In the Heart of the Sea

onto the ship and began to hack away at the spars and rigging with hatchets from the whaleboats. As noon approached, Captain Pollard shoved off in his boat to take an observation with his quadrant. They were at latitude 0 °40’ south, longitude 119 °0’ west, just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on earth.
    Forty-five minutes later, the masts had been reduced to twenty-foot stumps and the Essex was floating partly upright again, at a forty-five-degree angle. Although most of the provisions were unreachable in the lower hold, there were two large casks of bread between decks in the waist of the ship. And since the casks were on the Essex ’s upper side, the men could hope that they were still dry.
    Through the holes they chopped into the deck they were able to extract six hundred pounds of hardtack. Elsewhere they broke through the planks to find casks of freshwater—more, in fact, than they could safely hold in their whaleboats. They also scavenged tools and equipment, including two pounds of boat nails, a musket, two pistols, and a small canister of powder. Several Galapagos tortoises swam to the whaleboats from the wreck, as did two skinny hogs. Then it began to blow.
    In need of shelter from the mounting wind and waves, yet fearful the Essex might at any moment break up and sink like a stone, Pollard ordered that they tie up to the ship but leave at least a hundred yards of line between it and themselves. Like a string of ducklings trailing their mother, they spent the night in the lee of the ship.
     
    THE ship shuddered with each wave. Chase lay sleepless in his boat, staring at the wreck and reliving the catastrophe over and over again in his mind. Some of the men slept and others “wasted the night in unavailing murmurs,” Chase wrote. Once, he admitted, he found himself breaking into tears.
    Part of him was guilt-wracked, knowing that if he had only hurled the lance, it might have all turned out differently. (When it came time to write his own account of the attack, Chase would neglect to mention that he had the chance to lance the whale—an omission Nickerson made sure to correct in his narrative.) But the more Chase thought about it, the more he realized that no one could have expected a whale to attack a ship, and not just once but twice. Instead of acting as a whale was supposed to—as a creature “never before suspected of premeditated violence, and proverbial for its inoffensiveness”—this big bull had been possessed by what Chase finally took to be a very human concern for the other whales. “He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered,” the first mate wrote, “and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”
    As they bobbed in the lee of the wreck, the men of the Essex were of no mind to debate the whale’s motives. Their overwhelming question was how twenty men in three boats could get out of a plight like this alive.

CHAPTER SIX
    The Plan

    A LL NIGHT THE WIND BLEW out of the southeast. Waves beat against the stricken hull, dislodging spars and casks and splintering timbers. Jagged debris might at any time pierce the frail sides of the three whaleboats tied up to leeward of the ship, so each officer posted a man in the bow of his boat and commanded him to keep a sharp lookout for floating objects bearing down on them and to shove those objects aside before they could do damage. It was terrifying duty—straining to see what threat would next emerge from the darkness.
    When the sun lit the eastern horizon, the men rose up blinking from the bilges of the boats, most of them having had little sleep. “[W]e began to think of doing something,” Chase recalled, “what, we did not know.”
    The three boat-crews returned to the wreck, and for most of the morning the men wandered about the wave-washed deck “in a sort of vacant idleness.” The officers instructed them to search for any additional provisions that might have floated up from the depths of the hold during the night. Except for a few more Galapagos tortoises, of which they already had as many as could be safely carried in the whale-boats, they found nothing of use.
    The obvious next step was to make preparations for leaving the wreck. But this was a prospect that none of the men wanted to contemplate, no matter how “cheerless and desolate” their current circumstances might be. “Our thoughts . . . hung about the ship,