Whale's Revenge by Walter Karp

Author:Walter Karp [Walter Karp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature/Mammals
ISBN: 9781612308050
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2014-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

THE WORST CHASE feared had already befallen the men of two vessels separated from him and his crew by the storm of January 12. As early as January 14, the five men left on Joy’s boat had run out of food entirely and had been barely kept alive by the scant provisions left on Captain Pollard’s boat. That sharing was an extraordinary act of love and loyalty, for how tempting it must have been for six starving men to sail away from their comrades and save what they had for themselves. The price of Pollard’s charity, however, was quickly exacted. On January 21, not an ounce of bread was left on the captain’s boat. After two days without food, starvation claimed Lawson Thomas on Joy’s boat; his surviving boat mates shared the man’s flesh. Between January 25 and 28, three more men died, and their flesh, too, was shared between the boats. Then, on the night of January 28, a storm separated Pollard’s group from the three men still alive on Joy’s boat. They were never seen again. Four starving men remained in Pollard's boat: the captain, a cabin boy named Owen Coffin, a Barzillai Ray from Portugal, and a third Nantucket man, Charles Ramsdell.

On February 1, the flesh of their stricken comrades, their sole source of food, was gone. What happened next was related a few years later by Pollard to two English missionaries after he was shipwrecked a second time in the South Pacific. Out of food, “we looked at each other with horrid thoughts in our minds, but we held our tongues. . . . I am sure we loved one another as brothers all the time; yet our looks told plainly what must be done.” By lot, the victim would be chosen and shot for his flesh. His executioner would be chosen by lot, as well. Ramsdell drew the executioner’s straw. When the cabin boy Coffin drew the victim’s, Pollard said, “I started forward and cried out, ‘My lad, my lad, if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man that touches you.’ The poor, emaciated boy hesitated for a moment or two, then, quietly laying his head down upon the gunwale of the boat, he said, ‘I like it as well as any other.’ He was soon dispatched, and nothing of him left.” Pollard then cried out to his listeners: “I can tell you no more. My head is on fire at the recollection. I hardly know what I say.”

That was February 1. Ten days later on February 11, Ray succumbed to starvation, and his flesh prolonged the lives of his two survivors: Pollard and Ramsdell. By now, the two horror-haunted whaleboats - the captain’s and the first mate’s - were sailing on a perfectly parallel course, with Chase’s boat some 300 miles farther north. On February 18, three men were still alive on Chase’s boat, but their carefully hoarded food was gone, and Chile was still 300 miles away. That morning, Chase

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