In the Heart of the Sea

make their portion last as long as possible, nibbling it almost daintily and savoring each tiny morsel with what little saliva their mouths could generate. Others ate their ration virtually whole, hoping to provide their stomachs with at least some sensation of fullness. Afterward, all of them fastidiously licked the residue from their fingers.
    That night the placid waters around Chase’s boat suddenly erupted into pale foam as something enormous slammed into the stern. Clinging to the gunwales, the men rose up from the bottom of the boat and saw that a shark, nearly as large as the killer whale that had attacked Pollard’s boat, was “swimming about us in a most ravenous manner, making attempts every now and then upon different parts of the boat, as if he would devour the very wood.” The monster snapped at the steering oar, then tried to get its massive jaws around the boat’s sternpost, as if possessed by the same gnawing hunger that was consuming all of them.
    In the bottom of the boat was a lance just like the one Chase had been tempted to hurl at the whale that sank the Essex. If they could kill this giant shark, they’d have enough food to last them for several weeks. But when Chase attempted to stab the creature, he discovered that he did not have the strength even to dent its sandpaper-like skin. “[H]e was so much larger than an ordinary [shark],” Chase wrote, “and manifested such a fearless malignity, as to make us afraid of him; and our utmost efforts, which were at first directed to kill him for prey, became in the end self-defense.” There was little the men could do as the shark pushed and slapped their whaleboat’s thin sides. Eventually, the shark grew bored with them. “Baffled . . . in all his hungry attempts upon us,” Chase wrote, “he shortly made off.”
    The next day a group of porpoises replaced the shark. For almost an hour Chase’s men did everything they could to catch one of these playful creatures. Whenever a porpoise surfaced near the boat, they tried to stab it with the lance. But as had been true with the shark, they could not, in Nickerson’s words, “muster strength sufficient to pierce through their tough hide.” While a shark is a primitive killing machine, a porpoise is one of the most intelligent mammals on earth. The porpoises’ mastery of their environment was now cruelly obvious to this boatload of starving land-dwellers. “[T]hey soon left us,” Nickerson wrote, “apparently in high glee[,] leaping from the water and . . . in full exercise of every enjoyment. Poor devils, how much they are now our superiors and yet not . . . know it.”
    For the next two days, January 17 and 18, the calms returned. “[T]he distresses of a cheerless prospect and a burning hot sun were,” Chase wrote, “once again visited upon our devoted heads.” As they approached their sixtieth day since leaving the Essex, even Chase had become convinced that it was their destiny to die. “We began to think that Divine Providence had abandoned us at last,” the first mate wrote, “and it was but an unavailing effort to endeavor to prolong a now tedious existence.” They could not help but wonder how they would die: “Horrible were the feelings that took possession of us!—The contemplation of a death of agony and torment, refined by the most dreadful and distressing reflections, absolutely prostrated both body and soul.”
    Chase called the night of January 18 “a despairing era in our sufferings.” Two months of deprivation and fear had reached an unbearable climax as they anticipated the horrors to come. “[O]ur minds were wrought up to the highest pitch of dread and apprehension for our fate,” Chase wrote, “and all in them was dark, gloomy, and confused.”
    At around eight o’clock, the darkness came to life with a familiar sound: the breathing of sperm whales. It was a black night, and the noise that had once signaled the thrill of the hunt now terrified them. “[W]e could distinctly hear the furious thrashing of their tails in the water,” Chase remembered, “and our weak minds pictured out their appalling and hideous aspects.”
    As the whales surfaced and dove around them, Richard Peterson “took an immediate fright” and pleaded with his companions to row them to safety. But no one had the strength even to lift an oar. After three whales passed the stern in rapid succession, “blowing and spouting at a terrible rate,” the pod disappeared.
    When