In the Heart of the Sea

Pollard of Nantucket. Pollard said that, yes, he was the same man. “[T]his made a great impression on me,” Wilkes said many years later.
    Even though Wilkes had already read the published account, Pollard insisted on telling the young midshipman his own version of the story. “It was to be expected that some effect of his former cruise would have been visible in his manner or conversation,” Wilkes wrote, “but not so, he was cheerful and very modest in his account.” The midshipman judged Pollard to be “a hero, who did not even consider that he had overcome obstacles which would have crushed 99 out of a hundred.”
    But there was at least one indication that Pollard had not emerged from the ordeal entirely unscathed. Wilkes noted an unusual feature in the captain’s cabin. Attached to the ceiling was a large amount of netting, and it was filled with provisions—primarily potatoes and other fresh vegetables. Captain Pollard, the man who had almost starved to death only the year before, could now simply reach over his head and pull down something to eat. Wilkes asked Pollard how, after all that he had suffered, he could dare go to sea again. “He simply remarked,” Wilkes wrote, “that it was an old adage that the lightning never struck in the same place twice.” But in the case of Captain Pollard, it did.
    In February of 1823 the Two Brothers and another Nantucket whaleship, the Martha, were sailing west together toward a new whaling ground. In the few years since the start of Pollard’s previous voyage, much had changed in the Pacific whale fishery. Soon after the opening up of the Offshore Ground in 1819, Nantucket whaleships had stopped at the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time. That same year, Frederick Coffin, captain of the Syren, laid claim to discovering the rich Japan Ground. All of the Pacific, not just its eastern and western edges, had become the domain of the Nantucket whalemen.
    The Two Brothers and the Martha were several hundred miles west of the Hawaiian Islands, headed toward the Japan Ground, when it began to blow. Pollard ordered his men to shorten sail. It was raining hard, and in the high seas, the Two Brothers was proving difficult to steer. The Martha was the faster of the two whaleships, and as night came on the lookout of the Two Brothers could barely see her from the masthead.
    They were sailing at about the same latitude as French Frigate Shoals—a deadly maze of rocks and coral reefs to the northwest of the Hawaiian Islands—but both Pollard and Captain John Pease of the Martha judged themselves to be well to the west of danger. Since his previous voyage, Pollard had learned how to determine his ship’s longitude by lunar observation. However, owing to overcast skies, it had been more than ten days since he had been able to take a lunar, so he had to rely on dead reckoning to determine his ship’s position.
    It was blowing so hard that the whaleboats had been taken off the davits and lashed to the deck. That night one of the officers remarked that “the water alongside looked whiter than usual.” Thomas Nickerson was about to retrieve a jacket from down below when he noticed Pollard standing on the ship’s railing, staring down worriedly into the sea.
    While Nickerson was belowdecks, the ship struck something “with a fearful crash,” and he was thrown to the floor. Nickerson assumed they had collided with another ship. “Judge of my astonishment,” he wrote, “to find ourselves surrounded with breakers apparently mountains high, and our ship careening over upon her broadside and thumping so heavily that one could scarcely stand upon his feet.” The ship was being pounded to pieces on a coral reef. “Captain Pollard seemed to stand amazed at the scene before him,” Nickerson remembered.
    First mate Eben Gardner leaped into the breach. He ordered the men to begin cutting down the masts in hopes of saving the ship. Realizing that the spars would likely fall across and crush the whaleboats tied to the deck, Pollard finally came to life. He commanded the crew to put away their axes and begin readying the boats. “Had the masts of the ship been cut away at that time,” Nickerson wrote, “[I] would probably have adorned this tale instead of [told] it.”
    But by the time the men begun crowding into the two boats, Pollard had lapsed into his former state of mesmerized despair. “[H]is reasoning powers had flown,” Nickerson remembered, and the captain