In the Heart of the Sea (37 page)

The first recorded instance of drawing lots in a survival situation at sea was published in 1641; see Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law (pp. 122-23). The description of David Flatt's reaction to his death sentence aboard the Peggy is told by Harrison (Wharton, pp. 271-76). See also H. Bluestone and C. L. McGahee's “Reaction to Extreme Stress: Impending Death by Execution.” My thanks to Friends Robert Leach and Michael Royston for their insights regarding Quakerism's stand on gambling and killing (personal communication, June 3,1998). Leach also provided me with information regarding the Quaker background of George Pollard (personal communication, May 22, 1998). R. B. Forbes, in the pamphlet Loss of the Essex, Destroyed by a Whale, refers to how the men aboard the Polly fished for sharks with people's body parts (pp. 13-14). My account of the drawing of lots and execution of Owen Coffin is based not only on testimonies from Pollard (as recorded by George Bennet, in Heffernan [p. 215]), Chase, and Nickerson but also on a letter Nickerson wrote to Leon Lewis dated October 27, 1876 (at the NHA). In the letter Nickerson claims that Pollard was Coffin's executioner, which contradicts his own account in the narrative, where he says that it was Ramsdell who shot Coffin. Since other accounts claim it was Ramsdell, I have assumed that Nickerson was mistaken in the letter.

chapter twelve: In the Eagle's Shadow

John Leach speaks of the active-passive approach to a long-term survival situation in Survival Psychology (p. 167). Eleanor Whitney et al., in Understanding Normal and Clinical Nutrition, describe the effects of an extreme magnesium deficiency: “convulsions, bizarre muscle movements (especially of the eye and facial muscles), hallucinations, and difficulty in swallowing” (p. 302). Captain Harrison's account of the sailor who died insane after eating the raw liver of a black slave is in Donald Wharton's In the Trough of the Sea (p. 269). Aversion of this

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story apparently made its way into the lore surrounding the Essex ordeal. In his pamphlet Loss of the Essex, R. B. Forbes, who depended greatly on information provided by the often unreliable Frederick Sanford, claimed that “when a black man died in one of the boats, another one partook of his liver, became mad, and jumped overboard” (p. 11).

The meaning of “Barzillai” comes from Alfred Jones's “A List of Proper Names in the Old and New Testaments” in Cruden 's Complete Concordance (p. 791). Warren Kinston and Rachel Rosser write of the psychological effects of suffering high losses in battle in “Disaster: Effects on Mental and Physical State” (pp. 445-46). Ancel Keys et al. discuss what they call the “edema problem” in The Biology of Human Starvation (pp. 935-1014).

Robert Leach provided me with the information concerning Benjamin Lawrence's Quaker upbringing (personal communication, May 22,1998). Josiah Quincy wrote of his conversation with the financially humbled Captain Lawrence (Benjamin's grandfather) in 1801, recording: “Lawrence had seen better days, and had been upon a level in point of property, with the principal inhabitants of the island. But misfortunes had beset his old age, and he was just preparing to remove his family to Alexandria” (Crosby, p. 119). As Leach reveals, Benjamin's father died during a voyage to Alexandria in 1809.

Concerning the sailing speed of a whaleboat, Willits Ansel writes, in The Whaleboat: “[F]our to six knots was a good average for a boat beating or running over a period of time on a number of headings” (p. 17). In 1765 the crew of the Peggy watched helplessly as the captain of a potential rescue ship ordered his men to sail away from the disabled craft (Wharton, p. 265). As Edward Leslie writes in Desperate Journeys. Abandoned Souls: “[R]escuing castaways entailed risks and offered no tangible rewards; indeed, taking survivors on board would deplete already limited supplies of food and water” (p. 218). According to Beth Tornovish, tapioca pudding is “a soft food that would be easy for these starving men to digest. It is high in calories and protein... [and] high-protein, high-calorie foods are recommended to postoperative surgical patients to promote healing and regain nutrient losses experienced prior to and during surgery” (personal communication, March 28. 1999).

Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner discuss techniques for extracting marrow from human bones in Man Corn (pp. 33-38). MacDonald Critchley, in Shipwreck Survivors: A Medical Study, writes of

deliriums among castaways that are “shared in... actual content... leading to a sort of collective confabulation” (p. 81). Charles Murphey, third mate on the Dauphin, tells how Pollard's boat was discovered in his 220-stanza poem published in 1877; Murphey also provides a crew list that indicates the Native Americans who were aboard the Dauphin. For an account of the Indian legend of how the giant Maushop followed a giant eagle to Nantucket, see mjAbram 's Eyes: The Native American Legacy ofNantucket Island (p. 35). Melville retells aversion of this legend in Chapter 14 of Moby-Dick. Commodore Charles Ridgely of the Constellation recorded the account of how Pollard and Ramsdell were found sucking the bones of their shipmates (Heffernan, p. 99). As Heffernan points out, Ridgely would have heard this account from the Nantucketer Obed Starbuck, first mate of the Hero (p. 101). A story in the Sydney Gazette (June 9,1821) claimed that “the fingers, and other fragments of their deceased companions, were in the pockets of the Capt. and boy when taken on board the whaler.” An incomplete photocopy of Aaron Paddack's letter describing Pollard's account of the Essex disaster is in NHA Collection 15, Folder 57. In the letter, Paddack writes:”Captain Pollard, though very low when first taken up has immediately revived I regret to say that young Ramsdell has appeared to fail since taken up.” Claude Rawson, the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University, spoke to me about the tendency of those who have been reduced to survival-cannibalism to speak openly about the experience-often to the horror of their listeners (personal communication, November 13,1998). The loquacity of the sixteen survivors of an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972 made possible Piers Paul Read's now famous account of survival-cannibalism, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.

CHAPTER thirteen: Homecoming

In Stove by a Whale Thomas Heffernan provides a detailed account of the political situation in Chile at the time of the Essex survivors' arrival in Valparaiso (pp. 89-91). The NHA Essex blue file contains a transcript from the National Archives in Chile of the February 25 entry describing the ordeal of Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson. Nickerson speaks of the acting American consul Henry Hill's efforts on their behalf. Commodore Ridgely's account of the survivors' appearance and their treatment by Dr. Osbornis cited by Heffernan (pp. 100-1). Ridgely

claims that the sailors aboard the Constellation originally offered to donate an entire month's pay to the treatment of the Essex survivors (which would have totaled between two and three thousand dollars), but realizing that American and English residents of Valparaiso had also created a fund, Ridgely limited his men to a dollar each (Heffernan, p. 100).

Ancel Keys et al. tell of the painful process by which the participants in the Minnesota starvation experiment regained the weight they had lost in The Biology of Human Starvation (p. 828). Captain Harrison's account of the difficulties he had in regaining use of his digestive tract are described in his narrative of the Peggy disaster (Wharton. p. 275). Nickerson provides a detailed account of the troubles the Hero ran into off St. Mary's Island; also see mjAway Off Shore (pp. 161-62). My description of how Pollard and Ramsdell made their way to Valparaiso is indebted to Heffernan's Stove by a Whale (pp. 95-109), as is my account of the rescue of the three men on Henderson Island (pp. 109-15). Brian Simpson writes of “gastronomic incest” in Cannibalism and the Common Law (p. 141).

Chappel tells of their travails on Henderson in a pamphlet titled “Loss of the Essex,” reprinted in Heffernan (pp. 218-24). Nickersor talked to Seth Weeks about his time on the island, and Weeks confirmed that the freshwater spring never again appeared above the tide line. According to the oceanographer James McKenna, it is more than likely that an exceptionally high (and low) spring tide, combined with other factors such as the phase of the moon and variations in the orbital patterns of the sun and moon, were what gave the Essex crew temporary access to the spring in late December of 1820 (personal communication. May 10,1999). Captain Beechey writes of the missing Essex boat: “The third [boat] was never heard of; but it is not improbable that the wreck of a boat and four skeletons which were seen on Ducie's Island by a merchant vessel were her remains and that of her crew” (in Narrative, voL 1, pp. 59-61). Heffernan, who cites the Beechey reference, doubts thai the whaleboat referred to could have belonged to the Essex (Stove by a Whale, p. 88).

Obed Macy's account of what happened on Nantucket during the winter and spring of 1821 are in the third volume of his journals in NHA Collection 96. Frederick Sanford's description of the letter regard: the Essex survivors being read “in front of the post-office in a public way” is in a brief article titled “Whale Stories” that apparently appear e i

in an off-island newspaper in or around 1872. An undated copy of the article is on file at the NHA; my thanks to Elizabeth Oldham for bringing the story to my attention. Sanford also includes a somewhat overheated account of the whale attack: “[A] large whale (sperm) came upon the ship, and with such violence as to make her heel and shake like an aspen leaf. The whale glanced off to windward and when two miles to windward turned and came down upon the ship and struck her a most deadly blow on the bows which caused her to heel over and to fill and sink!”

The New Bedford Mercury (June 15, 1821) includes two stories about the Essex. The first comes from a Captain Wood, of the Triton, who had heard about the disaster from Captain Paddack of the Diana and reports that Pollard and Ramsdell had been picked up by the Dauphin; the second story tells of a letter just received from Nantucket reporting on the arrival of the Eagle with Chase, Lawrence, Nickerson, and Ramsdell as passengers. Nantucket's own paper, the Inquirer, did not begin publication until June 23,1821, almost two weeks after the arrival of the first group of Essex survivors. The letter describing Chase's inability to speak about the disaster is dated June 17, 1821 and is the possession of Rosemary Heaman, a descendant of Barnabas Sears, to whom the letter was addressed. My thanks to Mrs. Heaman for bringing the letter to my attention. Mention of Pollard's reception is limited to a single sentence: “Capt. Pollard, late Master of the ship Essex, arrived here in the Two Brothers, last Sunday” (August 9,1821). Frederick Sanford's account of Pollard's arrival is in Gustav Kobbe's “The Perils and Romance of Whaling,” The Century Magazine, August 1890 (p. 521); he also writes of Pollard's return to Nantucket in the Inquirer (March 28,1879). Although many writers have mistakenly attributed Sanford's account of a silent reception to the arrival of Chase and company, it was Pollard's return that elicited this response. The description of a Nantucketer's reaction to the arrival of a whaleship is from the Nantucket Inquirer (May U, 1842).

Lance Davis et al. speak of the greater responsibilities and pay of a whaling captain compared to a merchant captain (In Pursuit ofLeviathan, pp. 175-85). Amasa Delano's memories of his return after an unsuccessful voyage are in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels (pp. 252-53). Edouard Stackpole writes of Owen Coffin's grandfather Hezekiah and his involvement in the Boston Tea Party in Whales and Destiny (p. 38). Robert Leach provided me with information regarding the Coffin family and the Friends Meeting (personal communication, May 20, 1998).

Thomas Nickerson's account of Nancy Coffin's response to George Pollard is in his letter to Leon Lewis.

Piers Paul Read speaks of the Montevideo Archbishop's judgment of the Andes survivors in Alive! (p. 308). Another Catholic official did insist, however, that, contrary to the claims of one of the Andes survivors, the eating of human flesh under these circumstances was not equivalentto Holy Communion (p. 309). Documents relating to the rise of Quakerism on Nantucket mention a religious discussion that makes an intriguing reference to cannibalism and communion. In the spring of 1698, several years before Quakerism took hold on the island, an itinerant Friend named Thomas Chalkley visited Nantucket and recorded his conversation with one of the community's first settlers, Stephen Hussey. Hussey had once lived in the Barbados, where he had heard a Quaker claim that “we must eat the spiritual flesh, and drink the spiritual blood of Christ.” Hussey asked, “Is it not a contradiction in nature, that flesh and blood should be spiritual?” When Chalkley pointed out that Christ had been speaking figuratively when he told the apostles. “Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood ye have no life in you,” Hussey indignantly replied, “ I don't think they were to gnaw it from his arms and shoulders” (Starbuck, History of Nantucket, p. 518). One can only wonder how Chalkley and Hussey would have responded to the all-too-literal story of the Essex. Claude Rawson refers to cannibalism as a “cultural embarrassment” in a review of Brian Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law in the London Review of Books (January 24. 1985, p. 21). Concerning survivors who have resorted to cannibalism. John Leach writes, “If it can be accepted, justified or in cases rationalized, then the act of enforced cannibalism can be accommodated with little or no psychological dysfunction” (SurvivalPsychology, p. 98).

Thomas Heffernan has pointed out the similarities between Chase's account of what happened on Pollard's and Joy's boat and what is described in Aaron Paddack's letter (StoveBy a Whale, p. 231). Herman Melville wrote about Owen Chase's authorship of his narrative in the back pages of his own copy of the book (see Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, p. 984). Yet another aspect of the disaster not mentionedby Chase is whether he ever followed Richard Peterson's dying wishes and contacted the sailor's widow in New York. The family of William Coffin. Jr., had something of a tradition of writing controversial publications. Five years earlier, his father, who twenty years before had been wrongly