In the Heart of the Sea

their proposal as “going up the coast.”
    Just as he had after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream, Pollard succumbed to them. “Not wishing to oppose where there was two against one,” Nickerson remembered, “the captain reluctantly yielded to their arguments.” When writing of this “fatal error” later, the Essex ’s cabin boy asked, “How many warm hearts have ceased to beat in consequence of it?”
     
    TODAY, the Nantucketers’ lack of knowledge of the Pacific, an ocean in which they had been sailing for several decades, seems incredible. Since before the turn of the century, China traders from the nearby ports of New York, Boston, and Salem had been making frequent stops at not only the Marquesas but also the Hawaiian Islands on their way to Canton. While rumors of cannibalism in the Marquesas were widespread, there was plenty of readily accessible information to the contrary.
    Several months before the Essex ’s departure from Nantucket in 1819, when both Pollard and Chase were on-island, an article appeared in the April 28 issue of the New Bedford Mercury with the latest news from the Marquesas. According to the Lion ’s Captain Townsend, who had recently returned from Canton with three natives from the island of Nukahivah, all had been peaceful on these islands ever since Captain David Porter had visited them during the War of 1812. “[T]he benign influence of his name still remained with the natives, who live in great harmony and social intercourse,” the Mercury recorded. “The hostile tribes learnt war no more; and the Typees [formerly known for their cannibalism] were frequent visitors of the Lion, while she lay at that island.” Unfortunately, Pollard and his officers appear not to have read the report.
    Their ignorance of the Society Islands, in particular Tahiti, is even more extraordinary. Since 1797, there had been a thriving English mission on the island. Tahiti’s huge royal mission chapel, 712 feet long and 54 feet wide, was bigger than any Quaker meetinghouse on Nantucket. As Melville noted in his copy of Chase’s Narrative,
    All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might, in all human probability, have been avoided, had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti, from which they were not very distant at the time, & to which, there was a fair Trade wind. But they dreaded cannibals, & strange to tell knew not that . . . it was entirely safe for the Mariner to touch at Tahiti.—But they chose to stem a head wind, & make a passage of several thousand miles (an unavoidably roundabout one too) in order to gain a civilized harbor on the coast of South America.
    The men of the Essex were the victims of their particular moment in the history of the whale fishery. The Offshore Ground had been discovered only the year before. In another few years whaleships would go so far from the coast of South America that they would be compelled to provision in the islands of the Central Pacific, making the opening up of the Marquesas and the Society Islands to the west an accomplished fact. But in November 1820, these islands were outside the bounds of what they considered to be reliable knowledge.
    Nantucketers were suspicious of anything beyond their immediate experience. Their far-reaching success in whaling was founded not on radical technological advances or bold gambles but on a profound conservatism. Gradually building on the achievements of the generations before them, they had expanded their whaling empire in a most deliberate and painstaking manner. If new information didn’t come to them from the lips of another Nantucketer, it was suspect.
    By spurning the Society Islands and sailing for South America, the Essex officers chose to take their chances with an element they did know well: the sea. “The whaling business is peculiarly an ocean life,” Obed Macy wrote. “The sea, to mariners generally, is but a highway over which they travel to foreign markets; but to the whaler it is his field of labor, it is the home of his business.” Or, as Melville would write in the “Nantucket” chapter of Moby-Dick: “The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.”
    For these Nantucketers the