In the Heart of the Sea

became almost frantic with the thought,” Nickerson wrote, “and I have heard that she never could become reconciled to the captain’s presence.”
    The verdict of the community was less harsh. The drawing of lots was accepted by the unwritten law of the sea as permissible in a survival situation. “Captain Pollard was not thought to have dealt unfairly with this trying matter,” Nickerson wrote. Although it did not involve the drawing of lots, a comparable case of survival cannibalism rocked the community of Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1972. The ordeal began when a plane transporting a local rugby team to Santiago, Chile, crashed in the snowy Andes Mountains. Until their rescue ten weeks later, the sixteen survivors sustained themselves on the frozen corpses of the passengers who had died in the crash. Just as had occurred in Nantucket more than 150 years earlier, the residents of Montevideo did not fault the young men’s behavior. Soon after their return, Montevideo’s Catholic Archbishop declared that since it had been a question of survival, the men were blameless, adding, “It is always necessary to eat whatever is at hand, in spite of the repugnance it may evoke.”
    There is no evidence that Nantucket’s religious leaders felt compelled to speak in defense of the Essex survivors. The fact remains, however, that no matter how justified it may have been, cannibalism was, and continues to be, what one scholar has termed a “cultural embarrassment”—an act so unsettling that it is inevitably more difficult for the general public to accept than for the survivors who resorted to it.
    For his own part, Pollard did not allow the horror he had experienced in the whaleboat to defeat him, displaying an honesty and directness concerning the disaster that would sustain him all his life. Captain George Worth of the Two Brothers was so impressed with the integrity of the former captain of the Essex during the two-and-a-half-month voyage back from Valparaiso that he recommended Pollard as his replacement. Soon after his return, Pollard was formally offered command of the Two Brothers.
    By the time Pollard returned to Nantucket, Owen Chase had begun working on a book about the disaster. Chase had kept a daily log of his ordeal in the boats. He also appears to have obtained a copy of the letter written by the Diana ’s captain, Aaron Paddack, the night after hearing Pollard’s story, which provided him with an account of what had happened on the other two boats after the separation on January 12. But Owen Chase was a whaleman, not a writer. “There seems no reason to suppose that Owen himself wrote the Narrative,” Herman Melville would write in his own copy of Chase’s book. “It bears obvious tokens of having been written for him; but at the same time, its whole air plainly evinces that it was carefully and conscientiously written to Owen’s dictation of the facts.”
    Chase had grown up with a boy who, instead of shipping out for the Pacific, had attended Harvard College. William Coffin, Jr., was the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful whale-oil merchant who had also served as Nantucket’s first postmaster. After graduating from Harvard, William Jr. had briefly studied medicine, and then, in the words of a friend, followed “other pursuits more congenial with his enthusiastic love of literature.” Years later, he would ghostwrite Obed Macy’s much-praised history of Nantucket; there is also evidence that he helped write an account of the notorious Globe mutiny. His published literary career appears to have begun, however, with the narrative of the Essex disaster.
    Coffin was the ideal person to work with Chase. Well educated and an accomplished writer, Coffin also had a thorough knowledge of both Nantucket and whaling. Being Chase’s own age, he could empathize with the young first mate in a way that makes the narrative read, Melville noted, “as tho’ Owen wrote it himself.” The two men worked quickly and well together. By early fall the manuscript was finished. By November 22, almost precisely a year after the sinking, the published book had reached shops on Nantucket.
    In a note to the reader, Chase claims that, having lost everything in the wreck, he was desperate to make some money to support his young family. “The hope of obtaining something of remuneration,” Chase wrote, “by giving a short history of my sufferings to the world, must therefore constitute my claim to public