In the Heart of the Sea

nail by way of strengthening” the boat’s ribs and planks. The incessant activity helped to divert Chase’s men from the reality of their situation. They were in the worst of the three boats, but they had a leader who had dedicated himself to postponing its disintegration until it was beyond his final powers to prevent it.
    That morning a school of iridescent dolphin fish appeared in the waters surrounding the boats and followed them for most of the day. Placing pieces of a white rag on one of Chase’s fish hooks, they attempted, in Nickerson’s words, “to use all our persuasive powers . . . to induce them to come aboard.” The fish proved “as tenacious of their existence as ourselves” and refused to bite.
    By the following day, the men’s hunger had become almost as difficult to bear as their thirst. The weather proved the best they’d seen since leaving the Essex eight days before, and Chase proposed that they attempt to allay “the ravenous gnawings upon our stomachs” by eating one of the tortoises. All the men readily agreed, and at one o’clock that afternoon, Chase’s dissection began. First they flipped the tortoise on its back. As his men held its beak and claws, Chase slit the creature’s throat, cutting the arteries and veins on either side of the vertebrae in the neck. Nickerson claimed that “all seemed quite impatient of the opportunity to drink the blood as it came oozing from the wound of the sacrificed animal,” eager to consume it before it coagulated.
    They collected the blood in the same tin cup from which they drank their water rations. Despite their shrieking thirst, some of the men could not make themselves drink the blood. For this part, Chase “took it like a medicine to relieve the extreme dryness of my palate.”
    All of them, however, were willing to eat. Chase inserted his knife into the leathery skin beside the neck and worked his way around the shell’s edge, cutting with a sawing motion until he could lift out the meat and guts. With the help of the tinderbox stored in the whaleboat’s small keg of emergency equipment, they kindled a fire in the shell and cooked the tortoise, “entrails and all.”
    After ten days of eating only bread, the men greedily attacked the tortoise, their teeth ripping the succulent flesh as warm juice ran down their salt-encrusted faces. Their bodies’ instinctive need for nutrition led them irresistibly to the tortoise’s vitamin-rich heart and liver. Chase dubbed it “an unspeakably fine repast.”
    Their hunger was so voracious that once they began to eat, they found it difficult to stop. An average-sized tortoise would have provided each man with about three pounds of meat, one pound of fat, and at least half a cup of blood, together worth more than 4,500 calories—equivalent to a large Thanksgiving dinner. This would have been a tremendous amount of food to introduce into the shrunken stomach of a person who had only eaten a total of four pounds of bread over the last ten days. The men’s dehydrated condition would have also made it difficult for their stomachs to generate the digestive juices required to handle the large amount of food. But neither Chase nor Nickerson speaks of saving any of the cooked tortoise for a later day. For these starved men, this was one gratification no one was willing to delay. “[O]our bodies were considerably recruited,” Chase wrote, “and I felt my spirits now much higher than they had been at anytime before.” Instead of limiting each whaleboat to two live tortoises, they now realized, they should have butchered and cooked the meat of every animal they found on the wreck.
    For the first time in several days, the sky was clear enough for a noon observation. Pollard’s sight indicated that they were approaching latitude 8° south. Since leaving the wreck on November 22, they had traveled almost five hundred miles, putting them slightly ahead of schedule—at least in terms of distance sailed over the water. That evening, with the bones and charred carapace of the tortoise littering the boat’s bilge, Richard Peterson once again led the men in prayer.
     
    FOR the next three days, the weather remained mild and clear. The wind shifted to the north, allowing them to shape their course toward Peru. Their stomachs full, they dared to believe that “our situation was not at that moment . . . so comfortless as we had been led at first to consider.” Nickerson noticed “a degree of repose