Read In the Heart of the Sea for Free Online
Authors: Nathaniel Philbrick
providing most whaleships with lives much longer than that of a typical merchant vessel. Still, there were limits. Rot, teredo worms, and a condition called iron sickness, in which the ship’s rusted iron fastenings weakened the oak, were all potential problems.
The ever lengthening voyages around Cape Horn were another concern. “The ship[s] being so long at sea without much repairs,” Obed Macy would write in his journal, “must shorten the durations of the ships [by] many years.” Indeed, the Essex had undergone several days of repairs in South America during her previous voyage. She was an old ship caught up in a new era of whaling, and no one knew how much longer she would last.
Owners were always reluctant to invest any more money in the repair of a ship than was absolutely necessary. While they had no choice but to rebuild the Essex ’s upperworks, there could well have been suspicious areas below the waterline that they chose to address at a later time, if not ignore. That summer, the Essex ’s principal owners, Gideon Folger and Sons, were awaiting delivery of a new, much larger whaleship, the Aurora. This was not the year to spend an inordinate amount of money on a tired old vessel like the Essex.
NANTUCKET’S shipowners could be as fierce in their own bloodless way as any whaleman. They might “act the Quaker,” but that didn’t keep them from pursuing profits with a lethal enthusiasm.
In Moby-Dick, one of the Pequod ’s owners is Bildad, a pious Quaker whose religious scruples do not prevent him from extorting cruelly long lays from the crew (he offers Ishmael a 1/777 lay!). With his Bible in one hand and ledgerbook in the other, Bildad resembles a lean, Quakerly John D. Rockefeller, his mind and soul devoted to the cold calculus of making a whaling voyage pay.
There were some observers who claimed that, rather than leading the islanders to prosperity and grace, Quakerism was at the root of whatever evil flourished in the sharp business practices of Nantucket’s shipowners. According to William Comstock, who penned an account of a whaling cruise from Nantucket in the 1820s, “Unfortunately, the anger which [the Quakers] are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart, and, while they make professions of love and good will . . . , the rancor and intense malevolence of their feelings poisons every generous spring of human kindness.”
Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, two major shareholders in the Essex, were prominent members of the island’s Quaker upper class. Yet, according to Nickerson, Macy, in charge of outfitting the Essex that summer of 1819, attempted to cut costs by severely underprovisioning the ship. In this practice he was not alone. “[T]he owners of whale-ships too frequently neglect to victual their ships properly,” Comstock wrote, “depending on the Captain to stint his crew in proportion to his means, by which a few dollars are saved to the rich owners, while the poor hard laboring sailor famishes with hunger.” While it would be unfair to point to Paul Macy as responsible, even in part, for the grief that eventually awaited the men of the Essex, the first step toward that future began with Macy’s decision to save a little money in beef and hardtack.
On Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, people didn’t invest in bonds or the stock market, but rather in whaleships. By purchasing shares in several ships rather than putting their money in a single vessel, islanders spread both the risk and the reward throughout the community. Agents such as Macy and Folger could expect a total return on their whaling investments of somewhere between 28 and 44 percent per year.
Making this level of profitability all the more remarkable was the state of the world’s economy in 1819. As Nantucket continued to add ship after ship to her fleet, mainland businesses were collapsing by the hundreds. Claiming that the “days of our fictitious affluence
The ever lengthening voyages around Cape Horn were another concern. “The ship[s] being so long at sea without much repairs,” Obed Macy would write in his journal, “must shorten the durations of the ships [by] many years.” Indeed, the Essex had undergone several days of repairs in South America during her previous voyage. She was an old ship caught up in a new era of whaling, and no one knew how much longer she would last.
Owners were always reluctant to invest any more money in the repair of a ship than was absolutely necessary. While they had no choice but to rebuild the Essex ’s upperworks, there could well have been suspicious areas below the waterline that they chose to address at a later time, if not ignore. That summer, the Essex ’s principal owners, Gideon Folger and Sons, were awaiting delivery of a new, much larger whaleship, the Aurora. This was not the year to spend an inordinate amount of money on a tired old vessel like the Essex.
NANTUCKET’S shipowners could be as fierce in their own bloodless way as any whaleman. They might “act the Quaker,” but that didn’t keep them from pursuing profits with a lethal enthusiasm.
In Moby-Dick, one of the Pequod ’s owners is Bildad, a pious Quaker whose religious scruples do not prevent him from extorting cruelly long lays from the crew (he offers Ishmael a 1/777 lay!). With his Bible in one hand and ledgerbook in the other, Bildad resembles a lean, Quakerly John D. Rockefeller, his mind and soul devoted to the cold calculus of making a whaling voyage pay.
There were some observers who claimed that, rather than leading the islanders to prosperity and grace, Quakerism was at the root of whatever evil flourished in the sharp business practices of Nantucket’s shipowners. According to William Comstock, who penned an account of a whaling cruise from Nantucket in the 1820s, “Unfortunately, the anger which [the Quakers] are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart, and, while they make professions of love and good will . . . , the rancor and intense malevolence of their feelings poisons every generous spring of human kindness.”
Gideon Folger and Paul Macy, two major shareholders in the Essex, were prominent members of the island’s Quaker upper class. Yet, according to Nickerson, Macy, in charge of outfitting the Essex that summer of 1819, attempted to cut costs by severely underprovisioning the ship. In this practice he was not alone. “[T]he owners of whale-ships too frequently neglect to victual their ships properly,” Comstock wrote, “depending on the Captain to stint his crew in proportion to his means, by which a few dollars are saved to the rich owners, while the poor hard laboring sailor famishes with hunger.” While it would be unfair to point to Paul Macy as responsible, even in part, for the grief that eventually awaited the men of the Essex, the first step toward that future began with Macy’s decision to save a little money in beef and hardtack.
On Nantucket in the early nineteenth century, people didn’t invest in bonds or the stock market, but rather in whaleships. By purchasing shares in several ships rather than putting their money in a single vessel, islanders spread both the risk and the reward throughout the community. Agents such as Macy and Folger could expect a total return on their whaling investments of somewhere between 28 and 44 percent per year.
Making this level of profitability all the more remarkable was the state of the world’s economy in 1819. As Nantucket continued to add ship after ship to her fleet, mainland businesses were collapsing by the hundreds. Claiming that the “days of our fictitious affluence