In the Heart of the Sea

from the ship.
    Even with the whale just a stone’s throw from the Essex, Chase did not see it as a threat. “His appearance and attitude gave us at first no alarm,” he wrote. But suddenly the whale began to move. Its twenty-foot-wide tail pumped up and down. Slowly at first, with a slight side-to-side waggle, it picked up speed until the water crested around its massive barrel-shaped head. It was aimed at the Essex ’s port side. In an instant, the whale was only a few yards away—“coming down for us,” Chase remembered, “with great celerity.”
    In desperate hopes of avoiding a direct hit, Chase shouted to Nickerson, “Put the helm hard up!” Several other crew members cried out warnings. “Scarcely had the sound of the voices reached my ears,” Nickerson remembered, “when it was followed by a tremendous crash.” The whale rammed the ship just forward of the forechains.
    The Essex shook as if she had struck a rock. Every man was knocked off his feet. Galapagos tortoises went skittering across the deck. “We looked at each other with perfect amazement,” Chase recalled, “deprived almost of the power of speech.”
    As they pulled themselves up off the deck, Chase and his men had good reason to be amazed. Never before, in the entire history of the Nantucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship. In 1807 the whaleship Union had accidentally plowed into a sperm whale at night and sunk, but something very different was happening here.
    After the impact, the whale passed underneath the ship, bumping the bottom so hard that it knocked off the false keel—a formidable six-by-twelve-inch timber. The whale surfaced at the Essex ’s starboard quarter. The creature appeared, Chase remembered, “stunned with the violence of the blow” and floated beside the ship, its tail only a few feet from the stern.
    Instinctively, Chase grabbed a lance. All it would take was one perfectly aimed throw and the first mate might slay the whale that had dared to attack a ship. This giant creature would yield more oil than two, maybe even three, normal-sized whales. If Pollard and Joy also proved successful that day, they would be boiling down at least 150 barrels of oil in the next week—more than 10 percent of the Essex ’s total capacity. They might be heading back to Nantucket in a matter of weeks instead of months.
    Chase motioned to stab the bull—still lying hull-to-hull with the Essex. Then he hesitated. The whale’s flukes, he noticed, were perilously close to the ship’s rudder. If provoked, the whale might smash the delicate steering device with its tail. They were too far from land, Chase decided, to risk damaging the rudder.
    For the first mate, it was a highly uncharacteristic display of caution. “But could [Chase] have foreseen all that so soon followed,” Nickerson wrote, “he would probably have chosen the lesser evil and have saved the ship by killing the whale even at the expense of losing the rudder.”
     
    A SPERM whale is uniquely equipped to survive a head-on collision with a ship. Stretching for a third of its length between the front of the whale’s battering ram-shaped head and its vital organs is an oil-filled cavity perfectly adapted to cushioning the impact of a collision. In less than a minute, this eighty-ton bull was once again showing signs of life.
    Shaking off its woozy lethargy, the whale veered off to leeward, swimming approximately six hundred yards away. There it began snapping its jaws and thrashing the water with its tail, “as if distracted,” Chase wrote, “with rage and fury.” The whale then swam to windward, crossing the Essex ’s bow at a high rate of speed. Several hundred yards ahead of the ship, the whale stopped and turned in the Essex ’s direction. Fearful that the ship might be taking on water, Chase had, by this point, ordered the men to rig the pumps. “[W]hile my attention was thus engaged,” the first mate remembered, “I was aroused with the cry of a man at the hatchway, ‘Here he is—he is making for us again.’ ” Chase turned and saw a vision of “fury and vengeance” that would haunt him in the long days ahead.
    With its huge scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed—at least six knots. Chase, hoping “to cross the line of his approach before he could get up to us, and thus