In the Heart of the Sea

information was transferred onto a chart, where the captain established the ship’s estimated position.
    Survivors of other maritime catastrophes—most notably the Bounty ’s Captain Bligh—placed in similar situations managed to navigate successfully with dead reckoning. Soon after being abandoned in the middle of the Pacific in the ship’s launch, Captain Bligh manufactured his own log line and trained his men to count the seconds as it was run out. Bligh’s estimates of their latitude and longitude proved amazingly accurate, enabling him to find the distant island of Timor, one of history’s greatest feats of navigation.
    Chase explained that “having no glass, nor log-line,” they decided that it was futile to maintain an estimate of their longitude. If Pollard’s inability to work a lunar is any indication, he was not a particularly skilled navigator or an unusually unskilled one. There were many captains who were also navigating their vessels by dead reckoning and, like Pollard, never expected to find themselves in such a situation. By forgoing all estimates of their longitude, he and his men were now sailing blind, with no way to determine their distance from South America.
     
    IN THE afternoon a school of porpoises surrounded the three boats and followed them until well after sunset. That night the wind built to almost a gale. Chase and his crew watched in horror as the planks of their old boat worked and twisted in the waves. The boat was in such terrible shape, Nickerson claimed, that he normally would not have felt safe sailing ten miles in it, let alone the thousands they had ahead of them.
    By the morning of Friday, November 24, the third day in the boats, the waves were “very large,” according to Chase, “and increased, if possible, the extreme uncomfortableness of our situation.” Nickerson observed that if they’d been aboard the Essex, the wind would have seemed unexceptional, but now, he said, “in our crippled state it answers the purpose of a gale, and keeps us constantly wet and chilled through.” That day an immense wave broke over Chase’s boat and almost filled it with water. The swamped boat threatened to roll over on its side as kegs, tortoises, and Chase’s sea chest floated up from the bottom and knocked against the men. They bailed frantically, knowing that the next wave might sink them.
    Once they’d brought the boat out of danger, they discovered that some of the hardtack—which they’d carefully wrapped in sailcloth—had been soaked by the seawater. They did their best to salvage as much of the damaged bread as possible. Over the course of the next few days, they would seize every chance to dry the dissolving lumps in the sun. While this saved the provisions from what Nickerson called “utter ruin,” the bread remained infiltrated with salt, the worst possible thing for their already water-deprived bodies. “The bread being our only dependence,” Nickerson remembered, “[this] gave . . . us on the whole a cheerless prospect”—a prospect that only worsened when they learned that a portion of the bread on Pollard’s boat had also been damaged. A few days before, the officers had possessed cautious faith in “the human means at our command”; now they recognized “our utter dependence on that divine aid we so much the more stood in need of.”
    At eight o’clock the next morning, the man assigned to bailing Chase’s boat became alarmed. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep ahead of the rising tide of water. Their boat, he alerted the rest of the crew, was sinking. Soon all six men were searching for the new leak, their hands probing desperately in the sloshing bilge, feeling the boat’s sides for the gush of incoming water. It wasn’t until they’d torn up the floor that they discovered the problem: one of the planks in the bow had sprung from the hull, and water was pouring in. The leak was about six inches below the waterline, and if they were going to fix it, they needed to figure out some way to get at it from the outside.
    The sprung board was on the starboard, or leeward, side, and Chase immediately “hove about,” using the steering oar to turn the boat so that the wind was now coming over the other side. This put the leak on the windward, or “high,” side; Chase hoped to heel the boat over enough so that the hole would rise up out of the water.
    Noticing that Chase had suddenly veered away, Pollard brought his own boat around and