Читать книгу In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’ - Nathaniel Philbrick - Страница 12

AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING on November 25, 1819, the lookout cried, “Land ho!” In the distance, what appeared to be an island of rock towered high above the water. Without hesitation, Captain Pollard pronounced it to be Staten Island, off the eastern tip of Cape Horn. 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 1788 Captain William Bligh and the crew of the Bounty had attempted to round this menacing promontory. After a solid month of sleet-filled headwinds and horrendous seas that threatened to break up the ship, Bligh decided that the only sensible way to reach the Pacific was to go the other way, so he turned the Bounty around and headed for Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-five years later, during the War of 1812, a much larger vessel, also named the Essex, an American naval frigate commanded by Captain David Porter, rounded the Horn. Porter and his men would eventually become famous for their heroics against a superior British force in the Pacific, but Cape Horn put a fright into the otherwise fearless mariner. “[O]ur sufferings (short as has been our passage) have been so great that I would advise those bound into the Pacific, never to attempt the passage of Cape Horn, if they can get there by another route.”

The whalemen of Nantucket had a different attitude toward the Horn. They’d been rounding it regularly ever since 1791, when Captain Paul Worth steered the Beaver, a whaleship about the size of the Essex, into the Pacific. Pollard and Chase had done it at least three times; for Pollard it may have been his fourth or even fifth time. 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 an instant the squall slammed into the ship with the force of a cannon shot. In the shrieking darkness, the crew labored to shorten sail. Under a close-reefed maintopsail and storm staysails, the Essex performed surprisingly well in the mountainous seas. “[T]he ship rode over them as buoyantly as a seagull,” Nickerson claimed, “without taking onboard one bucket of water.”

But now, with the wind out of the southwest, there was the danger of being driven against the jagged rocks of the Horn. The days became weeks as the ship struggled against the wind and waves in nearfreezing temperatures. In these high latitudes the light never entirely left the night sky. Without the usual sequence of light and dark, the passage stretched into a dreary, seemingly unending test of a whaleman’s sanity.

It took more than a month for the Essex to round Cape Horn. Not until January of the new year, 1820, did the lookout sight the island of St. Mary’s, a gathering spot for whalers off the coast of Chile. To the south of the island in the bay of Arauco they found several Nantucket vessels, including the Chili, the same ship with which they had left the island five months earlier.

The news from the west coast of South America was not good. For one thing, the political situation in Chile and Peru was extremely volatile. In recent years towns up and down the coast had been ravaged by fighting between the Patriots, who hoped to wrest control of South America from Spain, and the Royalists, whose interests were still linked to the mother country. Although the Patriot forces, assisted by the swashbuckling British naval hero Lord Cochrane, appeared in the ascendancy, fighting was still going on, particularly in Peru. Caution was the watchword when provisioning on this coast.

For most vessels it had been a miserable whaling season. While the scarcity of whales kept up the price of oil back home on Nantucket, these were tough times for whalemen in the Pacific. After driving his crew to fill his ship, the Independence, Captain George Swain had returned to Nantucket in November and predicted, “No other ship will ever fill with sperm oil in the South Seas.” Obed Macy feared Captain Swain might be right: “Some new place must be found where the whales are more numerous,” he told his journal, “or the business will not be worth pursuing.” Praying that they might elude these grim forecasts, the crew of the Essex headed out to sea.

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 450 barrels of oil, the equivalent of about eleven whales. This meant that they were killing, on average, a whale every five days, a pace that soon exhausted the crew.

The weather only added to their labors. High winds and rugged seas made every aspect of whaling doubly onerous. Instead of providing a stable platform on which to cut up the blubber and boil the oil, the Essex pitched back and forth in the waves. The large seas made it next to impossible to lower and raise the whaleboats safely. “Our boats were very much injured in hoisting them from the water,” Nickerson remembered, “and were on more than one occasion dashed in pieces by the heavy rolling of the ship.” The much-abused boats were constantly in a state of repair.

As the number of casks of oil in the hold increased, the green hands became accustomed to the brutal business of whaling. The repetitious nature of the work—a whaler was, after all, a factory ship—tended to desensitize the men to the awesome wonder of the whale. Instead of seeing their prey as a fifty- to sixty-ton creature whose brain was close to six times the size of their own (and, what perhaps should have been even more impressive in the all-male world of the fishery, whose penis was as long as they were tall), the whalemen preferred to think of it as what one commentator called “a self-propelled tub of high-income lard.” Whales were described by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a fifty-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the mammal’s habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whose constituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it—the tons of meat, bone, and guts—was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century.

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. That was why veteran whalemen had a special fondness for trying out the blubber, the final step in the transformation of a living, breathing sperm whale into cold, hard cash. “It is horrible,” the writer Charles Nordhoff admitted. “Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights.”

It was more than just the money. Each whale, each cask of oil, brought the Nantucketer closer to returning home to his loved ones. And it was when they were trying out the whale that the whalemen typically grew the most nostalgic for home. “Wives and children are remembered with new affection at such moments,” claimed William H. Macy, “and each feels nearer home and friends at each recurring sound of the light-driven bung, and the inspiring cry, ‘Away cask!’ Truly is it remarked by old whalemen that the most delightful parts of the voyage are ‘Boiling’ and arriving home.”

It was during this busy and exhausting two-month stretch off Peru that the crew of the Essex received what was for a whaleman the ultimate motivator: letters from home.

Toward the end of May, the Essex spoke, or hailed, the Aurora, the brand-new ship fitted out by Gideon Folger and Sons for Daniel Russell, formerly the captain of the Essex. The Aurora had left Nantucket on the day after Christmas, bringing with her news that was only five months old—a blink of an eye in the time frame of a whaleman. When the Aurora left Nantucket, the price of whale oil was at an all-time high; people were still talking about the fire in Rhoda Harris’s schoolroom in the black section of town, known as New Guinea; and they were catching codfish (two hundred to a boat) off the Nantucket village of Siasconset.

But of most interest to the men was the pouch of mail, along with several newspapers, that Daniel Russell handed over to Captain Pollard. After the officers had selected their letters, the bag was sent forward to the crew. “It was amusing to watch those of our lads who had been disappointed and found no letters for them,” Nickerson recalled. “They would follow us around the decks and whilst we were reading our letters would seat themselves beside us, as though our letters could be of service to them.” Despairing of finding out anything about their own families, the unlucky ones sought solace in what Nickerson called “the careless folds of a newspaper.” For his part, Nickerson would reread the newspapers so many times that he would soon have their contents memorized.

The meeting between the Aurora and the Essex provided Pollard with the chance to speak with his former commander, the thirty-four-year-old Daniel Russell. The Aurora was a much larger, state-of-the-art ship and would return to Nantucket two years later, full of oil. Later it would be said that when Captain Russell had left the Essex to assume command of the Aurora, he had taken his old ship’s luck with him.

ONE of the topics Pollard and Russell discussed was the recent discovery of a new whaling ground. As if to refute Captain Swain’s dour prediction that the Pacific Ocean had been fished out of sperm whales, Captain George Washington Gardner of the Globe had headed farther out to sea in 1818 than any other Nantucket whaleship had so far dared to go. More than a thousand miles off the coast of Peru he hit the mother lode, an expanse of ocean full of sperm whales. He returned home to Nantucket in May of 1820 with more than two thousand barrels of oil.

Gardner’s discovery became known as the Offshore Ground. During the spring and summer of 1820, it was the talk of the whale fishery. Understanding that whales appeared in the Offshore Ground in November, Pollard resolved to make one final provisioning stop in South America, where he’d secure plenty of fruits, vegetables, and water; then, after touching at the Galapagos Islands, where he would pick up a load of giant tortoises (which were prized for their meat), he would head out for this distant section of ocean.

Sometime in September the Essex called at Atacames, a little village of approximately three hundred Spaniards and Indians in Ecuador, just north of the equator. Anchored beside them they found a ghost ship, the whaler George from London, England. Every member of the George’s crew, save for Captain Benneford and two others, had come down with a life-threatening case of scurvy after a long time at sea. Their condition was so serious that Benneford rented a house on shore and transformed it into a hospital for his men. Here was ample evidence of the dangers of venturing for extended periods out into the open Pacific.

Although poor, Atacames (called Tacames by the whalemen) was a beautiful town that for some sailors seemed a kind of Garden of Eden. “I could not but admire the exuberant growth of every thing belonging to the vegetable kingdom,” recalled Francis Olmsted, whose ship put in at Atacames in the 1830s. “The most delicious pineapples spread out before us, while the coconut tree, the plaintain and the banana waved their broad leaves gracefully in the breeze. Here were oranges, limes and other fruits lying scattered around in neglected profusion. The fig trees had also begun to put forth, and the indigo plant grew spontaneously like the most common weed.”

There were, however, monsters lurking in the dense jungle surrounding the town, including jaguars. To guard against such predators, as well as against mosquitoes and sand fleas, the villagers lived in thatch-roofed bamboo huts raised up on stakes as much as twenty feet above the ground.

Atacames was known for its game birds. Soon after the Nantucket whaleship Lucy Adams also dropped anchor, Pollard set out with her captain, thirty-seven-year-old Shubael Hussey, on what Nickerson described as a turkey-hunting expedition. 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.

The hunters lacked a way to flush out the game. “I being the youngest boy onboard,” Nickerson remembered, “was chosen to make up the company in place of a hunter’s dog.” And so they were off, “over the meadows and through the woods toward the hunting grounds.”

About three hours out, they heard “the most dismal howling that can be imagined.” Doing their best to ignore the cries, the two captains pushed on until it became clear that they were rapidly approaching the source of the disturbing sound. What could it be, Nickerson wondered, a blood-thirsty jaguar? But no one said a word. Finally, the two noble whale hunters stopped and “looked at each other a few moments as though they wished to say something which each was ashamed to open first.” As if on cue, they turned around and began walking back to town, casually remarking that it was too hot an afternoon to hunt and that they would return on a cooler day.

But there was no fooling their surrogate hunting dog. “[They were] afraid some beast of prey would devour them,” Nickerson wrote, “and that I could not find my way back, being too young to tell their anxious wives what became of them.” On a subsequent voyage to the region, Nickerson would discover the source of the sounds that had struck such terror in the hearts of these two whaling captains: a harmless bird smaller than a chickadee.

Something happened in Atacames that profoundly influenced the morale of the crew. Henry Dewitt, one of the Essex’s African American sailors, deserted.

Dewitt’s act came as no great surprise. Sailors fled from whaleships all the time. 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. If a storm should kick up, they would find it almost impossible to shorten sail. 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.

On October 2, the Essex set a course for the Galapagos Islands, approximately six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador. Referred to as the “Galleypaguses” by some seamen, these islands were also known as the Encantadas, Spanish for “enchanted” or “bewitched.” The strong and unpredictable currents that boiled in and around these volcanic outcroppings sometimes created the illusion that the islands were actually moving.

Even before the discovery of the Offshore Ground, the Galapagos had been a popular provisioning stop for whalers. Safely removed from the mainland, they provided a welcome refuge from the political turmoil in South America. They were also located in a region frequented by sperm whales. As early as 1793, just two years after the Beaver first rounded the Horn, Captain James Colnett, on a British exploratory voyage to investigate the potential for whaling in the Pacific, visited the Galapagos. 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. They also spied vast numbers of baby whales, “not larger than a small porpoise.” Colnett wrote, “I am disposed to believe that we were now at the general rendezvous of the spermaceti whales from the coasts of Mexico, Peru, and the Gulf of Panama, who come here to calve.” He noted that of all the whales they killed, they found only one male.

Colnett’s observations are in keeping with the results of the latest research on the sperm whales of the Galapagos. One of the world’s premier sperm-whale experts, Hal Whitehead, began observing whales in this area in 1985. Using a cruising sailboat equipped with sophisticated technological gadgetry, Whitehead has monitored whales in the same waters plied by the Essex 180 years ago. He has found that the typical pod of whales, which ranges between three and twenty or so individuals, is comprised almost exclusively of interrelated adult females and immature whales. Adult males made up only 2 percent of the whales he observed.

The females work cooperatively in taking care of their young. The calves are passed from whale to whale so that an adult is always standing guard when the mother is feeding on squid thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. As an older whale raises its flukes at the start of a long dive, the calf will swim to another nearby adult.

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. Even then, a male’s return is fairly fitful and inconclusive; he spends only eight or so hours with any one group, sometimes mating but never establishing any strong attachments, before making his way back to the high latitudes. He may live for sixty or seventy years.

The sperm whales’ network of female-based family units resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.