In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’. Nathaniel Philbrick
Isaiah Sheppard, William Bond, and Henry Dewitt—had even fewer choices than Addison Pratt would in 1820. None of their names appear in Boston or New York directories from this period, indicating that they were not landowners. Whether or not they called Boston home, most of them had probably spent more than a few nights in the boardinghouses in the waterfront area of the North End of the city—a place notorious as a gathering place for itinerant seamen, black and white, looking for a berth.
As they boarded the packet for Nantucket, the seven African Americans knew at least one thing: they might not be paid well for their time aboard a Nantucket whaler, but they were assured of being paid no less than a white person with the same qualifications. Since the time when Native Americans had made up the majority of Nantucket’s labor force, the island’s shipowners had always paid men according to their rank, not their color. Some of this had to do with the Quakers’ antislavery leanings, but much of it also had to do with the harsh realities of shipboard life. In a tight spot, a captain didn’t care if a seaman was white or black; he just wanted to know he could count on the man to complete his appointed task.
Still, black sailors who were delivered to the island as green hands were never regarded as equals by Nantucketers. In 1807, a visitor to the island reported:
[T]he Indians having disappeared, Negroes are now substituted in their place. Seamen of color are more submissive than the whites; but as they are more addicted to frolicking, it is difficult to get them aboard the ship, when it is about to sail, and to keep them aboard, after it has arrived. The Negroes, though they are to be prized for their habits of obedience, are not as intelligent as the Indians; and none of them attain the rank of [boatsteerer or mate].
It wasn’t lofty social ideals that brought black sailors to this Quaker island, but rather the whale fishery’s insatiable and often exploitative hunger for labor. “[A]n African is treated like a brute by the officers of their ship,” reported William Comstock, who had much to say about the evils of Nantucket’s Quaker shipowners. “Should these pages fall into the hands of any of my colored brethren, let me advise them to fly Nantucket as they would the Norway Maelstrom.” Even Nickerson admitted that Nantucket whaling captains had a reputation as “Negro drivers.” Significantly, Nantucketers referred to the packet that delivered green hands from New York City as the “Slaver.”
BY THE evening of Wednesday, August 11, all save for Captain Pollard were safely aboard the Essex. Anchored beside her, just off the Nantucket Bar, was another whaleship, the Chili. Commanded by Absalom Coffin, the Chili was also to leave the following day. It was an opportunity for what whalemen referred to as a “gam”—a visit between two ships’ crews. Without the captains to inhibit the revelry (and with the Bar between them and town), they may have seized this chance for a final, uproarious fling before the grinding discipline of shipboard life took control of their lives.
At some point that evening, Thomas Nickerson made his way down to his bunk and its mattress full of mildewed corn husks. As he faded off to sleep on the gently rocking ship, he surely felt what one young whaleman described as a great, almost overwhelming “pride in my floating home.”
That night he was probably unaware of the latest bit of gossip circulating through town—of the strange goings-on out on the Commons. Swarms of grasshoppers had begun to appear in the turnip fields. “[T]he whole face of the earth has been spotted with them…,” Obed Macy would write. “[N]o person living ever knew them so numerous.” A comet in July and now a plague of locusts?
As it turned out, things would end up badly for the two ships anchored off the Nantucket Bar on the evening of August 11, 1819. The Chili would not return for another three and a half years, and then with only five hundred barrels of sperm oil, about a quarter of what was needed to fill a ship her size. For Captain Coffin and his men, it would be a disastrous voyage.
But nothing could compare to what fate had in store for the twenty-one men of the Essex.
ON THE MORNING of Thursday, August 12, 1819, a harbor vessel delivered Captain George Pollard, Jr., to the Essex. At twenty-eight, Pollard was a young, but not spectacularly young, first-time captain. Over the last four years he had spent all but seven months aboard the Essex, as second mate and then first mate. Except for her former captain, Daniel Russell, no one knew this ship better than George Pollard.
Pollard carried a letter from the Essex’s principal owners telling the new captain, in spare, direct prose, exactly what was expected of him. His predecessor, Daniel Russell, had received a similar letter prior to an earlier voyage. It had read:
Respected Friend,
As thou art master of the Ship Essex now lying without the bar at anchor, our orders are, that thou shouldst proceed to sea the first fair wind and proceed for the Pacifick Ocean, and endeavour to obtain a load of Sperm Oil and when accomplished to make the best dispatch for this place. Thou art forbidden to hold any illicit trade. Thou art forbidden to carry on thyself or to suffer any person belonging to the ship Essex to carry on any trade except it should be necessary for the preservation of the ship Essex or her crew: wishing thee a short and prosperous voyage, with a full portion of happiness we remain thy friends.
In behalf of the owners of the ship Essex,
Gideon Folger, Paul Macy
Pollard felt the full weight of the owners’ expectations. But he was thinking not only about the voyage ahead but also about what he was leaving behind. Just two months before, he and nineteen-year-old Mary Riddell had been married in the Second Congregational Church, of which Mary’s father, a well-to-do cordwainer, or ropemaker, was a deacon.
As he scrambled up the Essex’s side, then made his way aft to the quarterdeck, Captain Pollard knew that the entire town was watching him and his men. All summer, ships had been leaving the island, sometimes as many as four or five a week, but with the departure of the Essex and the Chili, there would be a lull of about a month or so before another whaleship would depart. For the entertainment-starved inhabitants of Nantucket, this would be it for a while.
Leaving the island was difficult aboard any whaleship, since most of the crew had no idea of what they were doing. It could be an agony of embarrassment for a captain, as the green hands bumbled their way around the deck or clung white-knuckled to the spars. The whole affair was carried out in the knowledge that the town’s old salts and, of course, the owners were watching and criticizing from the shade of the windmills up on Mill Hill.
With, perhaps, a nervous glance townward, Captain George Pollard gave the order to prepare the ship for weighing the anchors.
A WHALESHIP, even a small and old whaleship, was a complex and sophisticated piece of equipment. The Essex had three masts and a bowsprit. To the mast were fastened a multitude of horizontal spars known as yards, from which the rectangular sails were set. There was so much cordage, dedicated to either supporting the spars or controlling the sails (more than twenty in number), that, from the perspective of a green hand staring up from the deck, the Essex looked like the web of a giant rope-spinning spider.
That each one of these pieces of rope had a name was plainly laughable to a green hand. How could anyone, even after a three-year voyage, pretend to have any idea of what went where? For young Nantucketers such as Nickerson and his friends, it was particularly devastating since they had begun this adventure assuming they knew much more than they apparently did. “[A]ll was bustle, confusion and awkwardness, that is, on the part of the crew,” Nickerson remembered. “The officers were smart active men and were no doubt…piqued at having such a display of awkwardness in full view of their native town.”
Since he was required by custom to remain