Clearly Philbrick is in love with Nantucket, and wrote either in the beginning of the book or somewhere else that he moved there. Nantucket was a very interesting whaling boom town, initially from the whales near its shores, and by the 19th century, with whalers sailing across the entire world. Whalers' journeys were marathons of several years. This meant that the women of Nantucket adapted to a three-years away, three-months-at-home rhythm. Apparently, many of them became addicted to opium. And life was hard and maternal mortality high, so many husbands returned home to find their wives dead and perhaps another child added to their plate. It is appropriate that the whalers had similar life patterns to the whales they hunted: young sperm whales leave the family unit at about six years old to make their way to colder waters, where they live alone or with other males until returning in their late twenties to warmer waters. In both whales and whalers, men spent their lives away from their families.
Whalers knew whales incredibly well. They could tell you that before diving, a whale blew once for every minute that it would spend underwater, and that it would generally continue in the same direction and speed underwater as it had before the dive. The whale they hunted was the sperm whale, which had blubber, but more importantly, oil and spermaceti, named because it looks like sperm. Whalers would send out smaller, twenty-five-foot whaleboats from their large ship, and the men would row out to a sperm whale and stick it with a harpoon and hold on for a "Nantucket sleigh ride" that could last for several miles at fifteen knots, making it the fastest journey a human could take at sea at the time. The critical move was to use a lance to pierce through the whale's vital organs with a lance that would cause it to choke on its own blood, but often it took as many as fifteen stabbings to kill a whale. The killing blow could transform the whale's spout into a "fifteen- to twenty-foot geyser of gore." The whale was stripped of blubber and then decapitated. The sperm whale's head, which accounts for almost a third of its length, contains 500 gallons of spermaceti. And its stomach contains ambergris, an opaque, grey substance that is used to make perfume and is worth more than its weight in gold.
While hunting several whales in a pod, the ship was suddenly bumped by a large male sperm whale. That one may have been an accident, but then the next hit was surely intentional, and managed to sink the already low-quality ship. The ship sank within hours, and then the survivors decided to head in three whaleboats for South America, ironically to avoid cannibals, which they would become after long weeks at sea. They would endure horrible hunger and thirst. They would reach a phase in which saliva becomes thick and bad-tasting and the tongue clings to teeth and the roof of the mouth. There is severe pain in the head and neck and many people begin to hallucinate. And then the tongue hardens, speech becomes impossible, and then the tongue swells, squeezing past the jaws. Eyelids crack and eyeballs weep tears of blood. Swelling in the throat makes breathing difficult, and the person dying of thirst enters a sort of living death, withering and blackening.
Eventually, a few of the whalers will survive and make it to South America, where they are discovered just off the coast. What is craziest is that they all went back to whaling after. The captain, George Pollard, actually got shipwrecked again in another storm and then never served as captain again. The book is a great story and worth a read.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Galapagos tortoises can live for more than a year without any food or water.
- Whalemen were able to create post offices on the uninhabited islands that they frequented and traded mail when they passed other whaleships.
- The South Pacific Gyre is a "Desolate Region" where currents conspire to allow for very little life in that part of the ocean.
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