In the Heart of the Sea

Peterson’s panic had receded, he talked with Chase about his religious beliefs. Although he knew his own death was imminent, Peterson’s faith in God remained undiminished. “[H]e reasoned very sensibly,” Chase wrote, “and with much composure.” Peterson had a wife back in New York City, and he asked Chase to contact her if the first mate should ever reach home alive.
    The next day, January 19, the wind blew so fiercely that they had to take in their sails and lie to. Lightning flashed and the rain poured down as the wind shifted through “every point of the compass.” As their little craft tossed in the confused seas, Peterson lay between the seats of the boat, “utterly dispirited and broken down.” That evening the wind finally settled into the east-northeast.
    On January 20, exactly two months since the sinking of the Essex, Richard Peterson declared that it was his time to die. When Chase offered Peterson his daily ration of bread, he refused it, saying, “It may be of service to someone but can be of none to me.” Soon after, he lost the power of speech.
    Modern-day proponents of euthanasia have long endorsed the combined effects of starvation and dehydration as a painless and dignified way for a terminally ill patient to die. In the final stages, hunger pangs cease, as does the sensation of thirst. The patient slips into unconsciousness as the deterioration of his internal organs results in a peaceful death. This was apparently how Richard Peterson passed away. “[T]he breath appeared to be leaving his body without the least pain,” Chase reported, “and at four o’clock he was gone.”
    The next day, at latitude 35 °07’ south, longitude 105 °46’ west, a thousand miles from Juan Fernandez, Peterson’s body joined Joy’s in the vast burial ground of the sea.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Games of Chance

    O N JANUARY 20, 1821, eight days after losing sight of Chase’s boat, Pollard’s and Hendricks’s men were coming to the end of their provisions. That day, Lawson Thomas, one of the blacks on Hendricks’s boat, died. With barely a pound of hardtack left to share among ten men, Hendricks and his crew dared speak of a subject that had been on all their minds: whether they should eat, instead of bury, the body.
    For as long as men had been sailing the world’s oceans, famished sailors had been sustaining themselves on the remains of dead shipmates. By the early nineteenth century, cannibalism at sea was so widespread that survivors often felt compelled to inform their rescuers if they had not resorted to it since, according to one historian, “suspicion of this practice among starving castaways was a routine reaction.” One of the most thoroughly documented cases of cannibalism occurred in the winter of 1710, when the Nottingham Galley, a British trading vessel under the command of Captain John Dean, wrecked on Boon Island, a tiny outcropping of rock just off the coast of Maine. Despite being within sight of the mainland, the men found themselves marooned with no provisions and no way of reaching help. When the ship’s carpenter died in the third week, one of the crew suggested that they use their shipmate’s body for food. Captain Dean initially found the proposal to be “most grievous and shocking.” Then, as they stood over the carpenter’s dead body, a discussion ensued. “After abundance of mature thought and consultation about the lawfulness or sinfulness on the one hand, and the absolute necessity on the other,” Dean wrote, “judgment, conscience, etc. were obliged to submit to the more prevailing arguments of our craving appetites.”
    One hundred and eleven years later, in the middle of the Pacific, ten men of the Essex reached a similar conclusion. Two months after deciding to spurn the Society Islands because, in Pollard’s words, “we feared we should be devoured by cannibals,” they were about to eat one of their own shipmates.
    First they had to butcher the body. On Nantucket there was a slaughterhouse at the foot of Old North Wharf where any island boy could watch a cow or sheep be transformed into marketable cuts of meat. On a whaleship it was the black members of the crew who prepared and cooked the food. In the case of the Essex, more than thirty hogs and dozens of tortoises had been butchered by the African American cook before the whale attack. And, of course, all twenty crew members had taken part in the cutting up of several dozen sperm whales. But this was