In the Heart of the Sea

steering oar. This eighteen-foot lever enabled a rowed whaleboat to spin around in its own length, but it was not so effective in guiding a sailboat, and required the helmsman to stand at the cumbersome oar. At this early stage in the voyage, the whaleboats were dangerously overloaded. Instead of five hundred pounds of whaling equipment, each boat contained close to a thousand pounds of bread, water, and tortoises, and waves broke over the built-up gunnels and soaked the men. The boats were also without centerboards or skegs to help them track through the water, forcing the helmsmen to tug and push their steering oars as their little, deeply laden boats corkscrewed in the turbulent seas.
    Each boat-crew was divided into two watches. While half the men attempted to rest—curling up with the Galapagos tortoises in the bilge or leaning uncomfortably against the seats—the others steered, tended the sails, and bailed. They also attempted to keep an eye on the other boats, which would sometimes disappear entirely from view when they dipped down into the trough of a wave.
    At the start it had been decided that every effort would be made to keep the three boats together. Together they could help if one of them ran into trouble; together they could keep one anothers’ spirits up. “[U]naided, and unencouraged by each other,” Chase observed, “there were with us many whose weak minds, I am confident, would have sunk under the dismal retrospections of the past catastrophe, and who did not possess either sense or firmness enough to contemplate our approaching destiny, without the cheering of some more determined countenance than their own.”
    There was also a more practical reason for staying together: there was not enough navigational equipment to go around. Pollard and Chase each had a compass, a quadrant, and a copy of Bowditch’s Navigator, but Joy had nothing. If his boat-crew should become separated from the other two, they would be unable to find their way across the ocean.
    Night came on. Although moon and starlight still made it possible to detect the ghostly paleness of the whaleboats’ sails, the men’s field of vision shrank dramatically in the darkness even as their perception of sounds was heightened. The whaleboats’ clinker, or lapstrake, construction (with planks overlapping, resembling the clapboards of a house) made them much noisier than a smooth-bottomed boat, and the fussy, fluted sound of water licking up against their boats’ lapped sides would accompany them for the duration of the voyage.
    Even at night the crews were able to maintain a lively three-way conversation among the boats. The subject on everyone’s mind was of course the “means and prospects of our deliverance.” It was agreed that their best chance of survival lay in happening upon a whaleship. The Essex had sunk about three hundred miles north of the Offshore Ground. They still had about five days of sailing before they entered the Ground, where, they desperately hoped, they would come across a whaler.
    A circumstance in their favor was that, unlike merchant vessels, whaleships almost always had a lookout posted at the masthead, so in whaling territory they had a better chance of being seen. Against them was the immensity of the Offshore Ground. It encompassed an enormous amount of ocean—more than twice the area of the state of Texas, a rectangle about three hundred miles north to south and almost two thousand miles from east to west. There were at least seven whaleships on the Offshore Ground at this time. But even if there were double that number, the odds were poor that three whaleboats sailing along a straight line through the Ground (which might take only four or five days to cross) would be spotted by a ship.
    One possibility was to extend their time in the Offshore Ground and actively search for whalers. But that was a gamble. If they searched the region and didn’t find a ship, they would jeopardize their chances of reaching South America before their food supplies ran out. As it was, they would be entering the western extreme of the Ground and would have a difficult time heading east against the southeasterly trades.
    There was another factor influencing their decision to continue on with the original plan. After having fallen victim to such a seemingly random and inexplicable attack, the men felt an overpowering need to reclaim at least some control of their own destiny. Being sighted by a whaleship would,