Rich & Dirty Business

THE SEA-HUNTERS (510 pp.)--Edouard A. Stackpole--Lippincoff ($7.50).

Captain George Pollard of Nantucket, Mass, had been out in one of the whaleboats himself, that day in 1820, when the whaler Essex began to founder. Nobody could have been more dismayed than Captain Pollard when he headed back to his stricken ship. "My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?" he cried. And from Mate Chase, bobbing with other survivors in a small boat, came the laconic answer: "We have been stove by a whale."*

The troubles of Pollard and his men were just beginning. For the next three months, with no charts, the survivors sailed three small open boats in a wandering course over some 3,000 miles of the South Pacific. They were reduced soon to eating flying fish which flopped against their sails, and finally to cannibalism.

Drawing of Lots. On the 73rd day, recorded Captain Pollard later: "We looked" at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds . . . We loved one another as brothers . . . yet our looks told plainly what must be done." That was to draw lots to decide who would be shot for food.

When two of the three boats were picked up off the coast of Chile 13 weeks after the ship had been lost, eight men were left of the original 20. Two had died and been cast adrift; seven had been eaten; the three in the third boat were never found. There was no official investigation; none of the survivors ever stood trial. Most lived to a ripe old age, though they never quite got over their experiences. Mate Chase used to cache food away in his attic. Captain Pollard, trying to tell the story, broke off: "I can tell you no more--my head is on fire at the recollection."

Author Edouard Stackpole, who comes from an old Nantucket clan himself, tells the story of the Essex with a plenitude of details and a sober chronicler's lack of shock. Few whaling men had as tragic a time as the men of the Essex, but whaling, as Author Stackpole describes it in The Sea-Himters, was characteristically a dangerous, grim and dirty business. Stack-pole's book is a serious attempt to set down the round story of how it all started, and how for a few generations it made Nantucket rich and famous.

Around the Horn. The Massachusetts mainlanders who settled Nantucket in the late 1600s, Stackpole believes, had little other choice of occupation. Their small island was hardly suitable for much farming, whereas whale oil could be a rich cash crop.

At first, the men of Nantucket copied the Indian technique of taking whales stranded close in shore. Later on, they pursued them far out into the Atlantic. By the beginning of the Revolution, the pursuit was taking the whalers as far as Cape Horn, and they were bringing back an annual harvest of 30,000 barrels of oil for the lamps and candles of the U.S. and Europe. There was even a highly profitable use for the whalebone: corset stays.

Author Stackpole follows the old Nantucket industry to its peak in the 1830s, when the search for whales had long since taken the ships into the Pacific. There, Stackpole believes, a Nantucket master named Captain Christopher Burdick deserves credit for being the first to sight the Antarctic continent. Others discovered new islands, gave them Nantucket family names, e.g., Gardner, Starbuck and Swain Islands.

Sometimes the God-fearing men of Nantucket were unable to get over the sight of the Pacific and its paradisial isles. The old records contain stories of men who left their ships and settled down with native women. Once, in 1824, a whole shipload of men mutinied, killed the officers of the Globe, and set up a short-lived kingdom on Mili Island.

Stackpole stops his story before the petroleum boom came along to supply most of the world's need for oil. But even before that, the clouds were gathering over Nantucket. Stubborn sand bars drove captains to New Bedford and other ports; the appeal of the Gold Rush drew crewmen to California. But if the oldtime whaling man disappeared, he left a record behind him, as Author Stackpole notes, as citizen of the world, man of industry, oceanographer and as "a sea-hunter whose exploits make ... a bright page in American history."

*The event gave Herman Melville the idea for the last chapter of Moby Dick, in which the White Whale sinks Captain Ahab's ship. Melville paraphrased Captain Pollard's question as: "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.