It’s August 1819, you’re sixteen years
old and you’ve just been hired as a deckhand on your first sea voyage. You’re preparing for the adventure of your
life, but little do you know that you and your crew will soon be stranded at sea, forced
to eat each other to survive! The 87 foot long, 240 ton whaling ship Essex
is leaving today for a two year, ten-thousand mile journey to hunt sperm whales. You grew up on the island of Nantucket, the
hub of the thriving whale oil trade, so you’ve always known you would go into the whaling
business like everyone else in your life. As the ship pulls away from port you stand
on the deck to wave goodbye to your family. You can’t believe that it will be two years
until you see them again, but at least you’ll be a sea-tested sailor when you return. Only two days after setting sail, you get
your first taste of the sea’s wrath when a fierce storm comes out of nowhere and nearly
sinks the ship. After making some repairs you continue on
your journey down the eastern coast of South America, and five weeks later the Essex arrives
in Cape Horn off the Southern tip of South America. To you, it feels like you’ve sailed to the
bottom of the world. Unfortunately, the delay from the storm means
you arrived late, and you find that the usually fertile hunting waters have been fished out. The Captain decides to head towards the Galapagos
islands in the South Pacific in search of whales. After a long trip up the other side of South
America, the crew anchors at Charles Island in the Galapagos to restock, where bad luck
continues to plague your excursion. A reckless crewmemeber’s prank burns the
entire island to the ground. You run through the flames and barely escape
with your life. Thankfully, no one in the crew is hurt, but
the same can’t be said for the island’s wildlife - you’re now responsible for the
extinction of the Floreana Tortoise and the near extinction of the Floreana Mockingbird. Finally, after more than a year at sea, your
crew encounters a group of sperm whales. It looks like luck is finally in your favor...or
so you think. The experienced crew jumps into action, immediately
launching three of the ship’s twenty-foot whaling boats crewed by six men each. Soon enough, two of the three whaling boats
have successfully harpooned whales - no easy feat, since this involves rowing incredibly
close to the whale so one man can harpoon it, then holding on for dear life while you
try stabbing it to death with a lance. The third boat was not so lucky - it got too
close to a whale and was damaged by the powerful beast. As the two successful boats are carried away
by the panicking whales in what’s called a “nantucket sleigh ride”, the third crew
returns to the ship, where you, as a lowly deckhand, had to stay during the hunt. As the first mate is angrily repairing his
boat, you look out and spot the biggest sperm whale you’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s a true monster, probably eighty-five
feet long and weighing eighty tons. The whale is acting strange, though - it’s
floating still in the sea, spraying water from its spout, and seems to be...watching
you. You shout out as it starts to swim directly
towards the boat, travelling at a speed of around 3 knots. The first mate grabs a lance and takes careful
aim, but hesitates, worried about angering the beast and it damaging the ship. You pray that it will dive, but your prayers
go unanswered - the giant whale smashes head-first into the side of the ship so hard you’re
knocked you off your feet. As water pours in through a hole in the port
side and the crew scrambles to get pumps going, you can see that the whale is still there
- and it looks enraged, rolling in the water and snapping its jaws. Again, it turns and barrels towards the ship
- travelling at six knots now as its twelve-foot wide tale pumps furiously, leaving a forty-foot
wake. The crew frantically tries to maneuver the
ship out of the whale’s path, but it’s too late - the whale once again smashes into
the ship head first, this time hitting the ship just below the anchor. The ship gets lodged on the beast’s head
as the whale pushes the ship sideways through the water and water pours over the transom. Finally, the whale disentangles itself from
the wreckage and dives, disappearing for good, but the ship is destroyed. The crew scrambles to lower the last spare
whaling boat and fill it with as much food, fresh water and navigational equipment as
possible. When the whaling boats notice that the Essex
has disappeared, they immediately cut loose their valuable whales and head back to where
they last saw the ship. The first whaling boat to arrive is the one
led by the Captain. As he arrives on the scene to find his majestic
ship floundering, the captain turns to the first mate and asks: “My God, Mr. Chase,
what is the matter!?” Mr. Chase, the first mate, can only reply:
“We’ve been stoved by a whale.” You spend that night in the whaling boats
tied to the wreckage, but by morning you all know you need a plan. You’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
about as far from land as you can possibly be. You are twenty men and you have only three
small whaling boats, and you only managed to save sixty days worth of provisions from
the wreck. The crew quickly vetoes the Captain’s plan
to head to the Society Islands a few hundred miles away or the Marquesas islands fifteen
hundred miles away because they had heard rumours of cannibals living on these islands
- the irony of this wouldn’t be apparent until much later. Instead it’s decided that you’ll head
south towards the South American mainland. You figure it will take about sixty days to
reach Chile or Peru, and at least you might be spotted by other whaling ships on the way. Each boat is loaded with two-hundred pounds
of hardtack - a type of dried bread - sixty-five gallons of water, and one gun. Now that you have a plan and are headed towards
land, you and the crew are in much higher spirits, believing the worst is behind you. But you have no idea what’s in store for
you... Within a few short days, those high spirits
are broken. The human body needs half a pint of water
per day just to eliminate waste, and you have less than half that amount. As you chew your hard bread and bemoan your
parched throats, it dawns on you - all of the food you managed to save had been soaked
in sea water, and as the water evaporated it left behind salt, accelerating your dehydration. To add insult to injury, your boat is attacked
yet again, this time by an aggressive killer whale. Thankfully you escape unscathed, but morale
is low, and getting lower by the minute. After seventeen days at sea, a storm hits
- gale force winds gust at forty-five knots, lightning flashes all around you, and immense
forty-foot high waves toss the boats like toys. But by your twenty-third day at sea, you begin
to pray for a storm when you find yourselves stuck in a dead calm with no wind for days. The Captain tries to rally a last-ditch effort
and convinces you to row to freedom, but the effort is quickly abandoned as men start to
collapse within minutes. You have travelled eleven hundred miles, but
you’re still five thousand miles from land. You are delirious with thirst, burned raw
from the sun, and are rapidly running out of food. You’re in an area of the Pacific with no
marine life near the surface, so you can’t even hope to catch fish. You reach Henderson Island two weeks later,
but it’s barren. Still, three men refuse to get back in the
boats, and you leave them behind on the island when you resume your mission, assuming that
they’re dead men. Ironically, they would be rescued three months
later, and they would end up being the lucky ones… A week later, the first man dies. He was ill before the shipwreck, so it was
not unexpected, but it’s still a blow to morale. The men tie a rock to his feet and slip the
body overboard in a traditional sea burial. Two nights later, the boat led by First Mate
Chase gets separated from the group. As the two remaining boats divide up what’s
left of the provisions, you realize that there is less than a pound of hardtack left to share
between ten men. A few days later, when the second man dies,
you all hesitate about giving him a burial at sea. No one wants to say what you’re all thinking
- without food, you will all surely die, and the obvious solution is right in front of
you. You can hardly believe your eyes as you watch
one of the most hardened crew members butcher the body of your fellow sailor. First he separates the limbs from the body,
then all the flesh is cut from the bones, the heart is removed and the body is sewn
back up and committed to the sea as decently as possible under the circumstances. Finally the meat and organs are roasted on
a flat stone at the bottom of the boat, and you have their first taste of fresh meat in
months. The average human body has about sixty pounds
of edible meat, but your starving friend provided less than thirty pounds of very lean meat. Even still, once you’ve tasted fresh meat
again you can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Satisfying your hunger seems to have reawoken
it with a vengeance. After nine weeks adrift in the sea the men
in your boat realize that you would all die without food, and someone suggests you all
draw lots to determine who will be eaten next. You know this is an old custom at sea, but
you had hoped to never live to see it. The lot falls to young Owen Coffin, and you
began to sweat. Owen is the Captain’s nephew - surely he
won’t let him be eaten, and who better to take his place than you, the youngest and
newest member of the crew. To your great relief, young Owen takes his
fate heroically. One of his friends kills and butchers him,
and you and the others feast again. Over the coming weeks, three more men would
die and be eaten. After a miserable eighty-nine days at sea,
the three men left clinging to life in First Mate Chase’s boat spot a sail on the horizon. They muster the last of their energy and chase
down an English ship, the Indian and are finally, miraculously rescued. The third boat will be found years later with
three skeletons inside, among many other scattered bones that show signs of having been gnawed
on. But your ordeal is not yet over. You and the Captain are the last two men left
alive, and still fifteen-hundred miles from Chile, when a ship pulls up alongside your
boat. You’re so delirious that you don’t understand
that these people are trying to help you - you are like a starved, feral dog, hoarding and
protecting the last of the bones of your departed crewmates and trying to suck the marrow from
them. As the ship makes its way to shore, you take
the time to rest and recover - although you hear that the Captain recovered rather quickly,
and has been dining in style with the captain of this ship and regaling him with stories
of your “adventure” (narrator: sarcasm). You’re reunited with the other three survivors
in Valparaiso, and by the end of the summer, nearly two years since you left, you’re
all safely back in Nantucket. You know that cannibalism at sea is customary
when men are faced certain death, but it’s still a relief to be welcomed back by your
community without judgement. You do hear, though, that the Captain wasn’t
so lucky - his sister can’t forgive him for eating his nephew, her son. Despite this harrowing ordeal, within a few
years you and every one of the other four survivors will return to the sea. And in eighteen fifty-one, a man named Herman
Melville will publish a novel inspired by the story of the men on the Essex who were
stranded at sea, forced to eat each other. It wasn’t very popular at the time, but
Moby Dick has gone down in literary history. Now go watch the harrowing tale titled “I
Was Lost At Sea for 76 Days With Sharks Circling”, or maybe you’ll like this other video.
