In the Heart of the Sea

during World War II discovered that no soldiers—regardless of how strong their emotional makeup might be—were able to function if their unit experienced losses of 75 percent or more. Pollard and Ramsdell were suffering from a double burden; not only had they seen seven of nine men die (and even killed one of them), but they had been forced to eat their bodies. Like Pip, the black sailor in Moby-Dick who loses his mind after several hours of treading water on a boundless sea, Pollard and Ramsdell had been “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro.” Now they were alone, with only the corpse of Barzillai Ray and the bones of Coffin and Reed to sustain them.
    Three days later, on February 14, the eighty-fifth day since leaving the wreck, Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson ate the last of Isaac Cole. A week of living off human flesh, combined with their earlier decision to increase their daily ration of hardtack, had strengthened them to the point where they could once again manage the steering oar. But if they were stronger, they were also in a great deal of pain. As if the boils that covered their skin weren’t enough, their arms and legs started to swell shockingly. Known as edema, this disfiguring accumulation of fluid is a common symptom of starvation.
    Several days of westerly winds had brought them to within three hundred miles of the islands of Masafuera and Juan Fernandez. If they averaged sixty miles a day, they might reach safety in another five days. Unfortunately, they had only three days of hardtack left.
    “Matters were now with us at their height,” Chase wrote. “[A]ll hope was cast upon the breeze; and we tremblingly and fearfully awaited its progress, and the dreadful development of our destiny.” Surrendering all prospects, the men were convinced that after two and a half months of suffering they were about to die nearly within sight of salvation.
    That night Owen Chase lay down to sleep, “almost indifferent whether I should ever see the light again.” He dreamed he saw a ship, just a few miles away, and even though he “strained every nerve to get to her,” she sailed off into the distance, never to return. Chase awoke “almost overpowered with the frenzy I had caught in my slumbers, and stung with the cruelties of a diseased and disappointed imagination.”
    The next afternoon, Chase saw a thick cloud to the northeast—a sure sign of land. It must be the island of Masafuera—at least that was what Chase told Lawrence and Nickerson. In two days, he assured them, they would be on dry land. At first, his companions were reluctant to believe him. Gradually, however, after “repeated assurances of the favorable appearances of things” on the part of Chase, “their spirits acquired even a degree of elasticity that was truly astonishing.” The wind remained favorable all night, and with their sails trimmed perfectly and a man tending the steering oar, their little boat made the best time of the voyage.
    The next morning the cloud still loomed ahead. The end of their ordeal was apparently only days away. But for fifteen-year-old Thomas Nickerson, the strain of anticipation had become too much. After bailing out the boat, he lay down, drew the mildewed piece of canvas over him like a shroud, and told his fellow crew members that “he wished to die immediately.”
    “I saw that he had given up,” Chase wrote, “and I attempted to speak a few words of comfort and encouragement to him.” But all the arguments that had served the first mate so well failed to penetrate Nickerson’s inner gloom. “A fixed look of settled and forsaken despondency came over his face,” Chase wrote. “[H]e lay for some time silent, sullen, and sorrowful—and I felt at once . . . that the coldness of death was fast gathering upon him.”
    It was obvious to Chase that some form of dementia had seized the boy. Having watched Isaac Cole slip into a similar madness, Chase could not help but wonder if all of them were about to succumb to the temptations of despair. “[T]here was a sudden and unaccountable earnestness in his manner,” he wrote, “that alarmed me, and made me fear that I myself might unexpectedly be overtaken by a like weakness, or dizziness of nature, that would bereave me at once of both reason and life.” Whether or not it had been communicated to him through Cole’s diseased flesh, Chase also felt