In the Heart of the Sea

don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.” Then the captain offered to take the lot himself. “Who can doubt but that Pollard would rather have met the death a thousand times,” Nickerson wrote. “None that knew him, will ever doubt.”
    But Coffin had already resigned himself to his fate. “I like it as well as any other,” he said softly.
    Lots were drawn again to see who would shoot the boy. It fell to Coffin’s friend, Charles Ramsdell.
    Even though the lottery had originally been his idea, Ramsdell now refused to follow it through. “For a long time,” Nickerson wrote, “he declared that he could never do it, but finally had to submit.” Before he died, Coffin spoke a parting message to his mother, which Pollard promised to deliver if he should make it back to Nantucket. Then Coffin asked for a few moments of silence. After reassuring the others that “the lots had been fairly drawn,” he lay his head down on the boat’s gunwale. “He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would later recall, “and nothing of him left.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
    In the Eagle’s Shadow

    C HASE AND HIS MEN lay in the bottom of their boat in a cold drizzle. All they had to shield them from the rain was a piece of tattered, water-soaked canvas. “Even had it been dry,” Nickerson wrote, “[it] would have been but a poor apology for covering.”
    On January 28, 1821, the breeze finally shifted into the west. But it brought them little comfort. “It had nearly become indifferent to us,” Chase wrote, “from what quarter it blew.” They now had too far to go and too few provisions to have any hope of reaching land. Their only chance was to be sighted by a ship. “[I]t was this narrow hope alone,” Chase remembered, “that prevented me from lying down at once to die.”
    They had fourteen days of hardtack left, but that assumed they could live two more weeks on only an ounce and a half a day. “We were so feeble,” Nickerson wrote, “that we could scarcely crawl about the boat upon our hands and knees.” Chase realized that if he didn’t increase their daily portion of bread, they all might be dead in as few as five days. It was time to abandon the strict rationing regime that had brought them this far and let the men eat “as pinching necessity demanded.”
    Success in a long-term survival situation requires that a person display an “active-passive” approach to the gradual and agonizing unfolding of events. “The key factor . . . [is] the realization that passivity is itself a deliberate and ‘active’ act,” the survival psychologist John Leach writes. “There is strength in passivity.” After more than two months of regimenting every aspect of his men’s lives, Chase intuitively understood this—that it was now time to give “ourselves wholly up to the guidance and disposal of our Creator.” They would eat as much bread as they needed to stave off death and see where the westerly wind took them.
    By February 6 they were still alive, but just barely. “Our sufferings were now drawing to a close,” the first mate wrote. “[A] terrible death appeared shortly to await us.” The slight increase in food intake had brought a return to their hunger pangs, which were now “violent and outrageous.” They found it difficult to talk and think clearly. Dreams of food and drink continued to torment them. “[O]ften did our fevered minds wander to the side of some richly supplied table,” Nickerson remembered. His fantasies always ended the same way—with him “crying at the disappointment.”
    That night, rain squalls forced them to shorten sail. The off-islander Isaac Cole was on watch, and rather than awaken his companions, he attempted to lower the jib himself. But it proved too much for him. Chase and Nickerson awoke the next morning to find Cole despondent in the bilge of the boat. He declared that “all was dark in his mind, not a single ray of hope was left for him to dwell upon.” Like Richard Peterson before him, he had given up, asserting that “it was folly and madness to be struggling against what appeared so palpably to be our fixed and settled destiny.”
    Even though he barely had the strength to articulate the words, Chase did his best to change Cole’s mind. “I remonstrated with him as effectually as the weakness both of my body and understanding would allow of.” Suddenly Cole sat up and crawled to the bow and hoisted the jib he had lowered, at such