In the Heart of the Sea

it did. The Essex might have been an old, work-worn whaleship, but she had been built to take her share of abuse. She was constructed almost entirely of white oak, one of the toughest and strongest of woods. Her ribs had been hewn from immense timbers, at least a foot square. Over that, laid fore and aft, were oak planks four inches thick. On top of the planks was a sheathing of yellow pine, more than half an inch thick. Extending down from the waterline (the point of impact, according to Nickerson) was a layer of copper. The bull had slammed into a solid wooden wall.
    What had begun as an experimental, perhaps unintentional jab with its head soon escalated into an all-out attack.
    Like male elephants, bull sperm whales tend to be loners, moving from group to group of females and juveniles and challenging whatever males they meet along the way. The violence of these encounters is legendary. One whaleman described what happened when a bull sperm whale tried to move in on another bull’s group:
    When the approaching bull attempted to join the herd, he was attacked by one of the established bulls, which rolled over on its back and attacked with its jaw. . . . Large pieces of blubber and flesh were taken out. Both bulls then withdrew and again charged at full tilt. They locked jaws and wrestled, each seemingly to try to break the other’s jaw. Great pieces of flesh again were torn from the animals’ heads. Next they either withdrew or broke their holds, and then charged each other again. The fight was even more strenuous this time, and little could be seen because of the boiling spray. The charge and withdrawal were repeated two or three times before the water quieted, and then for a few seconds the two could be seen lying head to head. The smaller bull then swam slowly away and did not attempt to rejoin the cows. . . . A whaleboat was dispatched, and the larger bull was captured. The jaw had been broken and was hanging by the flesh. Many teeth were broken and there were extensive head wounds.
    Instead of fighting with its jaws and tail—the way whales commonly dispatched whaleboats—the Essex whale rammed the ship with its head, something that, Chase insisted, “has never been heard of amongst the oldest and most experienced whalers.” But what most impressed the first mate was the remarkably astute way in which the bull employed its God-given battering ram. Both times the whale had approached the vessel from a direction “calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock.” Yet, even though it had come at the Essex from ahead, the whale had avoided striking the ship directly head-on, where the ship’s heavily reinforced stem, the vertical timber at the leading edge of the bow, might have delivered a mortal gash.
    Chase estimated that the whale was traveling at six knots when it struck the Essex the second time and that the ship was traveling at three knots. To bring the Essex to a complete standstill, the whale, whose mass was roughly a third of the ship’s, would have to be moving at more than three times the speed of the ship, at least nine knots. One naval architect’s calculations project that if the Essex had been a new ship, her oak planking would have withstood even this tremendous blow. Since the whale did punch a hole in the bow, the Essex ’s twenty-one-year-old planking must have been significantly weakened by rot or marine growth.
    Chase was convinced that the Essex and her crew had been the victims of “decided, calculating mischief” on the part of the whale. For a Nantucketer, it was a shocking thought. If other sperm whales should start ramming ships, it would be only a matter of time before the island’s whaling fleet was reduced to so much flotsam and jetsam.
    Chase began to wonder what “unaccountable destiny or design” had been at work. It almost seemed as if something—could it have been God?—had possessed the beast for its own strange, unfathomable purpose. Whatever or whoever might be behind it, Chase was convinced that “anything but chance” had sunk the Essex.
     
    AFTER listening to the first mate’s account of the sinking, Pollard attempted to take command of the dire situation. Their first priority, he announced, was to get as much food and water out of the wreck as possible. To do that, they needed to cut away the masts so that the still partially floating hull could right. The men climbed