In the Heart of the Sea

sinewing it.” Locked in his own private chamber of horrors, Ahab resolved that his only escape was through hunting down and killing Moby Dick: “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Chase, on a tiny boat a thousand miles from land, did not have the possibility of revenge. Ahab was fighting a symbol; Chase and his shipmates were fighting for their lives.

    THE next morning, the men were greatly relieved to discover that after a night of high winds all three boats were still close together. The wind built throughout the day, requiring them to shorten sail. The boats’ schooner rigs could be easily adapted to the changing conditions, and after the sails were reefed, Chase reported, the men “did not apprehend any very great danger from the then violence of the wind.” The high seas, however, continued to afflict them. Constantly wet from the salt spray, they had begun to develop painful sores on their skin that the violent bouncing of the boats only exacerbated.
    In his sea chest, Chase found an assortment of useful items: a jackknife, a whetstone, three small fish hooks, a cake of soap, a suit of clothes, a pencil, and ten sheets of writing paper. As first mate, Chase had been responsible for keeping the Essex ’s log, and using the pencil and paper he now attempted to start “a sort of sea journal”—despite the horrendous conditions. “It was with much difficulty . . . that I could keep any sort of record,” Chase remembered, “owing to the incessant rocking and unsteadiness of the boat and the continual dashing of spray of the sea over us.”
    Chase’s journal-keeping satisfied more than an official obligation; it also fulfilled a personal need. The act of self-expression—through writing a journal or letters—often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears. After beginning his informal log, Chase would never again suffer another sleepless night tortured by his memory of the whale.
    There were other daily rituals. Every morning they shaved with the same knife Chase used to sharpen his pencil. Benjamin Lawrence spent a portion of each day twisting stray strands of rope into an ever lengthening piece of twine. The boatsteerer vowed that if he should ever get out of the whaleboat alive, he would save the string as a memorial to the ordeal.
    At noon they paused to take an observation. Determining the angle of the sun with a quadrant was not easy on a tiny, wave-tossed boat. Their best estimate put them at latitude 0°58’ south. It was an encouraging indication. They had not only crossed back over the equator but had traveled approximately seventy-one nautical miles since leaving the wreck the day before, putting them ahead of their daily target of sixty miles. In the afternoon the wind moderated, enabling them to shake out the reefs in their sails and dry their wet clothes in the sun.
    That day Pollard decided to abandon “the idea altogether of keeping any correct longitudinal reckoning.” To maintain an accurate estimate of a vessel’s position, it is necessary to keep track of both its north-to-south position, or latitude, and its east-to-west position, or longitude. A noon observation with a quadrant indicates only a craft’s latitude. If a navigator in 1820 had a chronometer—an exceptionally accurate timepiece adapted to the rigors of being stored on a ship—he could compare the time of his noon sight with the time in Greenwich, England, and calculate his longitude. But chronometers at this time were expensive and not yet widely used on Nantucket whaleships.
    The alternative was to perform what was called a lunar observation, or simply a lunar. This was an extremely complicated process that involved as many as three hours of calculations before the vessel’s longitude could be determined—an impossibility on a whaleboat. Besides, according to Nickerson, Pollard had not yet learned how to work a lunar.
    That left dead reckoning. The officers of every ship kept a careful record of its heading, as indicated by the compass, and its speed. Speed was determined by throwing a knotted length of line with a piece of wood at the end of it (called a log line) into the water and determining how much of it (that is, how many “knots”) ran out in a set period of time. A sandglass, known as a slowglass, was used to measure the time. The ship’s speed and direction were recorded, and this