In the Heart of the Sea

three boats were brought together, and after sewing Joy up in his clothes, they tied a stone to his feet and “consigned him in a solemn manner to the ocean.”
    Even though they knew Joy had been ill for quite some time, his loss hit them hard. “It was an incident,” Chase wrote, “which threw a gloom over our feelings for many days.” The last two weeks had been particularly difficult for the men on the second mate’s boat. Instead of drawing strength and inspiration from their leader, they had been required to expend valuable energy nursing him. Making it even harder was the absence of Joy’s boatsteerer, Thomas Chappel. To fill the void, Pollard ordered his own boatsteerer, the twenty-one-year-old Obed Hendricks, to take command of the second mate’s shaken and dispirited crew.
    Soon after taking over the steering oar, Hendricks made a disturbing discovery. Joy’s illness had apparently prevented him from closely monitoring the distribution of his boat’s provisions. As best as Hendricks could determine, there was only enough hardtack in his boat’s cuddy to last two, maybe three more days.
     
    THROUGHOUT the morning and afternoon of the following day—the fifty-second since the men had left the Essex —the wind built out of the northwest until by nightfall it was blowing a full gale. The men took in all sail and steered their boats before the wind. Even without a stitch of canvas set, the boats surfed wildly down the crests of the waves. “Flashes of lightning were quick and vivid,” Chase wrote, “and the rain came down in cataracts.” Instead of being terrified, the men were exhilarated to know that each fifty-knot gust was blowing them toward their destination. “Although the danger was very great,” Nickerson remembered, “yet none seemed to dread this so much as death by starvation, and I believe none would have exchanged this terrific gale for a more moderate head wind or a calm.”
    Visibility was low that night in the driving rain. They had agreed that in the event they became separated, they would steer a course of east-southeast in the hope that they would be within sight of one another come daybreak. As usual, Chase was in the lead. Every minute or so, he turned his head to make sure he could see the other two boats. But at around eleven o’clock he glanced back and saw nothing. “It was blowing and raining at this time as if the heavens were separating,” he wrote, “and I knew not hardly at the moment what to do.” He decided to head up into the wind and hove to. After drifting for about an hour, “expecting every moment that they would come up with [us],” Chase and his men resumed their agreed-upon course, hopeful that, as had happened before, they would sight the other boats in the morning.
    “As soon as daylight appeared,” Nickerson wrote, “every man in our boat raised [himself] searching the waters.” Grabbing the masts, and one another, for support, they stood up on the seats, craning their necks for a glimpse of their lost companions on the wave-fringed horizon. But they had disappeared. “It was folly to repine at the circumstances,” Chase commented; “it could neither be remedied, nor could sorrow secure their return; but it was impossible to prevent ourselves feeling all the poignancy and bitterness that characterizes the separation of men who have long suffered in each other’s company, and whose interests and feelings fate had so closely linked together.”
    They were at latitude 32°16’ south, longitude 112 °20’ west, about six hundred miles south of Easter Island. Nineteen days from Henderson, with more than a thousand miles still left to go, Chase and his men were alone. “For many days after this accident, our progress was attended with dull and melancholy reflections,” he wrote. “We had lost the cheering of each other’s faces, that, which strange as it is, we so much required in both our mental and bodily distresses.”
    The squalls and rain continued through the next day. Chase decided to take an inventory of their remaining provisions. Thanks to his rigorous supervision, they still had a considerable store of bread left. But they had been fifty-four days at sea, and there were more than 1,200 miles between them and the island of Juan Fernandez. “Necessity began to whisper [to] us,” Chase wrote, “that a still further reduction of our allowance must take place, or we must abandon altogether the hopes of reaching the land, and