After surviving a second shipwreck, the captain took a job on sturdy land as Nantucket's night watchman, where he looked over the streets and wharves.
Before the voyage, he had promised Coffin’s mother that the boy would return home safely, and his failure to keep Coffin alive plagued Pollard's conscience. By that point, the two surviving men-Pollard and sailor Charles Ramsdell-had resorted to drinking their own urine and were found gnawing on the bones of their deceased mates. “He was soon dispatched,” Pollard grimly recalled, “and nothing of him left.” About two weeks later, Pollard's boat was discovered. When Pollard insisted that he take the young man's place, Coffin refused-and was summarily shot in the head. That decision, however, had made cannibals of the men on board.Īs for the drawing of lots, Pollard’s 18-year-old cousin, Owen Coffin, was the unlucky loser. Pollard agreed to follow a longer route, hoping to drift south and then east in hopes of reaching Chile.
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When the Essex sank, the men had been relatively close to the Marquesas Islands, but Pollard's men were afraid of landing there-the islands were rumored to be full of cannibals. So they agreed to draw lots: Whoever pulled the short stick would volunteer to be shot and eaten. After two and a half months at sea, the days began to blur and the stockpile of food dwindled, and the four men remaining on Pollard’s boat realized they were all going to starve if food didn’t soon become available. The 20 survivors scrambled into three small whaleboats, which eventually became separated during a storm.
Weeks earlier, in November 1820, Pollard's crew had been pursuing (and harpooning) a pod of sperm whales when an angry 85-foot-long whale barreled head-on into the captain's ship, The Essex of Nantucket, sending it to the ocean's bottom. Saltwater had leached into the men’s stash of bread, and one by one, Pollard’s men died of starvation-and were promptly devoured by the hungry survivors. The sun was relentless, their thirst was unquenchable, and the hull was leaking. Crammed aboard a small whaleboat with some of his crew, the captain had been drifting aimlessly in the South Pacific for more than two months.
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