In the Heart of the Sea

point—but they were deteriorating rapidly. As the sun beat down out of an empty blue sky, the heat became so intolerable that three of the men in Chase’s boat decided to hang over the gunwale and cool their blistered bodies in the sea. Almost as soon as the first man dropped over the side, he shouted with excitement. The bottom of their boat was covered with what he described as small clams. He quickly pulled one off and ate it, pronouncing it a “most delicious and agreeable food.”
    Actually not clams, these were gooseneck barnacles. Unlike the whitish, cone-shaped barnacles commonly seen on dock pilings and ships, goosenecks are stalked barnacles, with a dark brown shell surrounding a fleshy, pinkish-white neck. A medieval myth claimed that once these barnacles grew to a sufficient size, they would transform themselves into geese and fly away. Today the Coast Guard uses the size of the gooseneck barnacles growing on the bottom of a derelict craft to determine how long the vessel has been at sea. They can grow to half a foot in length, but the barnacles on Chase’s whaleboat were probably not much more than a few inches long.
    Soon all six men were plucking the crustaceans off the boat’s bottom and popping them into their mouths “like a set of gluttons.” Gooseneck barnacles have long been considered a delicacy in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, and are farmed commercially today in the state of Washington. Connoisseurs, who eat the tubelike neck only after peeling off the outer skin, compare the taste to crab, lobster, or shrimp. The Essex men, not as discriminating, consumed everything but the shells.
    “[A]fter having satisfied the immediate craving of the stomach,” Chase wrote, “we gathered large quantities and laid them up in the boat.” But getting the men back aboard proved a problem. They were too weak to pull themselves over the gunwale. Luckily, the three men who couldn’t swim had elected to remain on the boat and were able to haul the others in. They had intended to save the uneaten goosenecks for another day. But after less than a half hour of staring at the delectable morsels, they surrendered to temptation and ate them all.
    Except for flying fish, gooseneck barnacles would be the only marine life the Essex crew would manage to harvest from the open ocean. Indeed, these twenty whalemen were singularly unsuccessful in catching the fish that castaways normally depend on for survival. Part of the problem was that their search for the band of variable winds had taken them into a notoriously sterile region of the Pacific.
    For an ocean to support life, it must contain the nutrients necessary for the production of phytoplankton, the organism at the base of the ocean’s food chain. These nutrients come from two places: the land, through rivers and streams, and from the organic material on the ocean floor. The region into which the Essex crew had now ventured was so far removed from South America that the only source of nutrients was at the bottom of the sea.
    Cold water is denser than warm water, and when the surface waters of the ocean cool in the winter months, they are replaced by the warmer water underneath, creating a mixing action that brings the nutrient-rich waters at the bottom up to the surface. In the subtropical region, however, the temperature is fairly constant throughout the year. As a result, the ocean remains permanently divided into a warm upper layer and a cold lower layer, effectively sealing off the bottom nutrients from the surface.
    Over the next few decades seamen became well aware that the waters in this portion of the Pacific were almost devoid of fish and birds. In the middle of the nineteenth century Matthew Fontaine Maury compiled a definitive set of wind and current charts based largely on information provided by whalemen. In his chart of the Pacific is a vast oval-shaped area, stretching from the lower portion of the Offshore Ground to the southern tip of Chile, called the “Desolate Region.” Here, Maury indicates, “[m]ariners report few signs of life in sea or air.” The three Essex whaleboats were now in the heart of the Desolate Region. Like Pablo Valencia, they had journeyed into their very own valley of death.
     
    THE calm continued into December 15, the twenty-fourth day of the ordeal. Despite the windless conditions, Chase’s boat was taking on even more water than usual. Their search for the leak once again prompted them to pull up the