In the Heart of the Sea

mates became so disgusted with their boatsteerers’ unsuccessful attempts to harpoon whales that they ordered them aft and took the iron themselves. One mate, Comstock wrote, screamed, “Who are you? What are you? Miserable trash, scum of Nantucket, a whimpering boy from the chimney corner. By Neptune I think you are afraid of a whale.” When the boatsteerer finally burst into tears, the mate ripped the harpoon from his hands and ordered him to take the steering oar.
    With Chase at the bow and Lawrence relegated to the steering oar, the first mate’s boat approached a patch of water where, Chase predicted, a whale would surface. Chase was, in his own words, “standing in the fore part, with the harpoon in my hand, well braced, expecting every instant to catch sight of one of the shoal which we were in, that I might strike.” Unfortunately, a whale surfaced directly under their boat, hurling Chase and his crew into the air. Just as had occurred after their first attempt at killing a whale, off the Falkland Islands, Chase and his men found themselves clinging to a wrecked whaleboat.
    Given the shortage of spare boats aboard the Essex, caution on the part of the officers might have been expected, but caution, at least when it came to pursuing whales, was not part of the first mate’s makeup. Taking to heart the old adage “A dead whale or a stove boat,” Chase reveled in the risk and danger of whaling. “The profession is one of great ambition,” he would boast in his narrative, “and full of honorable excitement: a tame man is never known amongst them.”
     
    FOUR days later, on November 20, more than 1,500 nautical miles west of the Galapagos and just 40 miles south of the equator, the lookout saw spouts. It was about eight in the morning of a bright clear day. Only a slight breeze was blowing. It was a perfect day for killing whales.
    Once they had sailed to within a half mile of the shoal, the two shipkeepers headed the Essex into the wind with the maintopsail aback, and the three boats were lowered. The whales, unaware that they were being pursued, sounded.
    Chase directed his men to row to a specific spot, where they waited “in anxious expectation,” scanning the water for the dark shape of a surfacing sperm whale. Once again, Chase tells us, he was the one with the harpoon, and sure enough, a small whale emerged just ahead of them and spouted. The first mate readied to hurl the harpoon and, for the second time in as many days of whaling, ran into trouble.
    Chase had ordered Lawrence, the ex-harpooner, to steer the boat in close to the whale. Lawrence did so, so close that as soon as the harpoon sliced into it, the panicked animal whacked the already battered craft with its tail, opening up a hole in the boat’s side. As water poured in, Chase cut the harpoon line with a hatchet and ordered the men to stuff their coats and shirts into the jagged opening. While one man bailed, they rowed back to the ship. Then they pulled the boat up onto the Essex ’s deck.
    By this time, both Pollard’s and Joy’s crews had fastened to whales. Angered that he had once again been knocked out of the hunt, Chase began working on his damaged boat with a fury, hoping to get the craft operable while whales were still to be taken. Although he could have outfitted and lowered the extra boat (the one they had bargained for in the Cape Verde Islands, now lashed to the rack over the quarterdeck), Chase felt it would be faster to repair the damaged boat temporarily by stretching some canvas across the hole. As he nailed the edges of the canvas to the boat, his after oarsman, Thomas Nickerson—all of fifteen years old—took over the helm of the Essex and steered the ship toward Pollard and Joy, whose whales had dragged them several miles to leeward. It was then that Nickerson saw something off the port bow.
    It was a whale—a huge sperm whale, the largest they’d seen so far—a male about eighty-five feet long, they estimated, and approximately eighty tons. It was less than a hundred yards away, so close that they could see that its giant blunt head was etched with scars, and that it was pointed toward the ship. But this whale wasn’t just large. It was acting strangely. Instead of fleeing in panic, it was floating quietly on the surface of the water, puffing occasionally through its blowhole, as if it were watching them. After spouting two or three times, the whale dove, then surfaced less than thirty-five yards