of islands with names such as Ohevahoa, Marokinee, Owyhee, and Mowee might be listed in Captain Pollard’s navigational guide, but beyond that they were—save for blood-chilling rumors of native butchery and cannibalism—a virtual blank.
    All this was about to change. Unknown to Pollard, only a few weeks earlier, on September 29, the Nantucket whaleships Equator and Balaena stopped at the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time. In 1823, Richard Macy would be the first Nantucketer to provision his ship at the Society Islands, now known as French Polynesia. But as far as Pollard and his men knew in November of 1820, they were at the edge of an unknown world filled with unimaginable dangers. And if they were to avoid the fate of the ship they’d encountered at Atacames, whose men had almost died of scurvy before they could reach the South American coast for provisions, there was no time for far-flung exploration. It had taken them more than a month to venture out this far, and it would take at least that to return. They had, at most, only a few months of whaling left before they must think about returning to South America and eventually to Nantucket.
    So far, the whales they had sighted in this remote expanse of ocean had proved frustratingly elusive. “Nothing occurred worthy of note during this passage,” Nickerson remembered, “with the exception of occasionally chasing a wild shoal of whales to no purpose.” Tensions mounted among the Essex ’s officers. The situation prompted Owen Chase to make an adjustment aboard his whaleboat. When he and his boat-crew did finally approach a whale, on November 16, it was he, Chase reported, not his boatsteerer, Benjamin Lawrence, who held the harpoon.
    This was a radical and, for Lawrence, humiliating turn of events. A mate took over the harpoon only after he had lost all confidence in his boatsteerer’s ability to fasten to a whale. William Comstock told of two instances when