In the Heart of the Sea

was indeed strange, and such as I shall never forget,” Chase remembered. “At one instant I felt an almost choking excess of joy, and at the next I wanted the relief of a flood of tears.”
    By the time Chase reached the spring, men had already begun to drink, eagerly filling their mouths with the miraculous nectar. Mindful that in their dehydrated condition it was dangerous to drink too much water too quickly, Chase exhorted them to sip only small quantities and to wait several minutes between drinks. But their thirst proved overpowering, and some of the men had to be held back. Despite the officers’ best efforts, several of the crew “thoughtlessly swallowed large quantities of [water], until they could drink no more.” But the agonizing cramps Chase had warned against never came: “[I]t only served to make them a little stupid and indolent for the remainder of the day.”
    Once everyone had been given a chance to drink, they began to marvel at their good fortune. The spring was so far below the tide line that it was exposed for just a half hour at dead low; at high tide it was as much as six feet underwater. They had time to fill only two small kegs before the rock once again disappeared below the surf.
    After collecting more fish and birds, they sat down for the evening meal. With a dependable source of water and a seemingly bountiful supply of food, they now thought it possible to hold out indefinitely on the island. At the very least, they could stay at Henderson until they had recovered their strength and repaired their worn-out whaleboats for a final attempt at reaching South America. That night they agreed to remain on the island for at least another four or five days before they decided “whether it would be advisable to make any arrangement for a more permanent abode.” Their stomachs full and their thirst slaked, they quickly drifted off into what Chase described as “a most comfortable and delicious sleep.”
    At eleven o’clock the next morning, they returned to the spring. They arrived just as the tide fell below the rock. At first the water was somewhat brackish, raising fears that the spring was not as reliable a source of fresh water as they had first thought. But as the tide continued to retreat, the quality of the water steadily improved. After filling their casks with about twenty gallons, they set out in search of food.
    Every spare moment of every day was, in Chase’s words, “employed in roving about for food.” The evening hours proved the most productive, for it was then that the plump white birds known as tropic birds, about the size of chickens, returned to shore to feed their young. Approaching stealthily, the men would “pounce upon [the birds] with a stick and take them without difficulty.”
    They were not the only ones who lay in wait for the tropic birds each evening. There were also what Nickerson called the man-of-war hawks. But instead of killing the tropic birds, the hawks had what scientists call a kleptoparasitic relationship with them, pecking their backs and beating them with their wings until the tropic birds disgorged the fish that had been intended for their young. With the regurgitated food in their beaks, the hawks would fly away, “leaving,” Nickerson observed, “the young tropicbirds supperless.”
    The following day, December 24, they detected an alarming change. Nickerson noticed that the birds, “being so constantly harassed, began to forsake the island.” That evening some of the crew returned to camp complaining that they had not been able to find enough to eat. In just five days, these twenty voracious men had exhausted their portion of the island. “Every accessible part of the mountain, contiguous to us, or within the reach of our weak enterprise,” Chase wrote, “was already ransacked, for bird’s eggs and grass, and was rifled of all that they contained.”

    DEEP in the Desolate Region, Henderson Island had never been rich in natural resources. Scientists believe that flora and fauna originally spread to the islands of the Pacific from the luxuriant margins of Southeast Asia, and Henderson is more than nine thousand miles from this source. Making it even more difficult for life to reach this isolated outcropping of coral is the direction of the prevailing winds and currents. Like the men of the Essex, birds and plant species had to fight their way upwind and upstream to reach Henderson. Moreover, the island is south of the Tropic of