In the Heart of the Sea

avoid what I knew, if he should strike us again, would prove our inevitable destruction,” cried out to Nickerson, “Hard up!” But it was too late for a change of course. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, the whale struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cathead on the port bow. This time the men were prepared for the hit. Still, the force of the collision caused the whalemen’s heads to jounce on their muscled necks as the ship lurched to a halt on the slablike forehead of the whale. The creature’s tail continued to work up and down, pushing the 238-ton ship backward until—as had happened after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream—water surged up over the transom.
    One of the men who had been belowdecks ran up onto the deck shouting, “The ship is filling with water!” A quick glance down the hatchway revealed that the water was already above the lower deck, where the oil and provisions were stored.
    No longer going backward, the Essex was now going down. The whale, having humbled its strange adversary, disengaged itself from the shattered timbers of the copper-sheathed hull and swam off to leeward, never to be seen again.

    THE ship was sinking bow-first. The forecastle, where the black sailors slept, was the first of the living quarters to flood, the men’s sea chests and mattresses floating on the rising tide. Next the water surged aft into the blubber room, then into steerage, where Nickerson and the other Nantucketers slept. Soon even the mates’ and captain’s cabins were awash.
    As the belowdecks creaked and gurgled, the black steward, William Bond, on his own initiative, returned several times to the rapidly filling aft cabins to retrieve Pollard’s and Chase’s trunks and—with great foresight—the navigational equipment. Meanwhile Chase and the rest of the crew cut the lashing off the spare whaleboat and carried it to the waist of the ship.
    The Essex began to list dangerously to port. Bond made one last plunge below. Chase and the others carried the whaleboat to the edge of the deck, now only a few inches above the ocean’s surface. When the trunks and other equipment had been loaded aboard, everyone, including Bond, scrambled into the boat, the tottering masts and yards looming above them. They were no more than two boat lengths away when the Essex, with an appalling slosh and groan, capsized behind them.
    Just at that moment, two miles to leeward, Obed Hendricks, Pollard’s boatsteerer, casually glanced over his shoulder. He couldn’t believe what he saw. From that distance it looked as if the Essex had been hit by a sudden squall, the sails flying in all directions as the ship fell onto her beam-ends.
    “Look, look,” he cried, “what ails the ship? She is upsetting!”
    But when the men turned to look, there was nothing to see. “[A] general cry of horror and despair burst from the lips of every man,” Chase wrote, “as their looks were directed for [the ship], in vain, over every part of the ocean.” The Essex had vanished below the horizon.
    The two boat-crews immediately released their whales and began rowing back toward the place the Essex should have been—all the time speculating frantically about what had happened to the ship. It never occurred to any of them that, in Nickerson’s words, “a whale [had] done the work.” Soon enough, they could see the ship’s hull “floating upon her side and presenting the appearance of a rock.”
    As Pollard and Joy approached, the eight men crowded into Chase’s boat continued to stare silently at the ship. “[E]very countenance was marked with the paleness of despair,” Chase recalled. “Not a word was spoken for several minutes by any of us; all appeared to be bound in a spell of stupid consternation.”
    From the point at which the whale first attacked, to the escape from the capsizing ship, no more than ten minutes had elapsed. In only a portion of that time, spurred by panic, eight of the crew had launched an unrigged whaleboat from the rack above the quarterdeck, a process that would have normally taken at least ten minutes and required the effort of the entire ship’s crew. Now, here they were, with only the clothes on their backs, huddled in the whaleboat. It was not yet ten in the morning.
    It was then that Chase fully appreciated the service that William Bond had rendered them. He had salvaged two compasses, two copies of Nathaniel Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator,