In the Heart of the Sea

The captain refused to take part and, too weak to oppose them, overheard the terrifying sounds of the execution and subsequent feast from the cabin. A few days later, the crew appeared at the captain’s door, looking for another man to kill. “I . . . [told them] that the poor Negro’s death had done them no service,” Captain Harrison wrote, “as they were as greedy and as emaciated as ever. . . . The answer which they gave to this, was, that they were now hungry, and must have something to eat.”
    Like the crew of the Peggy, the Essex survivors were no longer operating under the rules of conduct that had governed their lives prior to the ordeal; they were members of what psychologists studying the effects of the Nazi concentration camps have called a “modern feral community”—a group of people reduced to “an animal state very closely approaching ‘raw’ motivation.” Just as concentration camp inmates underwent, in the words of one psychologist, “starvation . . . in a state of extreme stress,” so did the men of the Essex live from day to day not knowing which one of them would be the next to die.
    Under these circumstances, survivors typically undergo a process of psychic deadening that one Auschwitz survivor described as a tendency to “kill my feelings.” Another woman expressed it as an amoral, even immoral, will to live: “Nothing else counted but that I wanted to live. I would have stolen from husband, child, parent or friend, in order to accomplish this. Therefore, every day I disciplined myself with a sort of low, savage cunning, to bend every effort, to devote every fiber of my being, to do those things which would make that possible.”
    Within a feral community, it is not uncommon for subgroups to develop as a collective form of defense against the remorseless march of horror, and it was here that the Nantucketers—their ties of kinship and religion stitching them together—had an overwhelming advantage. Since there would be no black survivors to contradict the testimonies of the whites, the possibility exists that the Nantucketers took a far more active role in insuring their own survival than has been otherwise suggested. Certainly the statistics raise suspicion—of the first four sailors to be eaten all were black. Short of murdering the black crew members, the Nantucketers could have refused to share meat with them.
    However, except for the fact that the majority of the blacks were assigned to a whaleboat commanded by a sickly mate, there is no evidence of overt favoritism in the boats. Indeed, what appears to have distinguished the men of the Essex was the great discipline and human compunction they maintained throughout the whole ordeal. If necessity forced them to act like animals, they did so with the deepest regrets. There was a reason why William Bond in Hendricks’s boat was the last African American left alive. Thanks to his position as steward in the officers’ quarters, Bond had enjoyed a far more balanced and plentiful diet than his shipmates in the forecastle. But now that he was the only black among six whites, Bond had to wonder what the future held.
    Given the cruel mathematics of survival cannibalism, each death not only provided the remaining men with food but reduced by one the number of people they had to share it with. By the time Samuel Reed died on January 28, the seven survivors each received close to three thousand calories’ worth of meat (up by almost a third since the death of Lawson Thomas). Unfortunately, even though this portion may have been roughly equivalent to each man’s share of a Galapagos tortoise, it lacked the fat that the human body requires to digest meat. No matter how much meat they now had available to them, it was of limited nutritional value without a source of fat.
    The following night, January 29, was darker than most. The two boat-crews were finding it difficult to keep track of each other; they also lacked the strength to manage the steering oars and sails. That night, Pollard and his men looked up to find that the whaleboat containing Obed Hendricks, William Bond, and Joseph West had disappeared. Pollard’s men were too weak to attempt to find the missing boat—either by raising a lantern or firing a pistol. That left George Pollard, Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Barzillai Ray— all Nantucketers—alone for the first time since the sinking of the Essex. They were at latitude 35° south, longitude 100° west,