In the Heart of the Sea

1,500 miles from the coast of South America, with only the half-eaten corpse of Samuel Reed to keep them alive.
    But no matter how grim their prospects might seem, they were better than those of Hendricks’s boat-crew. Without a compass or a quadrant, Hendricks and his men were now lost in an empty and limitless sea.
     
    ON FEBRUARY 6, the four men on Pollard’s boat, having consumed “the last morsel” of Samuel Reed, began to “[look] at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds,” according to one survivor, “but we held our tongues.” Then the youngest of them, sixteen-year-old Charles Ramsdell, uttered the unspeakable. They should cast lots, he said, to see who would be killed so that the rest could live.
    The drawing of lots in a survival situation had long been an accepted custom of the sea. The earliest recorded instance dates back to the first half of the seventeenth century, when seven Englishmen sailing from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts were driven out to sea in a storm. After seventeen days, one of the crew suggested that they cast lots. As it turned out, the lot fell to the man who had originally made the proposal, and after lots were cast again to see who should execute him, he was killed and eaten.
    In 1765, several days after the crew of the disabled Peggy had eaten the remains of the black slave, lots were drawn to see who would be the next to serve as food. The lot fell to David Flatt, a foremastman and one of the most popular sailors in the crew. “The shock of the decision was great,” wrote Captain Harrison, “and the preparations for execution dreadful.” Flatt requested that he be given some time to prepare himself for death, and the crew agreed to postpone the execution until eleven the next morning. The dread of his death sentence proved too much for Flatt. By midnight he had become deaf; by morning he was delirious. Incredibly, a rescue ship was sighted at eight o’clock. But for David Flatt it was too late. Even after the Peggy ’s crew had been delivered to England, Harrison reported that “the unhappy Flatt still continued out of his senses.”
    Drawing lots was not a practice to which a Quaker whaleman could, in good conscience, agree. Friends not only have a testimony against killing people but also do not allow games of chance. Charles Ramsdell, the son of a cabinetmaker, was a Congregationalist. However, both Owen Coffin and Barzillai Ray were members of Nantucket’s Friends Meeting. Although Pollard was not a Quaker, his grandparents had been, and his great-grandmother, Mehitable Pollard, had been a minister.
    Faced with similarly dire circumstances, other sailors made different decisions. In 1811, the 139-ton brig Polly, on her way from Boston to the Caribbean, was dismasted in a storm, and the crew drifted on the waterlogged hull for 191 days. Although some of the men died from hunger and exposure, their bodies were never used for food; instead, they were used as bait. Attaching pieces of their dead shipmate’s bodies to a trolling line, the survivors managed to catch enough sharks to sustain themselves until their rescue. If the Essex crew had adopted this strategy with the death of Matthew Joy, they might never have reached the extreme that confronted them now.
    When first presented with young Ramsdell’s proposal, Captain Pollard “would not listen to it,” according to an account related by Nickerson, “saying to the others, ‘No, but if I die first you are welcome to subsist on my remains.’” Then Owen Coffin, Pollard’s first cousin, the eighteen-year-old son of his aunt, joined Ramsdell in requesting that they cast lots.
    Pollard studied his three young companions. Starvation had ringed their sunken eyes with a dark, smudgelike pigmentation. There was little doubt that they were all close to death. It was also clear that all of them, including Barzillai Ray, the orphaned son of a noted island cooper, were in favor of Ramsdell’s proposal. As he had two times before—after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream and the sinking of the Essex —Pollard acquiesced to the majority. He agreed to cast lots. If suffering had turned Chase into a compassionate yet forceful leader, Pollard’s confidence had been eroded even further by events that reduced him to the most desperate extreme a man can ever know.
    They cut up a scrap of paper and placed the pieces in a hat. The lot fell to Owen Coffin. “My lad, my lad!” Pollard cried out. “[I]f you