In the Heart of the Sea

friends whose workplace was on the other side of the world. Since no one knew what news the whaleship might bring, islanders greeting a ship tended to hide their eagerness and anxiety behind a veneer of solemnity. “We feel a singular blending of joy and grief on such occasions,” this same Nantucketer confessed. “We know not whether to smile or weep. Our emotion at all events is much subdued. We dare not express it aloud lest it grate upon the ear of some to whom this ship has been a harbinger of evil. We are disposed to be quiet. And yet at this time we have an irresistible impulse to utter our feelings.”
    And so, when Pollard first stepped upon the wharf, surrounded by more than a thousand familiar faces, there was an absolute, nerve-shattering quiet. Frederick Sanford, Nickerson’s and Ramsdell’s old school chum, would later describe the assembly as “an awe-struck, silent crowd.” As Pollard began to make his way toward home, people moved aside to let him pass. No one said a word.
     
    IT WAS generally acknowledged that a whaling captain bore a much heavier weight of responsibility than a captain in the merchant service. In addition to navigating his vessel around the Horn and back, he was required to train a crew of inexperienced men in the dangerous art of killing and processing whales. And when it was all done, he had to answer to his ship’s owners, who expected nothing less than a full hold of oil. It was little wonder, then, that a whaling captain was paid, on average, three times what the commander of a merchant vessel received.
    As a mate aboard the Essex, George Pollard had known only success; as captain, he had known only disaster. Since a whaleman was paid a portion of the proceeds at the end of the voyage, Pollard, like all the other survivors, had nothing to show for two years of misery and hardship.
    Captain Amasa Delano knew what it was like to return home after an unsuccessful voyage. “[I]t must be acknowledged, that I never saw my native country with so little pleasure as on my return to it after a disastrous termination of my enterprises and my hopes,” Delano wrote in an 1817 account of his many voyages to the Pacific. “The shore, on which I would have leaped with delight, was covered with gloom and sadness to my downcast eye and wounded mind. . . . [M]y observation was alive to every symptom of neglect or affected pity which might appear in the conduct or salutations of my acquaintance onshore.”
    Pollard was inevitably subjected to a lengthy interview by the Essex ’s owners, Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, a harrowing process during which it would have been difficult for a first-time captain not to sound defensive. “It is unquestionably true, that the poor and disappointed man is often too jealous on this subject,” Delano wrote, “and puts an erroneous and unjust construction upon conduct which is neither mercenary nor heartless.” But it wasn’t just the Essex ’s owners to whom Pollard had to answer. There was a member of his own family—Owen Coffin’s mother.
     
    NANCY Bunker Coffin, forty-three, was Pollard’s aunt, the sister of his mother, Tamar, fifty-seven. Nancy had married into one of Nantucket’s oldest and proudest families, one that traced its roots to Tristram Coffin, the patriarch of the island’s first English settlement in the seventeenth century. Nancy’s father-in-law, Hezekiah Coffin, Sr., had been the captain of one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Hezekiah had distinguished himself, according to family legend, as “the first to throw tea into Boston Harbor.” The family possessed a miniature portrait of Hezekiah. He had wide-set eyes, a sharp nose, and a gentle, slightly embarrassed smile.
    Although his son, Hezekiah Jr., had been a birthright Friend, he’d been disowned when he married Nancy Bunker, a non-Quaker, in 1799. Then, in 1812, when Owen Coffin was ten, Hezekiah Jr. officially “apologized,” and both he and Nancy became members of the North Meeting on Broad Street.
    On that August day in 1821, when George Pollard arrived on her doorstep, Nancy’s commitment to her adopted faith met the severest possible test. “He bore the awful message to the mother as her son desired,” Nickerson wrote. Nancy Coffin did not take it well. The idea that the man to whom she had entrusted the care of her seventeen-year-old son was living as a consequence of her boy’s death was too much for her to bear. “[S]he