In the Heart of the Sea

headed for the first mate. After shortening sail, Pollard came alongside and asked what was wrong.
    Now that the captain’s boat was beside them, Chase ordered his own crew to move to the port side and as far aft as possible, canting the bow up into the air. Working from Pollard’s boat, the first mate and captain attempted to steady the bow, realign the board, and hammer it into place. There was little room for error. The end of the board was already riddled with old nail holes, and it was critical that they drive in each new nail cleanly. Even though they were being bounced up and down by the waves, Chase and Pollard managed “to drive in a few nails, and secured [the plank], much beyond our expectations.” Soon all three boats were once again sailing to the south.
    “This little incident, although it may seem small,” Nickerson recalled, “[caused] amongst us the greatest excitement.” With a clear demonstration that their whaleboats might fall apart around them at any time, the men felt “a great gloominess over the natural prospects of our deliverance.” They knew that the longer the ordeal lasted, the more the boats would suffer in “the heavy and repeated racking of the swell.” All it took was the starting of a single nail, and one of these boats might be lost forever.
    For the men in Chase’s crew it had been an especially trying day. That evening Richard Peterson, the sole African American on their boat, led them in prayers and a few hymns. Nickerson remembered how the words and songs of the “pious old colored man . . . drew our minds from our present miseries to seek deliverance from a higher power.” That comfort notwithstanding, by the morning of November 26, the tentative optimism with which the men had begun the boat voyage had eroded into despair.
    For the last four days the windy and overcast weather had made it impossible to take an observation. Judging by the compass course they’d been forced to steer, their sails strapped in tight against the southeasterly trades, they knew they had been sailing parallel to, rather than toward, the coast of South America. They also knew that their boats, which were without centerboards, had a tendency to sideslip to leeward. Because of that slippage, they must now be well to the west of where they should have been. Despite having made significant progress south, they were no closer to their ultimate destination. The hopeful talk of being rescued by a passing whaleship had ceased. “[W]e looked forward,” Chase wrote, “not without an extreme dread, and anxiety, to the gloomy and disheartening prospect before us.”
    That afternoon the breeze dropped to a more comfortable level, allowing them to spread out their damaged bread to dry. Then the wind shifted, gradually backing into the north. For the first time since leaving the Essex, they were able to steer toward South America. Men began to talk about how far ahead of schedule they would be if the wind would only hold.
    But it was not to last. The next day, the wind shifted back into the east and “destroyed the fine prospect we had entertained of making a good run.” As if to mock them, the following day the wind veered even farther, to the east-southeast. Then it started to blow hard.
    That night they shortened sail and “began to entertain fears that we should be separated” in the darkness. To prevent just such an occurrence, the crew of the Union, the Nantucket ship that accidentally rammed into a whale in 1807, tied their boats together at night. But tethering interfered with sailing ability. The officers of the Essex —so intent on reaching the distant coast of South America—were reluctant to compromise their boats’ speed. Instead of tying themselves together, they sailed in a kind of formation, with Chase in the lead, Pollard in the middle, and Joy taking up the rear. If they could remain within one hundred feet of one another, each could always see the other two whaleboats’ white sails in the darkness.

    AT ABOUT eleven o’clock, Chase lay down in the bottom of his boat to sleep. He had just nodded off when he was startled awake by a cry from one of his men. Captain Pollard, the man said, was calling out to them in the darkness. Chase sat up and listened. In the howling wind and breaking waves, he could hear Pollard shouting to Joy, whose boat was nearest to him. Chase tacked around and sailed for the other two boats, only dimly visible in the moonless dark, and asked what