In the Heart of the Sea (20 page)

They weren't the first to be enticed by Henderson and then cheated. Although they weren't aware of it, in the cliffs behind them was a cave in which lay eight human skeletons.

A medical examination performed on the bones in 1966 revealed that they were of Caucasian origin, which suggests that these unidentified people, like the Essex crew, had been shipwreck survivors. The examination also revealed that one of the skeletons had belonged to a child between three and five years old. All eight people had died of dehydration.

The next morning-December 22, the thirty-first since leaving the wreck-the men resumed their search for water. Some, like Nickerson, climbed into the cliffs; others investigated the rocks along the beach. Chase returned to where they had found evidence of fresh water two days before. The rock was about a quarter mile from their encampment and, with a hatchet and an old rusted chisel, he and two others made their way across the sand.

“The rock proved to be very soft,” Chase wrote, “and in a very short time I had obtained a considerable hole, but, alas! without the least wished-for effect.” As the sun rose in the sky, Chase continued to peck away at the rock, hoping that by deepening the hole, he might establish a flow of water. “[B]ut all my hopes and efforts were unavailing,” he remembered, “and at last I desisted from further labor, and sat down near it in utter despair.”

Then he noticed something curious. On the beach, in the direction of the boats, two men were lugging a container of some sort. He was amazed to see them begin to run. “[T]he idea suddenly darted across my mind,” Chase wrote, “that they had found water, and were taking a keg to fill it.” Up in the cliffs, Nickerson had noticed the same display of “extraordinary spirit and activity” and soon became part of a general rush for the beach.

The men had, in fact, found a spring bubbling up from a hole in a large flat rock. “The sensation that I experienced was indeed strange, and such as I shall never forget,” Chase remembered. “At one instant I felt an almost choking excess of joy, and at the next I wanted the relief of a flood of tears.”

By the time Chase reached the spring, men had already begun to drink, eagerly filling their mouths with the miraculous nectar. Mindful that in their dehydrated condition it was dangerous to drink too much water too quickly, Chase exhorted them to sip only small quantities and to wait several minutes between drinks. But their thirst proved overpowering, and some of the men had to be held back. Despite the officers' best efforts, several of the crew “thoughtlessly swallowed large quantities of [water], until they could drink no more.” But the agonizing cramps Chase had warned against never came: “[I]t only served to make them a little stupid and indolent for the remainder of the day.”

Once everyone had been given a chance to drink, they began to marvel at their good fortune. The spring was so far below the tide line that it was exposed for just a half hour at dead low; at high tide it was as much as six feet underwater. They had time to fill only two small kegs before the rock once again disappeared below the surf.

After collecting more fish and birds, they sat down for the evening meal. With a dependable source of water and a seemingly bountiful supply of food, they now thought it possible to hold out indefinitely on the island. At the very least, they could stay at Henderson until they had recovered their strength and repaired their worn-out whaleboats for a final attempt at reaching South America. That night they agreed to remain on the island for at least another four or five days before they decided “whether it would be advisable to make any arrangement for a more permanent abode.” Their stomachs full and their thirst slaked, they quickly drifted off into what Chase described as “a most comfortable and delicious sleep.”

At eleven o'clock the next morning, they returned to the spring. They arrived just as the tide fell below the rock. At first the water was somewhat brackish, raising fears that the spring was not as reliable a source of fresh water as they had first thought. But as the tide continued to retreat, the quality of the water steadily improved. After filling their casks with about twenty gallons, they set out in search of food.

Every spare moment of every day was, in Chase's words, “employed in roving about for food.” The evening hours proved the most productive, for it was then that the plump white birds known as tropic birds, about the size of chickens, returned to shore to feed their young. Approaching stealthily, the men would “pounce upon [the birds] with a stick and take them without difficulty.”

They were not the only ones who lay in wait for the tropic birds each evening. There were also what Nickerson called the man-of-war hawks. But instead of killing the tropic birds, the hawks had what scientists call a kleptoparasitic relationship with them, pecking their backs and beating them with their wings until the tropic birds disgorged the fish that had been intended for their young. With the regurgitated food in their beaks, the hawks would fly away, “leaving,” Nickerson observed, “the young tropicbirds supperless.”

The following day, December 24, they detected an alarming change. Nickerson noticed that the birds, “being so constantly harassed, began to forsake the island.” That evening some of the crew returned to camp complaining that they had not been able to find enough to eat. In just five'days, these twenty voracious men had exhausted their portion of the island. “Every accessible part of the mountain, contiguous to us, or within the reach of our weak enterprise,” Chase wrote, “was already ransacked, for bird's eggs and grass, and was rifled of all that they contained.”

deep in the Desolate Region, Henderson Island had never been rich in natural resources. Scientists believe that flora and fauna originally spread to the islands of the Pacific from the luxuriant margins of Southeast Asia, and Henderson is more than nine thousand miles from this source. Making it even more difficult for life to reach this isolated outcropping of coral is the direction of the prevailing winds and currents. Like the men of the Essex, birds and plant species had to fight their way upwind and upstream to reach Henderson. Moreover, the island is south of the Tropic of Capricorn, a relatively cool band of water that acts as a further barrier to the spread of tropical species. As a result, Henderson has always been a difficult place for man to live.

The human colonization of the Pacific Islands appears to have followed a pattern similar to the spread of plants and birds. Moving from one stepping-stone of an island to the next, people pushed out ever farther to the east and south. Archeological digs on Henderson have revealed that man first arrived on the island sometime between 800 and 1050 AD. These first inhabitants established a settlement on the same beach where the Essex crew hauled up their whaleboats. In the few places where the soil allowed for it, they grew sweet potatoes. They fished with hooks made out of imported pearl shells. They buried their dead in slab crypts. But by 1450, they were gone, no longer able to scratch out a living on what is considered today the “last pristine elevated limestone island in the world.”

there was no Christmas feast for the Essex crew. That evening they “found that a fruitless search for nourishment had not repaid us the labors of a whole day.” Only grass remained, and that was “not much relished,” Chase wrote, “without some other food.” They began to “entertain serious apprehensions that we should not be able to live long here.”

In less than a week, the Essex crew had accomplished what had taken their Polynesian predecessors at least four centuries. By December 26, their seventh day on Henderson and their thirty-fifth since leaving the wreck, they had resolved to abandon this used-up island. In Chase's words, their situation was “worse than it would have been in our boats on the ocean; because, in the latter case we should be still making some progress towards the land, while our provisions lasted.” In preparation for their departure, they had already begun working on the whaleboats. “We nailed our boats as well as it was possible to do,” Nickerson wrote, “with the small quantity of boat nails in our possession, in order to prepare them to stand against the boisterous elements which we were again... to encounter.”

The coast of Chile was approximately three thousand miles away-about twice as far as they had already sailed. Upon studying their copies of Bowditch's Navigator, they realized that Easter Island, at latitude 27 °9' south, longitude 109 °35' west, was less than a third of that distance. Although they, once again, knew nothing about the island, they decided to sail for it, belatedly realizing that the potential terrors of an unknown island were nothing compared to the known terrors of an open boat in the open ocean.

Early in the day, “all hands were called together,” Nickerson remembered, “for a last talk previous to taking a final departure.” Pollard explained that they would be leaving the next day and that the boat-crews would remain the same as they'd been prior to their arrival on Henderson. It was then that three men came forward-Joy's boatsteerer Thomas Chappel and two teenagers from Cape Cod, Seth Weeks and William Wright, from Pollard's and Chase's boats, respectively. Several times over the last few days these three white off-islanders had been observed “reasoning upon the probabilities of their deliverance.” And the more they talked about it, the more they dreaded the prospect of climbing back into the whaleboats.

Chappel, the once spirited and mischievous Englishman who had set fire to Charles Island, could see that second mate Matthew Joy did not have long to live. As the rest of the crew gradually regained weight and strength during the week on Henderson, Joy, who had possessed a “weak and sickly constitution” even before the sinking, had remained shockingly thin. Chappel knew that if Joy should die, he would become, by default, his whaleboat's leader-a prospect no reasonable man could relish, given what might lie ahead.

In preparing for a sea voyage that could result in the deaths of some, if not all, of the men assembled on the beach, the crew of the Essex were reenacting a scenario that had been played out countless times before on islands across the Pacific. The colonization of the Polynesian islands had depended on such scenarios. But instead of a last, desperate push to reach a known world, the early South Sea islanders had set out on voyages of discovery-sailing east and south into the giant blue void of the Pacific. During these long and uncertain passages, starvation inevitably took its toll. The biological anthropologist Stephen McGarvey has speculated that the people who survived these voyages tended to have a higher percentage of body fat before the voyage began and/or more efficient metabolisms, allowing them to live longer on less food than their thinner companions. (McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern-day Polynesians suffer from a high incidence of obesity.)

The same factors that favored fat, metabolically efficient Polynesians were now at work among the crew of the Essex. Although they had all survived on the same rations during their month in the boats, this had not been the case prior to the sinking. As was customary aboard a whaleship, the food served in the forecastle (where the blacks lived) had been a grade below the miserable fare that had been served to the boatsteerers and young Nantucketers in steerage. The blacks were also, in all probability, in poorer health than the whites even before they sailed on the Essex. (The life expectancy of a black infant in 1900-the earliest date for which there are statistics-was only thirty-three years, more than fourteen years less than that of a white infant.)

Now, thirty-eight days after the whale attack, it was plain to all that the African Americans, although not as weak as Joy, were faring more poorly than the rest of the crew.

At the other extreme were the Nantucketers. Besides being better fed, they had an additional source of strength: they were all from the same close-knit community. The younger Nantucketers had been friends since childhood, while the officers, especially Captain Pollard, demonstrated a fatherly concern for the teenagers' welfare. Whether enduring the torments of thirst and hunger on the boats or foraging for food on Henderson, the Nantucketers provided one another with support and encouragement that they did not offer the others.

They had all seen how the man-of-war hawks robbed the tropic birds of their food. As conditions deteriorated on the boats, one could only wonder who of these nine Nantucketers, six African Americans, and five white off-islanders would become the hawks and who would become the tropic birds. Chappel, Wright, and Weeks decided that they did not want to find out.

“The rest of us could make no objection to their plan,” Chase wrote, “as itlessened the load of our boats, [and] allowed us their share of the provisions.” Even the first mate had to admit that “the probability of their being able to sustain themselves on the island was much stronger than that of our reaching the mainland.” Pollard assured the three men that if he did make it back to South America, he would do everything in his power to see that they were rescued.

With downcast eyes and trembling rips, the three men drew away from the rest of the crew. They'd already picked a spot, well removed from the original encampment, on which to construct a crude shelter out of tree branches. It was time they started work. But their seventeen shipmates were reluctant to see them go, offering “every little article that could be spared from the boats.” After accepting the gifts, Chappel and his two companions turned and started down the beach.

that evening Pollard wrote what he assumed would be his last letter home. It was addressed to his wife, Mary, the twenty-year-old ropemaker's daughter with whom he had spent the sum total of fifty-seven days of married life. He also wrote another, more public letter:

Account of the loss of the Ship Essex of Nantucket in North America, Ducies Island, December 20, 1820, commanded by Capt. Pollard, jun. which shipwreck happened on the 20th day - of November, 1820 on the equator in long. 120 ° W done by a large whale striking her in the bow, which caused her to fill with water in about 10 minutes. We got what provisions and water the boats would carry, and left her on the 22nd of November, and arrived here this day with all hands, except one black man, who left the ship at Ticamus. We intend to leave tomorrow, which will be the 26th of December [actually December 27], 1820, for the continent. I shall leave with this a letter for my wife, and whoever finds, and will have the goodness to forward it will oblige an unfortunate man, and receive his sincere wishes.