In the heart of the sea pdf free download

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But for the men who were typically rounded up by shipping agents in cities such as Boston, it was a different story. Instead of the beginning of something, shipping out on a whaling voyage was often a last and desperate resort.

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. Still, black sailors who were delivered to the island as green hands were never regarded as equals by Nantucketers.

At some point that evening, Thomas Nickerson made his way down to his bunk and its mattress full of mildewed corn husks. Swarms of grasshoppers had begun to appear in the turnip fields. But nothing could compare to what fate had in store for the twenty-one men of the Essex. Except for her former captain, Daniel Russell, no one knew this ship better than George Pollard. His predecessor, Daniel Russell, had received a similar letter prior to an earlier voyage.

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. He was thinking not only about the voyage ahead but also about what he was leaving behind.

For the entertainment-starved inhabitants of Nantucket, this would be it for a while. 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. With, perhaps, a nervous glance townward, Captain George Pollard gave the order to prepare the ship for weighing the anchors. 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.

That each one of these pieces of rope had a name was plainly 30 In the Heart of the Sea laughable to a green hand. How could anyone, even after a three-year voyage, pretend to have any idea of what went where? Pollard and Chase had been together aboard the Essex since , when Chase, at eighteen, had signed on as a common sailor.

Chase had moved quickly through the ranks. As the crew assembled spare hawsers and rope in preparation for weighing the anchor, Chase made sure everything was secured about the deck.

Positioned just forward of the forecastle hatch, the windlass provided the mechanical advantage required to do the heavy lifting aboard the ship. Eight men were stationed at the two ends, four aft, four forward, each holding a wooden handspike.

Working the windlass in a coordinated fashion was as challenging as it was backbreaking. Eventually, however, the anchor was lashed to the bulwarks, with the ring at the end of its shank secured to a projecting timber known as a cathead. There were additional sails to be set in the gradually building southwesterly breeze. As cabin boy, Nickerson had to sweep the decks and coil any stray lines. The next time I have to speak to you, your hide shall pay for it, my lad!

A not very pleasing prospect [was] truly before me, that of a long voyage and a hard overseer. This to a boy of my years who had never been used to hear such language or threats before. Like children picking teams on a playground, the mate and second mate took turns choosing the men who would serve in their watches. Next came the choice of oarsmen for the whaleboats, a contest that involved both mates and also Captain Pollard, who headed up his own boat.

Since these were the men with whom a mate or a captain was going into battle, he took the selection of the whaleboat crew very seriously. It was their duty to handle the Essex when whales were being hunted.

The divide between the forecastle and the other living quarters was not just physical but also racial. But the forecastle had its merits. The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated. Chase was not about to coddle his queasy crew. That morning at eight bells sharp, he ordered all hands to clear the decks and prepare the ship for whaling. Even though the whale population in the waters to the southeast of the island along the edges of the Gulf Stream had been greatly diminished over the years, it was still quite possible to come across what Nantucketers called a shoal of sperm whales.

Woe to the crew that was not ready when a whale was sighted. But for a whale to be sighted, a lookout had to be positioned aloft—not a pleasing prospect for a crew of seasick green hands. Every man was expected to climb to the head of the mainmast and spend two hours in search of whales. But it was futile. First, pushed by the westerlies, the ship sailed south and east toward Europe and Africa.

There she picked up winds called the northeast trades, which took her back across the ocean again, in the direction of South America. These stops also gave the whalemen the opportunity to ship back any oil they might have obtained during their cruise across the Atlantic. Whaleships rarely set their studding sails, especially when they were in a region where whales might be sighted. Whereas ships in the China trade lived and died by how quickly they delivered their cargo, whalers were, for the most part, in no particular hurry.

With the extra sail area catching the wind, the Essex was moving well, probably at six to eight knots. The lookout spotted a ship ahead. Clouds moved into the sky, and it grew suspiciously dark to the southwest. Nantucketers knew this eerily warm ocean current better than perhaps any other group of mariners. In the eighteenth century they had hunted sperm whales along its margins from Carolina to Bermuda.

Many considerations, both nautical and psychological, went into a decision to shorten sail. No captain wanted to be needlessly timid, yet taking unnecessary risks, especially at the beginning of a voyage that Knockdown 39 might last as long as three years, was unwise. Pollard may have wanted to see how the Essex performed when pushed to the limit. They sailed on, refusing to back down. According to Chase, they could see it coming: a large black cloud rushing toward them from the southwest.

Now was surely the time to shorten sail. They would ride it out. But it was too late. Most captains, however, favored turning away from the wind—a strategy that required them to anticipate the 40 In the Heart of the Sea arrival of the squall as the crew shortened the upper and aft sails. When the gust slammed into the ship, she had just begun to turn and was sideways to the wind—the worst possible position. When a ship suffers a knockdown, her hull acts as a barrier against the wind and rain.

Pollard took the opportunity to pull the crew back together. 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. 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. The deck shifted, and the green hands temporarily lost their balance. 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.

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 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.

Captain Knockdown 43 Pollard stared at the splintered mess and declared that they would be returning to Nantucket for repairs. 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. But instead of ignoring his two younger mates, Pollard paused to consider their arguments.

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. Two weeks later they sighted Boavista Island. Pollard intended to obtain some hogs at the island of Maio a few miles to the southwest.

Before Pollard could dispatch one of his own boats to the wreck, a whaleboat was launched from the beach and made its way directly toward the Essex. Aboard the boat was the acting American consul, Ferdinand Gardner. He explained that the wrecked whaler was the Archimedes of New York.

Gardner had purchased the wreck, but he had only a single whaleboat left to sell. With this latest addition and an old and leaky addition at that , the Essex would now have a total of four whaleboats.

That would leave her with only one spare. In a business as dangerous as whaling, boats were so frequently damaged in their encounters with whales that many whaleships were equipped with as many as three spare boats. With a total of only four boats, the crew of the Essex would have scant margin for error. That was disturbing. The Essex anchored beside another Nantucket whaleship, the Atlantic, which was off-loading more than three hundred barrels of oil for shipment back to the island.

White beans were the medium of exchange on Maio, and with a cask of beans aboard, Pollard took a whaleboat in to procure some hogs. Nickerson was at the aft oar. Even though they approached the beach at the best possible part of the harbor, Pollard and his men ran into trouble. Tubs of harpoon line were placed into them; the sheaths were taken off the heads of the harpoons, or irons, which were hastily sharpened one last time.

Once within a mile of the shoal of whales, the ship was brought to a near standstill by backing the mainsail. The mate climbed into the stern of his whaleboat and the boatsteerer took his position in the bow First Blood 49 as the four oarsmen remained on deck and lowered the boat into the water with a pair of block-and-tackle systems known as the falls. An experienced crew could launch a rigged whaleboat from the davits in under a minute. Aft of the boatsteerer was the bow oarsman, usually the most experienced foremast hand in the boat.

Once the whale had been harpooned, it would be his job to lead the crew in pulling in the whale line. Next was the tub oarsman. He managed the two tubs of whale line. It was his job to wet the line with a small bucketlike container, called a piggin, once the whale was harpooned. This wetting prevented the line from burning from the friction as it ran out around the loggerhead, an upright post mounted on the stern of the boat.

Aft of the tub oarsman was the after oarsman. Three of the oars were mounted on the starboard side of the boat and two were on the port side. The competition among the boat-crews on a whaleship was always spirited. The pecking order of the Essex was about to be decided.

With nearly a mile between the ship and the whales, the three crews had plenty of space to test their speed. Sperm whales are typically underwater for ten to twenty minutes, although dives of up to ninety minutes have been reported. Whalemen also knew that while underwater the whale continued at the same speed and in the same direction as it had been traveling before the dive. Chase was the only man in the boat who could actually see the whale up ahead.

While each mate or captain had his own style, they all coaxed and cajoled their crews with words that evoked the savagery, excitement, and the almost erotic bloodlust associated with pursuing one of the largest mammals First Blood 51 on the planet.

There she lies; skote, skote! Oh, St. Peter, St. Jerome, St. Stephen, St. James, St. John, the devil on two sticks; carry me up; O, let me tickle him, let me feel of his ribs. There, there, go on; O, O, O, most on, most on. Stand up, Starbuck [the harpooner]. Now, now, look out.

Dart, dart. Now the attention turned to the boatsteerer, who had just spent more than a mile rowing as hard as he possibly could. His hands were sore, and the muscles in his arms were trembling with exhaustion. All the while he had been forced to keep his back turned to a creature that was now within a few feet, or possibly inches, of him, its tail—more than twelve feet across—working up and down within easy reach of his head.

By hurling the harpoon he would transform this gigantic, passive creature into an angry, panicked monster that could easily dispatch him into the hereafter with a single swipe of that massive tail.

As Lawrence stood at the tossing bow, waves breaking around him, he knew that the mate was analyzing every one of his movements. If he let Chase down now, there would be hell to pay. A second whale had come up from beneath them, giving their boat a tremendous whack with its tail and pitching them into the sky.

The entire side of the whaleboat was stove in, and the men, some of whom could not swim, clung to the wreck. The harpoon did not kill the whale.

It was simply the means by which a whaleboat crew attached itself to its prey. Eventually, however, the boatsteerer made it aft to the steering oar and the mate, who was always given the honor of the kill, took up his position in the bow. If the whale was proving too spirited, the mate would hobble it by 54 In the Heart of the Sea taking up a boat-spade and hacking away at the tendons in the tail. Back on Nantucket, where the largest wild quadruped was the Norway rat, there were no deer or even rabbits to hunt.

And as any hunter knows, killing takes some getting used to. It was dark by the time Chase and his men reached the ship. Now it was time to butcher the body. Then they lowered the cutting stage—a narrow plank upon which the mates balanced as they cut up the body.

Back at the corpse, the blubber-ripping continued. Once the whale had been completely stripped of blubber, it was decapitated. One or two men might then be ordered to climb into the case to make sure all 56 In the Heart of the Sea the spermaceti had been retrieved.

Spillage was inevitable, and soon the decks were a slippery mess of oil and blood. Thought to be the result of indigestion or constipation on the part of the whale, ambergris is a fatty substance used to make perfume and was worth more than its weight in gold. By now, the two immense, four-barreled iron try-pots were full of pieces of blubber. To hasten the trying-out process, the blubber was chopped into foot-square hunks, then cut through into inch-thick slabs that resembled the fanned pages of a book and were known as bible leaves.

The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful act. Nickerson and his friends, however, were so revolted by the noisome mixture of oil, blood, and smoke covering their skin and clothes that they changed after every watch. They must be nearing Antarctica. The next day the wind vanished, leaving the Essex to languish in a complete calm.

While the seals and birds may have provided a distraction, morale about the Essex had reached a nadir.

With the knockdown several days out from Nantucket setting the unfortunate tone of the voyage, they had been more than four months at sea and had only a single whale to show for it. If the voyage continued in this fashion, the Essex would have to be out a good deal longer than two years if she were to return with a full cargo of oil. Instead of sitting at a table to eat, they sat on their sea chests around a large wooden tub, known as a kid, containing a hunk of pork or beef.

It has been estimated that sailors in the latter part of the nineteenth century were consuming around 3, calories a day. It is unlikely that the men in the forecastle of a whaler in consumed even close to that amount. The sailors took their stations on the forward portion of the deck while one of the men, the tub of beef on his shoulder, made 60 In the Heart of the Sea his way aft toward the cabin gangway.

The kid was no sooner set down than Captain Pollard came up onto the quarterdeck. Come here, you damned scoundrels, and tell me! Have not I treated you like men? Have you had plenty to eat and drink? What in 61 First Blood hell do you want more? Do you wish me to coax you to eat? Or shall I chew your food for you? The next morning found him as kind as before.

Captain Pollard had proved he had the backbone to put the men in their place. From that day forward, no one ever complained about provisions. The crew was staring at this legendary sphinxlike sight when suddenly it dissolved in the hazy air. It had been nothing but a fog bank.

The dangers of the Horn were proverbial. In Captain William Bligh and the crew of the Bounty had attempted to round this menacing promontory. Still, Cape Horn was nothing any captain took for granted, certainly not one who, like Pollard, had almost lost his ship in the relatively benign Gulf Stream.

Soon after watching the mirage island vanish before them, the men of the Essex saw something so terrible that they could only hope their eyes were deceiving them once again. But it was all too real: from the southwest a line of ink-black clouds was hurtling in their direction.

In the shrieking darkness, the crew labored to shorten sail. In these high latitudes the light never entirely left the night sky. It took more than a month for the Essex to round Cape Horn. Not until January of the new year, , did the lookout sight the island of St. The news from the west coast of South America was not good.

For one thing, the political situation in Chile and Peru was extremely 64 In the Heart of the Sea volatile. Caution was the watchword when provisioning on this coast. For most vessels it had been a miserable whaling season. After several luckless months off the Chilean coast, punctuated by a provisioning stop at Talcahuano, the Essex began to meet with some success off Peru. In just two months, Pollard and his men boiled down barrels of oil, the equivalent of about eleven whales.

The weather only added to their labors. High winds and rugged seas made every aspect of whaling doubly onerous. The large seas made it next to impossible to lower and raise the whaleboats safely. The Lees of Fire 65 As the number of casks of oil in the hold increased, the green hands became accustomed to the brutal business of whaling.

Even the most repugnant aspects of whaling became easier for the green hands to take as they grew to appreciate that each was just part of a process, like mining for gold or growing crops, designed to make them money. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. Each whale, each cask of oil, brought the Nantucketer closer to returning home to his loved ones.

But of most interest to the men was the pouch of mail, along with several newspapers, that Daniel Russell handed over to Captain Pollard. More than a thousand miles off the coast of Peru he hit the mother lode, an expanse of ocean full of sperm whales.

Anchored beside them they found a ghost ship, the whaler George from London, England. Their condition was so serious that Benneford rented a house on shore and transformed it into a hospital for his men. Here were oranges, limes and other fruits lying scattered around in neglected profusion. Atacames was known for its game birds. In preparation for this all-day affair, the cooks of the two vessels baked pies and other delicacies for the hunting party to take with them into the wilderness.

What could it be, Nickerson wondered, a blood-thirsty jaguar? But no one said a word. But there was no fooling their surrogate hunting dog. Once a green hand realized how little money he was likely to make at the end of a voyage, he had no incentive to stay on if he had better options. However, the timing of the desertion could not have been worse for Captain Pollard. Since each whaleboat required a six-man crew, this now left only two shipkeepers whenever whales were being hunted.

Two men could not safely manage a square-rigged ship the size of the Essex. Yet Pollard, in a hurry to reach the Offshore Ground by November, had no alternative but to set out to sea shorthanded.

Down a crew member and a whaleboat, the Essex was about to head out farther off the coast of South America than she had ever sailed before. Even before the discovery of the Offshore Ground, the Galapagos had been a popular provisioning stop for whalers. They were also located in a region frequented by sperm whales. What he found was part sperm-whale boudoir, part nursery.

He and his crew witnessed something almost never seen by man: sperm whales copulating—the bull swimming upside down and beneath the female. Adult males made up only 2 percent of the whales he observed.

The females work cooperatively in taking care of their young. Young males leave the family unit at around six years of age and make their way to the cooler waters of the high latitudes. Here they live singly or with other males, not returning to the warm waters of their birth until their late twenties.

He may live for sixty or seventy years. In both societies the males were itinerants. They had been out just over a year, and if they should experience some good luck in the Offshore Ground, there was a chance they might be returning to Nantucket within the next year and a half. The much older Essex may have had similar problems below the waterline. The showers refresh the deserts, but in these isles, rain never falls.

Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky.

The creatures were interesting in another way to U. Navy captain David Porter. By the time the whaleship Essex ventured to these islands seven years later, sailors had devised a well-established procedure for what they called turpining.

Equipped with canvas harnesses, the seamen fanned out over the island, often following the deeply rutted tortoise tracks that crisscrossed the rocky surface, hoping these would lead them to their prey. By the middle of the afternoon, the Essex was still not in sight and Lawrence was feeling the torments of severe thirst. The blood spurting from the neck was a startlingly cool 62 degrees in the degree sun. It was thoroughly dark by the time Lawrence, tortoise-laden, staggered down to the beach and was greeted by the men who had been sent out to search for him.

In the next four days the crew collected tortoises on Hood. Then the Essex headed for nearby Charles Island. While on Charles during the War of , Captain David Porter had used to his tactical advantage information gleaned from letters left by British whaling captains.