In the Heart of the Sea

morsel to our mouths.” Boils had begun to break out on their skin. On the morning of January 24, with another day of calms and broiling sun ahead of them, Chase was certain that some of his crew would not see nightfall. “[W]hat it was that buoyed me above all the terrors which surrounded us,” Chase wrote, “God alone knows.”
    That night, the first mate had a vivid dream. He had just sat down to a “splendid and rich repast, where there was everything that the most dainty appetite could desire.” But just as he reached for his first taste of food, he “awoke to the cold realities of my miserable situation.” Fired to a kind of madness by his dream, Chase began to gnaw on the leather sheathing of an oar only to find that he lacked the strength in his jaws to penetrate the stiff, salt-caked hide.
    With the death of Peterson, Chase’s crew had been whittled down to only three—Nantucketers Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson, along with Isaac Cole from Rochester, Massachusetts. As their sufferings mounted, the men relied increasingly on the first mate. Chase reported that they “press[ed] me continually with questions upon the probability of our reaching land again. I kept constantly rallying my spirits to enable me to afford them comfort.”
    Chase had changed since the beginning of the ordeal. Instead of the harsh disciplinarian who had doled out rations with a gun by his side, he now spoke to the men in what Nickerson described as an almost cheerful voice. As their torments reached new heights, Chase recognized that it wasn’t discipline his men needed but encouragement. For as they had all seen with Peterson, hope was all that stood between them and death.
    Chase’s ability to adjust his manner of leadership to the needs of his men begs comparison to one of the greatest and most revered leaders of all time, Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton’s feat of delivering all twenty-seven men of his Antarctic expedition to safety has been called “the supreme epic of leadership in totally impossible circumstances.” In 1916, after seventeen months of fighting the cruelest conditions imaginable—which included a grueling trek across the pack-ice, two voyages in tiny, whaleboat-size craft over a storm-tossed Southern Ocean, and a terrifying hike across the jagged peaks of South Georgia—Shackleton finally reached a whaling station and safety, then returned to rescue those he had left behind on Elephant Island.
    Shackleton’s sensitivity to the needs of his men was legendary. “So great was his care of his people,” his associate Frank Worsley wrote, “that, to rough men, it seemed at times to have a touch of the woman about it, even to the verge of fussiness.” But Shackleton was also capable of insisting on a Bligh-like discipline. On an earlier expedition, when one of the men felt his freedoms were being infringed upon, Shackleton quelled the insurrection by knocking the man to the ground. This combination of decisive, authoritative action and an ability to empathize with others is rarely found in a single leader. But Chase, at twenty-three (almost half Shackleton’s age), had learned to move beyond the ruthless intensity of a fishy man and do everything in his power to lift his men from the depths of despair.
    Nickerson called the first mate a “remarkable man” and recognized Chase’s genius for identifying hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. Having already endured so much, Chase reasoned, they owed it to one another to cling as tenaciously to life as possible: “I reasoned with them, and told them that we would not die sooner by keeping our hopes.” But it was more than a question of loyalty to one another. As far as Chase was concerned, God was also involved in this struggle for survival. “[T]he dreadful sacrifices and privations we [had] endured were to preserve us from death,” he assured them, “and were not to be put in competition with the price which we set upon our lives.” In addition to saying it would be “unmanly to repine at what neither admitted of alleviation nor cure,” Chase insisted that “it was our solemn duty to recognize in our calamities an overruling divinity, by whose mercy we might be suddenly snatched from peril, and to rely upon him alone, ‘Who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.’” Although they had seen little evidence of the Lord’s mercy in the last two months, Chase insisted that they “bear up against all evils . . . and not weakly