In the Heart of the Sea

The crisis was over.
    The families of the Essex crew members had no reason for concern throughout the winter and spring. Letters mailed from the Galapagos post office on Charles Island in late October would not have reached Nantucket until February or March at the earliest. They would have told of a typical whaling voyage reaching its midpoint, with hopes high that a productive season in the Offshore Ground would allow them to return home in the summer of 1822.
    What the people of Nantucket did not know was that since late February, a kind of tidal wave of horror had been building in the whale fishery as the story of the Essex was passed from ship to ship, gradually making its way around the Horn and up the Atlantic toward Nantucket. Riding the crest of this wave was the Eagle, with Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell aboard. Before the Eagle ’s arrival, however, a letter reached Nantucket that told of the disaster.
    The town’s post office was on Main Street, and as soon as the letter arrived, it was read there before an overflowing crowd. The islander Frederick Sanford was a contemporary of the Nantucket teenagers aboard the Essex, and he would never forget what he saw and heard that day. The letter, Sanford recalled, told of “their sufferings in the boats, eating each other, and some of them my old playmates at school!” Despite Nantucket’s reputation for Quaker stoicism, the people assembled outside the post office could not conceal their emotions. “[E]veryone was overcome by [the letter’s] recital,” Sanford wrote, “and [wept] in the streets.”
    As it turned out, the letter contained an incomplete account of the disaster. Pollard and Ramsdell had been rescued almost a week after Chase’s boat-crew, but their account—passed from whaleship to whaleship—was the first to make it home. The letter mentioned the three men left on the island but gave little hope for any other survivors. Pollard and Ramsdell were assumed to be the only Nantucketers left alive.
    On June 11, the Eagle arrived at the Nantucket Bar. “My family had received the most distressing account of our shipwreck,” Chase wrote, “and had given me up for lost.” But standing alongside Ramsdell was not George Pollard; instead, there were three ghosts—Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson. Tears of sorrow were soon succeeded by amazement and then tears of joy. “My unexpected appearance,” Chase remembered, “was welcomed with the most grateful obligations and acknowledgments to a beneficent Creator, who had guided me through darkness, trouble, and death, once more to the bosom of my country and friends.”
    Chase discovered that he was the father of a fourteen-month-old daughter, Phebe Ann. For Chase’s wife, Peggy, it was an overwhelming sight: the husband whom she had once thought dead holding their chubby-cheeked daughter in his still bony, scab-covered arms.
    The community of Nantucket was overwhelmed as well. Obed Macy, the meticulous keeper of Nantucket’s historical record, chose not to mention the disaster in his journal. Although articles quickly appeared about the Essex in the New Bedford Mercury, Nantucket’s own fledgling newspaper, the Inquirer, did not write about the disaster that summer. It was as if Nantucketers were refusing to commit to an opinion about the matter until they had first had a chance to hear from the Essex ’s captain, George Pollard, Jr.
     
    THEY would have to wait almost two months, until August 5, when Pollard returned to the island aboard the Two Brothers. The whaleship was first sighted by the lookout posted at the tower of the Congregational church. As word spread down the lanes and into the grog shops and warehouses and ropewalks and out into the wharves, a crowd formed and began to make its way to the cliff along the north shore. From there they could see the black, sea-worn ship, heavy with oil, her sails furled, anchored at the Nantucket Bar. At 222 tons, the Two Brothers was even smaller than the Essex had been, and once she’d been relieved of some of her oil, she crossed the Bar at high tide and made her way toward the harbor entrance. The crowd surged back to the waterfront. Soon more than 1,500 people were waiting expectantly at the wharves.
    The arrival of a whaleship—any whaleship—was what one Nantucketer called “an era in most of our lives.” It was the way people learned about the ones they loved—the sons, husbands, fathers, uncles, and