In the Heart of the Sea

distrust the providence of the Almighty, by giving ourselves up to despair.”
    For the next three days the wind continued out of the east, forcing them farther and farther south. “[I]t was impossible to silence the rebellious repinings of our nature,” Chase admitted. “It was our cruel lot not to have had one bright anticipation realized—not one wish of our thirsting souls gratified.”
    On January 26, the sixty-sixth day since leaving the wreck, their noon observation indicated that they had sunk to latitude 36° south, more than 600 nautical miles south of Henderson Island and 1,800 miles due west of Valparaiso, Chile. That day the searing sun gave way to a bitterly cold rain. Starvation had lowered their body temperatures by several degrees, and with few clothes to warm their thin bodies, they were now in danger of dying of hypothermia. They had no choice but to try to head north, back toward the equator.
    With the breeze out of the east, they were forced to tack, turning with the steering oar until the wind came from the starboard side of the boat. Prior to reaching Henderson, it had been a maneuver they had accomplished with ease. Now, even though the wind was quite light, they no longer had the strength to handle the steering oar or trim the sails. “[A]fter much labor, we got our boat about,” Chase remembered, “and so great was the fatigue attending this small exertion of our bodies, that we all gave up for a moment and abandoned her to her own course.”
    With no one steering or adjusting the sails, the boat drifted aimlessly. The men lay helpless and shivering in the bilge as, Chase wrote, “the horrors of our situation came upon us with a despairing force and effect.” After two hours, they finally marshaled enough strength to adjust the sails so that the boat was once again moving forward. But now they were sailing north, parallel to, but not toward, the coast of South America. Like Job before him, Chase could not help but ask, “[What] narrow hopes [still] bound us to life?”
     
    AS CHASE’S men lay immobilized by hunger in the bottom of their boat, yet another member of Hendricks’s crew died. This time it was Isaiah Sheppard, who became the third African American to die and be eaten in only seven days. The next day, January 28—the sixty-eighth day since leaving the wreck—Samuel Reed, the sole black member of Pollard’s crew, died and was eaten. That left William Bond in Hendricks’s boat as the last surviving black in the Essex ’s crew. There was little doubt who had become the tropic birds and who had become the hawks.
    Sailors commonly accepted that eating human flesh brought a person’s moral character down to the level of those “brutish savages” who voluntarily indulged in cannibalism. On Boon Island in 1710, Captain Dean had noticed a shocking transformation among his crew once they began to eat the carpenter’s body. “I found (in a few days) their natural dispositions changed,” Dean wrote, “and that affectionate, peaceable temper they had all along hitherto, discovered totally lost; their eyes staring and looking wild, their countenances fierce and barbarous.”
    But it wasn’t the act of cannibalism that lowered a survivor’s sense of civility; rather, it was his implacable hunger. During the first leg of their voyage, Chase had noticed that their sufferings had made it difficult for them to maintain “so magnanimous and devoted a character to our feelings.”
    Even under the controlled circumstances of the 1945 Minnesota starvation experiment, the participants were aware of a distressing change in their behavior. A majority of the volunteers were members of the Church of the Brethren, and many had hoped that the period of deprivation would enhance their spiritual lives. But they found just the opposite to be true. “Most of them felt that the semi-starvation had coarsened rather than refined them,” it was reported, “and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”
    In another notorious case of survival cannibalism, sailors aboard the badly damaged Peggy were reaching the final stages of starvation on the stormy Atlantic in 1765. Although they still had more than enough left of the vessel’s cargo of wine and brandy, it had been eighteen days since they’d eaten the last of their food. Emboldened by alcohol, the first mate informed the captain that he and the rest of the crew were going to kill and eat a black slave.