In the Heart of the Sea

cost, the night before. He cried out that he would not give up and that he would live as long as any of them. “[T]his effort was,” Chase wrote, “but the hectic fever of the moment.” Cole soon returned to the bottom of the boat, where he lay despairing for the rest of the day and through the night. But Cole would not be permitted the dignity of a quiet and peaceful death.
    VOYAGES OF THE ESSEX WHALEBOATS
    November 22, 1820 to February 23, 1821

    On the morning of February 8, the seventy-ninth day since leaving the Essex, Cole began to rant incoherently, presenting to his frightened crew members “a most miserable spectacle of madness.” Twitching spasmodically, he sat up and called for a napkin and water, then fell down to the bottom of the boat as if struck dead, only to pop up again like a possessed jack-in-the-box. By ten o’clock he could no longer speak. Chase and the others placed him on a board they had laid across the seats and covered him with a few pieces of clothing.
    For the next six hours, Cole whimpered and moaned in pain, finally falling into “the most horrid and frightful convulsions” Chase had ever seen. In addition to dehydration and hypernatremia (an excess amount of salt), he may have been suffering from a lack of magnesium, a mineral deficiency that, when extreme, can cause bizarre and violent behavior. By four o’clock in the afternoon, Isaac Cole was dead.
    It had been forty-three days since they’d left Henderson Island, seventy-eight days since they’d last seen the Essex, but no one suggested—at least that afternoon—that they use Cole’s body for food. All night the corpse lay beside them, each man keeping his thoughts to himself.
    When the crew of the Peggy shot and killed a black slave in 1765, one of the men refused to wait for the meat to be cooked. “[B]eing ravenously impatient for food,” the sailor plunged his hand into the slave’s eviscerated body and plucked out the liver and ate it raw. “The unhappy man paid dear for such an extravagant impatience,” Captain Harrison wrote, “for in three days after he died raving mad.” Instead of eating that sailor’s body, the crew, “being fearful of sharing his fate,” threw it overboard. No one dared to consume the flesh of a man who had died insane.
    The next morning, February 9, Lawrence and Nickerson began making preparations for burying Cole’s remains. Chase stopped them. All night he had wrestled with the question of what they should do. With only three days of hardtack left, he knew, it was quite possible that they might be reduced to casting lots. Better to eat a dead shipmate—even a tainted shipmate—than be forced to kill a man.
    “I addressed them,” Chase wrote, “on the painful subject of keeping the body for food.” Lawrence and Nickerson raised no objections and, fearful that the meat had already begun to spoil, “[we] set to work as fast as we were able.”
    After separating the limbs from the body and removing the heart, they sewed up what remained of Cole’s body “as decently” as they could, before they committed it to the sea. Then they began to eat. Even before lighting a fire, the men “eagerly devoured” the heart, then ate “sparingly of a few pieces of the flesh.” They cut the rest of the meat into thin strips—some of which they roasted on the fire, while the others were laid out to dry in the sun.
    Chase insisted that he had “no language to paint the anguish of our souls in this dreadful dilemma.” Making it all the worse was the thought that any one of the remaining three men might be next. “We knew not then,” the first mate wrote, “to whose lot it would fall next, either to die or be shot, and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.”
    The next morning they discovered that the strips of flesh had turned a rancid green. They immediately cooked the strips, which provided them with enough meat to last another six or seven days, allowing them to save what little bread they had left for what Chase called “the last moment of our trial.”
     
    IN CAPTAIN Pollard’s boat, on February 11, only five days after the execution of Owen Coffin, Barzillai Ray died. Ray, whose biblical first name means “made of iron, most firm and true,” was nineteen years old. It was the seventh death George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell had witnessed in the month and a half since departing Henderson Island.
    Psychologists studying the phenomenon of battle fatigue