In the Heart of the Sea (21 page)

George Pollard, Jun.

To the west of their encampment, they had found a large tree with the name of a ship-the Elizabeth-carved into it. They transformed the tree into a Galapagos-like post office, placing the letters in a small wooden box they nailed to the trunk.

On December 27 at ten o'clock in the morning, by which time the tide had risen far enough to allow the boats to float over the rocks that surrounded the island, they began to load up. In Pollard's boat were his boatsteerer, Obed Hendricks, along with their fellow Nantucketers Barzillai Ray, Owen Coffin, and Charles Ramsdell, and the African American Samuel Reed. Owen Chase's crew was down to five: the Nantucketers Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson, along with Richard Peterson, the elderly black from New York, and Isaac Cole, a young white off-islander. Joy's crew contained the white off-islander Joseph West and four blacks-Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, and the steward William Bond. Not only were these men under the command of a seriously ill second mate, but Chappel's decision to remain on the island had left them without a boatsteerer to assist Joy in the management of the crew. But neither Pollard nor Chase was willing to part with a Nantucket-born boatsteerer.

Soon it was time for them to leave the island. But Chappel, Wright, and Weeks were nowhere to be found. “ [T]hey had not come down,” Chase wrote, “either to assist us to get off, nor to take any kind of leave of us.” The first mate walked down the beach to their dwelling and told them they were about to set sail. The men were, Chase observed, “very much affected,” and one of them began to cry. “They wished us to write to their relations, should Providence safely direct us again to our homes, and said but little else.” Seeing that they were “ill at heart about taking any leave of us,” Chase bid them a hasty good-bye and left for the boats. “They followed me with their eyes,” he wrote, “until I was out of sight, and I never saw more of them.”

Before leaving the island, the men in the boats decided to backtrack a bit and sail to a beach they had seen during their original circuit of the island. It had looked like a spot that “might be productive of some unexpected good fortune,” possibly providing them with fresh provisions for the start of their journey. After dropping half a dozen men on shore to search for food, the rest of them spent the day fishing. They saw several sharks but were unable to catch anything save a few mackerel-sized fish. The shore party returned at about six o'clock that evening with some more birds, and they made final preparations to leave.

It had been more of a tease than a salvation, but Henderson Island had at least given them a fighting chance. Back on December 20, Chase had seen “death itself staring us in the face.” Now, after more than a week of food and drink, their casks were full of fresh water. Their boats no longer leaked. In addition to hardtack, each crew had some fish and birds. There were also three fewer men to support. “We again set sail,” Nicker son wrote, “finally [leaving] this land which had been so providentially thrown in our way.”

BEFORE THEY LEFT Henderson Island, Chase loaded a flat stone and an armful of firewood into each boat. That first evening back on the water, as both the island and the sun slipped below the western horizon behind them, they put the stones to use as platforms for cooking fires. “[W]e kept our fires going,” Chase wrote, “and cooked our fish and birds, and felt our situation as comfortable as could be expected.”

For a month they had been driven south and even west; now they hoped to sail almost directly east to Easter Island. For this to happen they needed two weeks of westerly breezes. However, at latitude 24° south, they were still in the trades, where for more than 70 percent of the year the wind blows out of the southeast. But that night, as if in answer to their prayers, a strong breeze sprang up out of the northwest, and they steered straight for Easter.

If they were to keep track of their progress east, they needed to find a way to estimate their longitude-something they had not done during the first leg of the voyage. A month of sailing without knowing their east-to-west position had proved to them the necessity of at least attempting to determine it. Before leaving Henderson, they decided to maintain what Chase called “a regular reckoning.” Their noon observation told them their latitude, and by doing as Captain Bligh had done before them-using an improvised log line to gauge their speed and their compass to determine their direction-they could calculate their longitude. The Essex boats were no longer sailing blind.

For three days the northwesterly breeze held. Then, on December 30, the wind shifted into the east-southeast, and for two days they were forced to steer a course well to the south of Easter Island. But by the first day of the new year, 1821, the wind had shifted to the north, and they were once again back on track.

On January 3 they sailed into what Nickerson called “hard weather.” Squalls blasted them from the southwest. “The seas had become so rough,” Nickerson remembered, “that we were fearful that each successive gust would swamp our boats... Every squall was attended with the most vivid flashes of lightning and awful thunder claps, which seemed to cause the very bosom of the deep to tremble and threw a cheerless aspect upon the face of the ocean.”

The next day, the capricious wind shifted to the east-northeast. With their sails trimmed in tight on the port tack, they steered as close to the wind as possible but were still unable to fetch Easter Island. Pollard and Chase came to the same distressing conclusion: they were now too far to the south to have any hope of reaching the island. They searched their Navigator copies for the next closest island “where the wind would allow of our going.” About eight hundred miles off the Chilean coast are the islands of Juan Fernandez and Masafuera. Unfortunately there were more than 2,500 miles between them and these islands-farther than they had sailed since leaving the Essex forty-four days before.

On the same day that they abandoned all hope of reaching Easter Island, they ate the last of their fish and birds. It was back to their daily ration of a cup of water and three ounces of hardtack per man.

For the next two days, the wind deserted them. The sun beat down with the same withering force that had so oppressed them prior to their arrival at Henderson. The conditions were the hardest on Matthew Joy, whose bowels had ceased to function. Ever since leaving the island he had continued to deteriorate, and his glassy, distracted eyes had taken on the unmistakable look of death.

On January 7, a breeze rose up out of the north. Their noon observation revealed that they had slipped almost six degrees of latitude, or 360 nautical miles, to the south. But it was their progress to the east that most concerned them. They estimated that they were now only six hundred miles closer to the mainland than when they had left Henderson eleven days before.

The next day Matthew Joy made a request. The twenty-seven-year-old second mate asked if he might be moved to the captain's boat. The transfer was effected, Chase wrote, “under the impression that he would be more comfortable there, and more attention and pains be bestowed in nursing and endeavoring to comfort him.” But all knew the real reason for the second mate's removal. Now that he was reaching the end, Joy, who had been on a boat with five coofs, wanted to die among his own people.

Joy came from an old Quaker family. Near the town hall on Nantucket his grandfather had owned a large house that was still referred to as the Reuben Joy homestead. In 1800, when Matthew was only seven years old, his parents moved the family to Hudson, New York, where Nantucketers had established a whaling port soon after the Revolution. Matthew remained a Friend until 1817, when he returned to his native island to wed nineteen-year-old Nancy Slade, a Congregationalist. As was customary in such cases, he was disowned that year by the Nantucket Monthly Meeting for “marrying out.”

Joy was no longer a Quaker, but on January 10, a hot, windless day in the Pacific, he demonstrated a Friend's sense of duty and devotion. For the last two days his boat-crew had been left leaderless; he now asked to be returned to them. His loyalty to his crew was in the end greater than his need for comfort from his fellow Nantucketers. The transfer was made, and by four o'clock that afternoon Matthew Joy was dead.

Nantucket's Quaker Graveyard was without worldly monuments of any kind, and many had compared its smooth, unmarred sweep to the anonymous surface of the sea. Like that graveyard thousands of miles away, the sea that morning was calm and smooth-not a breath of air ruffled the Pacific's slow, rhythmic swell. The three boats were brought together, and after sewing Joy up in his clothes, they tied a stone to his feet and “consigned him in a solemn manner to the ocean.”

Even though they knew Joy had been ill for quite some time, his loss hit them hard. “It was an incident,” Chase wrote, “which threw a gloom over our feelings for many days.” The last two weeks had been particularly difficult for the men on the second mate's boat. Instead of drawing strength and inspiration from their leader, they had been required to expend valuable energy nursing him. Making it even harder was the absence of Joy's boatsteerer, Thomas Chappel. To fill the void, Pollard ordered his own boatsteerer, the twenty-one-year-old Obed Hendricks, to take command of the second mate's shaken and dispirited crew.

Soon after taking over the steering oar, Hendricks made a disturbing discovery. Joy's illness had apparently prevented him from closely monitoring the distribution of his boat's provisions. As best as Hendricks could determine, there was only enough hardtack in his boat's cuddy to last two, maybe three more days.

Throughout the morning and afternoon of the following day-the fifty-second since the men had left the Essex-the wind built out of the northwest until by nightfall it was blowing a full gale. The men took in all sail and steered their boats before the wind. Even without a stitch of canvas set, the boats surfed wildly down the crests of the waves. “Flashes of lightning were quick and vivid,” Chase wrote, “and the rain came down in cataracts.” Instead of being terrified, the men were exhilarated to know that each fifty-knot gust was blowing them toward their destination. “Although the danger was very great,” Nickerson remembered, “yet none seemed to dread this so much as death by starvation, and I believe none would have exchanged this terrific gale for a more moderate head wind or a calm.”

Visibility was low that night in the driving rain. They had agreed that in the event they became separated, they would steer a course of east-southeast in the hope that they would be within sight of one another come daybreak. As usual, Chase was in the lead. Every minute or so, he turned his head to make sure he could see the other two boats. But at around eleven o'clock he glanced back and saw nothing. “It was blowing and raining at this time as if the heavens were separating,” he wrote, “and I knew not hardly at the moment what to do.” He decided to head up into the wind and hove to. After drifting for about an hour, “expecting every moment that they would come up with [us],” Chase and his men resumed their agreed-upon course, hopeful that, as had happened before, they would sight the other boats in the morning.

“As soon as daylight appeared,” Nickerson wrote, “every man in our boat raised [himself] searching the waters.” Grabbing the masts, and one another, for support, they stood up on the seats, craning their necks for a glimpse of their lost companions on the wave-fringed horizon. But they had disappeared. “It was folly to repine at the circumstances,” Chase commented; “it could neither be remedied, nor could sorrow secure their return; but it was impossible to prevent ourselves feeling all the poignancy and bitterness that characterizes the separation of men who have long suffered in each other's company, and whose interests and feelings fate had so closely linked together.”

They were at latitude 32°16' south, longitude 112 °20' west, about six hundred miles south of Easter Island. Nineteen days from Henderson, with more than a thousand miles still left to go, Chase and his men were alone. “For many days after this accident, our progress was attended with dull and melancholy reflections,” he wrote. “We had lost the cheering of each other's faces, that, which strange as it is, we so much required in both our mental and bodily distresses.”

The squalls and rain continued through the next day. Chase decided to take an inventory of their remaining provisions. Thanks to his rigorous supervision, they still had a considerable store of bread left. But they had been fifty-four days at sea, and there were more than 1,200 miles between them and the island of Juan Fernandez. “Necessity began to whisper [to] us,” Chase wrote, “that a still further reduction of our allowance must take place, or we must abandon altogether the hopes of reaching the land, and rely wholly on the chance of being taken up by a vessel.”

They were already on half provisions, eating only three ounces of bread a day. “[H]ow to reduce the daily quantity of food, with any regard to life itself, was a question of the utmost consequence.” Three ounces of hardtack provided them with only two hundred and fifty calories a day, less than 15 percent of their daily needs. Chase told his men that they had no choice but to cut these half rations once again-to only one and a half ounces of bread a day. This, he knew, “must, in short time, reduce us to mere skeletons again.”

It was a terrifying dilemma, and Chase did not arrive at the decision easily. “It required a great effort to bring matters to this dreadful alternative,” he wrote. “[E]ither... feed our bodies and our hopes a little longer, or in the agonies of hunger to seize upon and devour our provisions, and coolly await the approach of death.” Somewhere to the north of them, their companions were about to discover the consequences of taking the latter course.

The men in Pollard's and Hendricks's boats were just as gravely affected by the separation. They continued on, however, almost confident that they would once again meet up with Chase's boat. That day, January 14, Obed Hendricks's boat ran out of provisions. For Hendricks and his five crew members-Joseph West, Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, and William Bond-the question was whether Pollard would be willing to share his boat's provisions.