In the Heart of the Sea

appeared unwilling to leave the ship. The waves threatened to bash the boats against the hull as the men pleaded with their commander to save himself. “Captain Pollard reluctantly got into the boat,” Nickerson wrote, “just as they were about to shove off from the ship.”
    Nickerson, who at seventeen years old had been promoted to boatsteerer, was standing at the steering oar when a huge wave slammed into the boat and threw him into the sea. One of the mates reached out to him with the blade of the after oar. Nickerson grabbed it and was pulled back into the boat.
    The two whaleboats were quickly separated in the darkness. “Our boat seemed to be surrounded with breakers,” Nickerson remembered, “and we were compelled to row between them all night for we could see no outlet.” The next morning they saw a ship anchored in the lee of a fifty-foot-high rock. It proved to be the Martha, which had narrowly escaped crashing into the rock the night before. Soon both boat-crews had been rescued, and the Martha was on her way to Oahu.
     
    TWO months later, in the harbor of Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, a missionary named George Bennet boarded the U.S. brig Pearl bound for Boston. Among the passengers was George Pollard. The thirty-one-year-old captain had greatly changed since he’d talked to Charles Wilkes less than a year before. His former cheerfulness had disappeared. Yet, anchored in the harbor of an island that he and his men had once spurned in the mistaken fear of cannibals, he insisted on telling Bennet the story of the Essex in painful detail. This time, when it came to describing the execution of Owen Coffin, he broke off. “But I can tell you no more,” he cried out to Bennet, “my head is on fire at the recollection; I hardly know what I say.”
    Pollard finished the conversation by relating how he had recently lost his second whaleship on a shoal off the Hawaiian Islands. Then, in what Bennet called “a tone of despondency never to be forgotten by him who heard it,” Pollard confessed, “[N]ow I am utterly ruined. No owner will ever trust me with a whaler again, for all will say I am an unlucky man.”
    As Pollard predicted, his whaling career was over. The island that had rallied so quickly behind him after the sinking of the Essex now turned its back. He had become a Jonah—a twice-doomed captain whom no one dared give a third chance. After returning to his wife, Mary, Pollard made a single voyage in a merchant vessel out of New York. “[B]ut not liking that business,” Nickerson wrote, “he returned to his home on Nantucket.” He became a night watchman—a position on the lowest rung of the island’s social ladder.
    A disturbing rumor began to be whispered about the streets of town, a rumor that was still being told on Nantucket almost a hundred years later. It had not been Owen Coffin who had drawn the short piece of paper, the gossipmongers claimed, it had been George Pollard. It was only then that his young cousin, already near death and convinced he would not last the night, offered and even insisted on taking the captain’s place. If the rumor had it right, Pollard was not only unlucky, he was a coward, and fate had found him out.
     
    THE word “pollard” has two meanings. A pollard is an animal, such as an ox, goat, or sheep, that has lost its horns. But pollard is also a gardening term. To pollard a tree is to prune back its branches severely so that it may produce a dense growth of new shoots. Misfortune had pollarded George Pollard, cutting back his possibilities, but, as if strengthened by the surgery, he created a happy, meaningful life for himself in his native town.
    George and Mary Pollard would never have any children of their own, but it might be said that they presided over the largest family on Nantucket. As the town’s night watchman, Pollard was responsible for enforcing the nine o’clock curfew, a duty that brought him into contact with nearly every young person on the island. Instead of becoming the dour, embittered man one might expect, he was known for his buoyant, even cheerful, manner. Joseph Warren Phinney was part of the Pollards’ extended family. When Phinney’s mother and father died, he came to Nantucket to live with his grandparents. His father’s first wife had been Mary Pollard’s sister, and late in life Phinney left an account of George Pollard.
    “He was a short fat man,” Phinney recalled, “jolly, loving the good things in