In the Heart of the Sea

wrecked and sunken as she was,” Chase remembered, “and we could scarcely discard from our minds the idea of her continuing protection.”
    Eventually some of the men began stripping the sails off the ship to make sails for the three whaleboats. Luckily Chase’s trunk contained the necessary needles and twine, and the men set to work. Others were directed to build masts for the whaleboats from the ship’s spars. Once the crew had been given specific tasks to accomplish, the change in morale was swift. Nickerson noticed “more cheerful faces than we dared to expect.”
    As the men worked—equipping each boat with two short masts, two spritsails, and a small sail up forward known as a jib—a lookout remained posted on the stump of the Essex ’s foremast, gazing out across the ocean for a sail. At noon, Chase took an observation and determined that the prevailing southeasterly winds and westerly current had driven the Essex and her crew almost fifty miles to the northwest of where they’d been the day before— away from the distant coast of South America. For the first mate, this troubling information made clear “the necessity of not wasting our time, and of endeavoring to seek some relief wherever God might direct us.”
    The wind increased throughout the day, making it difficult to work in the whaleboats, especially when waves broke across them, drenching the men. The officers realized that some further modifications were necessary to increase the vessels’ seaworthiness. Using rough cedar boards from the wreck, the men built up the sides of each boat by more than half a foot. This simple alteration—done almost as an after-thought—proved crucial. “[T]he boats must otherwise have taken in so much water,” Chase wrote, “that all the efforts of twenty such weak, starving men as we afterwards came to be, would not have sufficed to keep [them from swamping].”
    It was also now clear that they had to work out some method of shielding their provisions of bread from the salt spray. Each end of the whaleboat contained a cupboardlike space called a cuddy. After wrapping the bread in several layers of canvas, they placed it in the boat’s aft cuddy, as far as they could from the waves breaking at the bow. Having it in the aft cuddy also made it easy for the officer at the steering oar to monitor the bread’s distribution to the rest of the crew.
    When darkness began to come on, they reluctantly put aside their hammers, nails, needles, and twine and once again tied up the whale-boats in the lee of the wreck. It was still blowing hard, and all twenty men dreaded what Chase called “the horrors of another tempestuous night.” It wasn’t just the discomfort of attempting to sleep in a tiny rocking boat but also the prospect of an entire night with nothing to distract them from their fears.
    The same men who had worked so cheerfully at modifying the whaleboats were suddenly bludgeoned by despair. “[T]he miseries of their situation came upon them with such force,” Chase remembered, “as to produce spells of extreme debility, approaching almost to fainting.” Even though it had been almost two days since their last meal, they found it impossible to eat. Their throats parched by anxiety, they indulged instead in frequent drinks of water.
    Chase lay down in the bottom of his boat and began to pray. But his supplication provided little consolation: “Sometimes . . . a light hope would dawn, but then, to feel such an utter dependence on . . . chance alone for aid and rescue, would chase it again from my mind.” Rather than contemplating the possible means of their deliverance, Chase found himself once again reliving the circumstances that had brought them to this point, especially “the mysterious and mortal attack of the animal.”
    By seven o’clock the next morning, the ship’s deck had broken almost entirely from the hull. Like a whale dying in a slow-motion flurry, the Essex in dissolution made for a grim and disturbing sight, her joints and seams working violently in the waves. She was bleeding from the burst casks within her hull, surrounding the men in a reeking slick of whale oil—a yellowish slime that coated the boats’ sides and slopped over the gunwales with the waves. The boats became slippery and dangerous to move around in. The fluid that only a few days before had been their fortune, their obsession, was now their torment.
    Chase decided that something must be done. He rowed over