In the Heart of the Sea

floorboards in the bow. This time they discovered that a plank next to the keel, at the very bottom of the boat, had pulled loose. If they had been on the deck of the Essex, they would have simply flipped the boat over and renailed the plank. But now, in the middle of the ocean, they had no way of reaching the underside of the boat. Even Chase, whom Nickerson described as their boat’s “doctor,” could not figure out a way to repair it.
    After a few moments’ consideration, the twenty-one-year-old boatsteerer Benjamin Lawrence ventured a proposal. He would tie a rope around his waist and dive underwater with the boat’s hatchet in his hand. As Chase hammered in a nail from the inside of the boat, Lawrence would hold the hatchet against the outside of the plank. When the tip of the nail hit the metal face of the hatchet, it would curl up like a fishhook and be driven back into the boat. The last blows of Chase’s hammer would set the head of the nail while drawing the planks tightly together. This was known as clenching a nail and was usually performed with a tool known as a backing iron. For now, the hatchet would have to do.
    On the Essex, Lawrence’s abilities as a boatsteerer had been called into question, and he had been forced to surrender the harpoon to his demanding first mate. This time, however, it was Lawrence to whom Chase and the rest of the boat-crew looked for guidance. Chase readily agreed to the plan, and soon Lawrence was in the water, pressing the hatchet up against the bottom of the boat. Just as he had predicted, the sprung plank was drawn in snug. Even Chase had to admit that it “answered the purpose much beyond our expectations.”
    The oppressive conditions continued through the next day and “bore upon our health and spirits with an amazing force and severity.” Some of the men experienced thirst-induced delusions. “The most disagreeable excitements were produced by it,” Chase commented, “which added to the disconsolate endurance of the calm, called loudly for some mitigating expedient—some sort of relief to our prolonged sufferings.” The need for action intensified when the noon observation revealed that they had drifted ten miles backward in the last twenty-four hours.
    All around them, the unruffled ocean reached out to the curved horizon like the bottom of a shiny blue bowl. Their parched mouths made talking, let alone singing hymns, difficult. The prayer meetings, along with their progress, ceased. That Sunday they sat silently in their boats, desperate for deliverance, knowing that back on Nantucket thousands of people were sitting on the wooden benches of the North and South Meeting Houses, waiting for God’s will to be revealed.
    At worship, a Quaker sought to “center down,” shutting out all worldly cares in his attempt to find the divine spirit. When a person was moved to speak, he chanted in a peculiar way—a kind of half-singing, half-sobbing that could break into more natural speech. Although only a few of the Essex crew were active Quakers, all of the Nantucketers had, at one time or another, attended a meeting. The protocol and rhythms of a Friends meeting were part of their shared cultural heritage.
    Up until this point, it had been the African Americans, specifically the sixty-year-old Richard Peterson, who had led the men in prayer. This was not uncommon at sea. White sailors often looked to blacks and their evangelical style of worship as sources of religious strength, especially in times of peril. In 1818, the captain of a ship about to go down in a North Atlantic gale beseeched the black cook, a member of New Bedford’s Baptist church, to seek the Lord’s help on the crew’s behalf. The cook knelt down on the tossing deck and “prayed most fervently for God to protect and save us from the dreadful, raging storm.” The ship survived.
    But that afternoon, it was Pollard who was finally moved to speak beneath the punishing sun. His voice ravaged by dehydration, he proposed in a halting rasp that they attempt to row their way out of the calm. Each man would be given double rations during the day, and then that night they would row “until we should get a breeze from some quarter or other.”
    All readily agreed to the proposal. At last, after days of being stuck as if pinned to a place in the ocean, with nothing to distract them from their thirst and hunger, they had something to prepare for. They ate the bread and felt every sublimely