In the Heart of the Sea

each sailor donated a dollar toward their assistance. When this was combined with money collected from the American and British residents of Valparaiso, the Essex survivors had more than $500 to help defray the costs of their convalescence.
    But the men’s sufferings were not yet over. As the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment discovered in 1945, the recovery period was a torturous part of the ordeal. After three months, the Minnesota volunteers still had not returned to their normal weights, even though some were consuming more than five thousand calories a day. They would eat until their stomachs could not take any more, yet they still felt hungry. Many would continue to eat between meals. It wasn’t until after six months of “supernormal eating” that they had regained the bodies they had once possessed.
    The Essex survivors were in much worse shape than the volunteers in the Minnesota experiment. After three months of abuse, their digestive systems had a difficult time handling the intake of increased quantities of food—a problem shared by Captain David Harrison of the Peggy in 1765. Upon his rescue, Harrison was given some chicken broth. It had been thirty-seven days since he’d last had a bowel movement, and soon after drinking some of the broth, he was wracked by excruciating abdominal pain. “I was . . . at last relieved,” Harrison wrote, “by the discharge of a callous lump about the size of a hen’s egg, and enjoyed a tranquillity of body, notwithstanding all my disorders, with which I was utterly unacquainted for some preceding weeks.”
    The day after their arrival in Valparaiso, Chase and his men received a visit from the governor, who had heard rumors that, instead of being the survivors of a wreck, the first mate and his men had killed the Essex ’s captain in a bloody mutiny. “For there was a whispering abroad,” Nickerson wrote, “that foul play had been used by us.” The governor was reassured enough by Chase’s story that he allowed the Nantucketers to go freely about the city as soon as they were able.
     
    A WEEK and a half later, on March 9, the Nantucket whaleship Hero arrived in Valparaiso. While cutting in a whale off St. Mary’s Island, she’d been attacked by Spanish pirates. The Spaniards imprisoned the captain and the cabin boy on shore, then locked the rest of the crew belowdecks and began to ransack the ship. When an unknown vessel appeared in the harbor, the pirates returned briefly to shore, allowing first mate Obed Starbuck to burst open the cabin door and retake the ship. Starbuck ordered his men to set sail, and although the pirates came to within yards of catching up to the fleeing whaleship, the Nantucketers were able to reach safety.
    As dramatic as that report was, the Hero bore even more sensational news. With mate Starbuck acting as skipper, the Hero had encountered three whaleships sailing together as an informal group—the Dauphin, the Diana, and the Two Brothers. Captain Zimri Coffin of the Dauphin told Starbuck that he had the captain of the Essex and another crew member aboard. Shortly afterward, Pollard and Ramsdell were transferred to the Two Brothers, which was headed for Valparaiso.
    It arrived on March 17. The five survivors had last seen one another on the night of January 12, when their boats had become separated in a howling gale more than two thousand miles out to sea. Since then, two of Chase’s crew had died, four of Pollard’s, and three of Joy’s (then under Hendricks’s leadership) before the second mate’s boat and the three remaining men disappeared. Only Nantucketers had emerged from Pollard’s and Chase’s whaleboats alive.
    They had all suffered terribly, but it was Pollard and Ramsdell—found clutching the bones of their dead companions—who had come the closest to complete psychic disintegration. Of the anguish each of these two experienced, Pollard’s was perhaps the greater. A year and a half earlier, his aunt had entrusted him with the care and protection of her oldest son, Owen. Pollard had not only presided over his cousin’s execution but had eaten his flesh, thus participating in what one historian of cannibalism at sea has called the taboo of “gastronomic incest.”
    Pollard had demonstrated remarkable stamina immediately after his rescue, but his urgent need to tell his tale had almost killed him. Soon after that first night, he suffered a relapse. When Captain William Coffin of the