Nothing has come of my late ight of no going to bed - what a ahimpelfuck I have become.
My life seems to have no purose t all.
I ask you??
I am equally sure Captain Scott never intended for anyone else to read his diaries, although I have done (for my new novel, Everland), as have countless other people, and there is a chance my great-grandfather did too. Ernest Shackleton, however, would not have been surprised: he edited his 1914-17 journal into the book, South!, which was published three years after he had returned from Antarctica. Scott's journal, in contrast, was retrieved from his pocket after he had been dead for eight months. The difference would prove to be important.
With curious symmetry, both Scott and Shackleton's lives ended up being defined by a journey of around 800 miles. With his ship Endurance crushed by the ice and the crew eventually marooned on Elephant Island, Shackleton and five men then sailed more than 800 miles in a boat to South Georgia to get help. Incredibly, they made it. It took another four months before Shackleton was able to rescue the stranded men, but he succeeded. Not a single man died. South! describes one of the most astonishing journeys ever made. And despite the overwhelming probability that no one from Endurance would survive, a spirit of cheerfulness permeates the book. Shackleton and his boat crew battle against terrifying odds with unbreakable optimism, while on the storm-battered Elephant Island, where the men were reduced to boiling old seal bones for food, there are comic anecdotes and banjo concerts. Any mention of the conflict or anguish that occurred is brief to the point of non-existence. As Shackleton remarks in the preface, the story is of "high adventure, strenuous days, lonely nights, and, above all, records of unflinching determination". Writing retrospectively, his focus is naturally on the larger triumph of their escape rather than the smaller, spikier details of their ordeal.
No comments:
Post a Comment