In the whaling days of the 19th Century, crew members on ships, fearing cannibals, steered clear of many an island.
That’s the grim irony at the heart of a non-fiction survival saga by Nathaniel Philbrick. In the Heart of the Sea tells the true story of cannibal-fearing men resorting to cannibalism themselves while stranded at sea for 90 days.
A literature-lover and book collector, Julianne O’Connell of St. Joseph, recommended that book, so I ordered it. Glad I did. It’s a riveting book first page to last.
It’s doubly fascinating because the horrific story it tells partly inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, published in 1851 and arguably the greatest of all American novels (I believe it is). Melville himself signed up on a whaling ship. He then became haunted after reading about what had befallen a whaling crew some years earlier, in 1820.
In that year, 20 men – some white, some black, some of them mere teenagers – set off in a whaler named the Essex from Nantucket island. The ship’s captain was George Pollard Jr., its first mate Owen Chase. They were among the eight who survived to tell the awful tale.
The Essex rounded the tip of South America, heading for the whale-rich Pacific. Its crew was seeking to kill and boil down sperm whales for the oil so in demand in that pre-petroleum era. In rampages of slaughter, whalers harpooned and rendered down many hundreds of thousands of whales for the massive amounts of oil they contained.
On a day of doom, the Essex was attacked by an apparently enraged sperm whale, a would-be victim turning against its hunters. The whale, a precursor of the mythical Moby Dick, struck the ship full-force twice, shattering the ship’s hull.
Shaken by shock, the men began to unload water, food and survival gear from the slowly sinking ship into three whale boats. They also had time to fashion masts-with-sails onto their boats. Then they faced a cruel choice: Which way? About 1,000 miles to the west were the Marquesas Islands, which would have been fairly easy to reach because of the prevailing winds. More than 2,000 miles to the east was South America. Fearing the possibility of hostile cannibals in the Marquesas, they decided to sail back east toward safer, more “civilized” shores.
After suffering terribly for days in the dreadful heat with so little water and food, the men gleefully spied an island. But their hopes were dashed when it turned out to be an uninhabited, godforsaken place. They spent a few days there until they realized it would not sustain them very long. Three of the crew, however, decided to take their chances, staying on the island, hoping a passing ship would spot them, save them.
The men sailed on for weeks through oppressive heat, a blinding sun beating down. They bobbed and lurched through blasting storms. They kept alive – barely – with the quickly dwindling supplies of severely rationed bits of food and sips of water. The men began to deteriorate physically and mentally, some wracked by delusions, hallucinations and convulsions. A couple men died; they were buried at sea. Then, one day, the inevitable happened. Another man died. His body was eaten by the others in the boat. More deaths, more cannibalism, occurred in the other boats. And then, the unthinkable: There were only four men in the boat led by Captain Pollard. So hopeless were their prospects for survival, they agreed to draw lots to see who would be killed for “food” to help sustain the other three. A teenager named Owen Coffin, who – sad fact – was a cousin of Pollard’s, drew the black mark. Another man was chosen through lots to shoot Coffin, who then leaned his head against the side of the boat to await the fatal shot.
Pollard’s boat eventually reached South America with its two survivors (the third man had died, too, and was eaten). A second boat was rescued with its three survivors. The third boat was never accounted for. The three men who’d managed to survive on the island were later rescued by a ship. All told, eight survivors, 12 deaths.
In the Heart of the Sea is a grim story. But harrowing as it is, its horrific tragedy is buoyed up by its almost unbearably vivid account of the sheer human will to survive in the cruelest circumstances. The book underlines the truism of how slender a thread is life.
Philbrick is a superb historian, possessing breathless narrative skills, and this book, published in 2000, is a spellbinding page-turner if ever there was one.
