In the Heart of the Sea (27 page)

In 1820-21, as the Essex boat-crews struggled east under a blistering sun, their kin on Nantucket were suffering through one of the coldest winters in the island's history. On the day that the three whaleboats left Henderson Island, Obed Macy, Nantucket's historian, recorded in his journal that the harbor was covered with “porridge ice.” By January 7, the harbor was frozen solid. Ice extended north toward the mainland as far as the eye could see. Supplies of food and especially firewood were already dangerously low. Six feet of snow smothered the outlying areas of the island, making it impossible for the sheep to feed on grass. Macy estimated that as many as half of Nantucket's total herd of about nine thousand sheep would be dead by spring.

On January 13, six men from Martha's Vineyard, who were trapped on Nantucket and desperate to return to their families, launched a whaleboat from the south shore, where the ocean surf had maintained a corridor of open water. The wind remained moderate that day, and people were optimistic that the Vineyarders had reached home safely.

There is no record of whether or not they did. On January 25 the temperature dropped to 12 degrees below zero, the lowest ever recorded on the island. “Many people, especially the old,” Macy wrote, “could hardly be kept comfortable in bed.”

Four men were added to the town's nightwatch. With almost all of the island's population crowded into a congestion of old wooden buildings, their fireplaces roaring night and day, there was a high risk of what Macy called a “disastrous fire.” Adding to the danger was the unusually large amount of sperm oil stored in the town's warehouses that winter. Macy noted that the merchants had taken “every necessary care to preserve [the oil] from fire.”

Finally, in the beginning of February, the temperature rose above freezing, and it began to rain. “The ice and snow melts away rapidly,” Macy wrote, “which seems to animate and give life to business of most kinds. The vessels and men who have been confined here for some weeks begin to move, with some prospects of being released from prison. The people who are so anxious to get off are cutting out the mail packet [from the ice].” On the morning of February 4, the packet sailed from Nantucket with “the largest mail packages that ever went from here at one time.” On February 17, the day before Chase's rescue, several trading vessels arrived with cargoes of corn, cranberries, hay, fresh pork, beef, turkey, cider, dry fish, and apples. The crisis was over.

The families of the Essex crew members had no reason for concern throughout the winter and spring. Letters mailed from the Galapagos post office on Charles Island in late October would not have reached Nantucket until February or March at the earliest. They would have told of a typical whaling voyage reaching its midpoint, with hopes high that a productive season in the Offshore Ground would allow them to return home in the summer of 1822.

What the people of Nantucket did not know was that since late February, a kind of tidal wave of horror had been building in the whale fishery as the story of the Essex was passed from ship to ship, gradually making its way around the Horn and up the Atlantic toward Nantucket. Riding the crest of this wave was the Eagle, with Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell aboard. Before the Eagle's, arrival, however, a letter reached Nantucket that told of the disaster.

The town's post office was on Main Street, and as soon as the letter arrived, it was read there before an overflowing crowd. The islander Frederick Sanford was a contemporary of the Nantucket teenagers aboard the Essex, and he would never forget what he saw and heard that day. The letter, Sanford recalled, told of “their sufferings in the boats, eating each other, and some of them my old playmates at school!” Despite Nantucket's reputation for Quaker stoicism, the people assembled outside the post office could not conceal their emotions. “[E]veryone was overcome by [the letter's] recital,” Sanford wrote, “and [wept] in the streets.”

As it turned out, the letter contained an incomplete account of the disaster. Pollard and Ramsdell had been rescued almost a week after Chase's boat-crew, but their account-passed from whaleship to whaleship-was the first to make it home. The letter mentioned the three men left on the island but gave little hope for any other survivors. Pollard and Ramsdell were assumed to be the only Nantucketers left alive.

On June 11, the Eagle arrived at the Nantucket Bar. “My family had received the most distressing account of our shipwreck,” Chase wrote, “and had given me up for lost.” But standing alongside Ramsdell was not George Pollard; instead, there were three ghosts-Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson. Tears of sorrow were soon succeeded by amazement and then tears of joy. “My unexpected appearance,” Chase remembered, “was welcomed with the most grateful obligations and acknowledgments to a beneficent Creator, who had guided me through darkness, trouble, and death, once more to the bosom of my country and friends.”

Chase discovered that he was the father of a fourteen-month-old daughter, Phebe Ann. For Chase's wife, Peggy, itwas an overwhelming sight: the husband whom she had once thought dead holding their chubby-cheeked daughter in his still bony, scab-covered arms.

The community of Nantucket was overwhelmed as well. Obed Macy, the meticulous keeper of Nantucket's historical record, chose not to mention the disaster in his journal. Although articles quickly appeared about the Essex in the New Bedford Mercury, Nantucket's own fledgling newspaper, the Inquirer, did not write about the disaster that summer. It was as if Nantucketers were refusing to commit to an opinion about the matter until they had first had a chance to hear from foe Essex's captain, George Pollard, Jr.

They would have to wait almost two months, until August 5, when Pollard returned to the island aboard the Two Brothers. The whaleship was first sighted by the lookout posted at the tower of the Congregational church. As word spread down the lanes and into the grog shops and warehouses and ropewalks and out into the wharves, a crowd formed and began to make its way to the cliff along the north shore. From there they could see the black, sea-worn ship, heavy with oil, her sails furled, anchored at the Nantucket Bar. At 222 tons, the Two Brothers was even smaller than the Essex had been, and once she'd been relieved of some of her oil, she crossed the Bar at high tide and made her way toward the harbor entrance. The crowd surged back to the waterfront. Soon more than 1,500 people were waiting expectantly at the wharves.

The arrival of a whaleship-any whaleship-was what one Nantucketer called “an era in most of our lives.” It was the way people learned about the ones they loved-the sons, husbands, fathers, uncles, and friends whose workplace was on the other side of the world. Since no one knew what news the whaleship might bring, islanders greeting a ship tended to hide their eagerness and anxiety behind a veneer of solemnity. “We feel a singular blending of joy and grief on such occasions,” this same Nantucketer confessed. “We know not whether to smile or weep. Our emotion at all events is much subdued. We dare not express it aloudlest it grate upon the ear of some to whom this ship has been a harbinger of evil. We are disposed to be quiet. And yet at this time we have an irresistible impulse to utter our feelings.”

And so, when Pollard first stepped upon the wharf, surrounded by more than a thousand familiar faces, there was an absolute, nerve-shattering quiet. Frederick Sanford, Nickerson's and Ramsdell's old school chum, would later describe the assembly as “an awe-struck, silent crowd.” As Pollard began to make his way toward home, people moved aside to let him pass. No one said a word.

It was generally acknowledged that a whaling captain bore a much heavier weight of responsibility than a captain in the merchant service. In addition to navigating his vessel around the Horn and back, he was required to train a crew of inexperienced men in the dangerous art of killing and processing whales. And when it was all done, he had to answer to his ship's owners, who expected nothing less than a full hold of oil. Itwas little wonder, then, that awhaling captain was paid, on average, three times what the commander of a merchant vessel received.

As a mate aboard the Essex, George Pollard had known only success; as captain, he had known only disaster. Since a whaleman was paid a portion of the proceeds at the end of the voyage, Pollard, like all the other survivors, had nothing to show for two years of misery and hardship.

Captain Amasa Delano knew what it was like to return home after an unsuccessful voyage. “[I]t must be acknowledged, that I never saw my native country with so little pleasure as on my return to it after a disastrous termination of my enterprises and my hopes,” Delano wrote in an 1817 account of his many voyages to the Pacific. “The shore, on which I would have leaped with delight, was covered with gloom and sadness to my downcast eye and wounded mind... [M]y observation was alive to every symptom of neglect or affected pity which might appear in the conduct or salutations of my acquaintance onshore.”

Pollard was inevitably subjected to a lengthy interview by the Essex's owners, Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, a harrowing process during which it would have been difficult for a first-time captain not to sound defensive. “It is unquestionably true, that the poor and disappointed man is often too jealous on this subject,” Delano wrote, “and puts an erroneous and unjust construction upon conduct which is neither mercenary nor heartless.” But it wasn't just the Essex's owners to whom Pollard had to answer. There was a member of his own family-Owen Coffin's mother.

Nancy Bunker Coffin, forty-three, was Pollard's aunt, the sister of his mother, Tamar, fifty-seven. Nancy had married into one of Nantucket's oldest and proudest families, one that traced its roots to Tristram Coffin, the patriarch of the island's first English settlement in the seventeenth century. Nancy's father-in-law, Hezekiah Coffin, Sr., had been the captain of one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Hezekiah had distinguished himself, according to family legend, as “the first to throw tea into Boston Harbor.” The family possessed a miniature portrait of Hezekiah. He had wide-set eyes, a sharp nose, and a gentle, slightly embarrassed smile.

Although his son, Hezekiah Jr., had been a birthright Friend, he'd been disowned when he married Nancy Bunker, a non-Quaker, in 1799. Then, in 1812, when Owen Coffin was ten, Hezekiah Jr. officially “apologized,” and both he and Nancy became members of the North Meeting on Broad Street.

On that August day in 1821, when George Pollard arrived on her doorstep, Nancy's commitment to her adopted faith met the severest possible test. “He bore the awful message to the mother as her son desired,” Nickerson wrote. Nancy Coffin did not take it well. The idea that the man to whom she had entrusted the care of her seventeen-year-old son was living as a consequence of her boy's death was too much for her to bear. “ [S]he became almost frantic with the thought,” Nickerson wrote, “and I have heard that she never could become reconciled to the captain's presence.”

The verdict of the community was less harsh. The drawing of lots was accepted by the unwritten law of the sea as permissible in a survival situation. “Captain Pollard was not thought to have dealt unfairly with this trying matter,” Nickerson wrote. Although it did not involve the drawing of lots, a comparable case of survival cannibalism rocked the community of Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1972. The ordeal began when a plane transporting a local soccer team to Santiago, Chile, crashed in the snowy Andes Mountains. Until their rescue ten weeks later, the sixteen survivors sustained themselves on the frozen corpses of the passengers who had died in the crash. Just as had occurred in Nantucket more than 150 years earlier, the residents of Montevideo did not fault the young men's behavior. Soon after their return, Montevideo's Catholic Archbishop declared that since it had been a question of survival, the men were blameless, adding, “It is always necessary to eat whatever is at hand, in spite of the repugnance it may evoke.”

There is no evidence that Nantucket's religious leaders felt compelled to speak in defense of the Essex survivors. The fact remains, however, that no matter how justified it may have been, cannibalism was, and continues to be, what one scholar has termed a “cultural embarrassment”-an act so unsettling that it is inevitably more difficult for the general public to accept than for the survivors who resorted toil.

For his own part, Pollard did not allow the horror he had experienced in the whaleboat to defeat him, displaying an honesty and directness concerning the disaster that would sustain him all his life. Captain George “Worth of the Two Brothers was so impressed with the integrity of the former captain of the Essex during the two-and-a-half-month voyage back from Valparaiso that he recommended Pollard as his replacement. Soon after his return, Pollard was formally offered command of the Two Brothers.

By the time Pollard returned to Nantucket, Owen Chase had begun working on a book about the disaster. Chase had kept a daily log of his ordeal in the boats. He also appears to have obtained a copy of the letter written by the Dianas captain, Aaron Paddack, the night after hearing Pollard's story, which provided him with an account of what had happened on the other two boats after the separation on January 12. But Owen Chase was a whaleman, not a writer. “There seems no reason to suppose that Owen himself wrote the Narrative,” Herman Melville would write in his own copy of Chase's book. “It bears obvious tokens of having been written for him; but at the same time, its whole air plainly evinces that it was carefully and conscientiously written to Owen's dictation of the facts.”

Chase had grown up with a boy who, instead of shipping out for the Pacific, had attended Harvard College. William Coffin, Jr., was the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful whale-oil merchant who had also served as Nantucket's first postmaster. After graduating from Harvard, William Jr. had briefly studied medicine, and then, in the words of a friend, followed “other pursuits more congenial with his enthusiastic love of literature.” Years later, he would ghostwrite Obed Macy's much-praised history of Nantucket; there is also evidence that he helped write an account of the notorious Globe mutiny. His published literary career appears to have begun, however, with the narrative of the Essex disaster.