There was no nylon fishing line in 1818 to 1820
I wrote the above article regarding staying alive fishing in a long boat when the Essex was crushed by a big male sperm whale in real life. "In the Heart of the Sea" is a true story about what really happened to inspire Melville to write the fictional "Moby Dick". Also, when younger Melville was also a Whaler.
I was talking with my wife today whose father had a Concordia Sailboat that is about 45 feet in length from the time she was little likely by 1960. So she sailed with her family before she could walk and so knows more than I do about sailing a good sized wooden yacht and everything about the ocean.
She was saying that they could have urinated in the water to draw sharks and have speared them with their whale harpoon to have something to eat as well.
If you read the last article above I mentioned there was no nylon line available for fishing. So, other means would have had to be used for fishing. Also, to survive 90 days with that many men they needed to catch water with their sails. My wife told me there was a way to catch dew at night by putting a sail horizontal and weighting it in the center with a rock or other object also to have a little water in the morning that would collect from night time dew on the ocean.
So, any tricks they knew of in 1818 that we may or may not know of today (including drinking your own urine to stay hydrated likely was done to stay alive). (Even though too much of this will make you too toxic and likely start to hallucinate) it is one way to stay alive for awhile.
Even though what they likely would have done to stay alive would be mostly different from today.
Also, it is important to understand that these men would have immune systems far superior to those of us today who have had shots and anti-biotics etc. and have taken many synthetic medicines. Only those who were very lucky and had incredibly superior immune systems survived at all then.
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