The sailors had limited food and water and likely would have all perished if not for hitting land December 19th, roughly a month after the whale attack. Their first concern upon reaching the shores of Henderson Island, only 400 miles northeast of Pitcairn Island where they would have been rescued, was being attacked by natives, of which there were none, and after a week of finding and consuming limited food and water on Henderson, the ships (minus three men who decided to stay on island) left with a target of Easter Island, about a third of the 3,000 miles to the coast of Chile. The boats were unable to hit Easter Island and continued towards South America, with this being the point that sailors began to die of starvation and dehydration. Eventually the cannibalism that the Chase and Joy cited as the reason to not head towards Tahiti came about, only now it was the men eating those who passed as way to survive.
First mate Owen Chase and two additional sailors were the remaining crew of one of the boats and rescued February 18th off the coast of South America by the ship Indian and captain Pollard and one remaining crew member on his craft rescued five days later, also close to South America, by the crew of The Dauphin. As a result of this, a ship then went to Dulcie Island where the three crew members were said to be on, found it uninhabited, and then correctly surmised that they may actually be on Henderson Island 70 miles away. With five crew rescued from the two small boats, this left the whereabouts of the third boat unknown, until five years later when it was found up washed ashore of Dulcie Island, with three skeletons in it.
The book wraps up with the eight men returning to Nantucket and the captain of the Essex, George Pollard, being so accepted upon his return from disaster that he was made captain for another voyage and three months after his return sailed out on the whaleship, the Two Brothers, which then sunk several hundred miles west of Hawaii after hitting coral reefs during heavy winds. While this sinking effectively ended Pollard’s career as a whaleboat captain, he returned to Nantucket and lived out of the remainder of a full life. The story of the Essex and its men is a remarkable one and told very well by Philbrick with both huge detail and a focus on entertaining the reader throughout, and will be told in film by Ron Howard with a March 2015 theatrical release of In the Heart of the Sea.