In the Heart of the Sea

not a whale or a hog or a tortoise. This was Lawson Thomas, a shipmate with whom they had shared two hellish months in an open boat. Whoever butchered Thomas’s body had to contend not only with the cramped quarters of a twenty-five-foot boat but also with the chaos of his own emotions.
    The crew of the Nottingham Galley, the ship that wrecked off Maine, had found it so difficult to begin the gruesome task of cutting up the carpenter’s body that they pleaded with the reluctant Captain Dean to do it for them. “[T]heir incessant prayers and entreaties at last prevailed,” Dean wrote, “and by night I had performed my labor.” Dean, like most sailors forced to resort to cannibalism, began by removing the most obvious signs of the corpse’s humanity—the head, hands, feet, and skin—and consigned them to the sea.
    If Hendricks and his men followed Dean’s example, they next would have removed Thomas’s heart, liver, and kidneys from the bloody basket of his ribs. Then they would have begun to hack the meat from the backbone, ribs, and pelvis. In any case, Pollard reported that after lighting a fire on the flat stone at the bottom of the boat, they roasted the organs and meat and began to eat.
    Instead of easing their hunger pangs, their first taste of meat only intensified their atavistic urge to eat. The saliva flowed in their mouths as their long-dormant stomachs gurgled with digestive juices. And the more they ate, the hungrier they became.
    Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the phenomenon of cannibalism have estimated that the average human adult would provide about sixty-six pounds of edible meat. But Lawson Thomas’s body was not average. Autopsies of starvation victims have revealed a dramatic atrophy of muscle tissue and a complete absence of fat—replaced, in some instances, by a translucent gelatinous substance. Starvation and dehydration had also shrunk Thomas’s internal organs, including the heart and liver. His body may have yielded as little as thirty pounds of lean, fibrous meat. On the following day, when the captain’s store of bread ran out, Pollard and his men “were glad to partake of the wretched fare with the other crew.”
    Two days later, on January 23—the sixty-third day since leaving the wreck—yet another member of Hendricks’s crew died and was eaten. And like Lawson Thomas before him, Charles Shorter was black.
    It was likely that the African Americans had suffered from an inferior diet prior to the sinking. But there may have been yet another factor at work. A recent scientific study comparing the percentage of body fat among different ethnic groups claims that American blacks tend to have less body fat than their Caucasian counterparts. Once a starving body exhausts its reserves of fat, it begins consuming muscle, a process that soon results in the deterioration of the internal organs and, eventually, death. The blacks’ initially lower amount of body fat meant that they had begun living off muscle tissue before the whites.
    The importance of body fat in determining long-term survival under starvation conditions was shown among the members of the Donner Party, a group of settlers who became snowbound in the foothills of the Sierras during the winter of 1847. Despite their reputation as the weaker sex, the women tended to outlast the men, thanks in part to their higher percentage of body fat (approximately ten percent more than males). Now that people had begun to die among the Essex crew, it was no accident that the first to go (with the exception of the sickly Matthew Joy, who, in Chase’s words, “did not die of absolute starvation”) were African American.
    Of the whites, the Essex ’s twenty-nine-year-old captain had an advantage. He was short, had a tendency toward corpulence prior to the ordeal, and being older had a lower metabolic rate. Of these twenty sailors, Pollard was the most likely to survive this ordeal of starvation. Yet, given the complex range of factors—psychological as well as physiological—influencing each man’s health, it was impossible to predict with total precision who would live and who would die.
     
    MORE than a hundred miles to the south, as their shipmates consumed their second body in four days, Owen Chase and his men drifted in a windless sea. A week of eating only one and a half ounces of bread a day had left them “hardly able to crawl around the boat, and possessing but strength enough to convey our scanty