In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’. Nathaniel Philbrick
of an approaching squall, Pollard was now flaunting his disregard of traditional seafaring wisdom. The officers of the British Navy had a maxim: “never to be overtaken unprepared by [a squall], as never to be surprised by an enemy.” It was said that the sharper and more defined the storm cloud, the worse the wind; thunder and lightning were also bad signs. When jagged streaks of lightning began to crackle out of the forbidding black sky and thunder boomed, Pollard finally began to issue orders. But it was too late.
In the face of an approaching squall, there were two options: either to point the ship into the oncoming wind, to relieve the pressure on the sails by letting them luff, or to turn almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction, away from the wind, and let the storm blow the ship with it. This relieved the pressure on the forward sails as they became partially becalmed in the shelter of the after ones. In the merchant service, in which ships were typically undermanned, some captains favored heading into the wind—what they called luffing through a squall—in part because heading up is the natural tendency of a sailing ship in a gust. Most captains, however, favored turning away from the wind—a strategy that required them to anticipate the arrival of the squall as the crew shortened the upper and aft sails. To attempt to bear away from the wind in the last few seconds before being struck by a squall was held to show “a poor appreciation of the squall, or a lack of watchfulness.”
This was precisely what happened to the Essex. As the squall approached, the helmsman was ordered to turn away from the direction of the wind and “run before it.” Unfortunately it took time for a ship the size of the Essex to respond to her rudder. When the gust slammed into the ship, she had just begun to turn and was sideways to the wind—the worst possible position.
For the green hands, the sound alone was terrifying: the shrieking of the wind across the rigging and then a frenzied flapping of sails and creaking of the stays and masts. The Essex began to lurch to leeward—slowly at first, the ponderous weight of the ship’s keel and ballast, not to mention the tons of stores stowed in her hold, refusing at first to yield, but then, as the wind increased, the ship inevitably succumbed to the merciless pressure of the wind.
When a ship is heeled over by forty-five degrees or more, her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw. No matter how much he weighs, if the end of the seesaw on the other side of the pivot point is long enough, it becomes a lever that will eventually lift him up into the air as the distant tip of the seesaw settles softly to the ground. In the case of the Essex, the masts and their windpressed sails became levers prying the hull toward the point of no return, forcing it over until the tips of the yards were buried in the water. The Essex had been rolled almost ninety degrees onto her side—knocked over on her “beam-ends,” in the language of the sea.
Those on deck clung to the nearest fixture, fearful that they might fall down into the lee scuppers, now under knee-deep water. Those below deck did their best to shield themselves from objects falling down around them. If he hadn’t abandoned it already, the ship’s cook was doing his best to scramble out of the cookhouse, the heavy stove and cookware threatening to burst through its frail wooden sides. The two whaleboats on the Essex’s port side had disappeared beneath the waves, pressed underwater by the massive weight of the capsized ship. According to Chase, “The whole ship’s crew were, for a short time thrown into the utmost consternation and confusion.”
Yet amid all the chaos there was, at least on deck, a sudden sense of calm. When a ship suffers a knockdown, her hull acts as a barrier against the wind and rain. Even though the ship had been slammed against the water, the men were temporarily sheltered from the howling forces of the wind. Pollard took the opportunity to pull the crew back together. “[T]he cool and undismayed countenance of the captain,” Nickerson remembered, “soon brought all to their sober senses.” The order was given to let go all the halyards and let the sheets run, but “the ship lay so far upon her side that nothing would run down as desired.”
If the squall continued to pin her on her beam-ends, the ship would begin to settle into the water as the sea rushed into the hull through her open hatchways. The longer she was over on her side, the greater the chances of the ballast and stores in her hold shifting to leeward, a disastrous turn of events from which she might never recover. Already the waves had wiped the cookhouse almost completely off the deck. As a last resort, it might be necessary to cut away the masts.
The rain poured down and the lightning flashed, and time slowed to a crawl as the men clung to the weather rail. But before the axes came into play, the ship twitched back to life. The men could feel it in their hands and feet and in the pits of their stomachs—an easing of the awful strain. They waited for another gust to slam the ship back down again. But no—the ballast continued to exert its gravitational pull, lifting the three masts until the yards came clear of the water. As the masts swung into the sky, seawater rushed across the deck and out the scuppers. The Essex shuddered to the vertical and was a ship again.
Now that the hull was no longer acting as a shield, the officers quickly realized that the squall had passed. But even if the wind had diminished, it was still blowing hard. The ship’s bow was now pointed into the wind, the sails blown back against the masts. The rigging creaked in an eerie, unfamiliar way as the hull wallowed in the rainwhipped waves. The deck shifted, and the green hands temporarily lost their balance. This time the ship wasn’t going over, she was going backward, water boiling up over the quarterdeck as her broad transom was pushed back against the waves, pummeling the spare whaleboat stored off the stern.
Going backward in a square-rigged ship was dangerous. The sails were plastered against the masts, making it almost impossible to furl them. The pressure placed an immense amount of strain on the stays and spars. Since the rigging had not been designed for loads coming from this direction, all three masts might come tumbling down, domino fashion, across the deck. Already the windows in the stern were threatening to burst open and flood the captain’s cabin. There was also the danger of breaking the ship’s tall, narrow rudder, which became useless as water pressed against it.
Eventually, the Essex’s bow fell off to leeward, her sails filled, and she was once again making forward progress. Now the crew could do what they should have done before the storm—shorten sail.
As the men aloft wrestled with the canvas, the wind shifted into the northwest and the skies began to brighten. But the mood aboard the Essex sank into one of gloom. The ship had been severely damaged. Several sails, including both the main topgallant and the studding sail, had been torn into useless tatters. The cookhouse had been destroyed. The two whaleboats that had been hung off the port side of the ship had been torn from their davits and washed away, along with all their gear. The spare boat on the stern had been crushed by the waves. That left only two workable boats, and a whaleship required a minimum of three, plus two spares. Although the Essex’s stern boat could be repaired, they would be without a single spare boat. Captain Pollard stared at the splintered mess and declared that they would be returning to Nantucket for repairs.
His first mate, however, disagreed. Chase urged that they continue on, despite the damage. The chances were good, he insisted, that they would be able to obtain spare whaleboats in the Azores, where they would soon be stopping to procure fresh provisions. Joy sided with his fellow mate. The captain’s will was normally the law of the ship. But instead of ignoring his two younger mates, Pollard paused to consider their arguments. Four days into his first command, Captain Pollard reversed himself. “After some little reflection and a consultation with his officers,” Nickerson remembered, “it was deemed prudent to continue on our course and trust to fortune and a kind providence to make up our loss.”
The excuse given to the crew was that with the wind now out of the northwest, it would have taken too long to return to Nantucket. Nickerson suspected that Chase and Joy had other motives. Both knew that the men had not taken kindly to their treatment by the mates. Seeing the knockdown as a bad omen, many of the sailors had become sullen and sour. If they returned to Nantucket, some of the crew would jump ship. Despite the seriousness of the loss of the whaleboats, it was not the time to return to port.
Not surprisingly, given that he was the object of much of the crew’s discontent, Chase, in his own account of the accident, never mentions that Pollard