In the Heart of the Sea

according to Chase, not “depend on our own exertions, but on chance alone.” Reaching South America, on the other hand, depended “on our own labors.” From Chase’s perspective, this made all the difference and demanded that they not “lose sight, for one moment, of the strong probabilities which, under Divine Providence, there were of our reaching land by the route we had prescribed to ourselves.”
    The plan had one iron requirement: they had to make their provisions last two months. Each man would get six ounces of hardtack and half a pint of water a day. Hardtack was a simple dried bread made out of flour and water. Baked into a moisture-free rock to prevent spoilage, hardtack had to be broken into small pieces or soaked in water before it was eaten, if a sailor didn’t want to crack a tooth.
    The daily ration was equivalent to six slices of bread, and it provided about five hundred calories. Chase estimated that this amounted to less than a third of the nourishment required by “an ordinary man.” Modern dietary analysis indicates that for a five-foot, eight-inch person weighing 145 pounds, these provisions met about a quarter of his daily energy needs. True, the men of the Essex had more than just bread; they had tortoises. Each tortoise was a pod of fresh meat, fat, and blood that was capable of providing as many as 4,500 calories per man—the equivalent of nine days of hardtack. Yet, even augmented by the tortoises, their daily rations amounted to a starvation diet. If they did succeed in reaching South America in sixty days, each man knew he would be little more than a breathing skeleton.
    But as they would soon discover, their greatest concern was not food but rather water. The human body, which is 70 percent water, requires a bare minimum of a pint a day to remove its waste products. The men of the Essex would have to make do with half that daily amount. If they experienced any hot weather, the deficit would only increase.
    That first night of their journey, Chase, Pollard, and Joy distributed the rations of bread and water to their boat-crews. It was two days after the sinking now, and the men’s interest in food had finally returned; the bread was quickly eaten. There was something else they craved: tobacco. A whaleman almost always had a quid of tobacco in his mouth, going through more than seventy pounds of it in a single voyage. In addition to all their other woes, the crew of the Essex had to contend with the jittery withdrawal symptoms associated with nicotine addiction.
    After the meager meal, the men not on watch went to sleep. “Nature became at last worn out with the watchings and anxieties of the two preceding nights,” Chase recalled, “and sleep came insensibly upon us.” But as his men fell into what he judged to be a dreamless stupor, Chase found himself in the middle of a waking nightmare.
    Unable to sleep for the third night in a row, he continued to dwell obsessively on the circumstances of the ship’s sinking. He could not get the creature out of his mind: “[T]he horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my reflections.” In his desperate attempts to find some explanation for how a normally passive creature could suddenly become a predator, Chase was plagued by what psychologists call a “tormenting memory”—a common response to disasters. Forced to relive the trauma over and over again, the survivor finds larger, hidden forces operating through the incident. The philosopher William James felt this compulsion firsthand some years later. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he wrote: “I realize now how inevitable were men’s earlier mythological versions [of disaster] and how artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits which science educates us.”
    For most disaster victims, the repeated flashbacks of a tormenting memory have a therapeutic value, gradually weaning the sufferer from anxieties that might otherwise interfere with his ability to survive. There are some, however, who cannot rid themselves of the memory. Melville, building upon Chase’s account, would make his Captain Ahab a man who never emerged from the psychic depths in which Chase had writhed these three nights. Just as Chase was convinced that the whale that attacked the Essex exhibited “decided, calculating mischief,” so was Ahab haunted by a sense of the white whale’s “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice