In the Heart of the Sea

be found, to quit the island the morning after.”
     
    THE men of the Essex did not know that they were within just a few hundred miles of saving themselves. Pollard and Chase were mistaken as to their whereabouts. This was not Ducie Island but rather Henderson Island, at virtually the same latitude but seventy miles to the west. Both islands are part of a group named for its most famous member, Pitcairn, an island whose history was inextricably linked with Nantucket. In 1808, a sealing captain from Nantucket named Mayhew Folger stumbled across Pitcairn (whose location was incorrectly recorded on all available navigational guides) and discovered the answer to a nineteen-year-old mystery: what had happened to Fletcher Christian and the Bounty.
    After abandoning Captain Bligh in the ship’s launch in 1789, the Bounty mutineers had wandered the Pacific. They picked up some native women and a few men in Tahiti, and eventually made their way to an uninhabited island in the southeastern extreme of Polynesia. In 1820, a small community of Bounty descendants was flourishing on Pitcairn. Just four hundred miles to the southwest, a few days’ sail from Henderson, they would have provided the Essex crew with all the food and water they needed. But Pitcairn was not listed in their Bowditch’s Navigator. Even if it had been, it’s questionable whether they could have found it. As it was, they were off by almost a hundred miles when they tried to determine their current location.
    Henderson Island began as a coral atoll about 370,000 years ago. Twenty thousand years later, volcanic activity associated with Pitcairn caused the land underneath the atoll to rise. Today, the cliffs of Henderson are between thirty and thirty-five yards high and enclose a dry fossil lagoon. Surrounded by a vast ocean, this uninhabited speck of coral might seem an unlikely source of anyone’s salvation.
    As much as sixty-five inches of rain falls on Henderson each year. This water does not all run off into the sea or evaporate into the air. Much of it seeps down through the thin soils and layers of fossilized coral to a depth of a foot or so above sea level. Here it flows into a horizontal layer of freshwater saturating the rock and sand. The freshwater, which is lighter than saltwater, floats on the surface of the sea in the shape of a dome or lens beneath the island. But, unless they could find a spring, all this groundwater would be of no use to the men of the Essex.
    They weren’t the first to be enticed by Henderson and then cheated. Although they weren’t aware of it, in the cliffs behind them was a cave in which lay eight human skeletons.
    A medical examination performed on the bones in 1966 revealed that they were of Caucasian origin, which suggests that these unidentified people, like the Essex crew, had been shipwreck survivors. The examination also revealed that one of the skeletons had belonged to a child between three and five years old. All eight people had died of dehydration.
     
    THE next morning—December 22, the thirty-first since leaving the wreck—the men resumed their search for water. Some, like Nickerson, climbed into the cliffs; others investigated the rocks along the beach. Chase returned to where they had found evidence of fresh water two days before. The rock was about a quarter mile from their encampment and, with a hatchet and an old rusted chisel, he and two others made their way across the sand.
    “The rock proved to be very soft,” Chase wrote, “and in a very short time I had obtained a considerable hole, but, alas! without the least wished-for effect.” As the sun rose in the sky, Chase continued to peck away at the rock, hoping that by deepening the hole, he might establish a flow of water. “[B]ut all my hopes and efforts were unavailing,” he remembered, “and at last I desisted from further labor, and sat down near it in utter despair.”
    Then he noticed something curious. On the beach, in the direction of the boats, two men were lugging a container of some sort. He was amazed to see them begin to run. “[T]he idea suddenly darted across my mind,” Chase wrote, “that they had found water, and were taking a keg to fill it.” Up in the cliffs, Nickerson had noticed the same display of “extraordinary spirit and activity” and soon became part of a general rush for the beach.
    The men had, in fact, found a spring bubbling up from a hole in a large flat rock. “The sensation that I experienced