In the Heart of the Sea

refreshing drop of water seep into their cracked and shriveled mouths. They looked forward to the night ahead.
    Under normal circumstances, rowing was a task that helped define each man’s worth on a whaleship. Each crew took pride in its ability to row effortlessly, for hours at a time, and nothing made the men happier than passing another boat. But that night any flickering of those competitive fires was soon extinguished. Though in their teens and twenties, they rowed like old men—wincing and groaning with every stroke. For the last three weeks, their bodies had been consuming themselves. Without any natural padding to cushion their bones, they found the simple act of sitting to be a torture. Their arms had shrunk to sticks as their muscles withered, making it difficult to hold, let alone pull, the oars. As man after man collapsed in a slumped heap, it became impossible to continue.
    “[W]e made but a very sorry progress,” Chase remembered. “Hunger and thirst, and long inactivity, had so weakened us, that in three hours every man gave out, and we abandoned the further prosecution of the plan.” Air rattled in their desiccated throats and lungs as they lay panting in the boats. Despite the raging heat of their bodies, their thin papery skin was without a hint of perspiration. Gradually the noise of their breathing ebbed, and they were once again deafened by the forbidding silence of a windless and empty ocean.
    The next morning they detected a change—a rustling of the water and a movement across their faces as, for the first time in five days, a light breeze poured out across the sea. Even though it was from precisely the wrong direction (southeast), the men welcomed it “with almost frenzied feelings of gratitude and joy.”
    By noon it was blowing a gale. The wind had veered into the east-southeast, and once again, they were forced to take in all sail and lower the masts. The next day the wind moderated, and soon their sails were pulling them along. Despite the improvement in the weather, that night proved to be, Chase recalled, “one of the most distressing nights in the whole catalogue of our sufferings.”
    They now knew that even if the wind did miraculously shift into the west, they no longer had enough water to last the thirty or more days it would take to sail to the coast of Chile. Their physical torments had reached a terrible crescendo. It was almost as if they were being poisoned by the combined effects of thirst and hunger. A glutinous and bitter saliva collected in their mouths that was “intolerable beyond expression.” Their hair was falling out in clumps. Their skin was so burned and covered with sores that a splash of seawater felt like acid burning on their flesh. Strangest of all, as their eyes sunk into their skulls and their cheekbones projected, they all began to look alike, their identities obliterated by dehydration and starvation.
    Throughout this long and dismal week, the men had attempted to sustain themselves with a kind of mantra: “‘Patience and long-suffering’ was the constant language of our lips,” Chase remembered, “and a determination, strong as the resolves of the soul could make it, to cling to existence as long as hope and breath remained to us.” But by the night of December 19, almost precisely a month since the sinking of the Essex, several of the men had given up. Chase could see it in their “lagging spirits and worn out frames”—“an utter indifference to their fate.” One more day, maybe two, and people would start to die.
    The next morning began like so many others. Nickerson recalled how at around seven o’clock, they were “sitting in the bottom of our little boat quite silent and dejected.” Nineteen-year-old William Wright, from Cape Cod, stood up to stretch his legs. He glanced to leeward, then looked again.
    “There is land!” he cried.

CHAPTER NINE
    The Island

    T HE MEN IN CHASE’S BOAT stared eagerly ahead. Ravaged by hunger and thirst, half blinded by glare from the sea and sky, they had seen mirages before, and they feared this might prove to be another. But all of them could see the white sandy beach in the distance. “It was no visionary delusion,” Nickerson wrote, “but in reality ‘Land Ho.’”
    Even the most decrepit of Chase’s men sprang to life. “We were all aroused in an instant,” the first mate remembered, “as if electrified. . . . Anew and extraordinary impulse now took possession of us. We shook