In the Heart of the Sea

rely wholly on the chance of being taken up by a vessel.”
    They were already on half provisions, eating only three ounces of bread a day. “[H]ow to reduce the daily quantity of food, with any regard to life itself, was a question of the utmost consequence.” Three ounces of hardtack provided them with only two hundred and fifty calories a day, less than 15 percent of their daily needs. Chase told his men that they had no choice but to cut these half rations once again—to only one and a half ounces of bread a day. This, he knew, “must, in short time, reduce us to mere skeletons again.”
    It was a terrifying dilemma, and Chase did not arrive at the decision easily. “It required a great effort to bring matters to this dreadful alternative,” he wrote. “[E]ither . . . feed our bodies and our hopes a little longer, or in the agonies of hunger to seize upon and devour our provisions, and coolly await the approach of death.” Somewhere to the north of them, their companions were about to discover the consequences of taking the latter course.
     
    THE men in Pollard’s and Hendricks’s boats were just as gravely affected by the separation. They continued on, however, almost confident that they would once again meet up with Chase’s boat. That day, January 14, Obed Hendricks’s boat ran out of provisions. For Hendricks and his five crew members—Joseph West, Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, and William Bond—the question was whether Pollard would be willing to share his boat’s provisions.
    Having placed Hendricks in command of the second mate’s boat only three days before, Pollard could not easily deny his former boatsteerer some of his own stock of food. And if he was willing to feed Hendricks, he would have to feed the other five. So Pollard and his men shared with them what little bread they had, knowing full well that in only a few more days there would be nothing left.
    Chase’s separation from Pollard and Hendricks saved the first mate from having to face this painful predicament. From the beginning, Chase had strictly, even obsessively, attended to the distribution of rations aboard his boat. To throw open his sea chest of provisions to Hendricks’s men, all of them off-islanders who had begun the ordeal with the same amount of bread as his crew, would have been, from Chase’s perspective, an act of collective suicide. Earlier in the ordeal the men had discussed the possibility of having to share their provisions if one of the crews should lose their stock. “[S]uch a course of conduct,” Chase wrote, “was calculated to weaken the chances of a final deliverance for some, and might be the only means of consigning every soul of us to a horrid death of starvation.” For Chase, intent on getting himself and his boat-crew to safety, no matter what, the separation from Pollard’s and Hendricks’s boats could not have been better timed.
    On the same day that Chase cut his crew’s daily ration of bread in half, the wind gradually died to nothing. The clouds thinned until the sun’s rays once again became overwhelming. In desperation, Chase and his men tore the sails from the spars and hid beneath the salt-encrusted canvas. Swaddling themselves in the sails, they lay down in the bottom of the boat and “abandoned her,” the first mate wrote, “to the mercy of the waves.”
    Despite the severity of the sun, the men did not complain of thirst. After a week of drinking their fill at Henderson Island, they had been rehydrated to the extent that food had replaced water as their most desperate need. In fact some of the men were now suffering from diarrhea—a common symptom of starvation—which Chase attributed to the “relaxing effects of the water.” As he put it, “we were fast wasting away.”
    While the body can rebound quite quickly from dehydration, it takes a frustratingly long time to recover from the effects of starvation. During World War II, the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene conducted what scientists and relief workers still regard today as a benchmark study of starvation. Partly funded by religious groups, including the Society of Friends, the study was intended to help the Allies cope with released concentration-camp internees, prisoners of war, and refugees. The participants were all conscientious objectors who volunteered to lose 25 percent of their body weight over six months.
    The experiment was supervised by Dr. Ancel