Nathaniel Philbrick - In the Heart of the Sea - The Epic True Story that Inspired ‘Moby Dick’

Since there were only so many Nantucketers to go around, shipowners relied on off-islanders with no previous sailing experience, known as “green hands,” to man their vessels. Many came from nearby Cape Cod. Shipping agents in cities up and down the East Coast also provided the owners with green hands, often sending them to Nantucket in groups aboard packet ships.

A green hand’s first impression of the island was seldom positive. The young boys loitering on the waterfront inevitably harassed the new arrivals with the cry “See the greenies, come to go ileing.” (“Oil” was pronounced “ile” on Nantucket.) Then followed a walk from Straight Wharf to the base of Main Street, where a clothing and dry goods store served as the “grand resort and rendezvous of seafaring men.” Here men looking for a berth or just killing time (known as “watching the pass” on Nantucket) spent the day in a haze of tobacco smoke, lounging on an assortment of benches and wooden boxes.

On this island of perpetual motion, job-seeking seamen were expected to whittle. It was the way a man whittled that let people know what kind of berth he expected. A whaleman with at least one voyage under his belt knew enough to draw his knife always away from him. This signaled that he was looking for a boatsteerer’s berth. Boatsteerers, on the other hand, whittled in the opposite direction, toward themselves; this indicated that they believed they were ready to become a mate. Not knowing the secret codes that Nantucketers had developed, a green hand simply whittled as best he knew how.

Many of the green hands felt as if they had found themselves in a foreign country where the people spoke a different language. All Nantucketers, even the women and little children, used nautical terms as if they were able-bodied seamen. According to one visitor, “Every child can tell which way the wind blows , and any old woman in the street will talk of cruising about, hailing an old messmate , or making one bring to , as familiarly as the captain of a whaleship, just arrived from the northwest coast, will describe dimension to a landlubber by the span of his jibboom , or the length of his mainstay. ” For the green hands, whose first taste of the sea may have been on the packet ship to Nantucket, it was all a bewildering blur, particularly since many of the islanders also employed the distinctive “thee and thou” phrasing of the Quakers.

Compounding the confusion was the Nantucketers’ accent. It wasn’t just “ile” for “oil”; there was a host of peculiar pronunciations, many of which varied markedly from what was found even as nearby as Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard. A Nantucket whaleman kept his clothing in a “chist.” His harpoons were kept “shurp,” especially when “atteking” a “lirge” whale. A “keppin” had his own “kebbin” and was more often than not a “merrid” man, while a “met” kept the ship’s log for the entire “viege.”

Then there were all these strange phrases that a Nantucketer used. If he bungled a job, it was a “foopaw,” an apparent corruption of the French faux pas that dated back to the days after the Revolution when Nantucketers established a whaling operation in Dunkirk, France. A Nantucketer didn’t just go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, he went on a “rantum scoot,” which meant an excursion with no definite destination. Fancy victuals were known as “manavelins.” If someone was cross-eyed, he was “born in the middle of the week and looking both ways for Sunday.”

Green hands were typically subjected to what one man remembered as “a sort of examination” by both the shipowner and the captain. Recalled another, “We were catechized, in brief, concerning our nativity and previous occupation, and the build and physical points of each were looked to, not forgetting the eyes, for a sharp-sighted man was a jewel in the estimation of the genuine whaling captain.” Some green hands were so naive and poorly educated that they insisted on the longest lay possible, erroneously thinking that the higher number meant higher pay. The owners were all too willing to grant their wishes.

Whaling captains competed with one another for men. But, as with everything on Nantucket, there were specific rules to which everyone had to adhere. Since first-time captains were expected to defer to all others, the only men available to Captain Pollard of the Essex would have been those in whom no one else had an interest. By the end of July, Pollard and the owners were still short by more than half a dozen men.

ON AUGUST 4, Obed Macy stopped by the Marine Insurance Company at the corner of Main and Federal Streets to look at the thermometer mounted on its shingled exterior. In his journal he recorded, “93 degrees and very little wind, which has rendered it almost insupportable to be exposed to the rays of the sun.”

The next day, August 5, the fully rigged Essex was floated over the Nantucket Bar into deep water. Now the loading could begin in earnest, and a series of smaller craft called lighters began ferrying goods from the wharf to the ship. First to be stowed were the groundtier casks—large, iron-hooped containers each capable of holding 268 gallons of whale oil. They were filled with seawater to keep them swollen and tight. On top of these were stowed casks of various sizes filled with freshwater. Firewood took up a great deal of space, as did the thousands of shooks, or packed bundles of staves, which would be used by the ship’s cooper to create more oil casks. On top of that was enough food, all stored in casks, to last two and a half years. If the men were fed the same amount as merchant seamen (which is perhaps assuming too much when it came to a Nantucket whaler), the Essex would have contained at least fourteen tons of meat (salt beef and pork), more than eight tons of bread, and thousands of gallons of freshwater. Then there were massive amounts of whaling equipment (harpoons, lances, etc.), as well as clothing, charts, sails (including at least one spare set), navigational instruments, medicine, rum, gin, lumber, and so on. In addition to the three newly painted whaleboats that were suspended from the ship’s davits, there were at least two spare boats: one stored upside down on a rack over the quarterdeck, another mounted on spare spars that projected over the stern.

By the time the men were done loading the Essex six days later—their labors briefly interrupted by a tremendous shower of rain duly noted by Obed Macy on August 9—the ship was almost as heavily laden as it would be with whale oil on her return to Nantucket. Explained one Nantucketer, “[T]he gradual consumption of provisions and stores keeps pace with the gradual accumulation of oil…, and a whaleship is always full, or nearly so, all the voyage.”

Something, however, was still missing: the men needed to fill the seven empty berths in the Essex ’s forecastle. At some point, Gideon Folger put out the call to an agent in Boston for as many black sailors as the agent could find.

ALTHOUGH he wasn’t black, Addison Pratt came to Nantucket under circumstances similar to the ones that brought seven African Americans to the island and to service on the Essex. In 1820, Pratt found himself in Boston, looking for a ship:

I soon commenced hunting for a voyage, but it was dull times with commerce as seamen’s wages were but ten dollars per month, and there were more sailors than ships in port, and I found it dull times for green hands. But after looking around for a few days I heard there were hands wanted to go on a whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. I made no delay, but hastened to the office and put down my name and received twelve dollars of advance money, which I laid out in sea clothes…Six more hands were shipped for the same vessel, and we were all sent on board of a packet bound to Nantucket.