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In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’
Nathaniel Philbrick
The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century – and inspiration for ‘Moby-Dick’ – reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in December 2015, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy.When the whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819, the unthinkable happened. A mere speck in the vast Pacific ocean – and powerless against the forces of nature – Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and her twenty crewmen were forced to take to the open sea in three small boats. Ninety days later only a handful of survivors were rescued – and a terrifying story of desperation, cannibalism and courage was revealed…One of the greatest sea yarns ever spun, ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ is the true story of the extraordinary events that inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece ‘Moby-Dick’.



In the Heart of the Sea
The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick

Nathaniel Philbrick




Copyright (#ulink_7b301790-7cfa-505b-9ce7-0ef02ff754e3)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick 2000
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Lord Weary’s Castle by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1947 and renewed 1972 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
Frontispiece, images on chapter openings, and tailpiece by David Lazarus.
Ship diagrams © 2000 L. F. Tantillo.
Maps on pages 46–7 and 179 by Jeffrey L. Ward

Motion picture artwork © 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved.
Nathaniel Philbrick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006531203
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007381814
Version: 2015-11-16



Dedication (#ulink_1bdc57b6-7cb7-5603-8164-f6eb6cf0e3aa)
To Melissa

Epigraph (#ulink_ab89f867-6e35-5576-81f5-6d76f7591c22)
And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against thee: Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as a heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.
—EXODUS 15:7–8

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale
Who spewed Nantucket bones in the thrashed swell…
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
—ROBERT LOWELL,
‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’

Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ufe59c777-09b9-57cc-8266-b66ab4c5f3f6)
Title Page (#u68c1f3f8-5a0f-5f50-97b3-3706aeba5138)
Copyright (#ua00caca7-ee9f-5849-b37e-675d2662b4ec)
Dedication (#u52295fe8-cb6a-5749-85ea-4d941ed6f27b)
Epigraph (#u21fc3401-b770-5c97-845d-128601645e54)
PREFACE (#udb9db9a6-3409-5ac2-b905-2a336617971b)
CREW OF THE ESSEX (#u8f10b641-8cf4-5310-a7ca-73e36143f2cb)
CHAPTER ONE – Nantucket (#ubdccef52-274b-5fc6-bcaa-d5db9208bbe3)
CHAPTER TWO – Knockdown (#u536afc5a-e97d-5076-af61-f60dcd5580b2)
CHAPTER THREE – First Blood (#u3fe0f0f2-6153-59b3-a7b1-587f990be442)
CHAPTER FOUR – The Lees of Fire (#udcde78c1-27fc-5f40-8df2-3290cd9464b5)
CHAPTER FIVE – The Attack (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX – The Plan (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN – At Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT – Centering Down (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE – The Island (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN – The Whisper of Necessity (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN – Games of Chance (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE – In the Eagle’s Shadow (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – Homecoming (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – Consequences (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE – Bones (#litres_trial_promo)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PREFACE (#ulink_3aaea9c7-8dea-5c4a-bf82-6f1a8a1ddbe3)
February 23, 1821
LIKE A GIANT BIRD of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.
Harvesting sperm whales—the largest toothed whales in existence—was no easy matter. Six men would set out from the ship in a small boat, row up to their prey, harpoon it, then attempt to stab it to death with a lance. The sixty-ton creature could destroy the whaleboat with a flick of its tail, throwing the men into the cold ocean water, often miles from the ship.
Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the highgrade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age. That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined.
For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island called Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the coast of southern New England. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucket’s whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call “Quakers with a vengeance.”
It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, just a few months into what would be a three-year voyage, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. And on that February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusual—a boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The ship’s captain, the thirty-seven-year-old Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft with keen curiosity.
He soon realized that it was a whaleboat—double-ended and about twenty-five feet long—but a whaleboat unlike any he had ever seen. The boat’s sides had been built up by about half a foot. Two makeshift masts had been rigged, transforming the rowing vessel into a rudimentary schooner. The sails—stiff with salt and bleached by the sun—had clearly pulled the boat along for many, many miles. Coffin could see no one at the steering oar. He turned to the man at the Dauphin’s wheel and ordered, “Hard up the helm.”
Under Coffin’s watchful eye, the helmsman brought the ship as close as possible to the derelict craft. Even though their momentum quickly swept them past it, the brief seconds during which the ship loomed over the open boat presented a sight that would stay with the crew the rest of their lives.
First they saw bones—human bones—littering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat were the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered with sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates.
Instead of greeting their rescuers with smiles of relief, the survivors—too delirious with thirst and hunger to speak—were disturbed, even frightened. They jealously clutched the splintered and gnawed-over bones with a desperate, almost feral intensity, refusing to give them up, like two starving dogs found trapped in a pit.
Later, once the survivors had been given some food and water (and had finally surrendered the bones), one of them found the strength to tell his story. It was a tale made of a whaleman’s worst nightmares: of being in a boat far from land with nothing left to eat or drink and—perhaps worst of all—of a whale with the vindictiveness and guile of a man.

EVEN though it is little remembered today, the sinking of the whaleship Essex by an enraged sperm whale was one of the most well-known marine disasters of the nineteenth century. Nearly every child in America read about it in school. It was the event that inspired the climactic scene of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
But the point at which Melville’s novel ends—the sinking of the ship—was merely the starting point for the story of the real-life Essex disaster. The sinking seemed to mark the beginning of a kind of terrible laboratory experiment devised to see just how far the human animal could go in its battle against the savage sea. Of the twenty men who escaped the whale-crushed ship, only eight survived. The two men rescued by the Dauphin had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific—farther by at least 500 miles than Captain William Bligh’s epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackleton’s equally famous passage to South Georgia Island.
For nearly 180 years, most of what was known about the calamity came from the 128-page Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, written by Owen Chase, the ship’s first mate. Fragmentary accounts from other survivors existed, but these lacked the authority and scope of Chase’s narrative, which was published with the help of a ghostwriter only nine months after the first mate’s rescue. Then, around 1960, an old notebook was found in the attic of a home in Penn Yan, New York. Not until twenty years later, in 1980, when the notebook reached the hands of the Nantucket whaling expert Edouard Stackpole, was it realized that its original owner, Thomas Nickerson, had been the Essex’s cabin boy. Late in life, Nickerson, then the proprietor of a boardinghouse on Nantucket, had been urged to write an account of the disaster by a professional writer named Leon Lewis, who may have been one of Nickerson’s guests. Nickerson sent Lewis the notebook containing his only draft of the narrative in 1876. For whatever reason, Lewis never prepared the manuscript for publication and eventually gave the notebook to a neighbor, who died with it still in his possession. Nickerson’s account was finally published as a limited edition monograph by the Nantucket Historical Association in 1984.
In terms of literary quality, Nickerson’s narrative cannot compare to Chase’s polished account. Ragged and meandering, the manuscript is the work of an amateur, but an amateur who was there, at the helm of the Essex when she was struck by the whale. At fourteen, Nickerson had been the youngest member of the ship’s crew, and his account remains that of a wide-eyed child on the verge of manhood, of an orphan (he lost both his parents before he was two) looking for a home. He was seventy-one when he finally put pen to paper, but Thomas Nickerson could look back to that distant time as if it were yesterday, his memories bolstered by information he’d learned in conversations with other survivors. In the account that follows, Chase will get his due, but for the first time his version of events is challenged by that of his cabin boy, whose testimony can now be heard 180 years after the sinking of the Essex.
WHEN I was a child, my father, Thomas Philbrick, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of several books about American sea fiction, often put my brother and me to bed with the story of the whale that attacked a ship. My uncle, the late Charles Philbrick, winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize in 1958, wrote a five-hundred-line poem about the Essex, “A Travail Past,” published posthumously in 1976. It powerfully evoked what he called “a past we forget that we need to know.” Ten years later, as it happened, in 1986, I moved with my wife and two children to the Essex’s home port, Nantucket Island.
I soon discovered that Owen Chase, Herman Melville, Thomas Nickerson, and Uncle Charlie were not the only ones to have written about the Essex. There was Nantucket’s distinguished historian Edouard Stackpole, who died in 1993, just as my own research was beginning. There was Thomas Heffernan, author of Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex (1981), an indispensable work of scholarship that was completed just before the discovery of the Nickerson manuscript. Finally, there was Henry Carlisle’s compelling novel The Jonah Man (1984), which tells the story of the Essex from the viewpoint of the ship’s captain, George Pollard.
Even after I’d read these accounts of the disaster, I wanted to know more. I wondered why the whale had acted as it did, how starvation and dehydration had affected the men’s judgment; what had happened out there? I immersed myself in the documented experiences of other whalemen from the era; I read about cannibalism, survival at sea, the psychology and physiology of starvation, navigation, oceanography, the behavior of sperm whales, the construction of ships—anything that might help me better understand what these men experienced on the wide and unforgiving Pacific Ocean.
I came to realize that the Essex disaster had provided Melville with much more than an ending to one of the greatest American novels ever written. It had spoken to the same issues of class, race, leadership, and man’s relationship to nature that would occupy him throughout Moby-Dick. It had also given Melville an archetypal but real place from which to launch the imaginary voyage of the Pequod: a tiny island that had once commanded the attention of the world. Relentlessly acquisitive, technologically advanced, with a religious sense of its own destiny, Nantucket was, in 1821, what America would become. No one dreamed that in a little more than a generation the island would founder—done in, like the Essex, by a too-close association with the whale.

CREW OF THE ESSEX (#ulink_05efe82d-d951-5273-abdb-035865ed9f81)
CAPTAIN
George Pollard, Jr.
FIRST MATE
Owen Chase
SECOND MATE
Matthew Joy
BOATSTEERERS
Benjamin Lawrence • Obed Hendricks Thomas Chappel
STEWARD
William Bond
SAILORS
Owen Coffin • Isaac Cole • Henry Dewitt Richard Peterson • Charles Ramsdell • Barzillai Ray Samuel Reed • Isaiah Sheppard • Charles Shorter Lawson Thomas • Seth Weeks • Joseph West William Wright
CABIN BOY
Thomas Nickerson

Sail Plan of the Whaleship Essex


1 mizzen sail
2 mizzen topgallant sail
3 mizzen topsail
4 main topgallant sail
5 main topsail
6 main course or mainsail
7 fore topgallant sail
8 fore topsail
9 fore course or fore sail
10 fore topmast staysail
11 jib
12 flying jib

Deck Plan of the Whaleship Essex


1 windlass
2 forecastle companionway
3 foremast
4 tryworks
5 main hatch
6 mainmast and pumps
7 cookhouse
8 spare whaleboat mounted on overhead rack
9 mizzenmast
10 aft companionway
11 wheel
12 spare whaleboat
13 starboard boat
14 aft larboard boat
15 waist boat

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_395a5b9d-5eb5-5a4a-af0f-9f54c69c226c)
Nantucket (#ulink_395a5b9d-5eb5-5a4a-af0f-9f54c69c226c)


IT WAS, HE LATER REMEMBERED, “the most pleasing moment of my life”—the moment he stepped aboard the whaleship Essex for the first time. He was fourteen years old, with a broad nose and an open, eager face, and like every other Nantucket boy, he’d been taught to “idolize the form of a ship.” The Essex might not look like much, stripped of her rigging and chained to the wharf, but for Thomas Nickerson she was a vessel of opportunity. Finally, after what had seemed an endless wait, Nickerson was going to sea.
The hot July sun beat down on her old, oil-soaked timbers until the temperature below was infernal, but Nickerson explored every cranny, from the brick altar of the tryworks being assembled on deck to the lightless depths of the empty hold. In between was a creaking, compartmentalized world, a living thing of oak and pine that reeked of oil, blood, tobacco juice, food, salt, mildew, tar, and smoke. “[B]lack and ugly as she was,” Nickerson wrote, “I would not have exchanged her for a palace.”
In July of 1819 the Essex was one of a fleet of more than seventy Nantucket whaleships in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. With whale-oil prices steadily climbing and the rest of the world’s economy sunk in depression, the village of Nantucket was on its way to becoming one of the richest towns in America.
The community of about seven thousand people lived on a gently sloping hill crowded with houses and topped by windmills and church towers. It resembled, some said, the elegant and established port of Salem—a remarkable compliment for an island more than twenty miles out into the Atlantic, below Cape Cod. But if the town, high on its hill, radiated an almost ethereal quality of calm, the waterfront below bustled with activity. Sprouting from among the long, low warehouses and ropewalks, four solid-fill wharves reached out more than a hundred yards into the harbor. Tethered to the wharves or anchored in the harbor were, typically, fifteen to twenty whaleships, along with dozens of smaller vessels, mainly sloops and schooners, that brought trade goods to and from the island. Each wharf, a labyrinth of anchors, try-pots, spars, and oil casks, was thronged with sailors, stevedores, and artisans. Two-wheeled, horse-drawn carts known as calashes continually came and went.
It was a scene already familiar to Thomas Nickerson. The children of Nantucket had long used the waterfront as their playground. They rowed decrepit whaleboats up and down the harbor and clambered up into the rigging of the ships. To off-islanders it was clear that these children were a “distinctive class of juveniles, accustomed to consider themselves as predestined mariners…They climbed ratlines like monkeys—little fellows of ten or twelve years—and laid out on the yardarms with the most perfect nonchalance.” The Essex might be Nickerson’s first ship, but he had been preparing for the voyage almost his entire life.
He wasn’t going alone. His friends Barzillai Ray, Owen Coffin, and Charles Ramsdell, all between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, were also sailing on the Essex. Owen Coffin was the cousin of the Essex’s new captain and probably steered his three friends to his kinsman’s ship. Nickerson was the youngest of the group.
The Essex was old and, at 87 feet long and 238 tons displacement, quite small, but she had a reputation on Nantucket as a lucky ship. Over the last decade and a half, she had done well by her Quaker owners, regularly returning at two-year intervals with enough oil to make them wealthy men. Daniel Russell, her previous captain, had been successful enough over the course of four voyages to be given command of a new and larger ship, the Aurora. Russell’s promotion allowed the former first mate, George Pollard, Jr., to take over command of the Essex, and one of the boatsteerers (or harpooners), Owen Chase, to move up to first mate. Three other crew members were elevated to the rank of boatsteerer. Not only a lucky but apparently a happy vessel, the Essex was, according to Nickerson, “on the whole rather a desirable ship than otherwise.”
Since Nantucket was, like any seafaring town of the period, a community obsessed with omens and signs, such a reputation counted for much. Still, there was talk among the men on the wharves when earlier that July, as the Essex was being repaired and outfitted, a comet appeared in the night sky.
NANTUCKET was a town of roof dwellers. Nearly every house, its shingles painted red or left to weather into gray, had a roof-mounted platform known as a walk. While its intended use was to facilitate putting out chimney fires with buckets of sand, the walk was also an excellent place to look out to sea with a spyglass, to search for the sails of returning ships. At night, the spyglasses of Nantucket were often directed toward the heavens, and in July of 1819, islanders were looking toward the northwest sky. The Quaker merchant Obed Macy, who kept meticulous records of what he determined were the “most extraordinary events” in the life of his island, watched the night sky from his house on Pleasant Street. “The comet (which appears every clear night) is thought to be very large from its uncommonly long tail,” he wrote, “which extends upward in opposition to the sun in an almost perpendicular direction and heaves off to the eastward and nearly points for the North Star.”
From earliest times, the appearance of a comet was interpreted as a sign that something unusual was about to happen. The New Bedford Mercury, the newspaper Nantucketers read for lack of one of their own, commented, “True it is, that the appearance of these eccentric visitors have always preceded some remarkable event.” But Macy resisted such speculation: “[T]he philosophical reasoning we leave to the scientific part of the community, still it is beyond a doubt that the most learned is possessed of very little undoubted knowledge of the subject of cometicks.”
At the wharves and shipping offices there was much speculation, and not just about the comet. All spring and summer there had been sightings up and down the New England coast of what the Mercury described as “an extraordinary sea animal”—a serpent with black, horselike eyes and a fifty-foot body resembling a string of barrels floating on the water. Any sailor, especially if he was young and impressionable like Thomas Nickerson, must have wondered, if only fleetingly, if this was, in fact, the best time to be heading out on a voyage around Cape Horn.
Nantucketers had good reason to be superstitious. Their lives were governed by a force of terrifying unpredictability—the sea. Due to a constantly shifting network of shoals, including the Nantucket Bar just off the harbor mouth, the simple act of coming to and from the island was an often harrowing and sometimes catastrophic lesson in seamanship. Particularly in winter, when storms were the most violent, wrecks occurred almost weekly. Buried throughout the island were the corpses of anonymous seamen who had washed up on its wave-thrashed shores. Nantucket, which means “faraway land” in the language of the island’s native inhabitants, the Wampanoag, was a mound of sand eroding into an inexorable ocean, and all its residents, even if they had never left the island, were all too aware of the inhumanity of the sea.
Nantucket’s English settlers, who began arriving in 1659, had been mindful of the sea’s dangers. They had hoped to support themselves not as fishermen but as farmers and sheepherders on this grassy, pond-speckled crescent without wolves. But as the increasing size of the livestock herds, combined with the growing number of farms, threatened to transform the island into a wind-blown wasteland, Nantucketers inevitably looked seaward.
Every fall, hundreds of “right whales” appeared to the south of the island and remained until the early spring. So named because they were “the right whale to kill,” right whales grazed the waters off Nantucket much like seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths. While English settlers at Cape Cod and eastern Long Island had already been hunting right whales for decades, no one on Nantucket had had the courage to pursue the whales in boats. Instead they left the harvesting of whales that washed up onto the shore (known as drift whales) to the Wampanoag.
Around 1690, a group of Nantucketers was standing on a hill overlooking the ocean where some whales were spouting and playing with one another. One of the onlookers nodded toward the whales and the ocean beyond. “There,” he asserted, “is a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will go for bread.” In fulfillment of his prophecy, a Cape Codder by the name of Ichabod Paddock was soon thereafter lured across Nantucket Sound to instruct the islanders in the art of killing whales.
Their first boats were only twenty feet long, and they launched them from the beaches along the island’s south shore. Typically a whaleboat’s crew was comprised of five Wampanoag oarsmen, with a single white Nantucketer at the steering oar. Once they’d killed the whale, they towed it back to the beach, where they removed the blubber and boiled it into oil. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, English Nantucketers had instituted a system of debt servitude that provided them with a steady supply of Wampanoag labor. Without the island’s native inhabitants, who outnumbered Nantucket’s white population well into the 1720s, the island would never have become a successful whaling port.
In the year 1712, a Captain Hussey, cruising in his little boat for right whales along Nantucket’s south shore, was blown out to sea in a fierce northerly gale. Many miles out, he glimpsed several whales of a type he had never seen before. Unlike a right whale’s vertical spout, this whale’s spout arched forward. In spite of the high winds and rough seas, Hussey managed to harpoon and kill one of the whales, its blood and oil stilling the waves in an almost biblical fashion. This creature, Hussey quickly realized, was a sperm whale, one of which had washed up on the island’s southwest shore only a few years before. 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, called spermaceti, that could be simply ladled into an awaiting cask. (It was spermaceti’s resemblance to seminal fluid that gave rise to the sperm whale’s name.) The sperm whale might be faster and more aggressive than the right whale, but it was far more enriching. With no other means of support, Nantucketers dedicated themselves to the single-minded pursuit of the sperm whale, and they soon outstripped their whaling rivals on the mainland and Long Island.
By 1760, the Nantucketers had practically wiped out the local whale population. But no matter—by that point they had enlarged their whaling sloops and equipped them with brick tryworks capable of processing the oil on the open ocean. Now, since it would not need to return to port as often to deliver bulky blubber, their fleet had a far greater range. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, Nantucketers had made it to the verge of the Arctic Circle, to the west coast of Africa, the east coast of South America, and as far south as the Falkland Islands.
In a speech before Parliament in 1775, the British statesman Edmund Burke looked to the island’s inhabitants as the leaders of a new American breed—a “recent people” whose success in whaling had exceeded the collective might of all of Europe. Living on an island that was almost the same distance from the mainland as England was from France, Nantucketers developed a British sense of themselves as a distinct and superior people, privileged citizens of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “Nation of Nantucket.”
The Revolution and the War of 1812, when the British navy marauded offshore shipping, proved disastrous to the whale fishery. Fortunately, Nantucketers possessed enough capital and inherent whaling expertise to survive these trials. By 1819, Nantucket was well on its way to reclaiming and, as the whalers ventured into the Pacific, even surpassing its former glory. But the rise of the Pacific sperm-whale fishery had an unfortunate side effect. Instead of voyages that had once averaged about nine months, two- and three-year voyages had become the norm. Never before had the division between Nantucket’s whalemen and their people been so great. Long gone were the days when Nantucketers could watch from shore as the men and boys of the island pursued the whale. Nantucket was now the whaling capital of the world, but there were more than a few islanders who had never even seen a whale.
In the summer of 1819 people were still talking about the time when, nine years earlier, a pod of right whales was spotted to the north of the island. Whaleboats were quickly dispatched. A crowd gathered on shore to watch in fascination as two whales were killed and towed back into the harbor. For the people of Nantucket, it was an epiphany. Here at last were two of the creatures they had heard so much about, creatures upon which their livelihood depended. One of the whales was pulled up onto the wharf, and before the day was out, thousands of people—including, perhaps, the five-year-old Thomas Nickerson—had come to see it. One can only imagine the intensity of the Nantucketers’ curiosity as they peered at the giant creature, and poked and prodded it, and said to themselves, “So this is it.”
Nantucket had created an economic system that no longer depended on the island’s natural resources. The island’s soil had long since been exhausted by overfarming. Nantucket’s large Wampanoag population had been reduced to a handful by epidemics, forcing shipowners to look to the mainland for crew. Whales had almost completely disappeared from local waters. And still the Nantucketers prospered. As one visitor observed, the island had become a “barren sandbank, fertilized with whale-oil only.”

THROUGHOUT the seventeenth century, English Nantucketers resisted all attempts to establish a church on the island, partly because a woman by the name of Mary Coffin Starbuck forbade it. It was said that nothing of consequence was done on Nantucket without Mary’s approval. Mary Coffin and Nathaniel Starbuck had been the first English couple to be married on the island, in 1662, and had established a lucrative outpost for trading with the Wampanoag. Whenever an itinerant minister came to Nantucket looking to establish a congregation, he was firmly rebuffed by Mary Starbuck. Then, in 1702, Mary succumbed to a charismatic Quaker minister named John Richardson. Speaking before a group assembled in the Starbucks’ living room, Richardson succeeded in moving Mary to tears. It was Mary Starbuck’s conversion to Quakerism that established the unique fusion of spirituality and covetousness that would make possible Nantucket’s rise as a whaling port.
Quakers or, more properly, members of the Society of Friends, depended on their own experience of God’s presence, the “Inner Light,” for guidance rather than relying on a Puritan minister’s interpretation of scripture. But Nantucket’s ever growing number of Quakers were hardly free-thinking individuals. Friends were expected to conform to rules of behavior determined during yearly meetings, encouraging a sense of community that was as carefully controlled as that of any New England society. If there was a difference, it was the Quaker belief in pacifism and a conscious spurning of worldly ostentation—two principles that were not intended to interfere, in any way, with a person’s ability to make money. Instead of building fancy houses or buying fashionable clothes, Nantucket’s Quakers reinvested their profits in the whale fishery. As a result, they were able to weather the downturns that laid to waste so many mainland whaling merchants, and Mary Starbuck’s children, along with their Macy and Coffin cousins, quickly established a Quaker whaling dynasty.
Nantucketers saw no contradiction between their livelihood and their religion. God Himself had granted them dominion over the fishes of the sea. Peleg Folger, a Nantucket whaleman turned Quaker elder, expressed it in verse:
Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale, That wondrous monster of a mighty length; Vast is his head and body, vast his tail, Beyond conception his unmeasured strength.

But, everlasting God, thou dost ordain That we, poor feeble mortals should engage (Ourselves, our wives and children to maintain), This dreadful monster with a martial rage.
Even if Nantucket’s Quakers dominated the island economically and culturally, room was made for others, and by the early nineteenth century there were two Congregational church towers bracketing the town north and south. Yet all shared in a common, spiritually infused mission—to maintain a peaceful life on land while raising bloody havoc at sea. Pacifist killers, plain-dressed millionaires, the whalemen of Nantucket were simply fulfilling the Lord’s will.

THE town that Thomas Nickerson knew had a ramshackle feel about it. All it took was one walk through its narrow sandy streets to discover that despite the stately church towers and the occasional mansion, Nantucket was a far cry from Salem. “The good citizens of [Nantucket] do not seem to pride themselves upon the regularity of their streets [or] the neatness of their sidewalks,” observed a visiting Quaker. The houses were shingled and unpretentious and, as often as not, included items scavenged from ships. “[H]atchways make very convenient bridges for gutters…; a plank from the stern of a ship—having the name on it—answers the double purpose of making a fence—and informing the stranger if he can be at a loss—in what town he is.”
Instead of using the official street names that had been assigned for tax purposes in 1798, Nantucketers spoke of “Elisha Bunker’s street” or “Captain Mitchell’s.” “The inhabitants live together like one great family,” wrote the Nantucketer Walter Folger, who happened to be a part-owner of the Essex, “not in one house, but in friendship. They not only know their nearest neighbors, but each one knows all the rest. If you should wish to see any man, you need but ask the first inhabitant you meet, and he will be able to conduct you to his residence, to tell what occupation he is of, and any other particulars you may wish to know.”
But even within this close-knit familial community, there were distinctions, and Thomas Nickerson was on the outside looking in. The unhappy truth was that while Nickerson’s mother, Rebecca Gibson, was a Nantucketer, his father, Thomas Nickerson, had been from Cape Cod, and Thomas Junior had been born in Harwich in 1805. Six months later, his parents moved him and his sisters across the sound to Nantucket. It was six months too late. 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.
It might have earned Thomas Nickerson some regard on the island if his mother had at least come from old Nantucket stock, with a last name like Coffin, Starbuck, Macy, Folger, or Gardner. Such was not the case. On an island where many families could claim direct descent from one of the twenty or so “first settlers,” the Gibsons and Nickersons were without the network of cousins that sustained most Nantucketers. “Perhaps there is not another place in the world, of equal magnitude,” said Obed Macy, “where the inhabitants [are] so connected by consanguinity as in this, which add[s] much to the harmony of the people and to their attachment to the place.” Nickerson’s friends and shipmates Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Barzillai Ray could count themselves as part of this group. Thomas might play with them, go to sea with them, but deep down he understood that no matter how hard he might try, he was, at best, only a coof.
Where a person lived in Nantucket depended on his station in the whaling trade. If he was a shipowner or merchant, he more than likely lived on Pleasant Street, set back on the hill, farthest from the clamor and stench of the wharves. (In subsequent decades, as their ambitions required greater space and visibility, these worthies would gravitate toward Main Street). Captains, in contrast, tended to choose the thoroughfare with the best view of the harbor: Orange Street. With a house on the east side of Orange, a captain could watch his ship being outfitted at the wharf and keep track of activity in the harbor. Mates, as a rule, lived at the foot of this hill (“under the bank,” it was called) on Union Street, in the actual shadow of the homes they aspired one day to own.
On the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets was the Friends’ immense South Meeting House, built in 1792 from pieces of the even bigger Great Meeting House that once loomed over the stoneless field of the Quaker Burial Ground at the end of Main Street. Just because Nickerson had been brought up a Congregationalist didn’t mean he had never been inside this or the other Quaker meetinghouse on Broad Street. One visitor claimed that almost half the people who attended a typical Quaker meeting were not members of the Society of Friends. Earlier that summer, on June 29, Obed Macy recorded that two thousand people (more than a quarter of the island’s population) had attended a public Quaker meeting at the South Meeting House.
While many of the attendees were there for the good of their souls, those in their teens and early twenties tended to have other motives. No other place on Nantucket offered a better opportunity for young people to meet members of the opposite sex. Nantucketer Charles Murphey described in a poem how young men such as himself used the long gaps of silence typical of a Quaker meeting
To sit with eager eyes directed
On all the beauty there collected
And gaze with wonder while in sessions
On all the various forms and fashions.
Yet another gathering spot for amorous young people was the ridge of hills behind the town where the four windmills stood. Here couples could enjoy a spectacular view of the town and Nantucket Harbor, with the brand-new lighthouse at the end of Great Point visible in the distance.
What is surprising is how rarely Nantucketers, even young and adventurous Nantucketers like Nickerson and company, strayed beyond the gates of the little town. “As small as [the island] is,” one whale-oil merchant admitted in a letter, “I was never at the extreme east or west, and for some years I dare say have not been one mile from town.” In a world of whales, sea serpents, and ominous signs in the night sky, all Nantucketers, whalemen and landsmen alike, looked to the town as a sanctuary, a fenced-in place of familiar ways and timeless ancestral alliances, a place to call home.

PASSIONS stirred beneath Nantucket’s Quaker facade. Life might seem restrained and orderly as hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people made their way to meeting each Thursday and Sunday, the men in their long dark coats and wide-brimmed hats, the women in long dresses and meticulously crafted bonnets. But factors besides Quakerism and a common heritage also drove the Nantucket psyche—in particular, an obsession with the whale. No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.
The imprinting of a young Nantucketer began at the earliest age. The first words a baby was taught included the language of the chase—“townor,” for instance, a Wampanoag word meaning that the whale has been sighted for a second time. Bedtime stories told of killing whales and eluding cannibals in the Pacific. One mother approvingly recounted how her nine-year-old son attached a fork to the end of a ball of darning cotton and then proceeded to harpoon the family cat. The mother happened into the room just as the terrified pet attempted to escape, and unsure of what she had found herself in the middle of, she picked up the cotton ball. Like a veteran boatsteerer, the boy shouted, “Payout, mother! Pay out! There she sounds through the window!”
There was rumored to be a secret society of young women on the island whose members pledged to marry only men who had already killed a whale. To help these young women identify them as hunters, boatsteerers wore chockpins (small oak pins used to keep the harpoon line in the bow groove of a whaleboat) on their lapels. Boatsteerers, superb athletes with prospects of lucrative captaincies, were considered the most eligible of Nantucket bachelors.
Instead of toasting a person’s health, a Nantucketer offered invocations of a darker sort:
Death to the living,
Long life to the killers,
Success to sailors’ wives
And greasy luck to whalers.
Despite the bravado of this little ditty, death was a fact of life with which all Nantucketers were thoroughly familiar. In 1810 there were forty-seven fatherless children on Nantucket, while almost a quarter of the women over the age of twenty-three (the average age of marriage) had been widowed by the sea.
In old age, Nickerson still visited the graves of his parents in the Old North Burial Ground. In 1819, during the last few weeks before his departure aboard the Essex, he undoubtedly made his way to this fenced-in patch of sun-scorched grass and walked among its canted stones. Nickerson’s father had been the first of the parents to die, on November 9, 1806, at the age of thirty-three. His gravestone read:
Crush’d as the moth beneath thy hand
We moulder to the dust
Our feeble powers can ne’er withstand
And all our beauty’s lost.
Nickerson’s mother, who had borne five children, died less than a month later at the age of twenty-eight. Her oldest living daughter was eight years old; her only son was not yet two. Her inscription read:
This mortal life decays apace
How soon the bubble’s broke
Adam and all his numerous race
Are Vanity and Smoke.
Nickerson, who was raised by his grandparents, wasn’t the only orphan aboard the Essex. His friend Barzillai Ray had also lost both his parents. Owen Coffin and Charles Ramsdell had each lost a father. This may have been their closest bond: each of them, like so many Nantucketers, was a fatherless child for whom a ship’s officer would be much more than a demanding taskmaster; he would be, quite possibly, the first male authority figure the boys had ever known.
PERHAPS no community before or since has been so divided by its commitment to work. For a whaleman and his family, it was a punishing regimen: two to three years away, three to four months at home. With their men gone for so long, Nantucket’s women were obliged not only to raise the children but also to run many of the island’s businesses. It was largely the women who maintained the complex web of personal and commercial relationships that kept the community functioning. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, whose classic Letters from an American Farmer describes his lengthy stay on the island a few years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, suggested that the Nantucket women’s “prudence and good management…justly entitles them to a rank superior to that of other wives.”
Quakerism contributed to the women’s strength. In its emphasis on the spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes, the religion fostered an attitude that was in keeping with what all Nantucketers saw plainly demonstrated to them every day: that women, who on Nantucket tended to be better educated than the island’s men, were just as intelligent, just as capable as their male counterparts.
By necessity and choice, the island’s women maintained active social lives, visiting one another with a frequency Crèvecoeur described as incessant. These visits involved more than the exchange of mere gossip. They were the setting in which much of the business of the town was transacted. The ninteenth-century feminist Lucretia Coffin Mott, who was born and raised on Nantucket, remembered how a husband back from a voyage commonly followed in the wake of his wife, accompanying her to get-togethers with other wives. Mott, who eventually moved to Philadelphia, commented on how odd such a practice would have struck anyone from the mainland, where the sexes operated in entirely different social spheres.
Some of the Nantucket wives adapted quite well to the three-years-away, three-months-at-home rhythm of the whale fishery. The islander Eliza Brock recorded in her journal what she called the “Nantucket Girl’s Song”:
Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea,
For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me.
But every now and then I shall like to see his face,
For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace,
With his brow so nobly open, and his dark and kindly eye,
Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh.
But when he says “Goodbye my love, I’m off across the sea,”
First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I’m free.
The mantle of power and responsibility settled upon the Nantucket woman’s shoulders on her wedding day. “[N]o sooner have they undergone this ceremony,” said Crèvecoeur, “than they cease to appear so cheerful and gay; the new rank they hold in the society impresses them with more serious ideas than were entertained before…[T]he new wife…gradually advises and directs [the household]; the new husband soon goes to sea; he leaves her to learn and exercise the new government in which she is entered.”
To the undying outrage of subsequent generations of Nantucket loyalists, Crèvecoeur claimed that many of the island’s women had developed an addiction to opium: “They have adopted these many years the Asiatic custom of taking a dose of opium every morning, and so deeply rooted is it that they would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence.” Why they took the drug is perhaps impossible to determine from this distance in time. Still, the portrait that emerges—of a community of achievers attempting to cope with a potentially devastating loneliness—makes the women’s dependence on opium perhaps easier to understand. The ready availability of the drug on the island (opium was included in every whaleship’s medical chest) combined with the inhabitants’ wealth may also help to explain why the drug was so widely used in Nantucket.
There is little doubt that intimacy—physical as well as emotional—between a wife and a husband must have been difficult to establish under the tremendously compressed circumstances of the few months available between voyages. An island tradition claims that Nantucket women dealt with their husbands’ long absences by relying on sexual aids known as “he’s-at-homes.” Although this claim, like that of drug use, seems to fly in the face of the island’s staid Quaker reputation, in 1979 a six-inch plaster penis (along with a batch of letters from the nineteenth century and a laudanum bottle) was discovered hidden in the chimney of a house in the island’s historic district. Just because they were “superior wives” didn’t mean that the island’s women were without normal physical desires. Like their husbands, Nantucket’s women were ordinary human beings attempting to adapt to a most extraordinary way of life.

THOMAS Nickerson may have enjoyed his first moments aboard the Essex, exploring her dark, hot interior, but the thrill was soon over. For the next three weeks, during the warmest summer anyone could remember, Nickerson and the gradually accumulating crew of the Essex labored to prepare the ship. Even in winter, Nantucket’s wharves, topped by a layer of oil-soaked sand, stank to the point that people said you didn’t see Nantucket when you first rounded the lighthouse at Brant Point, you smelled it. That July and August the stench rising from the wharf must have been pungent enough to gag even a veteran whaleman.
At that time on Nantucket it was standard practice to have the newly signed members of a whaleship’s crew help prepare the vessel for the upcoming voyage. Nowhere else in New England was a sailor expected to help rig and provision his ship. That was what riggers, stevedores, and provisioners were for. But on Nantucket, whose Quaker merchants were famous for their ability to cut costs and increase profits, a different standard prevailed.
Whalemen did not work for wages; they were paid a share, or lay—a predetermined portion of the total take—at the end of the voyage. This meant that whatever work a shipowner could extract from a sailor prior to a voyage was, in essence, free or, to Nickerson’s mind, “a donation of…labor” on the part of the sailor. A shipowner might advance a seaman some money to help him purchase the clothing and equipment necessary for the voyage, but it was deducted (with interest) from his lay at the conclusion of the voyage.
As cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson had what was known as a very “long” (or meager) lay. Although the ship papers from the Essex’s 1819 voyage have vanished, we know that Nickerson’s predecessor, the cabin boy Joseph Underwood of Salem, received a 1/198 lay for the previous voyage. Given that the Essex’s cargo of 1,200 barrels of sperm oil sold for about $26,500, Underwood was paid, once the expenses of the voyage were deducted from the gross and his personal expenses were deducted from his own portion, a grand total of about a $150 for two years’ work. Although this was a pitiful wage, the cabin boy had been provided with room and board for two years and now had the experience to begin a career as a whaleman.
By the end of July, the Essex’s upperworks—just about everything at deck level and above—had been completely rebuilt, including a new layer of pine decking and a cookhouse. At some point—probably before Nickerson joined the crew—the Essex was laid over on her side for coppering. Immense block-and-tackle systems were strung from the ship’s masts to the wharf to haul the ship onto her side. The exposed bottom was then sheathed in copper to protect the ship from marine growth, which could turn her four-inch-thick oak hull planking into a soft, porous veneer.
At twenty years of age, the Essex was reaching the point when many vessels began to exhibit serious structural deterioration. Whale oil seems to have acted as a preservative, providing most whaleships with lives much longer than that of a typical merchant vessel. Still, there were limits. Rot, teredo worms, and a condition called iron sickness, in which the ship’s rusted iron fastenings weakened the oak, were all potential problems.
The ever lengthening voyages around Cape Horn were another concern. “The ship[s] being so long at sea without much repairs,” Obed Macy would write in his journal, “must shorten the durations of the ships [by] many years.” Indeed, the Essex had undergone several days of repairs in South America during her previous voyage. She was an old ship caught up in a new era of whaling, and no one knew how much longer she would last.
Owners were always reluctant to invest any more money in the repair of a ship than was absolutely necessary. While they had no choice but to rebuild the Essex’s upperworks, there could well have been suspicious areas below the waterline that they chose to address at a later time, if not ignore. That summer, the Essex’s principal owners, Gideon Folger and Sons, were awaiting delivery of a new, much larger whaleship, the Aurora. This was not the year to spend an inordinate amount of money on a tired old vessel like the Essex.
NANTUCKET’S shipowners could be as fierce in their own bloodless way as any whaleman. They might “act the Quaker,” but that didn’t keep them from pursuing profits with a lethal enthusiasm.
In Moby-Dick, one of the Pequod’s owners is Bildad, a pious Quaker whose religious scruples do not prevent him from extorting cruelly long lays from the crew (he offers Ishmael a 1/777 lay!). With his Bible in one hand and ledgerbook in the other, Bildad resembles a lean, Quakerly John D. Rockefeller, his mind and soul devoted to the cold calculus of making a whaling voyage pay.
There were some observers who claimed that, rather than leading the islanders to prosperity and grace, Quakerism was at the root of whatever evil flourished in the sharp business practices of Nantucket’s shipowners. According to William Comstock, who penned an account of a whaling cruise from Nantucket in the 1820s, “Unfortunately, the anger which [the Quakers] are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart, and, while they make professions of love and good will…, the rancor and intense malevolence of their feelings poisons every generous spring of human kindness.”
Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, two major shareholders in the Essex, were prominent members of the island’s Quaker upper class. Yet, according to Nickerson, Macy, in charge of outfitting the Essex that summer of 1819, attempted to cut costs by severely underprovisioning the ship. In this practice he was not alone. “[T]he owners of whaleships too frequently neglect to victual their ships properly,” Comstock wrote, “depending on the Captain to stint his crew in proportion to his means, by which a few dollars are saved to the rich owners, while the poor hard laboring sailor famishes with hunger.” While it would be unfair to point to Paul Macy as responsible, even in part, for the grief that eventually awaited the men of the Essex, the first step toward that future began with Macy’s decision to save a little money in beef and hardtack.
On Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, people didn’t invest in bonds or the stock market, but rather in whaleships. By purchasing shares in several ships rather than putting their money in a single vessel, islanders spread both the risk and the reward throughout the community. Agents such as Macy and Folger could expect a total return on their whaling investments of somewhere between 28 and 44 percent per year.
Making this level of profitability all the more remarkable was the state of the world’s economy in 1819. As Nantucket continued to add ship after ship to her fleet, mainland businesses were collapsing by the hundreds. Claiming that the “days of our fictitious affluence is past,” a Baltimore newspaper reported that spring on “dishonored credits, deserted dwellings, inactive streets, declining commerce, and exhausted coffers.” Nantucket remained an astonishing exception. Just as its isolated situation many miles out to sea enabled it to enjoy the warming influence of the Gulf Stream (providing for the longest growing season in the region), Nantucket existed, at least for the time being, in its own benign climate of prosperity.
Between July 4 and July 23, ten whaleships left the island, most heading out in pairs. The wharves were busy with laborers long into the night, all caught up in the disciplined frenzy of preparing whaleships for sea. But Gideon Folger, Paul Macy, and the Essex’s captain, George Pollard, knew that all the preparations would be for naught if they couldn’t find a crew of twenty-one men.
Since there were only so many Nantucketers to go around, shipowners relied on off-islanders with no previous sailing experience, known as “green hands,” to man their vessels. Many came from nearby Cape Cod. Shipping agents in cities up and down the East Coast also provided the owners with green hands, often sending them to Nantucket in groups aboard packet ships.
A green hand’s first impression of the island was seldom positive. The young boys loitering on the waterfront inevitably harassed the new arrivals with the cry “See the greenies, come to go ileing.” (“Oil” was pronounced “ile” on Nantucket.) Then followed a walk from Straight Wharf to the base of Main Street, where a clothing and dry goods store served as the “grand resort and rendezvous of seafaring men.” Here men looking for a berth or just killing time (known as “watching the pass” on Nantucket) spent the day in a haze of tobacco smoke, lounging on an assortment of benches and wooden boxes.
On this island of perpetual motion, job-seeking seamen were expected to whittle. It was the way a man whittled that let people know what kind of berth he expected. A whaleman with at least one voyage under his belt knew enough to draw his knife always away from him. This signaled that he was looking for a boatsteerer’s berth. Boatsteerers, on the other hand, whittled in the opposite direction, toward themselves; this indicated that they believed they were ready to become a mate. Not knowing the secret codes that Nantucketers had developed, a green hand simply whittled as best he knew how.
Many of the green hands felt as if they had found themselves in a foreign country where the people spoke a different language. All Nantucketers, even the women and little children, used nautical terms as if they were able-bodied seamen. According to one visitor, “Every child can tell which way the wind blows, and any old woman in the street will talk of cruising about, hailing an old messmate, or making one bring to, as familiarly as the captain of a whaleship, just arrived from the northwest coast, will describe dimension to a landlubber by the span of his jibboom, or the length of his mainstay.” For the green hands, whose first taste of the sea may have been on the packet ship to Nantucket, it was all a bewildering blur, particularly since many of the islanders also employed the distinctive “thee and thou” phrasing of the Quakers.
Compounding the confusion was the Nantucketers’ accent. It wasn’t just “ile” for “oil”; there was a host of peculiar pronunciations, many of which varied markedly from what was found even as nearby as Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard. A Nantucket whaleman kept his clothing in a “chist.” His harpoons were kept “shurp,” especially when “atteking” a “lirge” whale. A “keppin” had his own “kebbin” and was more often than not a “merrid” man, while a “met” kept the ship’s log for the entire “viege.”
Then there were all these strange phrases that a Nantucketer used. If he bungled a job, it was a “foopaw,” an apparent corruption of the French faux pas that dated back to the days after the Revolution when Nantucketers established a whaling operation in Dunkirk, France. A Nantucketer didn’t just go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, he went on a “rantum scoot,” which meant an excursion with no definite destination. Fancy victuals were known as “manavelins.” If someone was cross-eyed, he was “born in the middle of the week and looking both ways for Sunday.”
Green hands were typically subjected to what one man remembered as “a sort of examination” by both the shipowner and the captain. Recalled another, “We were catechized, in brief, concerning our nativity and previous occupation, and the build and physical points of each were looked to, not forgetting the eyes, for a sharp-sighted man was a jewel in the estimation of the genuine whaling captain.” Some green hands were so naive and poorly educated that they insisted on the longest lay possible, erroneously thinking that the higher number meant higher pay. The owners were all too willing to grant their wishes.
Whaling captains competed with one another for men. But, as with everything on Nantucket, there were specific rules to which everyone had to adhere. Since first-time captains were expected to defer to all others, the only men available to Captain Pollard of the Essex would have been those in whom no one else had an interest. By the end of July, Pollard and the owners were still short by more than half a dozen men.
ON AUGUST 4, Obed Macy stopped by the Marine Insurance Company at the corner of Main and Federal Streets to look at the thermometer mounted on its shingled exterior. In his journal he recorded, “93 degrees and very little wind, which has rendered it almost insupportable to be exposed to the rays of the sun.”
The next day, August 5, the fully rigged Essex was floated over the Nantucket Bar into deep water. Now the loading could begin in earnest, and a series of smaller craft called lighters began ferrying goods from the wharf to the ship. First to be stowed were the groundtier casks—large, iron-hooped containers each capable of holding 268 gallons of whale oil. They were filled with seawater to keep them swollen and tight. On top of these were stowed casks of various sizes filled with freshwater. Firewood took up a great deal of space, as did the thousands of shooks, or packed bundles of staves, which would be used by the ship’s cooper to create more oil casks. On top of that was enough food, all stored in casks, to last two and a half years. If the men were fed the same amount as merchant seamen (which is perhaps assuming too much when it came to a Nantucket whaler), the Essex would have contained at least fourteen tons of meat (salt beef and pork), more than eight tons of bread, and thousands of gallons of freshwater. Then there were massive amounts of whaling equipment (harpoons, lances, etc.), as well as clothing, charts, sails (including at least one spare set), navigational instruments, medicine, rum, gin, lumber, and so on. In addition to the three newly painted whaleboats that were suspended from the ship’s davits, there were at least two spare boats: one stored upside down on a rack over the quarterdeck, another mounted on spare spars that projected over the stern.
By the time the men were done loading the Essex six days later—their labors briefly interrupted by a tremendous shower of rain duly noted by Obed Macy on August 9—the ship was almost as heavily laden as it would be with whale oil on her return to Nantucket. Explained one Nantucketer, “[T]he gradual consumption of provisions and stores keeps pace with the gradual accumulation of oil…, and a whaleship is always full, or nearly so, all the voyage.”
Something, however, was still missing: the men needed to fill the seven empty berths in the Essex’s forecastle. At some point, Gideon Folger put out the call to an agent in Boston for as many black sailors as the agent could find.
ALTHOUGH he wasn’t black, Addison Pratt came to Nantucket under circumstances similar to the ones that brought seven African Americans to the island and to service on the Essex. In 1820, Pratt found himself in Boston, looking for a ship:
I soon commenced hunting for a voyage, but it was dull times with commerce as seamen’s wages were but ten dollars per month, and there were more sailors than ships in port, and I found it dull times for green hands. But after looking around for a few days I heard there were hands wanted to go on a whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. I made no delay, but hastened to the office and put down my name and received twelve dollars of advance money, which I laid out in sea clothes…Six more hands were shipped for the same vessel, and we were all sent on board of a packet bound to Nantucket.
As Pratt’s account suggests, a whaling voyage was the lowest rung on the maritime ladder for a seaman. Nantucketers like Thomas Nickerson and his friends might look to their first voyage as a necessary step in the beginning of a long and profitable career. But for the men who were typically rounded up by shipping agents in cities such as Boston, it was a different story. Instead of the beginning of something, shipping out on a whaling voyage was often a last and desperate resort.
The seven black sailors who agreed to sign on for a voyage aboard the Essex—Samuel Reed, Richard Peterson, Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, William Bond, and Henry Dewitt—had even fewer choices than Addison Pratt would in 1820. None of their names appear in Boston or New York directories from this period, indicating that they were not landowners. Whether or not they called Boston home, most of them had probably spent more than a few nights in the boardinghouses in the waterfront area of the North End of the city—a place notorious as a gathering place for itinerant seamen, black and white, looking for a berth.
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. Since the time when Native Americans had made up the majority of Nantucket’s labor force, the island’s shipowners had always paid men according to their rank, not their color. Some of this had to do with the Quakers’ antislavery leanings, but much of it also had to do with the harsh realities of shipboard life. In a tight spot, a captain didn’t care if a seaman was white or black; he just wanted to know he could count on the man to complete his appointed task.
Still, black sailors who were delivered to the island as green hands were never regarded as equals by Nantucketers. In 1807, a visitor to the island reported:
[T]he Indians having disappeared, Negroes are now substituted in their place. Seamen of color are more submissive than the whites; but as they are more addicted to frolicking, it is difficult to get them aboard the ship, when it is about to sail, and to keep them aboard, after it has arrived. The Negroes, though they are to be prized for their habits of obedience, are not as intelligent as the Indians; and none of them attain the rank of [boatsteerer or mate].
It wasn’t lofty social ideals that brought black sailors to this Quaker island, but rather the whale fishery’s insatiable and often exploitative hunger for labor. “[A]n African is treated like a brute by the officers of their ship,” reported William Comstock, who had much to say about the evils of Nantucket’s Quaker shipowners. “Should these pages fall into the hands of any of my colored brethren, let me advise them to fly Nantucket as they would the Norway Maelstrom.” Even Nickerson admitted that Nantucket whaling captains had a reputation as “Negro drivers.” Significantly, Nantucketers referred to the packet that delivered green hands from New York City as the “Slaver.”

BY THE evening of Wednesday, August 11, all save for Captain Pollard were safely aboard the Essex. Anchored beside her, just off the Nantucket Bar, was another whaleship, the Chili. Commanded by Absalom Coffin, the Chili was also to leave the following day. It was an opportunity for what whalemen referred to as a “gam”—a visit between two ships’ crews. Without the captains to inhibit the revelry (and with the Bar between them and town), they may have seized this chance for a final, uproarious fling before the grinding discipline of shipboard life took control of their lives.
At some point that evening, Thomas Nickerson made his way down to his bunk and its mattress full of mildewed corn husks. As he faded off to sleep on the gently rocking ship, he surely felt what one young whaleman described as a great, almost overwhelming “pride in my floating home.”
That night he was probably unaware of the latest bit of gossip circulating through town—of the strange goings-on out on the Commons. Swarms of grasshoppers had begun to appear in the turnip fields. “[T]he whole face of the earth has been spotted with them…,” Obed Macy would write. “[N]o person living ever knew them so numerous.” A comet in July and now a plague of locusts?
As it turned out, things would end up badly for the two ships anchored off the Nantucket Bar on the evening of August 11, 1819. The Chili would not return for another three and a half years, and then with only five hundred barrels of sperm oil, about a quarter of what was needed to fill a ship her size. For Captain Coffin and his men, it would be a disastrous voyage.
But nothing could compare to what fate had in store for the twenty-one men of the Essex.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1bbe70fc-fc8d-5d18-8dc4-de8daad2c014)
Knockdown (#ulink_1bbe70fc-fc8d-5d18-8dc4-de8daad2c014)


ON THE MORNING of Thursday, August 12, 1819, a harbor vessel delivered Captain George Pollard, Jr., to the Essex. At twenty-eight, Pollard was a young, but not spectacularly young, first-time captain. Over the last four years he had spent all but seven months aboard the Essex, as second mate and then first mate. Except for her former captain, Daniel Russell, no one knew this ship better than George Pollard.
Pollard carried a letter from the Essex’s principal owners telling the new captain, in spare, direct prose, exactly what was expected of him. His predecessor, Daniel Russell, had received a similar letter prior to an earlier voyage. It had read:
Respected Friend,
As thou art master of the Ship Essex now lying without the bar at anchor, our orders are, that thou shouldst proceed to sea the first fair wind and proceed for the Pacifick Ocean, and endeavour to obtain a load of Sperm Oil and when accomplished to make the best dispatch for this place. Thou art forbidden to hold any illicit trade. Thou art forbidden to carry on thyself or to suffer any person belonging to the ship Essex to carry on any trade except it should be necessary for the preservation of the ship Essex or her crew: wishing thee a short and prosperous voyage, with a full portion of happiness we remain thy friends.
In behalf of the owners of the ship Essex,
Gideon Folger, Paul Macy
Pollard felt the full weight of the owners’ expectations. But he was thinking not only about the voyage ahead but also about what he was leaving behind. Just two months before, he and nineteen-year-old Mary Riddell had been married in the Second Congregational Church, of which Mary’s father, a well-to-do cordwainer, or ropemaker, was a deacon.
As he scrambled up the Essex’s side, then made his way aft to the quarterdeck, Captain Pollard knew that the entire town was watching him and his men. All summer, ships had been leaving the island, sometimes as many as four or five a week, but with the departure of the Essex and the Chili, there would be a lull of about a month or so before another whaleship would depart. For the entertainment-starved inhabitants of Nantucket, this would be it for a while.
Leaving the island was difficult aboard any whaleship, since most of the crew had no idea of what they were doing. It could be an agony of embarrassment for a captain, as the green hands bumbled their way around the deck or clung white-knuckled to the spars. The whole affair was carried out in the knowledge that the town’s old salts and, of course, the owners were watching and criticizing from the shade of the windmills up on Mill Hill.
With, perhaps, a nervous glance townward, Captain George Pollard gave the order to prepare the ship for weighing the anchors.

A WHALESHIP, even a small and old whaleship, was a complex and sophisticated piece of equipment. The Essex had three masts and a bowsprit. To the mast were fastened a multitude of horizontal spars known as yards, from which the rectangular sails were set. There was so much cordage, dedicated to either supporting the spars or controlling the sails (more than twenty in number), that, from the perspective of a green hand staring up from the deck, the Essex looked like the web of a giant rope-spinning spider.
That each one of these pieces of rope had a name was plainly laughable to a green hand. How could anyone, even after a three-year voyage, pretend to have any idea of what went where? For young Nantucketers such as Nickerson and his friends, it was particularly devastating since they had begun this adventure assuming they knew much more than they apparently did. “[A]ll was bustle, confusion and awkwardness, that is, on the part of the crew,” Nickerson remembered. “The officers were smart active men and were no doubt…piqued at having such a display of awkwardness in full view of their native town.”
Since he was required by custom to remain stationed at the quarterdeck, Pollard was all but powerless before this clumsy display. Doing his best to apply some method to the madness was the first mate, Owen Chase, stationed in the forward part of the deck. It was his duty to implement Pollard’s orders, and he shouted and cajoled the men as if every hesitation or mistake on their part were a personal insult.
Pollard and Chase had been together aboard the Essex since 1815, when Chase, at eighteen, had signed on as a common sailor. Chase had moved quickly through the ranks. By the next voyage he was a boatsteerer, and now, at only twenty-two, he was the first mate. (Matthew Joy, the Essex’s second mate, was four years older than Chase.) If all went well during this voyage, Chase would have a good chance of becoming a captain before he was twenty-five.
At five feet ten, Chase was tall for the early nineteenth century; he towered over Captain Pollard, a small man with a tendency toward stoutness. While Pollard’s father was also a captain, Chase’s father was a farmer. Perhaps because his father was a farmer on an island where seagoing men got all the glory, Chase was fired with more than the usual amount of ambition and, as he started his third voyage, he made no secret of his impatience to become a captain. “Two voyages are generally considered sufficient to qualify an active and intelligent young man for command,” he would write, “in which time, he learns from experience, and the examples which are set him, all that is necessary to be known.” 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. The first mate’s cocksure attitude would make it difficult for Pollard, a first-time captain just emerging from the long shadow of a respected predecessor, to assert his own style of command.
As the crew assembled spare hawsers and rope in preparation for weighing the anchor, Chase made sure everything was secured about the deck. Then he ordered the men to the windlass, a long, horizontally mounted wooden cylinder with a double row of holes at each end. Positioned just forward of the forecastle hatch, the windlass provided the mechanical advantage required to do the heavy lifting aboard the ship. Eight men were stationed at the two ends, four aft, four forward, each holding a wooden handspike.
Working the windlass in a coordinated fashion was as challenging as it was backbreaking. “To perform this the sailors must…give a sudden jerk at the same instant,” went one account, “in which movement they are regulated by a sort of song or howl pronounced by one of their number.”
Once the men had pulled the slack out of the anchor cable, or hove short, it was time for crew members who had been positioned aloft to loosen the sails from their ties. Pollard then ordered Chase (whom, in accordance with custom, he always addressed as “Mr. Chase”) to heave up the anchor and to let him know when it was aweigh. Now the real work began—a process, given the rawness of the Essex’s crew, that probably took an excruciatingly long time to perform: inching the huge, mud-dripping anchor up to the bow. Eventually, however, the anchor was lashed to the bulwarks, with the ring at the end of its shank secured to a projecting timber known as a cathead.
Now Pollard’s and Chase’s public agony began in earnest. There were additional sails to be set in the gradually building southwesterly breeze. A crack crew would have had all the canvas flying in an instant. In the Essex’s case, it wasn’t until they had sailed completely around Great Point—more than nine miles from where they’d weighed anchor—that the upper, or topgallant, sails were, according to Nickerson, “set and all sails trimmed in the breeze.” All the while, Pollard and his officers knew that the town’s spyglasses had been following them for each and every awful moment.
As cabin boy, Nickerson had to sweep the decks and coil any stray lines. When he paused for a few seconds to watch his beloved island fade from view behind them, he was accosted by the first mate, who in addition to cuffing him about the ears, snarled, “You boy, Tom, bring back your broom here and sweep clean. The next time I have to speak to you, your hide shall pay for it, my lad!”
Nickerson and his Nantucket friends may have thought they knew Chase prior to their departure, but they now realized that, as another young Nantucketer had discovered, “at sea, things appear different.” The mate of a Nantucket whaleship routinely underwent an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he left his island home, stepping out of his mild Quaker skin to become a vociferous martinet. “You will often hear a Nantucket mother boast that her son ‘who is met of a ship is a real spit-fire,’” William Comstock wrote, “meaning that he is a cruel tyrant, which on that island is considered the very acme of human perfection.”
And so Nickerson saw Owen Chase change from a perfectly reasonable young man with a new wife named Peggy to a bully who had no qualms about using force to obtain obedience and who swore in a manner that shocked these boys who had been brought up, for the most part, by their mothers and grandmothers. “[A]lthough but a few hours before I had been so eager to go [on] this voyage,” Nickerson remembered, “there [now] seemed a sudden gloom to spread over me. A not very pleasing prospect [was] truly before me, that of a long voyage and a hard overseer. This to a boy of my years who had never been used to hear such language or threats before.”
It was more than a realization that the whaling life might be harsher than he had been led to believe. Now that the island had slipped over the horizon, Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: “Then it was that I, for the first time, realized that I was alone upon a wide and an unfeeling world…without one relative or friend to bestow one kind word upon me.” Not till then did Nickerson begin to appreciate “the full sacrifice that I had made.”

THAT evening the men were divided into two shifts, or watches. With the exception of the “idlers”—those such as the cook, steward, and cooper (or barrel maker), who worked in the day and slept at night—all the men served alternating four-hour stints on deck. Like children picking teams on a playground, the mate and second mate took turns choosing the men who would serve in their watches. “[T]he first step taken by the officers,” said William Comstock, “is, to discover who are natives of the island, and who are strangers. The honor of being a Roman citizen was not, in days of yore, so enviable a distinction, as it is on board one of these ships, to be a native of that sand bank, yclept Nantucket.” Once the Nantucketers had all been picked (with Nickerson taken by Chase), the mates chose among the Cape Codders and the blacks.
Next came the choice of oarsmen for the whaleboats, a contest that involved both mates and also Captain Pollard, who headed up his own boat. Since these were the men with whom a mate or a captain was going into battle, he took the selection of the whaleboat crew very seriously. “[T]here was much competition among the officers,” a whaleman remembered, “and evidently some anxiety, with a little illconcealed jealousy of feeling.”
Once again, each officer attempted to man his boat with as many fellow Nantucketers as he could. Nickerson found himself on Chase’s boat, with the Nantucketer Benjamin Lawrence as a boatsteerer. Nickerson’s friend (and the captain’s cousin) Owen Coffin was assigned to Pollard’s boat along with several other Nantucketers. Matthew Joy, who as second mate was the lowest-ranking officer, was left without a single islander on his boat. The three remaining men not chosen as oarsmen became the Essex’s shipkeepers. It was their duty to handle the Essex when whales were being hunted.
The first day of a whaling voyage included yet another ritual—the captain’s speech to the crew. The tradition was said to date back to when Noah first closed the doors of the ark, and was the way the captain officially introduced himself. It was a performance that all aboard the ship—officers and green hands alike—attended with great interest.
As soon as Pollard began to speak, Nickerson was impressed by the difference between the captain and the first mate. Instead of shouting and cursing at the men, Pollard spoke “without overbearing display or ungentleman-like language.” He simply stated that the success of the voyage would depend on the crew and that the officers should be strictly obeyed. Any sailor who willfully disregarded an order, Pollard told them, would have to answer not just to the officers but to him. He then dismissed the men with the words “Set the watch, Mr. Chase.”

Cross-section of the Whaleship Essex


1 captain’s and officers’ cabins
2 steerage
3 blubber room
4 forecastle
5 hold
THE men of the Essex ate and slept in three different areas: the captain’s and mates’ cabins, in the aft portion of the ship; steerage, where the boatsteerers and young Nantucketers lived, just forward of the officers; and the forecastle—the cramped, poorly lit quarters in the extreme forward part of the vessel, separated from steerage by the blubber room. The divide between the forecastle and the other living quarters was not just physical but also racial. According to Addison Pratt, a green hand on a Nantucket ship in 1820, the forecastle was “filled with darkies” while the white sailors who weren’t officers lived in steerage. Reflecting the prejudices typical of a Nantucket whaleman, Thomas Nickerson considered himself “fortunate indeed to escape being so closely penned up with so large a number of blacks” in the Essex’s forecastle.
But the forecastle had its merits. Its isolation (the only way to enter it was from a hatchway in the deck) meant that its occupants could create their own world. When he sailed on a merchant voyage in the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, preferred the camaraderie of the forecastle to steerage, where “[y]ou are immediately under the eye of the officers, cannot dance, sing, play, smoke, make a noise, or growl [i.e., complain], or take an other sailor’s pleasure.” In the forecastle the African American sailors indulged in the ancient seafaring tradition of “yarning”—swapping stories about passages, shipmates, and wrecks, along with other tales of the sea. They danced and sang songs, often accompanied by a fiddle; they prayed to their God; and, in keeping with yet another oceangoing tradition, they second-guessed the captain and his officers.
BY THE following morning, many of the green hands found themselves in the throes of seasickness, “rolling and tumbling about the decks almost ready…to die or be cast in to the sea,” Nickerson remembered. Nantucketers had what they considered a sure-fire cure for seasickness, a treatment that more delicate mortals might have considered even worse than the malady. The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.
Chase was not about to coddle his queasy crew. That morning at eight bells sharp, he ordered all hands to clear the decks and prepare the ship for whaling. Even though the whale population in the waters to the southeast of the island along the edges of the Gulf Stream had been greatly diminished over the years, it was still quite possible to come across what Nantucketers called a shoal of sperm whales. Woe to the crew that was not ready when a whale was sighted.
But for a whale to be sighted, a lookout had to be positioned aloft—not a pleasing prospect for a crew of seasick green hands. Every man was expected to climb to the head of the mainmast and spend two hours in search of whales. Some of the men were so weak from vomiting that they doubted they had the strength to hold on to a pitching spar for two hours. One of them, Nickerson said, even went so far as to protest that it was “altogether absurd and unreasonable” to expect them to look for whales, and that he, for one, “should not go, and he hoped the captain would not expect it of him.”
The fact that this unnamed sailor specifically mentioned the captain instead of the first mate suggests that he was Pollard’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Owen Coffin. Miserable and genuinely fearful for his life, Coffin may have made a desperate, ill-advised appeal to his kinsman for a reprieve from the first mate’s discipline. But it was futile. According to Nickerson, whose narrative is not without irony, there followed a few “soft words” from the officers, along with “some little challenging of their spirits,” and it wasn’t long before all the green hands had taken a turn at the masthead.

LIKE a skier traversing the face of a mountain, a Nantucket whaleship took an indirect route toward Cape Horn, a course determined by the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean. First, pushed by the westerlies, the ship sailed south and east toward Europe and Africa. There she picked up winds called the northeast trades, which took her back across the ocean again, in the direction of South America. After crossing the equator in an often airless region known as the doldrums, she worked her way south and west through the southeast trades into an area of variable winds. Then she encountered the band of westerlies that could make rounding the Horn so difficult.
On the first leg of this southern slide down the Atlantic, there were provisioning stops at the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, where vegetables and livestock could be purchased for much less than they cost on Nantucket. These stops also gave the whalemen the opportunity to ship back any oil they might have obtained during their cruise across the Atlantic.
On August 15, three days out of Nantucket, the Essex was making good time toward the Azores, with the wind out of the southwest, coming directly over her starboard side, or beam. Having left Nantucket late in the season, the officers hoped to make up lost time. As usual, three topgallant sails were pulling from the upper yards, but on this day the Essex also carried at least one studding sail, a rectangle of canvas mounted on a special spar temporarily fitted to the end of the fore topsail yard.
Whaleships rarely set their studding sails, especially when they were in a region where whales might be sighted. Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry. Use of the studding sails meant that a captain wanted to wring the last possible quarter knot of speed from his ship. The sails were difficult to set and even harder to take down, especially with an inexperienced crew. Since the sails’ booms projected out beyond the yards, there was a danger of dipping them into the water if the ship should begin to roll from side to side. For a whaleship full of green hands to approach the often tempestuous waters of the Gulf Stream with her studding sails flying indicated an aggressive, if not foolhardy, attitude on the part of her commander.
With the extra sail area catching the wind, the Essex was moving well, probably at six to eight knots. The lookout spotted a ship ahead. Pollard ordered the helmsman to steer for her, and soon the Essex had caught up to what proved to be the whaleship Midas, five days out of New Bedford. Captain Pollard and the captain of the Midas exchanged shouted pleasantries, along with estimates of their longitude, and the Essex was soon pulling ahead, her entire crew undoubtedly enjoying the fact that their ship had proved to be what Nickerson called “the fastest sailor of the two.”
Later that day, the weather began to deteriorate. Clouds moved into the sky, and it grew suspiciously dark to the southwest. “The sea became very rough,” Nickerson remembered, “which caused the ship to roll and tumble heavily.” A storm seemed imminent, but the Essex “continued to carry a press of sail throughout the night and [the officers] had no cause to disturb the hands except for their respective watches.”
By the next morning they were in the Gulf Stream, and it was raining steadily. Nantucketers knew this eerily warm ocean current better than perhaps any other group of mariners. In the eighteenth century they had hunted sperm whales along its margins from Carolina to Bermuda. In 1786, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother, Abiah Folger, had been born on Nantucket, had used knowledge gleaned from his Nantucket “cousin,” whaling captain Timothy Folger, to create the first chart of the Gulf Stream.
Many considerations, both nautical and psychological, went into a decision to shorten sail. No captain wanted to be needlessly timid, yet taking unnecessary risks, especially at the beginning of a voyage that might last as long as three years, was unwise. At some point the conditions became so rough that Pollard elected to take in the fore and mizzen topgallant sails yet to leave flying the main topgallant and also the studding sails, usually the first sails taken down in worsening weather. Pollard may have wanted to see how the Essex performed when pushed to the limit. They sailed on, refusing to back down.
ACCORDING to Chase, they could see it coming: a large black cloud rushing toward them from the southwest. Now was surely the time to shorten sail. But once again they waited, deciding the cloud was an inconsequential gust. They would ride it out. As Chase would later admit, they “miscalculated altogether as to the strength and violence of it.”
In delaying, even for a second, shortening sail in the face of an approaching squall, Pollard was now flaunting his disregard of traditional seafaring wisdom. The officers of the British Navy had a maxim: “never to be overtaken unprepared by [a squall], as never to be surprised by an enemy.” It was said that the sharper and more defined the storm cloud, the worse the wind; thunder and lightning were also bad signs. When jagged streaks of lightning began to crackle out of the forbidding black sky and thunder boomed, Pollard finally began to issue orders. But it was too late.
In the face of an approaching squall, there were two options: either to point the ship into the oncoming wind, to relieve the pressure on the sails by letting them luff, or to turn almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction, away from the wind, and let the storm blow the ship with it. This relieved the pressure on the forward sails as they became partially becalmed in the shelter of the after ones. In the merchant service, in which ships were typically undermanned, some captains favored heading into the wind—what they called luffing through a squall—in part because heading up is the natural tendency of a sailing ship in a gust. Most captains, however, favored turning away from the wind—a strategy that required them to anticipate the arrival of the squall as the crew shortened the upper and aft sails. To attempt to bear away from the wind in the last few seconds before being struck by a squall was held to show “a poor appreciation of the squall, or a lack of watchfulness.”
This was precisely what happened to the Essex. As the squall approached, the helmsman was ordered to turn away from the direction of the wind and “run before it.” Unfortunately it took time for a ship the size of the Essex to respond to her rudder. When the gust slammed into the ship, she had just begun to turn and was sideways to the wind—the worst possible position.
For the green hands, the sound alone was terrifying: the shrieking of the wind across the rigging and then a frenzied flapping of sails and creaking of the stays and masts. The Essex began to lurch to leeward—slowly at first, the ponderous weight of the ship’s keel and ballast, not to mention the tons of stores stowed in her hold, refusing at first to yield, but then, as the wind increased, the ship inevitably succumbed to the merciless pressure of the wind.
When a ship is heeled over by forty-five degrees or more, her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw. No matter how much he weighs, if the end of the seesaw on the other side of the pivot point is long enough, it becomes a lever that will eventually lift him up into the air as the distant tip of the seesaw settles softly to the ground. In the case of the Essex, the masts and their windpressed sails became levers prying the hull toward the point of no return, forcing it over until the tips of the yards were buried in the water. The Essex had been rolled almost ninety degrees onto her side—knocked over on her “beam-ends,” in the language of the sea.
Those on deck clung to the nearest fixture, fearful that they might fall down into the lee scuppers, now under knee-deep water. Those below deck did their best to shield themselves from objects falling down around them. If he hadn’t abandoned it already, the ship’s cook was doing his best to scramble out of the cookhouse, the heavy stove and cookware threatening to burst through its frail wooden sides. The two whaleboats on the Essex’s port side had disappeared beneath the waves, pressed underwater by the massive weight of the capsized ship. According to Chase, “The whole ship’s crew were, for a short time thrown into the utmost consternation and confusion.”
Yet amid all the chaos there was, at least on deck, a sudden sense of calm. When a ship suffers a knockdown, her hull acts as a barrier against the wind and rain. Even though the ship had been slammed against the water, the men were temporarily sheltered from the howling forces of the wind. Pollard took the opportunity to pull the crew back together. “[T]he cool and undismayed countenance of the captain,” Nickerson remembered, “soon brought all to their sober senses.” The order was given to let go all the halyards and let the sheets run, but “the ship lay so far upon her side that nothing would run down as desired.”
If the squall continued to pin her on her beam-ends, the ship would begin to settle into the water as the sea rushed into the hull through her open hatchways. The longer she was over on her side, the greater the chances of the ballast and stores in her hold shifting to leeward, a disastrous turn of events from which she might never recover. Already the waves had wiped the cookhouse almost completely off the deck. As a last resort, it might be necessary to cut away the masts.
The rain poured down and the lightning flashed, and time slowed to a crawl as the men clung to the weather rail. But before the axes came into play, the ship twitched back to life. The men could feel it in their hands and feet and in the pits of their stomachs—an easing of the awful strain. They waited for another gust to slam the ship back down again. But no—the ballast continued to exert its gravitational pull, lifting the three masts until the yards came clear of the water. As the masts swung into the sky, seawater rushed across the deck and out the scuppers. The Essex shuddered to the vertical and was a ship again.
Now that the hull was no longer acting as a shield, the officers quickly realized that the squall had passed. But even if the wind had diminished, it was still blowing hard. The ship’s bow was now pointed into the wind, the sails blown back against the masts. The rigging creaked in an eerie, unfamiliar way as the hull wallowed in the rainwhipped waves. The deck shifted, and the green hands temporarily lost their balance. This time the ship wasn’t going over, she was going backward, water boiling up over the quarterdeck as her broad transom was pushed back against the waves, pummeling the spare whaleboat stored off the stern.
Going backward in a square-rigged ship was dangerous. The sails were plastered against the masts, making it almost impossible to furl them. The pressure placed an immense amount of strain on the stays and spars. Since the rigging had not been designed for loads coming from this direction, all three masts might come tumbling down, domino fashion, across the deck. Already the windows in the stern were threatening to burst open and flood the captain’s cabin. There was also the danger of breaking the ship’s tall, narrow rudder, which became useless as water pressed against it.
Eventually, the Essex’s bow fell off to leeward, her sails filled, and she was once again making forward progress. Now the crew could do what they should have done before the storm—shorten sail.
As the men aloft wrestled with the canvas, the wind shifted into the northwest and the skies began to brighten. But the mood aboard the Essex sank into one of gloom. The ship had been severely damaged. Several sails, including both the main topgallant and the studding sail, had been torn into useless tatters. The cookhouse had been destroyed. The two whaleboats that had been hung off the port side of the ship had been torn from their davits and washed away, along with all their gear. The spare boat on the stern had been crushed by the waves. That left only two workable boats, and a whaleship required a minimum of three, plus two spares. Although the Essex’s stern boat could be repaired, they would be without a single spare boat. Captain Pollard stared at the splintered mess and declared that they would be returning to Nantucket for repairs.
His first mate, however, disagreed. Chase urged that they continue on, despite the damage. The chances were good, he insisted, that they would be able to obtain spare whaleboats in the Azores, where they would soon be stopping to procure fresh provisions. Joy sided with his fellow mate. The captain’s will was normally the law of the ship. But instead of ignoring his two younger mates, Pollard paused to consider their arguments. Four days into his first command, Captain Pollard reversed himself. “After some little reflection and a consultation with his officers,” Nickerson remembered, “it was deemed prudent to continue on our course and trust to fortune and a kind providence to make up our loss.”
The excuse given to the crew was that with the wind now out of the northwest, it would have taken too long to return to Nantucket. Nickerson suspected that Chase and Joy had other motives. Both knew that the men had not taken kindly to their treatment by the mates. Seeing the knockdown as a bad omen, many of the sailors had become sullen and sour. If they returned to Nantucket, some of the crew would jump ship. Despite the seriousness of the loss of the whaleboats, it was not the time to return to port.
Not surprisingly, given that he was the object of much of the crew’s discontent, Chase, in his own account of the accident, never mentions that Pollard originally proposed turning back. As Chase would have it, the knockdown was only a minor inconvenience: “We repaired our damage with little difficulty, and continued on our course.” But Nickerson knew differently. Many of the Essex’s men were profoundly shaken by the knockdown and wanted to get off the ship. Whenever they passed a homeward-bound vessel, the green hands would lament, in the words of one, “O, how I wish I was onboard with them going home again, for I am heartily sick of these whaling voyages”—even though they had not yet even seen a whale.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c062c375-7e04-5dd6-9bd0-00eb6f242346)
First Blood (#ulink_c062c375-7e04-5dd6-9bd0-00eb6f242346)


AFTER A PROVISIONING STOP in the Azores, which provided plenty of fresh vegetables but no spare whaleboats, the Essex headed south toward the Cape Verde Islands. Two weeks later they sighted Boavista Island. In contrast to the Azores’ green, abundant hills, the slopes of the Cape Verdes were brown and sere, with no trees to offer relief from the burning subtropical sun. Pollard intended to obtain some hogs at the island of Maio a few miles to the southwest.
The next morning, as they approached the island, Nickerson noticed that Pollard and his mates were strangely animated, speaking to each other with a conspiratorial excitement as they passed a spyglass back and forth, taking turns studying something on the beach. What Nickerson termed “the cause of their glee” remained a mystery to the rest of the crew until they came close enough to the island to see that a whaleship had been run up onto the beach. Here, perhaps, was a source of some additional whaleboats—something the men of the Essex needed much more desperately than pork.
Before Pollard could dispatch one of his own boats to the wreck, a whaleboat was launched from the beach and made its way directly toward the Essex. Aboard the boat was the acting American consul, Ferdinand Gardner. He explained that the wrecked whaler was the Archimedes of New York. While approaching the harbor she had struck a submerged rock, forcing the captain to run her up onto the beach before she was a total loss. Gardner had purchased the wreck, but he had only a single whaleboat left to sell.
While one was better than nothing, the Essex would still be dangerously low on boats. With this latest addition (and an old and leaky addition at that), the Essex would now have a total of four whaleboats. That would leave her with only one spare. In a business as dangerous as whaling, boats were so frequently damaged in their encounters with whales that many whaleships were equipped with as many as three spare boats. With a total of only four boats, the crew of the Essex would have scant margin for error. That was disturbing. Even the green hands knew that one day their lives could depend on the condition of these fragile cockleshells.
Pollard purchased the whaleboat, then sailed the Essex into the cove that served as Maio’s harbor, where pointed hills of bone-white salt—procured from salt ponds in the interior of the island—added a sense of desolation to the scene. The Essex anchored beside another Nantucket whaleship, the Atlantic, which was off-loading more than three hundred barrels of oil for shipment back to the island. Whereas Captain Barzillai Coffin and his crew could boast of the seven or so whales they’d killed since leaving Nantucket on the Fourth of July, the men of the Essex were still putting their ship back together after the knockdown in the Gulf Stream and had yet to sight a whale.
White beans were the medium of exchange on Maio, and with a cask of beans aboard, Pollard took a whaleboat in to procure some hogs. Nickerson was at the aft oar. The harbor was without any docks or piers, and in the high surf, bringing a whaleboat into shore was exceedingly tricky. Even though they approached the beach at the best possible part of the harbor, Pollard and his men ran into trouble. “Our boat was instantly capsized and overset in the surf,” Nickerson recalled, “and thrown upon the beach bottom upwards. The lads did not much mind this for none were hurt, but they were greatly amused to see the captain get so fine a ducking.”



Pollard traded one and a half barrels of beans for thirty hogs, whose squeals and grunts and filth turned the deck of the Essex into a barnyard. The impressionable Nickerson was disturbed by the condition of these animals. He called them “almost skeletons,” and noted that their bones threatened to pierce through their skin as they walked about the ship.
NOT until the Essex had crossed the equator and reached thirty degrees south latitude—approximately halfway between Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires—did the lookout sight the first whale of the voyage. It required sharp eyes to spot a whale’s spout: a faint puff of white on the distant horizon lasting only a few seconds. But that was all it took for the lookout to bellow, “There she blows!” or just “B-l-o-o-o-w-s!”
After more than three whaleless months at sea, the officer on deck shouted back in excitement, “Where away?” The lookout’s subsequent commentary not only directed the helmsman toward the whales but also worked the crew into an ever increasing frenzy. If he saw a whale leap into the air, the lookout cried, “There she breaches!” If he caught a glimpse of the whale’s horizontal tail, he shouted, “There goes flukes!” Any indication of spray or foam elicited the cry “There’s white water!” If he saw another spout, it was back to “B-l-o-o-o-w-s!”
Under the direction of the captain and the mates, the men began to prepare the whaleboats. Tubs of harpoon line were placed into them; the sheaths were taken off the heads of the harpoons, or irons, which were hastily sharpened one last time. “All was life and bustle,” remembered one former whaleman. Pollard’s was the single boat kept on the starboard side. Chase’s was on the aft larboard, or port, quarter. Joy’s was just forward of Chase’s and known as the waist boat.
Once within a mile of the shoal of whales, the ship was brought to a near standstill by backing the mainsail. The mate climbed into the stern of his whaleboat and the boatsteerer took his position in the bow as the four oarsmen remained on deck and lowered the boat into the water with a pair of block-and-tackle systems known as the falls. Once the boat was floating in the water beside the ship, the oarsmen—either sliding down the falls or climbing down the side of the ship—joined the mate and boatsteerer. An experienced crew could launch a rigged whaleboat from the davits in under a minute. Once all three whaleboats were away, it was up to the three shipkeepers to tend to the Essex.
At this early stage in the attack, the mate or captain stood at the steering oar in the stern of the whaleboat while the boatsteerer manned the forward-most, or harpooner’s oar. Aft of the boatsteerer was the bow oarsman, usually the most experienced foremast hand in the boat. Once the whale had been harpooned, it would be his job to lead the crew in pulling in the whale line. Next was the midships oarsman, who worked the longest and heaviest of the lateral oars—up to eighteen feet long and forty-five pounds. Next was the tub oarsman. He managed the two tubs of whale line. It was his job to wet the line with a small bucketlike container, called a piggin, once the whale was harpooned. This wetting prevented the line from burning from the friction as it ran out around the loggerhead, an upright post mounted on the stern of the boat. Aft of the tub oarsman was the after oarsman. He was usually the lightest of the crew, and it was his job to make sure the whale line didn’t tangle as it was hauled back into the boat.
Three of the oars were mounted on the starboard side of the boat and two were on the port side. If the mate shouted, “Pull three,” only those men whose oars were on the starboard side began to row. “Pull two” directed the tub oarsman and bow oarsman, whose oars were on the port side, to row. “Avast” meant to stop rowing, while “stern all” told them to begin rowing backward until sternway had been established. “Give way all” was the order with which the chase began, telling the men to start pulling together, the after oarsman setting the stroke that the other four followed. With all five men pulling at the oars and the mate or captain urging them on, the whaleboat flew like a slender missile over the wave tops.
The competition among the boat-crews on a whaleship was always spirited. To be the fastest gave the six men bragging rights over the rest of the ship’s crew. The pecking order of the Essex was about to be decided.
With nearly a mile between the ship and the whales, the three crews had plenty of space to test their speed. “This trial more than any other during our voyage,” Nickerson remembered, “was the subject of much debate and excitement among our crews; for neither was willing to yield the palm to the other.”
As the unsuspecting whales moved along at between three and four knots, the three whaleboats bore down on them at five or six knots. Even though all shared in the success of any single boat, no one wanted to be passed by the others; boat-crews were known to foul one another deliberately as they raced side by side behind the giant flukes of a sperm whale.
Sperm whales are typically underwater for ten to twenty minutes, although dives of up to ninety minutes have been reported. The whaleman’s rule of thumb was that, before diving, a whale blew once for each minute it would spend underwater. Whalemen also knew that while underwater the whale continued at the same speed and in the same direction as it had been traveling before the dive. Thus, an experienced whaleman could calculate with remarkable precision where a submerged whale was likely to reappear.
Nickerson was the after oarsman on Chase’s boat, placing him just forward of the first mate at the steering oar. Chase was the only man in the boat who could actually see the whale up ahead. While each mate or captain had his own style, they all coaxed and cajoled their crews with words that evoked the savagery, excitement, and the almost erotic bloodlust associated with pursuing one of the largest mammals on the planet. Adding to the tension was the need to remain as quiet as possible so as not to alarm or “gally” the whale. William Comstock recorded the whispered words of a Nantucket mate:
Do for heaven’s sake spring. The boat don’t move. You’re all asleep; see, see! There she lies; skote, skote! I love you, my dear fellows, yes, yes, I do; I’ll do anything for you, I’ll give you my heart’s blood to drink; only take me up to this whale only this time, for this once, pull. Oh, St. Peter, St. Jerome, St. Stephen, St. James, St. John, the devil on two sticks; carry me up; O, let me tickle him, let me feel of his ribs. There, there, go on; O, O, O, most on, most on. Stand up, Starbuck [the harpooner]. Don’t hold your iron that way; put one hand over the end of the pole. Now, now, look out. Dart, dart.
As it turned out, Chase’s crew proved the fastest that day, and soon they were within harpooning distance of the whale. Now the attention turned to the boatsteerer, who had just spent more than a mile rowing as hard as he possibly could. His hands were sore, and the muscles in his arms were trembling with exhaustion. All the while he had been forced to keep his back turned to a creature that was now within a few feet, or possibly inches, of him, its tail—more than twelve feet across—working up and down within easy reach of his head. He could hear it—the hollow wet roar of the whale’s lungs pumping air in and out of its sixty-ton body.
But for Chase’s novice harpooner, the twenty-year-old Benjamin Lawrence, the mate himself was as frightening as any whale. Having been a boatsteerer on the Essex’s previous voyage, Chase had definite ideas on how a whale should be harpooned and maintained a continual patter of barely audible, expletive-laced advice. Lawrence tucked the end of his oar handle under the boat’s gunnel, then braced his leg against the thigh thwart and took up the harpoon. There it was, the whale’s black body, glistening in the sun. The blowhole was on the front left side of the head, and the spout enveloped Lawrence in a foulsmelling mist that stung his skin.
By hurling the harpoon he would transform this gigantic, passive creature into an angry, panicked monster that could easily dispatch him into the hereafter with a single swipe of that massive tail. Or, even worse, the whale might turn around and come at them with its tooth-studded jaw opened wide. New boatsteerers had been known to faint dead away when first presented with the terrifying prospect of attaching themselves to an infuriated sperm whale.
As Lawrence stood at the tossing bow, waves breaking around him, he knew that the mate was analyzing every one of his movements. If he let Chase down now, there would be hell to pay.
“Give it to him!” Chase bawled. “Give it to him!”
Lawrence hadn’t moved when there was a sudden splintering crack and crunch of cedar boards, and he and the other five men were airborne. A second whale had come up from beneath them, giving their boat a tremendous whack with its tail and pitching them into the sky. The entire side of the whaleboat was stove in, and the men, some of whom could not swim, clung to the wreck. “I presume the monster was as much frightened as ourselves,” Nickerson commented, “for he disappeared almost instantly after a slight flourish of his huge tail.” To their amazement, no one was injured.
Pollard and Joy abandoned the hunt and returned to pick up Chase’s crew. It was a dispiriting way to end the day, especially since they were once again down a whaleboat, a loss that, in Nickerson’s words, “seemed to threaten the destruction of our voyage.”

SEVERAL days after Chase’s boat was repaired, the lookout once again sighted whales. The boats were dispatched, a harpoon was hurled—successfully—and the whaleline went whizzing out until it was finally snubbed at the loggerhead, launching the boat and crew on the voyage’s first “Nantucket sleigh ride,” as it would come to be called.
Merchant seamen spoke derisively about the slow speeds of the average bluff-bowed whaleship, but the truth of the matter was that no other sailors in the early nineteenth century experienced the speeds of Nantucket whalemen. And, instead of doing it in the safe confines of a large, three-masted ship, the Nantucketer traveled in a twenty-five-foot boat crammed with half-a-dozen men, rope, and freshly sharpened harpoons and lances. The boat rocked from side to side and bounced up and down as the whale dragged it along at speeds that would have left the fleetest naval frigate wallowing in its wake. When it came to sheer velocity over the water, a Nantucketer—pinned to the flank of a whale that was pulling him miles and miles from a whaleship that was already hundreds of miles from land—was the fastest seaman in the world, traveling at fifteen (some claimed as many as twenty) bone-jarring knots.
The harpoon did not kill the whale. It was simply the means by which a whaleboat crew attached itself to its prey. After letting the creature tire itself out—by sounding to great depths or simply tearing along the water’s surface—the men began to haul themselves, inch by inch, to within stabbing distance of the whale. By this point the boatsteerer and the mate had traded places, a miraculous feat in its own right on a craft as small and tender as a whaleboat. Not only did these two men have to contend with the violent slapping of the boat through the waves—which could be so severe that nails started from the planks in the bow and stern—but they had to stay clear of the whale line, quivering like a piano wire down the centerline of the boat. Eventually, however, the boatsteerer made it aft to the steering oar and the mate, who was always given the honor of the kill, took up his position in the bow.
If the whale was proving too spirited, the mate would hobble it by taking up a boat-spade and hacking away at the tendons in the tail. Then he’d take up the eleven- to twelve-foot-long killing lance, its petal-shaped blade designed for piercing a whale’s vital organs. But finding “the life” of a giant swimming mammal encased in a thick layer of blubber was not easy. Sometimes the mate would be forced to stab it as many as fifteen times, probing for a group of coiled arteries in the vicinity of the lungs with a violent churning motion that soon surrounded the whaleboat in a rushing river of bright red blood.
When the lance finally found its mark, the whale would begin to choke on its own blood, its spout transformed into a fifteen- to twenty-foot geyser of gore that prompted the mate to shout, “Chimney’s afire!” As the blood rained down on them, the men took up the oars and backed furiously away, then paused to watch as the whale went into what was known as its flurry. Beating the water with its tail, snapping at the air with its jaws—even as it regurgitated large chunks of fish and squid—the creature began to swim in an ever tightening circle. Then, just as abruptly as the attack had begun with the first thrust of the harpoon, it ended. The whale fell motionless and silent, a giant black corpse floating fin-up in a slick of its own blood and vomit.
This may have been the first time Thomas Nickerson had ever helped kill a warm-blooded animal. Back on Nantucket, where the largest wild quadruped was the Norway rat, there were no deer or even rabbits to hunt. And as any hunter knows, killing takes some getting used to. Even though this brutal and bloody display was the supposed dream of every young man from Nantucket, the sentiments of an eighteen-year-old green hand, Enoch Cloud, who kept a journal during his voyage on a whaleship, are telling: “It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God’s created beings, much more, one in which life is so vigorously maintained as the Whale! And when I saw this, the largest and most terrible of all created animals bleeding, quivering, dying a victim to the cunning of man, my feelings were indeed peculiar!”

THE dead whale was usually towed back to the ship headfirst. Even with all five men rowing—the mate at the steering oar sometimes lending a hand to the after oarsman—a boat towing a whale could go no faster than one mile per hour. It was dark by the time Chase and his men reached the ship.
Now it was time to butcher the body. The crew secured the whale to the Essex’s starboard side, with the head toward the stern. Then they lowered the cutting stage—a narrow plank upon which the mates balanced as they cut up the body. Although the stripping of a whale’s blubber has been compared to the peeling of an orange, it was a little less refined than that.
First the mates hacked a hole in the whale’s side, just above the fin, into which was inserted a giant hook suspended from the mast. Then the immense power of the ship’s windlass was brought to bear, heeling the ship over on its side as the block-and-tackle system attached to the hook creaked with strain. Next the mates cut out the start of a five-foot-wide strip of the blubber adjacent to the hook. Pulled by the tackle attached to the windlass, the strip was gradually torn from the whale’s carcass, slowly spinning it around, until a twenty-foot-long strip, dripping with blood and oil, was suspended from the rigging. This “blanket piece” was severed from the whale and lowered into the blubber room belowdecks to be cut into more manageable pieces. Back at the corpse, the blubber-ripping continued.
Once the whale had been completely stripped of blubber, it was decapitated. A sperm whale’s head accounts for close to a third of its length. The upper part of the head contains the case, a cavity filled with up to five hundred gallons of spermaceti, a clear, high-quality oil that partially solidifies on exposure to air. After the ship’s system of blocks and tackles hauled the head up onto the deck, the men cut a hole into the top of the case and used buckets to remove the oil. One or two men might then be ordered to climb into the case to make sure all the spermaceti had been retrieved. Spillage was inevitable, and soon the decks were a slippery mess of oil and blood. Before cutting loose the whale’s mutilated corpse, the mates probed its intestinal tract with a lance, searching for an opaque, ash-colored substance called ambergris. Thought to be the result of indigestion or constipation on the part of the whale, ambergris is a fatty substance used to make perfume and was worth more than its weight in gold.
By now, the two immense, four-barreled iron try-pots were full of pieces of blubber. To hasten the trying-out process, the blubber was chopped into foot-square hunks, then cut through into inch-thick slabs that resembled the fanned pages of a book and were known as bible leaves. A whale’s blubber bears no similarity to the fat reserves of terrestrial animals. Rather than soft and flabby, it is tough, almost impenetrable, requiring the whalemen to resharpen their cutting tools constantly.
Wood was used to start the fires beneath the try-pots, but once the boiling process had begun, the crispy pieces of blubber floating on the surface of the pot—known as scraps or cracklings—were skimmed off and tossed into the fire for fuel. The flames that melted down the whale’s blubber were thus fed by the whale itself. While this was a highly efficient use of materials, it produced a thick pall of black smoke with an unforgettable stench. “The smell of the burning cracklings is too horribly nauseous for description,” remembered one whaleman. “It is as though all the odors in the world were gathered together and being shaken up.”
At night the deck of the Essex looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno. “A trying-out scene has something peculiarly wild and savage in it,” stated a green hand from Kentucky, “a kind of indescribable uncouthness, which renders it difficult to describe with anything like accuracy. There is a murderous appearance about the blood-stained decks, and the huge masses of flesh and blubber lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened by the red, fierce glare of the fires.” It was a scene that perfectly suited Melville’s sinister artistic purposes in Moby-Dick. “[The] darkness was licked up by the fierce flames,” Ishmael tells us, “which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful act.”
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. Experienced whalemen knew enough to sleep in their trying-out clothes (usually an old short-sleeved shirt and a worn pair of woolen drawers), postponing any attempts at cleaning themselves until the casks of oil had been stored in the hold and the ship had been thoroughly scrubbed down. Nickerson and his friends, however, were so revolted by the noisome mixture of oil, blood, and smoke covering their skin and clothes that they changed after every watch. By the time the first whale had been tried out, they had ruined nearly every piece of clothing stored in their sea chests.
This forced them to purchase additional clothing from the ship’s slop chest—the nautical equivalent of the company store—at outrageous prices. Nickerson estimated that if the Essex ever made it back to Nantucket, he and his fellow green hands would owe the ship’s owners close to 90 percent of their total earnings from the voyage. Instead of warning the teenagers about the potential perils of dipping into the slop chest, the ship’s officers were content to let them learn the economics of whaling life the hard way. Nickerson’s judgment: “This should not have been.”
ONE night, not far from the Falkland Islands, the men were up in the rigging, reefing the topsails, when they heard a scream: a sharp, shrill shriek of terror coming from alongside the ship. Someone had apparently fallen overboard.
The officer of the watch was about to give the order to heave to when a second scream was heard. And then, perhaps with a nervous laugh, someone realized that it wasn’t a man but a penguin, bobbing beside the ship, piercing the night with its all-too-human cries. Penguins! They must be nearing Antarctica.
The next day the wind vanished, leaving the Essex to languish in a complete calm. Seals played about the ship, “plunging and swimming as though they desired our attention,” Nickerson remembered. There were several varieties of penguins, along with gulls and gannets pinwheeling in the sky—a sure sign that the Essex was approaching land.
While the seals and birds may have provided a distraction, morale about the Essex had reached a nadir. So far it had been a slow and unprofitable slog toward Cape Horn. With the knockdown several days out from Nantucket setting the unfortunate tone of the voyage, they had been more than four months at sea and had only a single whale to show for it. If the voyage continued in this fashion, the Essex would have to be out a good deal longer than two years if she were to return with a full cargo of oil. With the temperatures dropping and the legendary dangers of the Horn looming ahead of them, tensions aboard the Essex were reaching the breaking point.
Richard Henry Dana experienced firsthand how the morale of a ship’s crew could deteriorate to the extent that even the slightest incident might be perceived as a horrendous, unbearable injustice:
[A] thousand little things, daily and almost hourly occurring, which no one who has not himself been on a long and tedious voyage can conceive of or properly appreciate—little wars and rumors of wars,—reports of things said in the cabin,—misun-derstanding of words and looks,—apparent abuses,—brought us into a state in which everything seemed to go wrong.
Aboard the Essex, the crew’s discontent focused on the issue of food. At no time were the differences that existed between the officers and the men more pronounced than at mealtimes. In the cabin, the officers ate much as they did back home on Nantucket—on plates, with forks, knives, and spoons, and with plenty of vegetables (as long as they lasted) to add to the ship’s fare of salt beef and salt pork. If there was fresh meat available—as from those thirty Maio hogs—the officers were the ones who enjoyed most of it. As an alternative to hardtack (biscuits with the consistency of dried plaster), the steward regularly provided the officers with freshly baked bread.
The men in the forecastle and steerage enjoyed an entirely different dining experience. Instead of sitting at a table to eat, they sat on their sea chests around a large wooden tub, known as a kid, containing a hunk of pork or beef. Referred to as horse or junk, the meat was so salty that when the cook placed it in a barrel of saltwater for a day (to render it soft enough to chew), the meat’s salt content was actually lowered. The sailors were required to supply their own utensils, usually a sheath knife and a spoon, plus a tin cup for tea or coffee.
Rather than the heaping portions provided to the officers, those before the mast were given only a negligible amount of this less-than-nutritious fare, their daily diet of hardtack and salt beef occasionally augmented with a little “duff,” a flour pudding or dumpling boiled in a cloth bag. It has been estimated that sailors in the latter part of the nineteenth century were consuming around 3,800 calories a day. It is unlikely that the men in the forecastle of a whaler in 1819 consumed even close to that amount. Complained one green hand on a Nantucket whaler, “Alas, alas, the day that I came a-whaling. For what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but in the meantime starveth to death?”
One day soon after passing the Falkland Islands, the men went below to find in the kid a ration of meat even paltrier than usual. An impromptu meeting was held. It was decided that no one would touch the meat until the kid had been shown to Captain Pollard and a complaint officially filed. The sailors took their stations on the forward portion of the deck while one of the men, the tub of beef on his shoulder, made his way aft toward the cabin gangway. Nickerson, who had been assigned to tar the netting of the main staysail, was well above the deck and had a good view of the ensuing confrontation.
The kid was no sooner set down than Captain Pollard came up onto the quarterdeck. Pollard glanced at the tub of beef, and Nickerson watched as his complexion seemed to shift from red, to blue, to almost black. Food was a difficult and sensitive issue for Captain Pollard. As he knew better than anyone, the Essex had been woefully underprovisioned by the parsimonious owners. If there was any hope of providing for the men in the several years ahead, he had to limit their provisions now. He may not have felt good about it, but he had no alternative.
In bringing the kid aft, the men had dared to violate the sacred space of the quarterdeck, normally reserved for the officers. Even if the crew’s anger might be justified, this was a challenge to the ship’s authority that no self-respecting captain could tolerate. It was a critical moment for a commander who desperately needed to shake his crew out of a corrosive and potentially disastrous malaise.
Casting aside his normal reticence, Pollard roared out, “Who brought this kid aft? Come here, you damned scoundrels, and tell me!”
No one dared speak. The men sheepishly made their way toward the quarterdeck as a group, each trying to hide himself behind the others. It was just the display of timidity this first-time captain needed.
Pollard paced the quarterdeck in a fury, working a quid of tobacco in his mouth and spitting on the deck, all the while muttering, “You’ll throw your kid in my face, you damned scoundrels, will you?”
Finally, he made his way to the forward part of the quarterdeck, pulled off his jacket and hat, and stamped on them. “You scoundrels,” he snarled, “have not I given you all the ship could afford? Have not I treated you like men? Have you had plenty to eat and drink? What in hell do you want more? Do you wish me to coax you to eat? Or shall I chew your food for you?”
The men stood there dumbfounded. Pollard’s eyes strayed up into the rigging where Nickerson sat with his tar brush. Pointing a finger at him, the captain bellowed, “Come down here, you young rascal. I’ll kill the whole bunch of you together and then bang up northwest and go home.”
Not having any idea what the captain meant by “banging up northwest,” Nickerson slunk down to the deck, fully expecting to be, if not killed, at least flogged. But much to everyone’s relief, Pollard dismissed all hands, saying, “If I hear any more from you about provisions, I’ll tie the whole of you up together and whip it out of you.”
As the crew dispersed, Pollard could be heard growling what became known among the men as his “soliloquy,” which they parodied in a bit of doggerel that Nickerson still remembered fifty-seven years later:
Thirty hogs in the Isle of May
Duff every other day
Butter and cheese as much as you could sway
And now you want more beef, damn you.
Pollard’s behavior was fairly typical of Nantucket whaling captains, who were famous for oscillating wildly between tight-lipped reserve and incandescent rage. Pollard was, according to Nickerson, “generally very kind where he could be so…[This] display of violence was only one of his freaks and passed off with the setting sun. The next morning found him as kind as before.”
Yet everything aboard the Essex had changed. Captain Pollard had proved he had the backbone to put the men in their place. From that day forward, no one ever complained about provisions.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_21c34b4f-e95e-5019-a11b-3e2372bbdba2)
The Lees of Fire (#ulink_21c34b4f-e95e-5019-a11b-3e2372bbdba2)


AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING on November 25, 1819, the lookout cried, “Land ho!” In the distance, what appeared to be an island of rock towered high above the water. Without hesitation, Captain Pollard pronounced it to be Staten Island, off the eastern tip of Cape Horn. The crew was staring at this legendary sphinxlike sight when suddenly it dissolved in the hazy air. It had been nothing but a fog bank.
The dangers of the Horn were proverbial. In 1788 Captain William Bligh and the crew of the Bounty had attempted to round this menacing promontory. After a solid month of sleet-filled headwinds and horrendous seas that threatened to break up the ship, Bligh decided that the only sensible way to reach the Pacific was to go the other way, so he turned the Bounty around and headed for Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-five years later, during the War of 1812, a much larger vessel, also named the Essex, an American naval frigate commanded by Captain David Porter, rounded the Horn. Porter and his men would eventually become famous for their heroics against a superior British force in the Pacific, but Cape Horn put a fright into the otherwise fearless mariner. “[O]ur sufferings (short as has been our passage) have been so great that I would advise those bound into the Pacific, never to attempt the passage of Cape Horn, if they can get there by another route.”
The whalemen of Nantucket had a different attitude toward the Horn. They’d been rounding it regularly ever since 1791, when Captain Paul Worth steered the Beaver, a whaleship about the size of the Essex, into the Pacific. Pollard and Chase had done it at least three times; for Pollard it may have been his fourth or even fifth time. Still, Cape Horn was nothing any captain took for granted, certainly not one who, like Pollard, had almost lost his ship in the relatively benign Gulf Stream.
Soon after watching the mirage island vanish before them, the men of the Essex saw something so terrible that they could only hope their eyes were deceiving them once again. But it was all too real: from the southwest a line of ink-black clouds was hurtling in their direction. In an instant the squall slammed into the ship with the force of a cannon shot. In the shrieking darkness, the crew labored to shorten sail. Under a close-reefed maintopsail and storm staysails, the Essex performed surprisingly well in the mountainous seas. “[T]he ship rode over them as buoyantly as a seagull,” Nickerson claimed, “without taking onboard one bucket of water.”
But now, with the wind out of the southwest, there was the danger of being driven against the jagged rocks of the Horn. The days became weeks as the ship struggled against the wind and waves in nearfreezing temperatures. In these high latitudes the light never entirely left the night sky. Without the usual sequence of light and dark, the passage stretched into a dreary, seemingly unending test of a whaleman’s sanity.
It took more than a month for the Essex to round Cape Horn. Not until January of the new year, 1820, did the lookout sight the island of St. Mary’s, a gathering spot for whalers off the coast of Chile. To the south of the island in the bay of Arauco they found several Nantucket vessels, including the Chili, the same ship with which they had left the island five months earlier.
The news from the west coast of South America was not good. For one thing, the political situation in Chile and Peru was extremely volatile. In recent years towns up and down the coast had been ravaged by fighting between the Patriots, who hoped to wrest control of South America from Spain, and the Royalists, whose interests were still linked to the mother country. Although the Patriot forces, assisted by the swashbuckling British naval hero Lord Cochrane, appeared in the ascendancy, fighting was still going on, particularly in Peru. Caution was the watchword when provisioning on this coast.
For most vessels it had been a miserable whaling season. While the scarcity of whales kept up the price of oil back home on Nantucket, these were tough times for whalemen in the Pacific. After driving his crew to fill his ship, the Independence, Captain George Swain had returned to Nantucket in November and predicted, “No other ship will ever fill with sperm oil in the South Seas.” Obed Macy feared Captain Swain might be right: “Some new place must be found where the whales are more numerous,” he told his journal, “or the business will not be worth pursuing.” Praying that they might elude these grim forecasts, the crew of the Essex headed out to sea.
After several luckless months off the Chilean coast, punctuated by a provisioning stop at Talcahuano, the Essex began to meet with some success off Peru. In just two months, Pollard and his men boiled down 450 barrels of oil, the equivalent of about eleven whales. This meant that they were killing, on average, a whale every five days, a pace that soon exhausted the crew.
The weather only added to their labors. High winds and rugged seas made every aspect of whaling doubly onerous. Instead of providing a stable platform on which to cut up the blubber and boil the oil, the Essex pitched back and forth in the waves. The large seas made it next to impossible to lower and raise the whaleboats safely. “Our boats were very much injured in hoisting them from the water,” Nickerson remembered, “and were on more than one occasion dashed in pieces by the heavy rolling of the ship.” The much-abused boats were constantly in a state of repair.
As the number of casks of oil in the hold increased, the green hands became accustomed to the brutal business of whaling. The repetitious nature of the work—a whaler was, after all, a factory ship—tended to desensitize the men to the awesome wonder of the whale. Instead of seeing their prey as a fifty- to sixty-ton creature whose brain was close to six times the size of their own (and, what perhaps should have been even more impressive in the all-male world of the fishery, whose penis was as long as they were tall), the whalemen preferred to think of it as what one commentator called “a self-propelled tub of high-income lard.” Whales were described by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a fifty-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the mammal’s habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whose constituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it—the tons of meat, bone, and guts—was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. 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.
Even the most repugnant aspects of whaling became easier for the green hands to take as they grew to appreciate that each was just part of a process, like mining for gold or growing crops, designed to make them money. That was why veteran whalemen had a special fondness for trying out the blubber, the final step in the transformation of a living, breathing sperm whale into cold, hard cash. “It is horrible,” the writer Charles Nordhoff admitted. “Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights.”
It was more than just the money. Each whale, each cask of oil, brought the Nantucketer closer to returning home to his loved ones. And it was when they were trying out the whale that the whalemen typically grew the most nostalgic for home. “Wives and children are remembered with new affection at such moments,” claimed William H. Macy, “and each feels nearer home and friends at each recurring sound of the light-driven bung, and the inspiring cry, ‘Away cask!’ Truly is it remarked by old whalemen that the most delightful parts of the voyage are ‘Boiling’ and arriving home.”
It was during this busy and exhausting two-month stretch off Peru that the crew of the Essex received what was for a whaleman the ultimate motivator: letters from home.
Toward the end of May, the Essex spoke, or hailed, the Aurora, the brand-new ship fitted out by Gideon Folger and Sons for Daniel Russell, formerly the captain of the Essex. The Aurora had left Nantucket on the day after Christmas, bringing with her news that was only five months old—a blink of an eye in the time frame of a whaleman. When the Aurora left Nantucket, the price of whale oil was at an all-time high; people were still talking about the fire in Rhoda Harris’s schoolroom in the black section of town, known as New Guinea; and they were catching codfish (two hundred to a boat) off the Nantucket village of Siasconset.
But of most interest to the men was the pouch of mail, along with several newspapers, that Daniel Russell handed over to Captain Pollard. After the officers had selected their letters, the bag was sent forward to the crew. “It was amusing to watch those of our lads who had been disappointed and found no letters for them,” Nickerson recalled. “They would follow us around the decks and whilst we were reading our letters would seat themselves beside us, as though our letters could be of service to them.” Despairing of finding out anything about their own families, the unlucky ones sought solace in what Nickerson called “the careless folds of a newspaper.” For his part, Nickerson would reread the newspapers so many times that he would soon have their contents memorized.
The meeting between the Aurora and the Essex provided Pollard with the chance to speak with his former commander, the thirty-four-year-old Daniel Russell. The Aurora was a much larger, state-of-the-art ship and would return to Nantucket two years later, full of oil. Later it would be said that when Captain Russell had left the Essex to assume command of the Aurora, he had taken his old ship’s luck with him.
ONE of the topics Pollard and Russell discussed was the recent discovery of a new whaling ground. As if to refute Captain Swain’s dour prediction that the Pacific Ocean had been fished out of sperm whales, Captain George Washington Gardner of the Globe had headed farther out to sea in 1818 than any other Nantucket whaleship had so far dared to go. More than a thousand miles off the coast of Peru he hit the mother lode, an expanse of ocean full of sperm whales. He returned home to Nantucket in May of 1820 with more than two thousand barrels of oil.
Gardner’s discovery became known as the Offshore Ground. During the spring and summer of 1820, it was the talk of the whale fishery. Understanding that whales appeared in the Offshore Ground in November, Pollard resolved to make one final provisioning stop in South America, where he’d secure plenty of fruits, vegetables, and water; then, after touching at the Galapagos Islands, where he would pick up a load of giant tortoises (which were prized for their meat), he would head out for this distant section of ocean.
Sometime in September the Essex called at Atacames, a little village of approximately three hundred Spaniards and Indians in Ecuador, just north of the equator. Anchored beside them they found a ghost ship, the whaler George from London, England. Every member of the George’s crew, save for Captain Benneford and two others, had come down with a life-threatening case of scurvy after a long time at sea. Their condition was so serious that Benneford rented a house on shore and transformed it into a hospital for his men. Here was ample evidence of the dangers of venturing for extended periods out into the open Pacific.
Although poor, Atacames (called Tacames by the whalemen) was a beautiful town that for some sailors seemed a kind of Garden of Eden. “I could not but admire the exuberant growth of every thing belonging to the vegetable kingdom,” recalled Francis Olmsted, whose ship put in at Atacames in the 1830s. “The most delicious pineapples spread out before us, while the coconut tree, the plaintain and the banana waved their broad leaves gracefully in the breeze. Here were oranges, limes and other fruits lying scattered around in neglected profusion. The fig trees had also begun to put forth, and the indigo plant grew spontaneously like the most common weed.”
There were, however, monsters lurking in the dense jungle surrounding the town, including jaguars. To guard against such predators, as well as against mosquitoes and sand fleas, the villagers lived in thatch-roofed bamboo huts raised up on stakes as much as twenty feet above the ground.
Atacames was known for its game birds. Soon after the Nantucket whaleship Lucy Adams also dropped anchor, Pollard set out with her captain, thirty-seven-year-old Shubael Hussey, on what Nickerson described as a turkey-hunting expedition. In preparation for this all-day affair, the cooks of the two vessels baked pies and other delicacies for the hunting party to take with them into the wilderness.
The hunters lacked a way to flush out the game. “I being the youngest boy onboard,” Nickerson remembered, “was chosen to make up the company in place of a hunter’s dog.” And so they were off, “over the meadows and through the woods toward the hunting grounds.”
About three hours out, they heard “the most dismal howling that can be imagined.” Doing their best to ignore the cries, the two captains pushed on until it became clear that they were rapidly approaching the source of the disturbing sound. What could it be, Nickerson wondered, a blood-thirsty jaguar? But no one said a word. Finally, the two noble whale hunters stopped and “looked at each other a few moments as though they wished to say something which each was ashamed to open first.” As if on cue, they turned around and began walking back to town, casually remarking that it was too hot an afternoon to hunt and that they would return on a cooler day.
But there was no fooling their surrogate hunting dog. “[They were] afraid some beast of prey would devour them,” Nickerson wrote, “and that I could not find my way back, being too young to tell their anxious wives what became of them.” On a subsequent voyage to the region, Nickerson would discover the source of the sounds that had struck such terror in the hearts of these two whaling captains: a harmless bird smaller than a chickadee.
Something happened in Atacames that profoundly influenced the morale of the crew. Henry Dewitt, one of the Essex’s African American sailors, deserted.
Dewitt’s act came as no great surprise. Sailors fled from whaleships all the time. Once a green hand realized how little money he was likely to make at the end of a voyage, he had no incentive to stay on if he had better options. However, the timing of the desertion could not have been worse for Captain Pollard. Since each whaleboat required a six-man crew, this now left only two shipkeepers whenever whales were being hunted. Two men could not safely manage a square-rigged ship the size of the Essex. If a storm should kick up, they would find it almost impossible to shorten sail. Yet Pollard, in a hurry to reach the Offshore Ground by November, had no alternative but to set out to sea shorthanded. Down a crew member and a whaleboat, the Essex was about to head out farther off the coast of South America than she had ever sailed before.
On October 2, the Essex set a course for the Galapagos Islands, approximately six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador. Referred to as the “Galleypaguses” by some seamen, these islands were also known as the Encantadas, Spanish for “enchanted” or “bewitched.” The strong and unpredictable currents that boiled in and around these volcanic outcroppings sometimes created the illusion that the islands were actually moving.
Even before the discovery of the Offshore Ground, the Galapagos had been a popular provisioning stop for whalers. Safely removed from the mainland, they provided a welcome refuge from the political turmoil in South America. They were also located in a region frequented by sperm whales. As early as 1793, just two years after the Beaver first rounded the Horn, Captain James Colnett, on a British exploratory voyage to investigate the potential for whaling in the Pacific, visited the Galapagos. What he found was part sperm-whale boudoir, part nursery. He and his crew witnessed something almost never seen by man: sperm whales copulating—the bull swimming upside down and beneath the female. They also spied vast numbers of baby whales, “not larger than a small porpoise.” Colnett wrote, “I am disposed to believe that we were now at the general rendezvous of the spermaceti whales from the coasts of Mexico, Peru, and the Gulf of Panama, who come here to calve.” He noted that of all the whales they killed, they found only one male.
Colnett’s observations are in keeping with the results of the latest research on the sperm whales of the Galapagos. One of the world’s premier sperm-whale experts, Hal Whitehead, began observing whales in this area in 1985. Using a cruising sailboat equipped with sophisticated technological gadgetry, Whitehead has monitored whales in the same waters plied by the Essex 180 years ago. He has found that the typical pod of whales, which ranges between three and twenty or so individuals, is comprised almost exclusively of interrelated adult females and immature whales. Adult males made up only 2 percent of the whales he observed.
The females work cooperatively in taking care of their young. The calves are passed from whale to whale so that an adult is always standing guard when the mother is feeding on squid thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. As an older whale raises its flukes at the start of a long dive, the calf will swim to another nearby adult.
Young males leave the family unit at around six years of age and make their way to the cooler waters of the high latitudes. Here they live singly or with other males, not returning to the warm waters of their birth until their late twenties. Even then, a male’s return is fairly fitful and inconclusive; he spends only eight or so hours with any one group, sometimes mating but never establishing any strong attachments, before making his way back to the high latitudes. He may live for sixty or seventy years.
The sperm whales’ network of female-based family units resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.

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