Survival at sea ; An 1820 shipwreck leads to cannibalism - and inspiration
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Book Review
"In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex"
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Viking, $24.95
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In November 1820, the 240-ton whale ship Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine whaling expedition. After 15 months at sea, off the coast of South America, the ship was rammed and capsized by a sperm whale, setting its 20-man crew adrift in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.
For three months, with little or no provisions, the crew, led by Captain George Polland and First Mate Owen Chase, mounted an epic struggle for survival in several small lifeboats.
As their food and water dwindled, the men on board carried out the only known survival technique of the day - drinking sea water that, unbeknownst at the time, caused dehydration, madness and eventually death. In the diary he kept, Chase said he knew from years at sea that in three or four days, people would start to die. "Our bodies are wasted to mere skeletons," he confided in one entry.
Soon starvation and thirst took their first lives, forcing the survivors to discuss "the painful subject of preserving the bodies for food."
In some of the book's most graphic passages describing the survivors eating dead companions, Philbrick quotes from Chase's narrative, revealing a practice widely known as "the custom of the sea."
Eventually, after 93 days of gale-force winds, sharks, blistering heat and cannibalism, the emaciated survivors, including Polland and Chase, were rescued by the Indian, a British trading ship en route from London to Australia.
On his return to Nantucket, Chase wrote and published his experiences, an account that enjoyed a moderate degree of success. Years later, his son presented Herman Melville, who at the time was completing his first draft of "Moby Dick," with a copy of the diary. "The reading of this wondrous story had a surprising effect on me," he later commented.
Like students of the Essex tragedy before him, Philbrick, director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies at Nantucket, relied heavily on the Chase diary, as well as a sizable library shelf of material on the Essex's final voyage. In addition, the author also recently discovered a manuscript kept by one of the cabin boys, Thomas Nickerson, that somehow managed to survive the destruction of the ship.
Combined with his own knowledge of the sea, Philbrick has chronicled one of the more gruesome, if not freakish, stories in maritime history.
Yet scholars, including the author, continue to debate the influence the diary had on Melville. Certainly, the factual basis of the diary encouraged part of the apocalyptic climax of Melville's 1851 classic. Up until that time, no whale had ever attacked a vessel with the vengeance described in Chase's diary.
Ultimately though, the strength of this account lies in the expert seamanship of the Essex crew. Published under various titles since 1821, the story remains of continual interest to generations of historians and whalers alike, evolving over time from "history to fiction to myth."
Philbrick's version does an admirable job of bringing to life not only an engrossing story of endurance, but of the whaling tradition itself. However, it is Chase's words as a survivor of this horrible ordeal that express eloquently the reality of such an experience, even when all hope appeared lost.
Half starved when discovering an uninhabitable desert island, he records the crew's increasingly dismal prospects for survival in language worthy of Melville's best foreboding prose: "It seemed to us as if fate was wholly relentless, in pursuing us with such cruel complication of disasters."
--------------------------- Nathaniel Philbrick will discuss "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle. Information: 206-624-6600.