In the Heart of the Sea

Nantucket whaleship Eagle offered the Essex survivors passage home, Pollard was judged to be too weak for a voyage around Cape Horn. On March 23, Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell bid farewell to their captain and left for Nantucket. In May, after two months of recuperation and solitary reflection, Pollard followed them in the whaleship Two Brothers.
     
    IN THE meantime, Commodore Ridgely, commander of the Constellation, had made arrangements for the rescue of Chappel, Weeks, and Wright from (as he was told) Ducie Island. Recently arrived in Valparaiso was the Surry, a trading vessel from Australia being loaded with fifteen thousand bushels of wheat. Her captain, Thomas Raine, agreed to stop at Ducie on his way back to Sydney and pick up the three Essex crew members, assuming, of course, they were still alive.
    The Surry left South America on March 10. Captain Raine and his crew arrived at Ducie Island less than a month later, only to find the tiny coral atoll uninhabited. The shore was so thick with nesting birds it was impossible to walk without stepping on eggs. Raine decided that no one had visited this necklace of coral in a very long time.
    He studied his navigational guide and wondered if the Essex officers might have mistaken an island two hundred miles to the west for Ducie. A few days later, on April 9, Henderson Island came within view. They approached it from the east, then began to follow the coastline to the north. Upon rounding a rocky headland they found a “spacious bay” to the west. Raine ordered one of his men to fire a gun.
     
    AT THAT moment, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright had just sat down to eat a tropic bird. Except for some berries and shellfish, birds and eggs were the only food left on Henderson. The landcrabs had disappeared. A few months before, the men had succeeded in catching five green turtles, but by the time they had eaten just one of the turtles, the meat on the other four had spoiled. Over the last four months, the tropic birds had proved exceptionally difficult to find, so the bird they had now was, for them, a bountiful feast. But food was not their gravest concern. What they still needed most was water.
    From the day after their seventeen shipmates left for Easter Island, the spring of freshwater never again emerged above the tide line. At low tide they could see freshwater bubbling up to the ocean’s surface from the rock, but for the rest of their time on Henderson the spring always remained covered by saltwater.
    In desperation, Chappel, Weeks, and Wright dug a series of wells but were unable to reach groundwater. When it rained they would greedily collect the water that accumulated in the hollows of nearby rocks. Dehydration caused their tongues to swell and their lips to crack. After a five-day stretch without water, they reluctantly sucked the blood of a tropic bird but found themselves “much disordered” by it. While searching the crevices and caves for water, they discovered the remains of the eight unidentified castaways, whose fate they feared would soon be their own. The skeletons lay side by side as if the people had decided to lie down and quietly die together. For Chappel, who had once been the wildest and least responsible of the Essex ’s crew, it was a sight that helped change his life. From that day forward, he would look to God. “I found religion not only useful,” he later wrote, “but absolutely necessary to enable me to bear up under these severe trials.”
    When Chappel, Weeks, and Wright, crouched around their tropic-bird feast, heard a distant booming, they assumed it was thunder, but one of the men decided to walk down to the beach and have a look. Later he would tell what had happened as soon as he saw the ship: “The poor fellow,” one of the Surry ’s crew members reported, “was so overpowered with the emotions such a sight excited in his breast, he could not go to tell his companions the joyful news.” Finally, however, they, too, grew curious and joined him at the beach.
    A high surf was breaking on the ledge of coral surrounding the island. Several times the crew of the Surry attempted to land a boat, but the conditions proved too dangerous. The three desperate men stood on the beach, increasingly fearful that their rescuers would decide to abandon them. Finally Chappel, the strongest of the three and the only one who knew how to swim, dove into the sea. His arms were skin and bone but with the adrenaline coursing through