In the Heart of the Sea

Capricorn, a relatively cool band of water that acts as a further barrier to the spread of tropical species. As a result, Henderson has always been a difficult place for man to live.
    The human colonization of the Pacific Islands appears to have followed a pattern similar to the spread of plants and birds. Moving from one stepping-stone of an island to the next, people pushed out ever farther to the east and south. Archeological digs on Henderson have revealed that man first arrived on the island sometime between 800 and 1050 AD. These first inhabitants established a settlement on the same beach where the Essex crew hauled up their whaleboats. In the few places where the soil allowed for it, they grew sweet potatoes. They fished with hooks made out of imported pearl shells. They buried their dead in slab crypts. But by 1450, they were gone, no longer able to scratch out a living on what is considered today the “last pristine elevated limestone island in the world.”
     
    THERE was no Christmas feast for the Essex crew. That evening they “found that a fruitless search for nourishment had not repaid us the labors of a whole day.” Only grass remained, and that was “not much relished,” Chase wrote, “without some other food.” They began to “entertain serious apprehensions that we should not be able to live long here.”
    In less than a week, the Essex crew had accomplished what had taken their Polynesian predecessors at least four centuries. By December 26, their seventh day on Henderson and their thirty-fifth since leaving the wreck, they had resolved to abandon this used-up island. In Chase’s words, their situation was “worse than it would have been in our boats on the ocean; because, in the latter case we should be still making some progress towards the land, while our provisions lasted.” In preparation for their departure, they had already begun working on the whaleboats. “We nailed our boats as well as it was possible to do,” Nickerson wrote, “with the small quantity of boat nails in our possession, in order to prepare them to stand against the boisterous elements which we were again . . . to encounter.”
    The coast of Chile was approximately three thousand miles away—about twice as far as they had already sailed. Upon studying their copies of Bowditch’s Navigator, they realized that Easter Island, at latitude 27 °9’ south, longitude 109 °35’ west, was less than a third of that distance. Although they, once again, knew nothing about the island, they decided to sail for it, belatedly realizing that the potential terrors of an unknown island were nothing compared to the known terrors of an open boat in the open ocean.
    Early in the day, “all hands were called together,” Nickerson remembered, “for a last talk previous to taking a final departure.” Pollard explained that they would be leaving the next day and that the boat-crews would remain the same as they’d been prior to their arrival on Henderson. It was then that three men came forward—Joy’s boatsteerer Thomas Chappel and two teenagers from Cape Cod, Seth Weeks and William Wright, from Pollard’s and Chase’s boats, respectively. Several times over the last few days these three white off-islanders had been observed “reasoning upon the probabilities of their deliverance.” And the more they talked about it, the more they dreaded the prospect of climbing back into the whaleboats.
    Chappel, the once spirited and mischievous Englishman who had set fire to Charles Island, could see that second mate Matthew Joy did not have long to live. As the rest of the crew gradually regained weight and strength during the week on Henderson, Joy, who had possessed a “weak and sickly constitution” even before the sinking, had remained shockingly thin. Chappel knew that if Joy should die, he would become, by default, his whaleboat’s leader—a prospect no reasonable man could relish, given what might lie ahead.
    In preparing for a sea voyage that could result in the deaths of some, if not all, of the men assembled on the beach, the crew of the Essex were reenacting a scenario that had been played out countless times before on islands across the Pacific. The colonization of the Polynesian islands had depended on such scenarios. But instead of a last, desperate push to reach a known world, the early South Sea islanders had set out on voyages of discovery—sailing east and south into the giant blue void of the Pacific.