In the Heart of the Sea

him, he reached the launch and was pulled aboard.
    The Surry ’s crew discussed what to do next. They might have to return the following day for the other two men. But Chappel refused to abandon his two shipmates even temporarily. With a rope tied around his waist, he dove into the water and swam back over the coral to the beach. One at a time, the three of them were pulled out to the boat. They suffered many cuts and bruises from the reef, but all made it to the Surry alive.
    Captain Raine judged that the three of them would have been dead after another month on the island. Their clothes were mere rags; among them they had only a single pair of pants. Somehow one of them had been able to save his seaman’s certificate, on which he had kept a record of their days spent on Henderson. They told Raine that Captain Pollard had left several letters in a box nailed to a tree, and the next day Raine was able to land on the island and retrieve the letters.

    THE only Essex crew members not accounted for were the three men—Obed Hendricks, Joseph West, and William Bond—in the second mate’s boat, which separated from Pollard’s on the night of January 29. Months later, long after Captain Raine had searched Ducie Island, the atoll to the east of Henderson, another ship touched down there. The crew discovered a whaleboat washed up on the brittle shore, with four skeletons inside. In 1825 the British navy captain Frederick William Beechey, who visited both Ducie and Henderson Islands, made the connection between this ghostly vessel of bones and the lost Essex boat. If this was indeed the second mate’s whaleboat and the skeletons belonged to Hendricks, West, Bond, and perhaps Isaiah Sheppard, the last of the crew to die before the separation from Pollard, then it had drifted for more than a thousand miles, finally coming to rest within a day’s sail of where it had started on December 27, 1820.
     
    IN 1820-21, as the Essex boat-crews struggled east under a blistering sun, their kin on Nantucket were suffering through one of the coldest winters in the island’s history. On the day that the three whaleboats left Henderson Island, Obed Macy, Nantucket’s historian, recorded in his journal that the harbor was covered with “porridge ice.” By January 7, the harbor was frozen solid. Ice extended north toward the mainland as far as the eye could see. Supplies of food and especially firewood were already dangerously low. Six feet of snow smothered the outlying areas of the island, making it impossible for the sheep to feed on grass. Macy estimated that as many as half of Nantucket’s total herd of about nine thousand sheep would be dead by spring.
    On January 13, six men from Martha’s Vineyard, who were trapped on Nantucket and desperate to return to their families, launched a whaleboat from the south shore, where the ocean surf had maintained a corridor of open water. The wind remained moderate that day, and people were optimistic that the Vineyarders had reached home safely. There is no record of whether or not they did. On January 25 the temperature dropped to 12 degrees below zero, the lowest ever recorded on the island. “Many people, especially the old,” Macy wrote, “could hardly be kept comfortable in bed.”
    Four men were added to the town’s night watch. With almost all of the island’s population crowded into a congestion of old wooden buildings, their fireplaces roaring night and day, there was a high risk of what Macy called a “disastrous fire.” Adding to the danger was the unusually large amount of sperm oil stored in the town’s warehouses that winter. Macy noted that the merchants had taken “every necessary care to preserve [the oil] from fire.”
    Finally, in the beginning of February, the temperature rose above freezing, and it began to rain. “The ice and snow melts away rapidly,” Macy wrote, “which seems to animate and give life to business of most kinds. The vessels and men who have been confined here for some weeks begin to move, with some prospects of being released from prison. The people who are so anxious to get off are cutting out the mail packet [from the ice].” On the morning of February 4, the packet sailed from Nantucket with “the largest mail packages that ever went from here at one time.” On February 17, the day before Chase’s rescue, several trading vessels arrived with cargoes of corn, cranberries, hay, fresh pork, beef, turkey, cider, dry fish, and apples.