In the Heart of the Sea (35 page)

In Survival Psychology, John Leach writes of the apathy that commonly affects survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, known as the “recoil period” (pp. 24-37, 129-134). In “Disaster: Effects of Mental and Physical State,” Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser discuss the reluctance of survivors to leave the scene of a disaster (p. 444). Concerning whaleboats in the early nineteenth century, Erik Ronnberg, Jr., states, “Depictions of boats from this period-in the form of paintings, lithographs, and logbook sketches-make it clear that rowing was the usual if not exclusive form of propulsion. Those sources that do show whaleboats under sail indicate that the sprit rig was most favored and

the boats were guided with a steering oar with no rudder in evidence. This compounded by the lack of a centerboard, would have severely handicapped the boats' abilities to sail to windward; indeed, this rig and steering configuration would be efficient only in the pursuit of whales downwind” (To Build a Whaleboat, p.l). As Ronnberg also points out, these early boats were of clinker or lapstrake construction, not the batten-seam construction that typified boats in later years. Instead of being white (as were almost all whaleboats by the middle of the nineteenth century), the Essex boats were probably quite colorful-perhaps dark blue and red, the color of the ship's flag; see Ansel (p. 95).

Caleb Grain's “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels” contains an excellent synopsis of early-nineteenth-century accounts of Marquesan cannibalism and homosexuality (p. 30). For a discussion of the kinds of stories about native cannibalism that were told by the seamen of the era, see Gananath Obeyesekere's “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Figi: Seamen's Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. There was also a disturbing racial aspect to the rumors of cannibalism that sailors swapped in the forecastles of whaleships. A Maori chief from New Zealand who had been brought to London in 1818 insisted that “black men had a much more agreeable flavor than white” (in Tannahill's Flesh and Blood, p. 151). Suggesting that this was accepted as a fact among Nantucket whalemen was the experience of Captain Benjamin Worth off the coast of New Zealand in 1805. Worth told of how when a gale threatened to drive his ship ashore, the blacks in the crew begged him to do everything he could to make for open ocean since “the natives preferred Negro flesh to that of the white man” (in Stackpole's The Sea-Hunters, pp. 399-400). The officers of the Essex were between voyages when the stories about the peaceful state of the natives of Nukahivah appeared in the New Bedford Mercury (April 28, 1819). Melville's statement about the Essex crew's decision “to gain a civilized harbor” is part of the comments he wrote in the back pages of his own copy of Chase's narrative, a transcript of which is included in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (pp. 978-95). Ernest Dodge in Islands and Empires speaks of the gigantic royal mission chapel in Tahiti, built in 1819, the same year the Essex left Nantucket (p. 91).

Obed Macy's remarks about the Nantucketers' intimate knowledge

of the sea is in his History (p. 213). Such was not, apparently, the case when it came to the landmasses of the world. William Comstock recounts an incident that reveals just how geographically ignorant a Nantucketer could be. At one point the officer of a Nantucket whaleship “very honestly desired to be informed whether England was on the continent, or' stood alone by itself,' and on being answered by another officer that it was in the County of Great Britain, wanted to know how far it was from London” (The Life of Samuel Comstock, p. 57). If a whaleman could be this vague about an island with which Nantucket had always had a close commercial connection, it is little wonder that the men of the Essex were without any information concerning the islands of the Central Pacific. For a detailed drawing of the launch Captain Bligh and his men sailed to the island of Timor, see A. Richard Mansir's edition of Bligh's The Journal of Bounty's Launch.

Leach in Survival Psychology discusses the differences between authoritarian and social leaders (p. 140), while Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance: Survival at the Extremes speaks of the different personality types required in what he calls the escape and survival periods following a disaster (pp. 210-11). The analysis of a career first mate versus a “fishy” man is based on William H. Macy's words about the first mate Grafton, whom Macy describes as a “man of rather thoughtful cast of mind, of much intelligence, and possessed of an extensive stock of information upon many subjects, with a habit of generalizing and a clearness of expression which rendered him an agreeable companion to all with whom he came in contact. Though a good whaleman, Grafton [the first mate] was not what is known to the connoisseur as a 'fishy man'“ (pp. 44-45). John Leach in Survival Psychology writes about the importance family connections take on during a disaster (p. 156), as well as the relationship of strong leadership to survival (p. 139).

See Ronnberg's To Build a Whaleboat for an excellent analysis of the difficulties of sailing an early-nineteenth-century whaleboat (pp. 1-4). Concerning the sound made by a clinker-style whaleboat, Clifford Ashley writes in The Yankee Whaler: “[T]he name [of clinker] was formed in imitation of the sound made by the boat while going through water. I have frequently noted this in a clinker-built tender. As the whale

the boats were guided with a steering oar with no rudder in evidence. This compounded by the lack of a centerboard, would have severely handicapped the boats' abilities to sail to windward; indeed, this rig and steering configuration would be efficient only in the pursuit of whales downwind” (To Build a Whaleboat, p.l). As Ronnberg also points out, these early boats were of clinker or lapstrake construction, not the batten-seam construction that typified boats in later years. Instead of being white (as were almost all whaleboats by the middle of the nineteenth century), the Essex boats were probably quite colorful-perhaps dark blue and red, the color of the ship's flag; see Ansel (p. 95).

Caleb Grain's “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels” contains an excellent synopsis of early-nineteenth-century accounts of Marquesan cannibalism and homosexuality (p. 30). For a discussion of the kinds of stories about native cannibalism that were told by the seamen of the era, see Gananath Obeyesekere's “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Figi: Seamen's Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. There was also a disturbing racial aspect to the rumors of cannibalism that sailors swapped in the forecastles of whaleships. A Maori chief from New Zealand who had been brought to London in 1818 insisted that “black men had a much more agreeable flavor than white” (in TannahiU's Flesh and Blood, p. 151). Suggesting that this was accepted as a fact among Nan tucket whalemen was the experience of Captain Benjamin Worth off the coast of New Zealand in 1805. Worth told of how when a gale threatened to drive his ship ashore, the blacks in the crew begged him to do everything he could to make for open ocean since “the natives preferred Negro flesh to that of the white man” (in Stackpole's The Sea-Hunters, pp. 399-400). The officers of the Essex were between voyages when the stories about the peaceful state of the natives of Nukahivah appeared in the New Bedford Mercury (April 28, 1819). Melville's statement about the Essex crew's decision “to gain a civilized harbor” is part of the comments he wrote in the back pages of his own copy of Chase's narrative, a transcript of which is included in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (pp. 978-95). Ernest Dodge in Islands and Empires speaks of the gigantic royal mission chapel in Tahiti, built in 1819, the same year the Essex left Nantucket (p. 91).

Obed Macy's remarks about the Nantucketers' intimate knowledge

of the sea is in his History (p. 213). Such was not, apparently, the case when it came to the landmasses of the world. William Comstock recounts an incident that reveals just how geographically ignorant a Nantucketer could be. At one point the officer of a Nantucket whaleship “very honestly desired to be informed whether England was on the continent, or' stood alone by itself,' and on being answered by another officer that it was in the County of Great Britain, wanted to know how far it was from London” (The Life of Samuel Comstock, p. 57). If awhaleman could be this vague about an island with which Nantucket had always had a close commercial connection, it is little wonder that the men of the Essex were without any information concerning the islands of the Central Pacific. For a detailed drawing of the launch Captain Bligh and his men sailed to the island of Timor, see A. Richard Mansir's edition of Bligh's The Journal of Bounty's Launch.

Leach in Survival Psychology discusses the differences between authoritarian and social leaders (p. 140), while Glin Bennet in Beyond Endurance: Survival at the Extremes speaks of the different personality types required in what he calls the escape and survival periods following a disaster (pp. 210-11). The analysis of a career first mate versus a “fishy” man is based on William H. Macy's words about the first mate Grafton, whom Macy describes as a “man of rather thoughtful cast of mind, of much intelligence, and possessed of an extensive stock of information upon many subjects, with a habit of generalizing and a clearness of expression which rendered him an agreeable companion to all with whom he came in contact. Though a good whaleman, Grafton [the first mate] was not what is known to the connoisseur as a 'fishy man'“ (pp. 44-45). John Leach in Survival Psychology writes about the importance family connections take on during a disaster (p. 156), as well as the relationship of strong leadership to survival (p, 139).

See Ronnberg's To Build a Whaleboat for an excellent analysis of the difficulties of sailing an early-nineteenth-century whaleboat (pp. 1-4). Concerning the sound made by a clinker-style whaleboat, Clifford Ashley writes in The Yankee Whaler: “[T]he name [of clinker] was formed in imitation of the sound made by the boat while going through water. I have frequently noted this in a clinker-built tender. As the whale

grew wary [later in the nineteenth century], the noise was found objectionable, and therefore a smooth-sided boat, to glide more silently upon the unsuspecting animal, was adopted” (p. 61).

Ashley records the location of the Offshore Ground as latitude 5 ° to 10”south, longitude 105°to 125°west (p. 41). Thomas Heffernanhas identified at least seven whaleships that were in the neighborhood of the Essex at the sinking: three from Nantucket (the Governor Strong, the Thomas, and the Globe); three from New Bedford (the Balaena, the Persia, the Golconda); and one from England (the Coquette) (p. 77).

For information on hardtack, see Sandra Oliver's Saltwater Foodways (p. 107). The nutritional content of the hardtack rations and Galapagos tortoises, as well as the estimate of how much weight the men would lose over the course of sixty days, were determined with the help of Beth Tornovish and Dr. Timothy Lepore on Nantucket. Statistics relating to the body's water needs come from Understanding Normal and Clinical Nutrition, by Eleanor Whitney et al. (pp. 272-75). As a point of comparison, Captain Bligh set his men's initial daily rations at one ounce of bread (as opposed to six ounces for the men of the Essex) and a quarter pint (compared to ahalfpint) ofwater (Bounty's Launch, p. 36). Francis Olmstead observed that many of the crew aboard the whaleship on which he sailed had “laid in from fifty to seventy pounds of tobacco as their solace for the voyage, and will probably have to obtain a fresh supply from the captain before they return home” (pp. 83-84).

Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser speak of the effects of a “tormenting memory” and cite William James's reference to the San Francisco earthquake in “Disaster: Effects on Mental and Physical State” (pp. 443-44). Hilde Bluhm in “How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps” speaks of the importance of self-expression in promoting psychic survival (p. 10). John Leach, in Survival Psychology, refers to activities such as Lawrence's creation of a piece of twine as “tasking,” which he defines as “the breaking down of the person's aim or purpose into simple tasks so that life can be handled one step at a time” (p. 152); he refers to one subject who dealt with a particularly long-term situation by making himself “a rudimentary set of golf clubs and wooden balls” (p. 153).

My discussion of navigation is based in large part on J. B. Hewson's A History of the Practice of Navigation, especially his chapter on navigation by latitude and dead reckoning (pp. 178-225). Francis Olmsted

in Incidents of a Whaling Voyage also provides an interesting account of navigation on a whaleship (pp. 43-44). My thanks to Donald Treworgy of Mystic Seaport for sharing his expertise with me; according to Treworgy in a personal communication: “If Pollard of the Essex did not learn to work a lunar until the next voyage, it seems very unlikely that he would have had a chronometer for doing a time sight in 1819. Marine chronometers in 1819 were still handmade, costly and not always reliable.” According to Obed Macy, who speaks of Nantucket's whaling captains' being “lunarians” in his History, by the 1830s the island's whaleships were “generally furnished with chronometers” (p. 218). On Captain Bligh's remarkable feat of navigation in an open boat, see Bounty's Launch (pp. 24, 60-61).

In his History Obed Macy tells how the crew of the Union tied their two whaleboats together (p. 233). In Survive the Savage Sea, Dougal Robertson recounts how his wooden sailing yacht was rammed repeatedly and sunk by several killer whales. Robert Pitman and Susan Chivers describe how a pod of killer whales attacked and killed a sperm whale in “Terror in Black and White,” Natural History, December 1998 (pp. 26-28). The description of Chase's dissection of a tortoise is based, in parr. on Dougal Robertson's detailed account of cutting up a green turtle (p. 109).

Chase calls the conditions they experienced on December 8 as a “perfect gale.” Dean King's^f Sea of Words defines gale as a “wind of an intensity between that of a strong breeze and a storm. In the 19th century, it was more precisely denned as blowing at a speed of between 28 and 55 nautical miles per hour. In a gale, the waves are high with crests that break into spindrift, while in a strong gale the crests topple and roll and dense streaks of foam blow in the wind” (p. 202). Richard Hubbard's Boater's Bowditch: The Small Craft American Practical Navigator includes a table that puts the theoretical maximum of waves with unlimited fetch in Force 9 (41-47 knots) at40feet(p. 312). William Van Dorn's Oceanography and Seamanship also includes a useful table thai indicates the rate of sea state growth as a function of wind speed and duration (p. 189).