In the Heart of the Sea

transformed the tree into a Galapagos-like post office, placing the letters in a small wooden box they nailed to the trunk.
    On December 27 at ten o’clock in the morning, by which time the tide had risen far enough to allow the boats to float over the rocks that surrounded the island, they began to load up. In Pollard’s boat were his boatsteerer, Obed Hendricks, along with their fellow Nantucketers Barzillai Ray, Owen Coffin, and Charles Ramsdell, and the African American Samuel Reed. Owen Chase’s crew was down to five: the Nantucketers Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson, along with Richard Peterson, the elderly black from New York, and Isaac Cole, a young white off-islander. Joy’s crew contained the white off-islander Joseph West and four blacks—Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, and the steward William Bond. Not only were these men under the command of a seriously ill second mate, but Chappel’s decision to remain on the island had left them without a boatsteerer to assist Joy in the management of the crew. But neither Pollard nor Chase was willing to part with a Nantucket-born boatsteerer.
    Soon it was time for them to leave the island. But Chappel, Wright, and Weeks were nowhere to be found. “[T]hey had not come down,” Chase wrote, “either to assist us to get off, nor to take any kind of leave of us.” The first mate walked down the beach to their dwelling and told them they were about to set sail. The men were, Chase observed, “very much affected,” and one of them began to cry. “They wished us to write to their relations, should Providence safely direct us again to our homes, and said but little else.” Seeing that they were “ill at heart about taking any leave of us,” Chase bid them a hasty good-bye and left for the boats. “They followed me with their eyes,” he wrote, “until I was out of sight, and I never saw more of them.”
    Before leaving the island, the men in the boats decided to backtrack a bit and sail to a beach they had seen during their original circuit of the island. It had looked like a spot that “might be productive of some unexpected good fortune,” possibly providing them with fresh provisions for the start of their journey. After dropping half a dozen men on shore to search for food, the rest of them spent the day fishing. They saw several sharks but were unable to catch anything save a few mackerel-sized fish. The shore party returned at about six o’clock that evening with some more birds, and they made final preparations to leave.
    It had been more of a tease than a salvation, but Henderson Island had at least given them a fighting chance. Back on December 20, Chase had seen “death itself staring us in the face.” Now, after more than a week of food and drink, their casks were full of fresh water. Their boats no longer leaked. In addition to hardtack, each crew had some fish and birds. There were also three fewer men to support. “We again set sail,” Nickerson wrote, “finally [leaving] this land which had been so providentially thrown in our way.”

CHAPTER TEN
    The Whisper of Necessity

    B EFORE THEY LEFT Henderson Island, Chase loaded a flat stone and an armful of firewood into each boat. That first evening back on the water, as both the island and the sun slipped below the western horizon behind them, they put the stones to use as platforms for cooking fires. “[W]e kept our fires going,” Chase wrote, “and cooked our fish and birds, and felt our situation as comfortable as could be expected.”
    For a month they had been driven south and even west; now they hoped to sail almost directly east to Easter Island. For this to happen they needed two weeks of westerly breezes. However, at latitude 24° south, they were still in the trades, where for more than 70 percent of the year the wind blows out of the southeast. But that night, as if in answer to their prayers, a strong breeze sprang up out of the northwest, and they steered straight for Easter.
    If they were to keep track of their progress east, they needed to find a way to estimate their longitude—something they had not done during the first leg of the voyage. A month of sailing without knowing their east-to-west position had proved to them the necessity of at least attempting to determine it. Before leaving Henderson, they decided to maintain what Chase called “a regular reckoning.” Their noon observation told them their latitude, and by doing as Captain Bligh