CHAPTER TWELVE
CHASE AND HIS MEN lay in the bottom of their boat in a cold drizzle. All they had to shield them from the rain was a piece of tattered, water-soaked canvas. “Even had it been dry,” Nickerson wrote, “ [it] would have been but a poor apology for covering.”
On January 28,1821, the breeze finally shifted into the west. But it brought them little comfort. “It had nearly become indifferent to us,” Chase wrote, “from what quarter it blew.” They now had too far to go and too few provisions to have any hope of reaching land. Their only chance was to be sighted by a ship. “[I]t was this narrow hope alone,” Chase remembered, “that prevented me from lying down at once to die.”
They had fourteen days of hardtack left, but that assumed they could live two more weeks on only an ounce and a half a day. “We were so feeble,” Nicker son wrote, “that we could scarcely crawl about the boat upon our hands and knees.” Chase realized that if he didn't increase their daily portion-of bread, they all might be dead in as few as five days. It was time to abandon the strict rationing regime that had brought them this far and let the men eat “as pinching necessity demanded.”
Success in a long-term survival situation requires that a person display an “active-passive” approach to the gradual and agonizing unfolding of events. “The key factor... [is] the realization that passivity is itself a deliberate and 'active' act,” the survival psychologist John Leach writes. “There is strength in passivity.” After more than two months of regimenting every aspect of his men's lives, Chase intuitively understood this-that it was now time to give “ourselves wholly up to the guidance and disposal of our Creator.” They would eat as much bread as they needed to stave off death and see where the westerly wind took them.
By February 6 they were still alive, but just barely. “Our sufferings were now drawing to a close,” the first mate wrote. “ [A] terrible death appeared shortly to await us.” The slight increase in food intake had brought a return to their hunger pangs, which were now “violent and outrageous.” They found it difficult to talk and think clearly. Dreams of food and drink continued to torment them. “ [O]ften did our fevered minds wander to the side of some richly supplied table,” Nickerson remembered. His fantasies always ended the same way-with him “crying at the disappointment.”
That night, rain squalls forced them to shorten sail. The off-islander Isaac Cole was on watch, and rather than awaken his companions, he attempted to lower the jib himself. But it proved too much for him. Chase and Nickerson awoke the next morning to find Cole despondent in the bilge of the boat. He declared that “all was dark in his mind, not a single ray of hope was left for him to dwell upon.” Like Richard Peterson before him, he had given up, asserting that “it was folly and madness to be struggling against what appeared so palpably to be our fixed and settled destiny.”
Even, though he barely had the strength to articulate the words, Chase did his best to change Cole's mind. “I remonstrated with him as effectually as the weakness both of my body and understanding would allow of.” Suddenly Cole sat up and crawled to the bow and hoisted the jib he had lowered, at such cost, the night before. He cried out that he would not give up and that he would live as long as any of them. “ [T]his effort was,” Chase wrote, “but the hectic fever of the moment.” Cole soon returned to the bottom of the boat, where he lay despairing for the rest of the day and through the night. But Cole would not be permitted the dignity of a quiet and peaceful death.
On the morning of February 8, the seventy-ninth day since leaving the Essex, Cole began to rant incoherently, presenting to his frightened crew members “a most miserable spectacle of madness.” Twitching spasmodically, he sat up and called for a napkin and water, then fell down to the bottom of the boat as if struck dead, only to pop up again like a possessed jack-in-the-box. By ten o'clock he could no longer speak. Chase and the others placed him on a board they had laid across the seats and covered him with a few pieces of clothing.
For the next six hours, Cole whimpered and moaned in pain, finally falling into “the most horrid and frightful convulsions” Chase had ever seen. In addition to dehydration and hypernatremia (an excess amount of salt), he may have been suffering from a lack of magnesium, a mineral deficiency that, when extreme, can cause bizarre and violent behavior. By four o'clock in the afternoon, Isaac Cole was dead.
It had been forty-three days since they'd left Henderson Island, seventy-eight days since they'd last seen the Essex, but no one suggested-at least that afternoon-that they use Cole's body for food. All night the corpse lay beside them, each man keeping his thoughts to himself.
When the crew of the Peggy shot and killed a black slave in 1765, one of the men refused to wait for the meat to be cooked. “ [B] eing ravenously impatient for food,” the sailor plunged his hand into the slave's eviscerated body and plucked out the liver and ate it raw. “The unhappy man paid dear for such an extravagant impatience,” Captain Harrison wrote, “for in three days after he died raving mad.” Instead of eating that sailor's body, the crew, “being fearful of sharing his fate,” threw it overboard. No one dared to consume the flesh of a man who had died insane.
The next morning, February 9, Lawrence and Nickerson began making preparations for burying Cole's remains. Chase stopped them. All night he had wrestled with the question of what they should do. With only three days of hardtack left, he knew, it was quite possible that they might be reduced to casting lots. Better to eat a dead shipmate-even a tainted shipmate-than be forced to kill a man.
“I addressed them,” Chase wrote, “on the painful subject of keeping the body for food.” Lawrence and Nickerson raised no objections and, fearful that the meat had already begun to spoil, “ [we] set to work as fast as we were able.”
After separating the limbs from the body and removing the heart, they sewed up what remained of Cole's body “as decently” as they could, before they committed it to the sea. Then they began to eat. Even before lighting a fire, the men “eagerly devoured” the heart, then ate “sparingly of afewpieces of the flesh.” They cut the rest of the meat into thin strips-some of which they roasted on the fire, while the others were laid out to dry in the sun.
Chase insisted that he had “no language to paint the anguish of our souls in this dreadful dilemma.” Making it all the worse was the thought that any one of the remaining three men might be next. “We knew not then,” the first mate wrote, “to whose lot it would fall next, either to die or be shot, and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.”
The next morning they discovered that the strips of flesh had turned a rancid green. They immediately cooked the strips, which provided them with enough meat to last another six or seven days, allowing them to save what little bread they had left for what Chase called “the last moment of our trial.”
In captain Pollard's boat, on February 11, only five days after the execution of Owen Coffin, Barzillai Ray died. Ray, whose biblical first name means “made of iron, most firm and true,” was nineteen years old. It was the seventh death George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell had witnessed in the month and a half since departing Henderson Island.
Psychologists studying the phenomenon of battle fatigue during “World War II discovered that no soldiers-regardless of how strong their emotional makeup might be-were able to function if their unit experienced losses of 75 percent or more. Pollard and Ramsdell were suffering from a double burden; not only had they seen seven of nine men die (and even killed one of them), but they had been forced to eat their bodies. Like Pip, the black sailor in Moby-Dick who loses his mind after several hours of treading water on a boundless sea, Pollard and Ramsdell had been “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro.” Now they were alone, with only the corpse of Barzillai Ray and the bones of Coffin and Reed to sustain them.
Three days later, on February 14, the eighty-fifth day since leaving the wreck, Owen Chase, Benjamin Lawrence, and Thomas Nickerson ate the last of Isaac Cole. A week of living off human flesh, combined with their earlier decision to increase their daily ration of hardtack, had strengthened them to the point where they could once again manage the steering oar. But if they were stronger, they were also in a great deal of pain. As if the boils that covered their skin weren't enough, their arms and legs started to swell shockingly. Known as edema, this disfiguring accumulation of fluid is a common symptom of starvation.
Several days of westerly winds had brought them to within three hundred miles of the islands of Masafuera and Juan Fernandez. If they averaged sixty miles a day, they might reach safety in another five days. Unfortunately, they had only three days of hardtack left.
“Matters were now with us at their height,” Chase wrote. “[A]ll hope was cast upon the breeze; and we tremblingly and fearfully awaited its progress, and the dreadful development of our destiny.” Surrendering all prospects, the men were convinced that after two and a half months of suffering they were about to die nearly within sight of salvation.
That night Owen Chase lay down to sleep, “almost indifferent whether I should ever see the light again.” He dreamed he saw a ship, just a few miles away, and even though he “strained every nerve to get to her,” she sailed off into the distance, never to return. Chase awoke “almost overpowered with the frenzy I had caught in my slumbers, and stung with the cruelties of a diseased and disappointed imagination.”
The next afternoon, Chase saw a thick cloud to the northeast-a sure sign of land. It must be the island of Masafuera-at least that was what Chase told Lawrence and Nickerson. In two days, he assured them, they would be on dry land. At first, his companions were reluctant to believe him. Gradually, however, after “repeated assurances of the favorable appearances of things” on the part of Chase, “their spirits acquired even a degree of elasticity that was truly astonishing.” The wind remained favorable all night, and with their sails trimmed perfectly and a man tending the steering oar, their little boat made the best time of the voyage.
The next morning the cloud still loomed ahead. The end of their ordeal was apparently only days away. But for fifteen-year-old Thomas Nickerson, the strain of anticipation had become too much. After bailing out the boat, he lay down, drew the mildewed piece of canvas over him like a shroud, and told his fellow crew members that “he wished to die immediately.”
“I saw that he had given up,” Chase wrote, “and I attempted to speak a few words of comfort and encouragement to him.” But all the arguments that had served the first mate so well failed to penetrate Nickerson's inner gloom. “A fixed look of settled and forsaken despondency came over his face,” Chase wrote. “[H]e lay for some time silent, sullen, and sorrowful-and I felt at once... that the coldness of death was fast gathering upon him.”
It was obvious to Chase that some form of dementia had seized the boy. Having watched Isaac Cole slip into a similar madness, Chase could not help but wonder if all of them were about to succumb to the temptations of despair. “[T]here was a sudden and unaccountable earnestness in his manner,” he wrote, “that alarmed me, and made me fear that I myself might unexpectedly be overtaken by a like weakness, or dizziness of nature, that would bereave me at once of both reason and life.” Whether or not it had been communicated to him through Cole's diseased flesh, Chase also felt the stirrings of a death wish as dark and palpable as the pillarlike cloud ahead.
At seven o'clock the next morning, February 18, Chase was sleeping in the bottom of the boat. Benjamin Lawrence was standing at the steering oar. Throughout the ordeal, the twenty-one-year-old boat-steerer had demonstrated remarkable fortitude. He was the one who, two months earlier, had volunteered to swim underneath the boat to repair a sprung plank. As Lawrence had watched Peterson, Cole, and now Nicker son lose their grip on life, he had clung, as best he could, to hope.
It was something his careworn family had become good at. His grandfather, George Lawrence, had married Judith Coffin, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. For many years the Lawrences had been part of the island's Quaker elite, but by the time Benjamin came into the world, his grandfather had suffered several financial reversals. The proud old man decided to move to Alexandria, Virginia, where, he told an acquaintance, he could “descend into a humble sphere among strangers, rather than... remain in a place where every object reminded him of his lost prosperity.” When Benjamin was ten years old, his father died during a voyage to Alexandria, leaving his wife with seven children to support.
Safe in Lawrence's pocket was the piece of twine he had been working on ever since they'd left the wreck. It was now close to twelve inches long. He leaned into the steering oar and scanned the horizon.
“There's a sail! “he cried.
Chase immediately scrambled to his feet. Just visible over the horizon was the speck of pale brown that Lawrence had taken for a sail. Chase stared for several suspenseful moments, gradually realizing that, yes, it was a sail-the topgallant of a ship, about seven miles away.
“I do not believe it is possible,” Chase wrote, “to form a just conception of the pure, strong feelings, and the unmingled emotions of joy and gratitude, that took possession of my mind on this occasion.”
Soon even Nickerson was up on his feet and gazing excitedly ahead.
Now the question was whether they could catch up to the much larger vessel. The ship was several miles to leeward, which was an advantage for the smaller vessel, and heading slightly north of their position, which meant that it might intercept their line of sail. Could their whaleboat reach that crossing point at approximately the same time the ship did? Chase could only pray that his nightmare of the missed rescue ship would not prove true. “I felt at the moment,” Chase wrote, “a violent and unaccountable impulse to fly directly towards her.”
For the next three hours they were in a desperate race. Their battered old whaleboat skimmed lightly over the waves at between four and six knots in the northwesterly breeze. Up ahead, the ship's sail plan continued to emerge from the distant horizon, revealing, with excruciating slowness, not only the topgallant sails but the topsails beneath and, finally, the mainsail and foresail. Yes, they assured themselves, they were catching up to the ship.
There was no lookout at the vessel's masthead, but eventually someone on deck saw them approaching to windward and behind. Chase and his men watched in tense fascination as the antlike figures bustled about the ship, shortening sail. Gradually the whaleboat closed the distance, and the hull of the merchantman rose up out of the sea, looming larger and larger ahead of them until Chase could read her quarterboard. She was the Indian from London.
Chase heard a shout and through glazed, reddened eyes saw a figure at the quarterdeck rail with a trumpet, a hailing device resembling a megaphone. It was an officer of the Indian, asking who they were. Chase summoned all his strength to make himself heard, but his desiccated tongue stumbled over the words: “Essex... whaleship... Nantucket.”
The narratives of shipwreck survivors are filled with accounts of captains refusing to take castaways aboard. In some instances the officers were reluctant to share their already low supply of provisions; in others they were fearful the survivors might be suffering from communicable diseases. But as soon as Chase explained that they were from a wreck, the Indian's captain immediately insisted that they come alongside.
When Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson attempted to climb aboard, they discovered that they didn't have the strength. The three men stared up at the crew, their eyes wide and huge within the dark hollows of their skulls. Their raw, ulcerated skin hung from their skeletons like noxious rags. As he looked down from the quarterdeck, Captain William Crozier was moved to tears at what Chase called “the most deplorable and affecting picture of suffering and misery.”
The English sailors lifted the men from their boat and carried them to the captain's cabin. Crozier ordered the cook to serve them their first taste of civilized food-tapioca pudding. Made from the root of the cassava plant, tapioca is a high-calorie, easy-to-digest food rich in the proteins and carbohydrates that their bodies craved.
Rescue came at latitude 33°45' south, longitude 81°03' west. It was the eighty-ninth day since Chase and his men had left the Essex, and at noon they came within sight of Masafuera. Chase had succeeded in navigating them across a 2,500-mile stretch of ocean with astonishing accuracy. Even though they had sometimes been so weak that they could not steer their boat, they had somehow managed to sail almost to within sight of their intended destination. In just a few days the Indian would be in the Chilean port of Valparaiso.
Trailing behind on a towline was the whaleboat that had served the Nantucketers so well. Captain Crozier hoped to sell the old boat in Valparaiso and establish a fund for the men's relief. But the next night the weather blew up to a gale, and the boat, empty of men for the first time in three months, was lost.
Three hundred miles to the south, Pollard and Ramsdell sailed on. For the next five days they pushed east, until by February 23, the ninety-fourth day since leaving the wreck, they were approaching the island of St. Mary's just off the Chilean coast. Over a year before, this had been the Essex's first landfall after rounding Cape Horn. Pollard and Ramsdell were on the verge of completing an irregular circle with a diameter of more than three thousand miles.
It had been twelve days since the death of Barzillai Ray. They had long since eaten the last scrap of his flesh. The two famished men now cracked open the bones of their shipmates-beating them against the stone on the bottom of the boat and smashing them with the boat's hatchet-and ate the marrow, which contained the fat their bodies so desperately needed.
Pollard would later remember these as “days of horror and despair.” Both of them were so weak that they could barely lift their hands. They were drifting in and out of consciousness. It is not uncommon for castaways who have been many days at sea and suffered both physically and emotionally to lapse into what has been called “a sort of collective confabulation,” in which the survivors exist in a shared fantasy world. Delusions may include comforting scenes from home-perhaps, in the case of Pollard and Ramsdell, a sunny June day on the Nantucket Commons during the sheepshearing festival. Survivors may find themselves in conversation with deceased shipmates and family members as they lose all sense of time.
For Pollard and Ramsdell, it was the bones-gifts from the men they had known and loved-that became their obsession. They stuffed their pockets with finger bones; they sucked the sweet marrow from the splintered ribs and thighs. And they sailed on, the compass card wavering toward east.
Suddenly they heard a sound: men shouting and then silence as shadows fell across them and then the rustle of wind in sails and the creaking of spars and rigging. They looked up, and there were faces.
Of the Dauphin's twenty-one-man crew, at least three-Dimon Peters, Asnonkeets, and Joseph Squibb-were Wampanoags from Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. As children they had been taught a legend about the discovery of Nantucket that told of how, long before the arrival of the Europeans, a huge eagle appeared over a village on Cape Cod. The eagle would swoop down out of the sky and carry off children in its talons, then disappear over the waters to the south. Finally the villagers asked a benevolent giant named Maushop to find out where the eagle was taking their children. Maushop set off to the south, wading through the water until he came to an island he had never seen before. After searching all over the island, he found the bones of the children piled high beneath a large tree.
On the morning of February 23, the crew of the Dauphin made a similar discovery. Looking down from a restless forest of spars and sails, they saw two men in awhaleboat filled with bones.
The men were not much more than skeletons themselves, and the story that would be passed from ship to ship in the months ahead was that they were “found sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.” The Dauphin's captain, Zimri Coffin, ordered his men to lower a boat and bring the two survivors
aboard. Like Chase, Lawrence, and Nickerson before them, Pollard and Ramsdell were too weak to stand and had to be lifted up to the whaleship's deck. Both men were, in the words of a witness, “very low” when first brought aboard. But after being given some food, Pollard made an astonishing recovery.
At around five o'clock that evening, the Dauphin spoke the whale-ship Diana from New York. The Diana's captain, Aaron Paddack, toward the end of a successful voyage, joined Captain Coffin for dinner. Also joining them was Captain George Pollard, Jr., formerly of the Essex.
Like many survivors, Pollard was animated by a fierce and desperate compulsion to tell his story. Just as the gaunt, wild-eyed Ancient Mariner of Coleridge's poem poured forth each harrowing detail to the Wedding Guest, so did Pollard tell them everything: how his ship had been attacked “in a most deliberate manner” by a large sperm whale; how they had headed south in the whaleboats; how his boat had been attacked once again, this time by “an unknown fish”; and how they had found an island where a “ few fowl and fish was the only sustenance.” He told them that three men still remained on the island. He told of how the rest of them had set out for Easter Island and how Matthew Joy had been the first to die. He told of how Chase's boat had become separated from them in the night and how, in rapid succession, four black men “became food for the remainder.” Then he told how, after separating from the second mate's boat, he and his crew “were reduced to the deplorable necessity of casting lots.” He told of how the lot fell to Owen Coffin, “who with composure and resignation submitted to his fate.” Lastly he told of the death of Barzillai Ray, and how Ray's corpse had kept both him and Ramsdell alive.
Later that night, once he had returned to the Diana, Captain Paddack wrote it all down, calling Pollard's account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.” The question now became one of how the survivors would fare in the dark shadow of their story.