In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

“Not only was the oil derived from the sperm whale’s blubber far superior to that of the right whale, providing a brighter and cleaner-burning light, but its block-shaped head contained a vast reservoir of even better oil […].”

The first whales Nantucket whalers hunted were right whales, but the discovery of the far larger and more valuable sperm whales shifted the focus of most hunts. However, the whales’ size and habitat (farther out to sea) also heightened the danger associated with whaling: The Essex was more than a thousand miles from the nearest land when a single whale managed to wreck her.

“Nantucketers took a dim view of off-islanders. They called them ‘strangers’ or, even worse, ‘coofs,’ a term of disparagement originally reserved for Cape Codders but broadened to include all of those unlucky enough to have been born on the mainland.”

Nantucket whaling created an idiosyncratic community that gave islanders a strong sense of identity while also causing them to be deeply suspicious of outsiders. That most Nantucketers were Quakers heightened and strengthened both this sense of shared identity and the mistrust and condescension with which they viewed all others. Lastly, several Nantucket families had populated the island from the mid-17th century, leading the community to look down on relative newcomers.

“As they boarded the packet for Nantucket, the seven African Americans knew at least one thing: they might not be paid well for their time aboard a Nantucket whaler, but they were assured of being paid no less than a white person with the same qualifications.”

While naturally suspicious of any outsiders, the people of Nantucket had a reputation for being racially and culturally accepting. Race, background, and skin color were all less important than whether one came from Nantucket or not. The people of Nantucket had a long history of working in concert with the local Wampanoag population, and so working with African American sailors was just par for the course.

“He was six years younger than Captain Pollard, but Chase felt he had already mastered everything he needed to know to perform Pollard’s job.”

Chase and Pollard might have been friends, sharing a long history as sailors on the Essex before their new assignments, but Chase was headstrong and arrogant. Convinced that he was already captain material and had nothing else to learn, Chase proved difficult for many of his subordinates to deal with and would sometimes sway Pollard’s opinion in destructive ways.

“Pollard may have wanted to see how the Essex performed when pushed to the limit. They sailed on, refusing to back down.”

While Pollard operated with greater humility and grace than his first mate, he was still set on pushing his crew to the limit, confident in his own abilities. This led the crew into almost immediate danger, as Pollard failed to recommend stowing the sails in time when encountering their first storm, leading to a near-disaster just days after setting out. This storm ended up damaging the main ship and completely destroying 60% of the whaling boats they would need in their upcoming hunts. In Philbrick’s account, the storm foreshadows worse to come, previewing Humans’ Relationship With, and Vulnerability to, Nature.

“Trying out a whale could take as long as three days. Special try watches were set, lasting between five and six hours, and affording the men scant sleep.”

The term for processing a whale was “trying out.” Depending on the size of the whale and the skill of the sailor, this could take many days: The process of skinning, dissecting, and rendering all the necessary material was messy, laborious work, so the whole crew would divide duties to work as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century.”

The author compares the process and aftermath of whale hunts to the aftermath of the slaughter of buffalo as settlers migrated west. Unfortunately, in both instances, the hunts didn’t result in the use of the entire animal, instead being an extraction of raw materials that left a large portion of the animal behind.

“One of the reasons Galapagos tortoises were so valued by the whalemen was that they could live for more than a year without any food or water.”

The collection of the tortoises from the Galapagos helped the crew of the Essex survive after the wreck. Instead of needing to subsist only on what could be packed and stored for months and years at a time—hardtack bread, dried meats, and other similar unperishable goods—the crew could butcher tortoises as they needed them. The animals’ ability to live without food and water made them naturally preservable food sources.

“It was a whale—a huge sperm whale, the largest they’d seen so far—a male about eighty-five feet long, they estimated, and approximately eighty tons […] But this whale wasn’t just large. It was acting strangely. Instead of fleeing in panic, it was floating quietly on the surface of the water, puffing occasionally through its blowhole, as if it were watching them.”

The whale that would cave in the hull of the Essex was noticeably different. While the first strike of the whale seems to have been accidental, the follow-up attack seemed to survivors to be meditated and intentional. Both its size and its apparent determination proved key to its ability to destroy the Essex in only two encounters.

“Never before, in the entire history of the Nantucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship.”

One of the reasons that Chase felt it unnecessary to attempt a strike on the whale from the deck of the Essex was the simple fact that was about to happen had never happened before. To Nantucketers’ knowledge, no other ship had been sunk by a whale, so it was no wonder that no one had considered what to do in such a situation.

“The closest islands in this direction were the Marquesas, about 1,200 miles away. Unfortunately, the Essex men had heard that their native inhabitants had a reputation for cannibalism.”

Before setting out in the three whaleboats after the sinking of the Essex, the crew made a decision that had life-or-death ramifications: where to sail to maximize their chances of rescue. The group settled on heading for South America, but if they had chosen to sail for the land closest to them, they could have rather easily made landfall on the islands of the Marquesas. The fear of cannibalism that drove this decision would prove ironic, considering the means to which the group would be driven in a manner of months.

“Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities.”

With sailing in their blood, every citizen of Nantucket knew that the top two leadership positions onboard any ship required a reciprocal compatibility of opposite temperaments. Normally, a ship’s crew operated best when the captain was the harsher of the two. This was not the case with the pair of leaders onboard the Essex, and Philbrick suggests that this mismatch contributed to the disaster; Pollard repeatedly deferred to Chase in situations where it would have been more prudent to follow his own inclinations.

“That night the officers agreed that if they should ever become separated again, no action would be taken to reassemble the convoy.”

After a harrowing ordeal of being temporarily separated from one another, the crew held a meeting to determine what to do if a similar fate were to befall them again. Not only would searching for a lost boat waste valuable time (and by extension valuable resources), but there would also be no way of helping crewmembers if another boat were damaged or sunk; the boats were already filled to capacity. The decision illustrates the harsh calculations survivors had to make to ensure that as many survived the disaster as possible.

“That day, Lawson Thomas, one of the blacks on Hendricks’s boat, died. With barely a pound of hardtack left to share among ten men, Hendricks and his crew dared speak of a subject that had been on all their minds: whether they should eat, instead of bury, the body.”

Unwilling to risk sailing to relatively nearby islands thanks to an unfounded fear of happening upon cannibals, the surviving crew of the Essex was eventually reduced to considering this very possibility to ensure their own survival. Eventually, they would make the fateful choice, but not until they had exhausted all other means of nourishment.

“Nickerson called the first mate a ‘remarkable man’ and recognized Chase’s genius for identifying hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. Having already endured so much, Chase reasoned, they owed it to one another to cling as tenaciously to life as possible […]”

While certainly possessed of his faults, Chase was capable of getting the most out of the men who served with and under him. Among the notable traits Philbrick identifies was Chase’s capacity to maintain hope and optimism even in the darkest of circumstances; since they had already devoted so much of themselves to their survival, Chase felt it was a duty to continue striving to live, in a prime example of The Endurance of the Human Spirit.

“Within a feral community, it is not uncommon for subgroups to develop as a collective form of defense against the remorseless march of horror, and it was here that the Nantucketers—their ties of kinship and religion stitching them together—had an overwhelming advantage.”

In the wake of their doomed voyage, the fact that the Nantucketers formed a group within the group—even if subconsciously—provided them with comfort and a sense of comradeship beyond what the crew shared generally. With their backs up against the wall, the men who shared a Nantucket genealogy knew at their core that they would be able to trust their fellow islanders. That this fact proved so crucial in determining who lived and who died highlights Philbrick’s emphasis on mental fortitude as equally important to physical fortitude (if not more so) in disaster situations.

“Like many survivors, Pollard was animated by a fierce and desperate compulsion to tell his story.”

A phenomenon many survivors of traumatic and life-threatening ordeals share is the desperate need to communicate what they had to endure. Pollard proved no different, regurgitating his story practically before he had even dried off upon his rescue.

“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.”

Due to the realities of 19th-century communication, the community in Nantucket didn’t find out about the tragedy of the Essex until the survivors were mere weeks away from arriving back safely. Adding misery to misery, the communication that Nantucket did receive was actually faulty; the community expected only Pollard and Ramsdell to return and was shocked when the three other survivors arrived as well.

“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.”

The author comments here on the reticence with which the community would greet returning sailors and whaling expeditions. When they arrived, they wouldn’t immediately know whether the journey had been a success or not, and so those who would wait and greet the returning sailors would always need to temper their expectations: In the case of failure, this would allay some disappointment, and in the case of success, this would result in delayed gratification. Generally speaking, the community knew that the expeditions were fraught with peril and acted accordingly.

“It was generally acknowledged that a whaling captain bore a much heavier weight of responsibility than a captain in the merchant service.”

Merchant vessels carried goods from port to port, rarely risking life and limb; the greatest danger any such ship would face would be from storms or the occasional pirate vessel. Whaling ships, on the other hand, dealt with an intrinsically risky product and spent years at sea on missions. As such, the captain of a whaling vessel was responsible for far more than safe passage from point A to point B, including finding and securing the cargo and keeping a hunting crew of sailors happy and sharp the entire length of the trip.

“By keeping many of the most disturbing and problematic aspects of the disaster offstage, Chase transforms the story of the Essex into a personal tale of trial and triumph.”

The account of the voyage by Chase whitewashed a number of details in order to present as respectable and honorable a tale as possible. The truth was far messier and even reveals some flaws and mistakes of Chase’s that were perhaps too embarrassing or incriminating for Chase to include in his personal account. These omissions might have also helped Chase himself cope with the experience, as he was apparently haunted by some of his decisions (most notably, his failure to harpoon the whale that attacked the ship).

“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.”

Pollard was known later in life for keeping a close store of rations with him at all times, possibly a leftover defense mechanism from the months spent at sea with nothing but dried bread, saltwater, and the remains of his friends and crewmembers. Chase would similarly hoard food in his old age, again suggesting the lingering effects of trauma on the survivors.

“Pollard’s friends didn’t credit that story either. They knew that he was incapable of mocking the memory of the men who had died in the Essex whaleboats.”

All of Pollard’s friends knew him to be an honorable man who would simply have been incapable of making light of the tragedy he had endured. In this case, the “mockery” would have been doubly insensitive—a flippant reference not only to the cannibalism the men participated in but also to the death of Pollard’s young cousin, which by all accounts he took very hard.