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

The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2000

Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick 2000

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Lord Weary’s Castle by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1947 and renewed 1972 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Frontispiece, images on chapter openings, and tailpiece by David Lazarus.

Ship diagrams © 2000 L. F. Tantillo.

Maps on pages 46–7 and 179 by Jeffrey L. Ward

Motion picture artwork © 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved.

Nathaniel Philbrick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006531203

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007381814

Version: 2015-11-16

To Melissa

And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against thee: Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as a heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.

—EXODUS 15:7–8

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale

Who spewed Nantucket bones in the thrashed swell…

This is the end of running on the waves;

We are poured out like water. Who will dance

The mast-lashed master of Leviathans

Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?

—ROBERT LOWELL,

‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’

Cover Page

Title Page In the Heart of the Sea The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PREFACE

CREW OF THE ESSEX

CHAPTER ONE – Nantucket

CHAPTER TWO – Knockdown

CHAPTER THREE – First Blood

CHAPTER FOUR – The Lees of Fire

CHAPTER FIVE – The Attack

CHAPTER SIX – The Plan

CHAPTER SEVEN – At Sea

CHAPTER EIGHT – Centering Down

CHAPTER NINE – The Island

CHAPTER TEN – The Whisper of Necessity

CHAPTER ELEVEN – Games of Chance

CHAPTER TWELVE – In the Eagle’s Shadow

CHAPTER THIRTEEN – Homecoming

CHAPTER FOURTEEN – Consequences

EPILOGUE – Bones

KEEP READING

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author

Notes

Praise

About the Publisher

February 23, 1821

LIKE A GIANT BIRD of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.

Harvesting sperm whales—the largest toothed whales in existence—was no easy matter. Six men would set out from the ship in a small boat, row up to their prey, harpoon it, then attempt to stab it to death with a lance. The sixty-ton creature could destroy the whaleboat with a flick of its tail, throwing the men into the cold ocean water, often miles from the ship.

Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the highgrade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age. That all of this was conducted on the limitless Pacific Ocean meant that the whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not merely seagoing hunters and factory workers but also explorers, pushing out farther and farther into a scarcely charted wilderness larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined.

For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island called Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the coast of southern New England. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucket’s whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism, at least when it came to the human race. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call “Quakers with a vengeance.”

It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin , just a few months into what would be a three-year voyage, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. And on that February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusual—a boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The ship’s captain, the thirty-seven-year-old Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft with keen curiosity.

He soon realized that it was a whaleboat—double-ended and about twenty-five feet long—but a whaleboat unlike any he had ever seen. The boat’s sides had been built up by about half a foot. Two makeshift masts had been rigged, transforming the rowing vessel into a rudimentary schooner. The sails—stiff with salt and bleached by the sun—had clearly pulled the boat along for many, many miles. Coffin could see no one at the steering oar. He turned to the man at the Dauphin ’s wheel and ordered, “Hard up the helm.”