CHAPTER SEVEN
AS DARKNESS APPROACHED at the end of the first day, the wind built steadily, kicking up a steep, irregular chop. The Essex whaleboats were hybrids-built for rowing but now adapted to sail-and the men were still learning how they handled. Instead of a rudder, each boat was equipped with a steering oar. This eighteen-foot lever enabled a rowed whaleboat to spin around in its own length, but it was not so effective in guiding a sailboat, and required the helmsman to stand at the cumbersome oar. At this early stage in the voyage, the whaleboats were dangerously overloaded. Instead of five hundred pounds of whaling equipment, each boat contained close to a thousand pounds of bread, water, and tortoises, and waves broke over the built-up gunnels and soaked the men. The boats were also without centerboards or skegs to help them track through the water, forcing the helmsmen to tug and push their steering oars as their little, deeply laden boats corkscrewed in the turbulent seas.
Each boat-crew was divided into two watches. While half the men attempted to rest-curling up with the Galapagos tortoises in the bilge or leaning uncomfortably against the seats-the others steered, tended the sails, and bailed. They also attempted to keep an eye on the other boats, which would sometimes disappear entirely from view when they dipped down into the trough of a wave.
At the start it had been decided that every effort would be made to keep the three boats together. Together they could help if one of them ran into trouble; together they could keep one anothers' spirits up. “[U]naided, and unencouraged by each other,” Chase observed, “there were with us many whose weak minds, I am confident, would have sunk under the dismal retrospections of the past catastrophe, and who did not possess either sense or firmness enough to contemplate our approaching destiny, without the cheering of some more determined countenance than their own.”
There was also a more practical reason for staying together: there was not enough navigational equipment to go around. Pollard and Chase each had a compass, a quadrant, and a copy of Bowditch's Navigator, but Joy had nothing. If his boat-crew should become separated from the other two, they would be unable to find their way across the ocean.
Night came on. Although moon and starlight still made it possible to detect the ghostly paleness of the whaleboats' sails, the men's field of vision shrank dramatically in the darkness even as their perception of sounds was heightened. The whaleboats' clinker, or lapstrake, construction (with planks overlapping, resembling the clapboards of a house) made them much noisier than a smooth-bottomed boat, and the fussy, fluted sound of water licking up against their boats' lapped sides would accompany them for the duration of the voyage.
Even at night the crews were able to maintain a lively three-way conversation among the boats. The subject on everyone's mind was of course the “means and prospects of our deliverance.” It was agreed that their best chance of survival lay in happening upon a whaleship. The Essex had sunk about three hundred miles north of the Offshore Ground. They still had about five days of sailing before they entered the Ground, where, they desperately hoped, they would come across a whaler.
A circumstance in their favor was that, unlike merchant vessels, whaleships almost always had a lookout posted at the masthead, so in whaling territory they had a better chance of being seen. Against them was the immensity of the Offshore Ground. It encompassed an enormous amount of ocean-more than twice the area of the state of Texas, a rectangle about three hundred miles north to south and almost two thousand miles from east to west. There were at least seven whaleships on the Offshore Ground at this time. But even if there were double that number, the odds were poor that three whaleboats sailing along a straight line through the Ground (which might take only four or five days to cross) would be spotted by a ship.
One possibility was to extend their time in the Offshore Ground and actively search for whalers. But that was a gamble. If they searched the region and didn't find a ship, they would jeopardize their chances of reaching South America before their food supplies ran out. As it was, they would be entering the western extreme of the Ground and would have a difficult time heading east against the southeasterly trades.
There was another factor influencing their decision to continue on with the original plan. After having fallen victim to such a seemingly random and inexplicable attack, the men felt an overpowering need to reclaim at least some control of their own destiny. Being sighted by a whaleship would, according to Chase, not “depend on our own exertions, but on chance alone.” Reaching South America, on the other hand, depended “on our own labors.” From Chase's perspective, this made all the difference and demanded that they not “lose sight, for one moment, of the strong probabilities which, under Divine -Providence, there were of our reaching land by the route we had prescribed to ourselves.”
The plan had one iron requirement: they had to make their provisions last two months. Each man would get six ounces of hardtack and half a pint of water a day. Hardtack was a simple dried bread made out of flour and water. Baked into a moisture-free rock to prevent spoilage, hardtack had to be broken into small pieces or soaked in water before it was eaten, if a sailor didn't want to crack a tooth.
The daily ration was equivalent to six slices of bread, and it provided about five hundred calories. Chase estimated that this amounted to less than a third of the nourishment required by “an ordinary man.” Modern dietary analysis indicates that for a five-foot, eight-inch person weighing 145 pounds, these provisions met about a quarter of his daily energy needs. True, the men of the Essex had more than just bread; they had tortoises. Each tortoise was a pod of fresh meat, fat, and blood that was capable of providing as many as 4,500 calories per man-the equivalent of nine days of hardtack. Yet, even augmented by the tortoises, their daily rations amounted to a starvation diet. If they did succeed in reaching South America in sixty days, each man knew he would be little more than a breathing skeleton.
But as they would soon discover, their greatest concern was not food but rather water. The human body, which is 70 percent water, requires a bare minimum of a pint a day to remove its waste products. The men of the Essex would have to make do with half that daily amount. If they experienced any hot weather, the deficit would only increase.
That first night of their journey, Chase, Pollard, and Joy distributed the rations of bread and water to their boat-crews. It was two days after the sinking now, and the men's interest in food had finally returned; the bread was quickly eaten. There was something else they craved: tobacco. A whaleman almost always had a quid of tobacco in his mouth, going through more than seventy pounds of it in a single voyage. In addition to all their other woes, the crew of the Essexhad to contend with the jittery withdrawal symptoms associated with nicotine addiction.
After the meager meal, the men not on watch went to sleep. “Nature became at last worn out with the watchings and anxieties of the two preceding nights,” Chase recalled, “and sleep came insensibly upon us.” But as his men fell into what he judged to be a dreamless stupor, Chase found himself in the middle of a waking nightmare.
Unable to sleep for the third night in a row, he continued to dwell obsessively on the circumstances of the ship's sinking. He could not get the creature out of his mind: “[T]he horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my reflections.” In his desperate attempts to find some explanation for how a normally passive creature could suddenly become a predator, Chase was plagued by what psychologists call a “tormenting memory”-a common response to disasters. Forced to relive the trauma over and over again, the survivor finds larger, hidden forces operating through the incident. The philosopher William James felt this compulsion firsthand some years later. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he wrote: “I realize now how inevitable were men's earlier mythological versions [of disaster] andhow artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits which science educates us.”
For most disaster victims, the repeated flashbacks of a tormenting memory have a therapeutic value, gradually weaning the sufferer from anxieties that might otherwise interfere with his ability to survive. There are some, however, who cannot rid themselves of the memory. Melville, building upon Chase's account, would make his Captain Ahab a man who never emerged from the psychic depths in which Chase had writhed these three nights. Just as Chase was convinced that the whale that attacked the Essex exhibited “decided, calculating mischief,” so was Ahab haunted by a sense of the white whale's “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.” Locked in his own private chamber of horrors, Ahab resolved that his only escape was through hunting down and killing Moby Dick: “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Chase, on a tiny boat a thousand miles from land, did not have the possibility of revenge. Ahab was fighting a symbol; Chase and his shipmates were fighting for their lives.
the next morning, the men were greatly relieved to discover that after a night of high winds all three boats were still close together. The wind built throughout the day, requiring them to shorten sail. The boats' schooner rigs could be easily adapted to the changing conditions, and after the sails were reefed, Chase reported, the men “didnot apprehend any very great danger from the then violence of the wind.” The high seas, however, continued to afflict them. Constantly wet from the salt spray, they had begun to develop painful sores on their skin that the violent bouncing of the boats only exacerbated.
In his sea chest, Chase found an assortment of useful items: a jack-knife, a whetstone, three small fish hooks, a cake of soap, a suit of clothes, a pencil, and ten sheets of writing paper. As first mate, Chase had been responsible for keeping the Essex's log, and using the pencil and paper he now attempted to start “a sort of sea journal”-despite the horrendous conditions. “It was with much difficulty... that I could keep any sort of record,” Chase remembered, “owing to the incessant rocking and unsteadiness of the boat and the continual dashing of spray of the sea over us.”
Chase's journal-keeping satisfied more than an official obligation; it also fulfilled a personal need. The act of self-expression-through writing a journal or letters-often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears. After beginning his informal log, Chase would never again suffer another sleepless night tortured by his memory of the whale.
There were other daily rituals. Every morning they shaved with the same knife Chase used to sharpen his pencil. Benjamin Lawrence spent a portion of each day twisting stray strands of rope into an ever lengthening piece of twine. The boatsteerer vowed that if he should ever get out of the whaleboat alive, he would save the string as a memorial to the ordeal.
At noon they paused to take an observation. Determining the angle of the sun with a quadrant was not easy on a tiny, wave-tossed boat.
Their best estimate put them at latitude 0 °58' south. It was an encouraging indication. They had not only crossed back over the equator but had traveled approximately seventy-one nautical miles since leaving the wreck the day before, putting them ahead of their daily target of sixty miles. In the afternoon the wind moderated, enabling them to shake out the reefs in their sails and dry their wet clothes in the sun.
That day Pollard decided to abandon “the idea altogether of keeping any correct longitudinal reckoning.” To maintain an accurate estimate of a vessel's position, it is necessary to keep track of both its north-to-south position, or latitude, and its east-to-west position, or longitude. A noon observation with a quadrant indicates only a craft's latitude. If a navigator in 1820 had a chronometer-an exceptionally accurate timepiece adapted to the rigors of being stored on a ship-he could compare the time of his noon sight with the time in Greenwich, England, and calculate his longitude. But chronometers at this time were expensive and not yet widely used on Nantucket whaleships.
The alternative was to perform what was called a lunar observation, or simply a lunar. This was an extremely complicated process that involved as many as three hours of calculations before the vessel's longitude could be determined-an impossibility on a whaleboat. Besides, according to Nickerson, Pollard had not yet learned how to work a lunar.
That left dead reckoning. The officers of every ship kept a careful record of its heading, as indicated by the compass, and its speed. Speed was determined by throwing a knotted length of line with a piece of wood at the end of it (called a log line) into the water and determining how much of it (that is, how many “knots”) ran out in a set period of time. A sandglass, known as a slowglass, was used to measure the time. The ship's speed and direction were recorded, and this information was transferred onto a chart, where the captain established the ship's estimated position.
Survivors of other maritime catastrophes-most notably the Bounty's Captain Bligh-placed in similar situations managed to navigate successfully with dead reckoning. Soon after being abandoned in the middle of the Pacific in the ship's launch, Captain Bligh manufactured his own log line and trained his men to count the seconds as it was run out. Bligh's estimates of their latitude and longitude proved amazingly accurate, enabling him to find the distant island of Timor, one of history's greatest feats of navigation.
Chase explained that “having no glass, nor log-line,” they decided that itwas futile to maintain an estimate of their longitude. If Pollard's inability to work a lunar is any indication, he was not a particularly skilled navigator or an unusually unskilled one. There were many captains who were also navigating their vessels by dead reckoning and, like Pollard, never expected to find themselves in such a situation. By forgoing all estimates of their longitude, he and his men were now sailing blind, with no way to determine their distance from South America.
In the afternoon a school of porpoises surrounded the three boats and followed them until well after sunset. That night the wind built to almost a gale. Chase and his crew watched in horror as the planks of their old boat worked and twisted in the waves. The boat was in such terrible shape, Nicker son claimed, that he normally would not have felt safe sailing ten miles in it, let alone the thousands they had ahead ofthem.
By the morning of Friday,-November 24, the third day in the boats, the waves were “very large,” according to Chase, “and increased, if possible, the extreme uncomfortableness of our situation.” Nickerson observed that if they'd been aboard the Essex, the wind would have seemed unexceptional, but now, he said, “in our crippled state it answers the purpose of a gale, and keeps us constantly wet and chilled through.” That day an immense wave broke over Chase's boat and almost filled it with water. The swamped boat threatened to roll over on its side as kegs, tortoises, and Chase's sea chest floated up from the bottom and knocked against the men. They bailed frantically, knowing that the next wave might sink them.
Once they'd brought the boat out of danger, they discovered that some of the hardtack-which they'd carefully wrapped in sailcloth- had been soaked by the seawater. They did their best to salvage as much of the damaged bread as possible. Over the course of the next few days, they would seize every chance to dry the dissolving lumps in the sun. While this saved the provisions from what Nickerson called “utter ruin,” the bread remained infiltrated with salt, the worst possible thing for their already water-deprived bodies. “The bread being our only dependence,”Nickerson remembered, “[this] gave ... us on the whole a cheerless prospect”-a prospect that only worsened when they learned that a portion of the bread on Pollard's boat had also been damaged. A few days before, the officers had possessed cautious faith in “the human means at our command”; now they recognized “ our utter dependence on that divine aid we so much the more stood in need of.”
At eight o'clock the next morning, the man assigned to bailing Chase's boat became alarmed. Try as he might, he couldn't keep ahead of the rising tide of water. Their boat, he alerted the rest of the crew, was sinking. Soon all six men were searching for the new leak, their hands probing desperately in the sloshing bilge, feeling the boat's sides for the gush of incoming water. It wasn't until they'd torn up the floor that they discovered the problem: one of the planks in the bow had sprung from the hull, and water was pouring in. The leak was about six inches below the waterline, and if they were going to fix it, they needed to figure out some way to get at it from the outside.
The sprung board was on the starboard, or leeward, side, and Chase immediately “hove about,” using the steering oar to turn the boat so that the wind was now coming over the other side. This put the leak on the windward, or “high,” side; Chase hoped to heel the boat over enough so that the hole would rise up out of the water.
Noticing that Chase had suddenly veered away, Pollard brought his own boat around and headed for the first mate. After shortening sail, Pollard came alongside and asked what was wrong.
Now that the captain's boat was beside them, Chase ordered his own crew to move to the port side and as far aft as possible, canting the bow up into the air. Working from Pollard's boat, the first mate and captain attempted to steady the bow, realign the board, and hammer it into place. There was little room for error. The end of the board was already riddled with old nail holes, and it was critical that they drive in each new nail cleanly. Even though they were being bounced up and down by the waves, Chase and Pollard managed “to drive in a few nails, and secured [the plank], much beyond our expectations.” Soon all three boats were once again sailing to the south.
“This little incident, although it may seem small,” Nickerson recalled, “[caused] amongst us the greatest excitement.” With a clear demonstration that their whaleboats might fall apart around them at any time, the men felt “a great gloominess over the natural prospects of our deliverance.” They knew that the longer the ordeal lasted, the more the boats would suffer in “the heavy and repeated racking of the swell.” All it took was the starting of a single nail, and one of these boats might be lost forever.
For the men in Chase's crew it had been an especially trying day. That evening Richard Peterson, the sole African American on their boat, led them in prayers and a few hymns. Nickerson remembered how the words and songs of the “pious old colored man... drew our minds from our present miseries to seek deliverance from a higher power.” That comfort notwithstanding, by the morning of November 26, the tentative optimism with which the men had begun the boat voyage had eroded into despair.
For the last four days the windy and overcast weather had made it impossible to take an observation. Judging by the compass course they'd been forced to steer, their sails strapped in tight against the southeasterly trades, they knew they had been sailing parallel to, rather than toward, the coast of South America. They also knew that their boats, which were without centerboards, had a tendency to sideslip to leeward. Because of that slippage, they must now be well to the west of where they should have been. Despite having made significant progress south, they were no closer to their ultimate destination. The hopeful talk of being rescued by a passing whaleship had ceased. “[W]e looked forward,” Chase wrote, “not without an extreme dread, and anxiety, to the gloomy and disheartening prospect before us.”
That afternoon the breeze dropped to a more comfortable level, allowing them to spread out their damaged bread to dry. Then the wind shifted, gradually backing into the north. For the first time since leaving the Essex, they were able to steer toward South America. Men began to talk about how far ahead of schedule they would be if the wind would only hold.
But it was not to last. The next day, the wind shifted back into the east and “destroyed the fine prospect we had entertained of making a good run.” As if to mock them, the following day the wind veered even farther, to the east-southeast. Then it started to blow hard.
That night they shortened sail and “began to entertain fears that we should be separated” in the darkness. To prevent just such an occurrence, the crew of the Union, the Nantucket ship that accidentally rammed into a whale in 1807, tied their boats together at night. But tethering interfered with sailing ability. The officers of the Essex-so intent on reaching the distant coast of South America-were reluctant to compromise their boats' speed. Instead of tying themselves together, they sailed in a kind of formation, with Chase in the lead, Pollard in the middle, and Joy taking up the rear. If they could remain within one hundred feet of one another, each could always see the other two whaleboats' white sails in the darkness.
at about eleven o'clock, Chase lay down in the bottom of his boat to sleep. He had just nodded off when he was startled awake by a cry from one of his men. Captain Pollard, the man said, was calling out to them in the darkness. Chase sat up and listened. In the howling wind and breaking waves, he could hear Pollard shouting to Joy, whose boat was nearest to him. Chase tacked around and sailed for the other two boats, only dimly visible in the moonless dark, and asked what was wrong. Given what had happened to the Essex only a week before, the reply seemed like a sick joke.
Pollard told them that his boat had been attacked by a whale.
Instead of a sperm whale, it had been a smaller, but more aggressive, killer whale. These eight- to twelve-ton toothed whales feed on warm-blooded animals such as dolphins and seals. They hunt in packs and have even been known to attack and kill sperm whales. There have been documented cases in which killer whales, also known as orcas, have repeatedly rammed and sunk wooden sailing yachts.
Pollard explained that, entirely unprovoked, the whale had slammed its head against their boat and taken a sizable bite out of it. Then it proceeded to “play about” the boat, batting it around with its head and tail as a cat might toy with a mouse, before it finally attacked once again, this time splitting the boat's stem. As the whale churned up the water around them, the men grabbed the two poles that held up the tips of the sails (known as sprit poles) and repeatedly punched the creature's sides. Chase arrived just as Pollard and his men succeeded in beating back the whale and sending it swimming away.
Pollard's boat had begun to swamp, so he ordered his crew to transfer their provisions to the other boats. All night the three boats lay huddled together in the swells. Unable to see very far in the inky darkness, the men let their imaginations fill the void with their fears. Over the last week they had contended with stiff headwinds, spoiled provisions, and leaky boats. To be attacked by yet another whale was the crowning blow: “ [I]t seemed to us as if fate was wholly relentless, in pursuing us with such a cruel complication of disasters.” They searched the water's black surface, convinced that the whale would reappear. “We were not without our fears that the fish might renew his attack, some time during the night, upon one of the other boats, and unexpectedly destroy us.” Without their ship to protect them, the hunters had become the prey.
The next morning they accomplished a quick repair of Pollard's boat by nailing thin strips of wood along the interior of the broken section. Once again, they were on their way, this time in a strong southeasterly breeze. That day the men in Chase's boat began to experience overpowering sensations of thirst-a lust for water that made it impossible to think about anything else. Despite the dryness of their mouths, they talked compulsively about their cravings. Only gradually did they realize the cause of their distress.
The day before, they had started eating the saltwater-damaged bread. The bread, which they had carefully dried in the sun, now contained all the salt of seawater but not, of course, the water. Already severely dehydrated, the men were, in effect, pouring gasoline on the fire of their thirsts-forcing their kidneys to extract additional fluid from their bodies to excrete the salt. They were beginning to suffer from a condition known as hypernatremia, in which an excessive amount of sodium can bring on convulsions.
“The privation of water is justly ranked among the most dreadful of the miseries of our life,” Chase recorded. “[T]he violence of raving thirst has no parallel in the catalogue of human calamities.” Chase claimed that it was on this day, November 28-the sixth since leaving the wreck-that “our extreme sufferings here first commenced.”
Even after they realized that the bread was responsible for their agony, the men in the first mate's boat resolved to continue eating the damaged provisions. The bread would spoil if it wasn't eaten soon, and their plan was contingent on a full sixty days of provisions. “Our determination was, to suffer as long as human patience and endurance would hold out,” Chase wrote, “having only in view, the relief that would be afforded us, when the quantity of wet provisions should be exhausted.”
The next day it became clear that the strain of sailing in the open ocean, day and night, for more than a week had taken its toll on the boats. The seams were gradually pulling apart, and all three craft now had to be bailed constantly. On board Chase's boat the situation was the most dire, but the first mate refused to give in. With his hammer in hand, he attended to even the most trivial repair. “[B]eing an active and ingenious man,” Nickerson recalled, the first mate let “no opportunity pass whereby he [could] add a nail by way of strengthening” the boat's ribs and planks. The incessant activity helped to divert Chase's men from the reality of their situation. They were in the worst of the three boats, but they had a leader who had dedicated himself to postponing its disintegration until it was beyond his final powers to prevent it.
That morning a school of iridescent dolphin fish appeared in the waters surrounding the boats and followed them for most of the day. Placing pieces of a white rag on one of Chase's fish hooks, they attempted, in Nickerson's words, “to use all our persuasive powers... to induce them to come aboard.” The fish proved “as tenacious of their existence as ourselves” and refused to bite.
By the following day, the men's hunger had become almost as difficult to bear as their thirst. The weather proved the best they'd seen since le'aving the Essex eight days before, and Chase proposed that they attempt to allay “the ravenous gnawings upon our stomachs” by eating one of the tortoises. All the men readily agreed, and at one o'clock that afternoon, Chase's dissection began. First they flipped the tortoise on its back. As his men held its beak and claws, Chase slit the creature's throat, cutting the arteries and veins on either side of the vertebrae in the neck. Nickerson claimed that “all seemed quite impatient of the opportunity to drink the blood as it came oozing from the wound of the sacrificed animal,” eager to consume it before it coagulated.
They collected the blood in the same tin cup from which they drank their water rations. Despite their shrieking thirst, some of the men could not make themselves drink the blood. For this part, Chase “took it like a medicine to relieve the extreme dryness of my palate.”
All of them, however, were willing to eat. Chase inserted his knife into the leathery skin beside the neck and worked his way around the shell's edge, cutting with a sawing motion until he could lift out the meat and guts. With the help of the tinderbox stored in the whale-boat's small keg of emergency equipment, they kindled a fire in the shell and cooked the terrapin, “entrails and all.”
After ten days of eating only bread, the men greedily attacked the tortoise, their teeth ripping the succulent flesh as warm juice ran down their salt-encrusted faces. Their bodies' instinctive need for nutrition led them irresistibly to the tortoise's vitamin-rich heart and liver. Chase dubbed it “an unspeakably fine repast.”
Their hunger was so voracious that once they began to eat, they found it difficult to stop. An average-sized tortoise would have provided each man with about three pounds of meat, one pound of fat, and at least half a cup of blood, together worth more than 4,500 calories- equivalent to a large Thanksgiving dinner. This would have been a tremendous amount of food to introduce into the shrunken stomach of a person who had only eaten a total of four pounds of bread over the last ten days. The men's dehydrated condition would have also made it difficult for their stomachs to generate the digestive juices required to handle the large amount of food. But neither Chase nor Nickerson speaks of saving any of the cooked tortoise for a later day. For these starved men, this was one gratification no one was willing to delay. “ [O]our bodies were considerably recruited,” Chase wrote, “and I felt
my spirits nowmuch higher than they had been at anytime before.” Instead of limiting each whaleboat to two live tortoises, they now realized, they should have butchered and cooked the meat of every animal they found on the wreck.
For the first time in several days, the sky was clear enough for a noon observation. Pollard's sight indicated that they were approaching latitude 8 ° south. Since leaving the wreck on November 22, they had traveled almost five hundred miles, putting them slightly ahead of schedule-at least in terms of distance sailed over the water. That evening, with the bones and charred carapace of the tortoise littering the boat's bilge, Richard Peterson once again led the men in prayer.
For the next three days, the weather remained mild and clear. The wind shifted to the north, allowing them to shape their course toward Peru. Their stomachs full, they dared to believe that “our situation was not at that moment... so comfortless as we had been led at first to consider.” Nickerson noticed “a degree of repose and carelessness, scarcely to be looked for amid persons in our forlorn and hopeless situation.”
Only one thing lay between them and “a momentary forgetfulness of our actual situation”-a ferocious, unbearable thirst. Chase reported that even after consuming the tortoise and its blood, they still yearned for a long, cool drink of water: “[H] ad it not been for the pains which that gave us, we should have tasted, during this spell of fine weather, a species of enjoyment.”
On Sunday, December 3, they ate the last of their damaged bread. For the men in Chase's boat, it was a turning point. At first they didn't notice the change, but with each succeeding day of eating unspoiled hardtack, “the moisture began to collect in our mouths and the parching fever of the palate imperceptibly left it.” They were still seriously dehydrated, and becoming only more so, but no longer were they introducing excessive amounts of salt into their bodies.
That evening, after the men in Chase's boat had conducted what Nickerson called “our usual prayer meeting,” clouds moved in, cutting them off from the starlight. At around ten o'clock, Chase and Pollard lost track of Joy's boat. Its disappearance was so sudden that Nickerson feared “something had destroyed them.” Almost immediately, Chase hove to and raised a lantern to the masthead as the rest of his crew scanned the darkness for some sign of the second mate's boat. About a quarter of a mile to leeward, they spotted a small light flickering in the gloom. It proved to be Joy's answering signal. All three boats were once again accounted for.
Two nights later, it was Chase's turn to become separated from the others. Instead of lighting a lantern, the first mate fired his pistol. Soon after, Pollard and Joy appeared out of the darkness to windward. That night the officers agreed that if they should ever become separated again, no action would be taken to reassemble the convoy. Too much time was being lost trying to keep the boats together. Besides, if one of the boats either capsized or became unrepairable, there was little the other crews could do. All three boats were already overloaded, and to add any more men would result in the eventual deaths of all of them. The prospect of beating away the helpless crew of another boat with their oars was awful to contemplate, even if they all realized that each boat should go it alone.
However, so strong was what Chase called “the extraordinary interest which we felt in each other's company” that none of them would consider voluntarily separating. This “desperate instinct” persisted to such a point that, even in the midst of conditions that made simply staying afloat a full-time occupation, they “continued to cling to each other with a strong and involuntary impulse.”
On December 8, the seventeenth day, the wind increased to a full gale. Forty- to fifty-knot gusts lashed the men with rain. It was the most wind they'd experienced so far, and after gradually shortening sail all night, each boat-crew found it necessary to lower its masts. The waves were huge, the giant crests atomized into foam by the shrieking wind. Despite the horrendous conditions, the men attempted to collect rainwater in the folds of their sails. They soon discovered that the sailcloth was even more permeated with salt than their damaged provisions had been, and the water proved as salty as seawater.
The boats became unmanageable in the immense waves. “The sea rose to a fearful height,” Chase remembered, “and every wave that came looked as if it must be the last that would be necessary for our destruction.” There was nothing for the men to do but lie down in the bottoms of their fragile vessels and “await the approaching issue with firmness and resignation.”
Gale-force winds in the open ocean can create waves of up to forty feet. But the mountainous size of the waves actually worked to the men's advantage. The whaleboats flicked over the crests, then wallowed in the troughs, temporarily protected from the wind. The vertical walls of water looming on either side were a terrifying sight, but not once did a wave crash down and swamp a boat.
The intense darkness of the night was, according to Nickerson, “past conception to those who have not witnessed the same.” Making the blackness all the more horrible were flashes of lightning that seemed to envelop the boats in crackling sheets of fire.
By noon of the following day, the wind had moderated enough that the men dared to poke their heads above the raised gunwales of the boats. Incredibly, all three boats were still within sight of one another. “To an overruling Providence alone must be attributed our salvation from the horrors of that terrible night,” Chase wrote. “It can be accounted for in no other way: that a speck of substance, like that which we were1, before the driving terrors of the tempest, could have been conducted safely through it.”
None of the men had slept all night. All of them had expected to die. When Chase ordered his crew to raise the masts and set sail, they resisted. “My companions... were dispirited and broken down to such a degree,” the first mate remembered, “as to appear to want some more powerful stimulus than the fears of death to enable them to do their duty.”
But Chase was unrelenting. “By great exertions,” he induced them to restep the masts and set a double-reefed mainsail and jib, even though dawn had not yet arrived. All three boats were back to sailing again when “the sun rose and showed the disconsolate faces of our companions once more to each other.”
As they sailed to the south, the large waves left over from the storm pummeled the boats, opening up their seams even wider. The constant bailing had become “an extremely irksome and laborious task” for these starved and dehydrated men. Their noon observation on Saturday, December 9, put them at latitude 17°40' south. In their seventeen days at sea, they had stayed ahead-justbarely-of their target of a degree of latitude a day, traveling close to 1,100 nautical miles. However, because of the easterly direction of the winds, they were now farther from South America than when they'd started.
They had close to three thousand miles left to go if they were to reach their destination. They were starving and thirsty. Their boats were barely holding together. But there was a way out.
On December 9, well into their third week in the open boats, they drew abreast of the Society Islands. If they hadheaded west, sailing along latitude 17 ° south, they would have reached Tahiti, perhaps in as little as a week. There were islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago that they might have sighted in less than half that time. They would have also been sailing with the wind and waves, easing the strain on the boats.
However, despite the numerous setbacks they had already faced, despite the extremity of their sufferings, Pollard, Chase, and Joy pushed on with the original plan. Nickerson could not understand why. “I can only say there was gross ignorance or a great oversight somewhere, which cost many... fine seamen their lives.” The men's sufferings only narrowed and intensified their focus. It was “up the coast” or nothing.