Rifles

William T Vollmann

He had the knowledge that manhood isn’t something you only earn once, even when you’ve been circumcised by the Elders or you’ve killed your first tiger, but something that must be achieved over and over, always by pursuing what you fear; if you stay still you will only come to fear more and more things. Being a man doesn’t mean being afraid of nothing; it means being warned by the fear, not mastered by it. There was nothing wrong with being afraid of what he was about to do. He had never done it. He was doing it. Later he could feel proud or ashamed of it.

It is strange when the light fails. Since it happens so gradually, you are deceived. The river is still blue – surely the same blue! The fractures in the rocks on the far side are as numerous as ever (not that you counted them), and the tundra is still there with all its little mosses and leaves. Everything is still there, and yet everything is harder to see. Logic proves that certain things which were visible a quarter-hour ago cannot be anymore. But which?

A polar bear killed a man and didn’t even get to eat him before it was shot.

Maybe life is a process of trading hope for memories. When the snow was deep in September maybe you did not remember very much. But you did remember, I am sure, how many flat rocks of a sulphurous color there were which had been shattered into slabs stacked neatly one against the next like the slices of a loaf of bread; you could pick up a book of these slabs and turn their livid-yellow pages in your hands, reading the words of lichen-dots and listening to the moaning of the wind; then, if you chose, you could skip the pages into some Arctic lake one by one, and watch them smash into two as they struck the water, sink, and lie shimmering among the greenish rocks, and the water rippled over them in the wind, as if trying to turn them, but they would never turn or be together again. – All books are like this; they stand shoulder to shoulder in the library stacks; perhaps they are ‘popular’ at first, perhaps not, but eventually they stand anonymous, unread, forgotten; and that is how it should be, for that is how it is with lives.

These appearances, however were but gimmicks of the present, whose artifice it is to make everything seem new.

When a Native American first fired a rifle, he agreed to the unstated contract that doomed all American tribes and guaranteed European success on the North American continent. This is because technologies, like species, can have catastrophic consequences when they migrate. You have heard of invasive species--the rifle was an invasive technology.
A technology develops in a specific context and when the higher levels of that technology migrate to another context there is always the risk that the balance will be so disturbed that the context will be driven to extinction before it can reattain equilibrium--and this is usually through ignorance.
When European traders brought firearms to North America, the natives were presented with a vastly more effective tool that was also much easier to use. But what natives did not understand was that firearms rely on a massive infrastructure which is in turn based on an even more sweeping set of technologies and values. By using a rifle, a native endorsed and became a part of such things as mining, manufacturing, industrialism, corporations, markets, capitalism, western philosophy, and even Christianity. Without passing judgment on any of these things, it is safe to say that their transplantation into a society might be dangerous--and is undoubtedly worrying when they are transplanted in secret.
In Western society, where the aforementioned technologies and values were evolved, the society was adapted to their presence and at balance with them. But when they were brought to North America, the same protective shielding of slowness and time was not available to act as a buffer to their integration into native societies. The technologies were available and ready-to-use, so who could wait?
But with their use came a reliance on Europeans because native society lacked many of the technologies off which firearms are based. They had to blindly agree to these without the ability either to develop them for themselves or observe and consider how they would change their society.
After fifty years of rifle use, what was left of the original hunting technologies and cultures of natives? Not enough to kick the addiction to European supply of ammunition and firearms and technology. It was in this way that Europeans conquered North America.

Currently, we have the moral enlightenment to shake our heads and wag our fingers at this behavior. We think we would have had more respect. But at the same moment we advise developing countries to accept our boon of modern medicine (just as an example, there are millions of advanced technologies that we are giving as impossible debts). Many of these countries cannot help but take this fruit we offer--it's miraculous after all--yet they do not understand that by taking their are agreeing to all the technologies and values that are the context for the development of modern medicine. And in many cases developing countries are also agreeing to a reliance on developed countries that sometimes looks more like subjugation than philanthropy and aid. And so when they've forgotten how they used to do medicine, when their own technologies have been choked into extinction by the invasive species of a far more pernicious species, what will they do if the new species suddenly dies off? What will they do if they decide that they don't like these new flowers? They were hooked but they didn't even know it.

And on an even more startling scale (well, maybe not, but it will be to you, because if you're reading this, you'll probably care more about what I'm about to say than what I just said), all technology is the same. We never really understand what we are getting into when we adopt a new technology, especially in our culture where new is a very good word and old is often a bad one. We've been raised to believe that if it's new it's worth our attention and maybe worth a shot. But who knows how addicting the technologies we develop are? What if one shot is enough to hook us?
So now we've got the Internet, cell phones, television, plastic, nuclear bombs and we don't really understand all we've agreed to in our contracts with these technologies, nor do we even know if there is a way to go back. We assume that if a technology catches on and becomes widely in use it's good. But by that definition, we are forever doomed to what is new and can never, never go back. If five years from now we find out that the Internet is actually more of a chain than freedom, we won't have anything for it but to bind our wrists a little tighter.

Victoria

Knut Hamsun

No, I’m smiling, the husband says. It’s my way of smiling. I want this grimace to be uniquely my own.

Thank you, thank you, Johannes, dear; it’s so sweet of you not to be furious with me, she said, wiping away her tears. But you mustn’t think I don’t love you too. By God, I’ll come and see you much more often than before and do everything you desire. It’s just that I love him more. I didn’t want it that way. It’s not your fault.

Love is God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, “Let there be light!” there was love. And everything that he made was very good, and no part thereof did he wish undone. And love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

Love is not just. Love does not deal in equality, nor does it acknowledge rights. Like the unreasoned whims of fate that make one man tall and smart while another is left deformed and brainless without even material comforts as compensation, love gives to the undeserving and takes from the worthy.
Love is the truth in "To those who have much, more will be given, and to those who have little, even what they have will be taken from them." Love gives and takes in scandalous disproportion. Like Joseph Merrick, love is a misshapen Elephant Man. Like Proteus, it shapeshifts while we try to pin it down (which never we can) but we will try anyway.
You disagree? Love isn't out of its mind? True love anyway. But what of all things is true love if it isn't a madman on a dream? Who would say that scaling Cliffs of Insanity, enduring the Pit of Despair, and fighting Rodents of Unusual Size is anything but a wildly inappropriate response to life?
Love is inappropriate.
If you seek balance, do not venture near love or any of those who move in that circus crowd: mercy, selflessness, humility, kindness, compassion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and grace--these are not well-balanced individuals. They are a set of lunatics prancing about in their underpants; they are flower bedecked babies fully grown, who have scraped their knees and elbows. Their giddiness makes us feel embarrassed for them, but that feeling's tricky since in its loftiness it has pity which might be disdain and if we look at it our embarrassment on their behalf looks very much like jealousy on their account. After all, they do seem to be enjoying themselves, for all their scrapes and bruises. And love is their tyrant leader, the great extortionist.
Do you see, love just isn't just. You'll pardon that literary atrocity because love works in atrocities and outrages and in disturbing and in discomfort.

It is Victoria who is writing this, and God is reading over my shoulder.

Dark Shadows Falling

Joe Simpson

One distressing incident in this storm illustrates the selfishness of some of the trekkers. Two Western clients had abandoned their Sherpa when he was too weak to move form his tent to the helicopter. The clients broke trail out to the aircraft, which had been unable to land nearby, and then took off, leaving the poor man to die. When asked in Namche why they had abandoned the Sherpa, the same trekkers replied that they were anxious to reach the airport at Lukla so that they would not miss their international flight connections.

If you would like to lose all respect for people who don't belong in the wilderness, read this book (just be careful, you might be one of them).

The Ice-Shirt

William T Vollmann

Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?

The lambs crunch grass very watchfully, but the old ewes and rams do not look up at your approach because nobody has ever hurt them and they do not understand the meaning of the sheep-skulls that lie in the grass they graze on. – The birds, on the other hand, await the worst with hysterical foreknowledge, so that if you venture into their nesting-fields, where the grass is green and then white, as if frosted, thousands of them begin to swoop and scream and flap until their gull-cousins on the rocks offshore are infected with alarm, and sob like babies. (Would you, reader, rather be a sheep or a bird? I say that the sweet sheep have no cares, and for that reason their stupidity is to be prized).

In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

Oh, that game of Changing! The players did not really want to be anything; they only wanted to be what they were not. Nobody saw that change came of its own, unfolding as was ordained, so that one would be as ungracious to rush it as to stay it.

Was a woman something she was supposed to be? But she had not started out being one, and she did not want to be one. She did not necessarily want not to be one, but she wanted to be several things. A woman was not all she was.

So, too, Freydis’s selfish cruelties were not originally hers by nature, but came about simply because her stepmother Thjodhild would not own her in her heart – or so it is incumbent upon a historian to believe in this age of compassionate first causes, for how could we hope, if people could be born wicked?

It seems like there’s nothing like a close brush to bring you down to earth, and make your priorities in your mind very clear (for a good while, anyway). I started considering what the fuck I was doing here and realized that while I think it was a step in the right direction, doing that kind of thing, my priorities were all fucked up, that I just had to quit doing things so much for show, just start doing things just ‘cause I wanted to. Real honest things that I wanted to do. I was so ashamed of myself. After that I had kind of a miserable night. Thought entirely too much. And in the morning I packed up and headed out.

In those days there was Power everywhere. You did not have to be wise to find it. Power lived in pretty feathers; Power was in stars and owls’ beaks; Power was in the patterns that the women painted on everyone’s shirts so that they could find the animals they hunted and kill them; they could bring back meat to eat and clothe everyone in their skins and they could all dream of the Star People who dwelled on the black roof above the trees and sparkled at their images in brooks and lakes; they dreamed also of the Plant People who came on green legs bringing corn-gifts and tobacco-gifts; and all the gifts had Power; but the most Powerful color was red, and the women made paint from red earth and birds’ eggs and painted special things on everyone’s shirts, so that red cloth of the Jenuaq was highly prized.

The first part of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, Vollmann begins an impressive project--to detail intimately the various first interactions between North Americans and Europeans. Vollmann's choice to embrace the story-telling histories of various places and peoples instead of generating the traditional history or historical novel, provides a startling conception of our history. Seven Dreams (or what I've read of it so far) opens the mind to a host of new thoughts on history.
Often times histories attempt a detailed look at where we were then but fail to acknowledge where we are now, and comparatively many fictional works attempt to reveal what then was through a reality of now. But Vollman, by a combination of interviews, histories, myths, fiction, and personal experiences, finds a way to tell the story of then and now. What makes him so succesful is his basic theory that he must walk in the footsteps of the histories he is going to tell. The Ice-Shirt circles around the Viking discovery of North America; Vollmann writes their story while he is walking along the shores of Greenland and moving about from island to island in Northern Canada.
There are so many understated but interesting approaches to history in Vollmann's Seven Dreams that one has a strange sense of urgency reading the books. Like any truly novel idea, you read it with some strong sense of disbelief--like watching magic trick, or better, like seeing the impossible made reality before your very eyes. It's very exciting.

Vain Art of the Fugue

Dumitru Tsepeneag

As I stepped onto the bus I felt an urge to look back, as if someone had called out to me or tapped me on the shoulder or perhaps just looked at me, the way you look at a person who seems familiar and whose name you want to call out (what name?), or the way you stand at the window or the garden gate, gripping the green or black bars, and follow someone with your eyes as long as possible as he walks away, and--for no real reason, knowing he'll turn around anyway--you feel a tightness in your chest as you will him to look back, focusing on the nape of his neck or a point between his shoulders, not thinking of anything so that people might say you were staring into space down a street that'll soon be empty, where a dog sneaks along the side of the house, and a woman looks vacantly towards the man who's turned the corner, hurriedly walking along with his head slightly bent, clutching a bunch of flowers rather awkwardly, slowing almost to a stop to look at a front yard, unsure of himself, then starting up again, crossing one street and another, approaching the stop where the bus is already about to leave, running the last few yards, jumping onto the step, and glancing back: I couldn't resist the temptation and therefore moved my head with a sense of shame because I couldn't control myself, no one had called out to me, no one was behind me, and then the wheels of the bus began to turn, I climbed the next and final step, felt in my pocket for some change, and the flowers got squashed a little against the ticket-seller's counter.

A fish was passing, in flight above the garden.

I wanted to write a thought imitating the style of Vain Art of the Fugue but this is not the place for that. I have never read a piece that had so much of the form of music. Tsepeneag's story is really a one-chapter story that is told thirty times, but never quite the same. It's not a story being told and retold from different perspectives, although it encompasses that, but it's a story being told differently thirty times. Tsepeneag repeats certain notes, maybe at different octaves, but certainly the same notes, in each revision of the story. I did not think the conventions of plot and story could be disregarded so blatantly with such success. Vain Art of the Fugue is a challening read, but more rewarding than many things I have read recently. It is an entirely different way of telling a story with an emphasis on the things in the story rather than the story as a whole. In a way it is the opposite of what Steinbeck tried to do in his story-play Burning Bright. Where Steinbeck took the broader story of his piece and repeated and expanded it with different pieces, Tsepeneag places the emphasis on the continuity of the pieces though the story may be different. As with anything that is associated with GEB, there's math somewhere nearby.

K2 the 1939 Tragedy

Andrew J Kauffman
William L Putnam

Commendable but not recommended as a way of life.

History with an agenda is always a little unnerving. History is always a little unnerving. Though Kauffman and Putnam go about "setting the record straight" with the necessary nods at the opposing viewpoint, it is clear that they intend to leave one sort of taste in the reader's mouth. Perhaps if they hadn't been quite so blatant about their project, or perhaps if they had never acknowledged that they were doing it, my mind would not have put up so many fences and walls to keep them from getting into me. While it covers an interesting story, it fails to do more than be finger-pointing.

Riding Toward Everywhere

William T. Vollmann

I am not a brave man at all, but a cautious, even timid soul who makes himself pull off one stunt after another for his own good.

Above all, how luxurious it is to travel I care not where for no good reason! As my best friend Ben likes to say, What you get is what you get. And I hope that as what I get diminishes, thanks to old age, erotic rejection, financial loss or authority’s love-taps, I will continue to receive it gratefully. But there is no gainsaying the fact that what I’ve gotten is more than many people’s share. Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may or may not be warranted. The question is what I make of them. When Thoreau went to ground at Walden Pond, he got free use of Emerson’s land. When he was jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax, a lady bailed him out. Do these two footnotes of dependency vitiate the integrity of his eloquence? It may well be that Thoreau lacked gratitude for these favors, or that his self-reliance was never as perfect as he pretended or I once imagined. What of that? During the time of their fashioning, words may or may not dwell with their maker in a relationship of “sincerity.” After the maker has finished with them, they live to the extent that they inspire us. I might not have been allowed to be, nor wanted to be, Thoreau’s friend. But Walden gives me pleasure and makes me braver. So does riding the rails. If this essay can do the same for you, then my material comforts, even if in your eyes they render me a dilettante or a hypocrite, have been useful means to that end. If this essay fails, the fault must be in it, in you, me, the orange bucket or some combination of the above; all the same, it was still written “sincerely.”

Hypocrisy is a great shadow over life. We are all possessors of hypocrisy just as we are all possessors of shadows. Like our shadows, hypocrisy grows and shrinks but never fully leaves us. The great length of humanity's shadow sickens us. From the privileged college kids discussing poverty to the fearful readers of high adventure to the many residents of church pews on Sunday, few, if any are able to match up the ideals of their worldview with the reality of their worldlife. Most live a disgustingly righteous life in their minds while their actual actions are dirty, sticky, dull, and muddy with selfishness. Every great proponent of anything has failed to live up to his own advice. We are often in word but rare in deed.
How many people have become embittered at the sight of so much hypocrisy, at such a shadowy land? No one can last long in such a shadowland without being driven to anger, bitterness and hatred. You've met these people. Former idealists who have been hurt too many times by friends and fellows, prematurely retired zealots who found they didn't have the strength to push through on their own and now recognize the shadows in others that are similar to their own. So their shadows grow long with the lengthening shadows of the world and it seems the sun is setting on them.
Standing beneath a tree, it's hard to see anything but shadowy shapes. Walking through a shadowed valley, few wildflowers are noticed. Sitting in the shade of a porch, dimness. But we cannot forgot that shadows are always produced by realities in the sun. What looks to be ugly and dark is only our perception of a thousand bright-shining leaves. What look like great walls looming forbodingly over us, are the gentle green slopes covered in heather and red. What is dimness, is the misperception of goodness. Hypocrisy will always exist and often in great quantities, but like shadows it is a slight impression made by a good reality. To dwell in shadows, to search them out first, to roll oneself up in them, to find them about you is to fail to use your eyes and to gaze at a flat, monochrome representation of the truth. If you live in shadows, look at the sunlight side of the shadow-caster.
Get pissed if you would like. Sit down in your little shadowland and find the world unintersting and gray and dull. But remember, this is not reality. So look atVollmann and Thoreau and myself and anyone who has ever let you down, all great paragons of outspoken hypocrisy, and recognize that it couldn't be so shadowy if there weren't such a bulk of goodness standing between you and the sun.

A Furnace Afloat

Joe Jackson

Good luck had consequences.

Perhaps he didn’t know it yet, for Fred was angered beyond words. This is what it comes to, he thought: a high-hat’s offer of money for something more precious than gold. He hated Henry in that instant as he stared back at the gaunt face, wide eyes, mouth frozen open in hope and surprise. Why didn’t the little bastard just ask for water instead of going on about how much his watch would bring? As if there was a pawn shop here in the Pacific; as if he could eat the watch case and mainspring. That’s what the rich always assumed of the poor—that they were slaves to the price of a trinket, lackeys to be bought and sold. It didn’t work like that, not here. Sure it was easy to take money, but what people like Henry never understood was that you did so to survive. Survival was what ultimately mattered: the fuel that drove the anger, that primed the panic of starvation, that lurked in every shadow like a thug. Survival was the chasm dividing the rich and poor, a divide the rich would never bridge because they hadn’t experienced what such life did to a man. It twisted him to something brutal, turned him inside out with vengeance till he was ready to kill just to be heard. Eventually he assumed that killing was the only way to be heard. The gap would grow wider, the hatred deeper, until the entire world was like their little boat, swept by a wrath that raged like a furnace till nothing was left but ashes in a drifting hull.

A clipper ship set afire and sunk through one man's carelessness; a 4,300 mile voyage in a longboat; a class war enacted in the microcosm of a castaway's world--survival does not induce democracy any more than a voting system.

The Stars, the Snow, the Fire

John Haines

To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read. The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combinations change in meaning, but the language remains the same. It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again.

Far across the Tanana, a mile or more to the south of us, a group of wolves was singing. I call it singing, not howling, for that is what it was like. We could distinguish three, perhaps four voices – wavering, ascending in pitch, each one following on the other, until they all broke off in a confused chorus. Their voices sank into distant echoes on the frozen river, and began again. A light and uncertain wind was blowing out there, and the sound grew and faded as the air brought it toward us or carried it away southward. It might have come across a thousand years of ice and wind-packed snow, traveling as the light of stars from a source no longer there.

More likely he was one of those eternal children who will never make a name or a fortune; a child of the weather, without complaint and harmless as a fly. He would never lose his innocence, no matter how badly the world behaved toward him. Disappointment would weather on him like the faded blue of his clothing, and he would go on in his quiet way, working and looking until death found him.

I look at my hands and flex my fingers. They have handled much, done things I hardly dreamed of doing when I was younger. I have woven my nets with them and made my snares. I have pulled the trigger of my rifle many times and watched a bird fall or a moose crumple to the ground. And with these hands I have gone deep into the hot body of the animal, and torn from it the still-quivering tissue of lungs, heart, liver and guts. There is blood under the nails, dirt and grease in the cracks of the finger joints.
I have learned to do these things, and do them well, as if I’d come into something for which I had a native gift. And a troubling thought will return sometimes: having done so much, would I kill a man? I do not know. I might if I had to, in anger, perhaps, passion of defense or revenge. But not, I think, in the cold, judging light of the law. I have seen a war, a dead man floating in the sea off a Pacific island, and I was there. By my presence alone, I took part in many deaths. I cannot pretend that I am free and guiltless. Justice evades us; the forest with all its ancient scarcity and peril is still within us, and it may be that we will never know a world not haunted in some way by a return to that night of the spirit where the hangman adjusts his noose and the executioner hones his axe to perfection.

Last night a thunder storm came through our area. We've been having quite a few late afternoon storms this summer. I went out to watch it. I saw a bolt of lighting curl and snarl across the sky like a whip crack. The thunder shook my house.
I am always startled by how humbling it is to be faced with storms, mountains, oceans, and any part of nature on her own scale and terms. I am always startled how calming it is to be humbled. It makes me wonder if humility isn't the best guard there is against anxiety and fear. You can worry all you want, but once you recognize your place, just how small you are beneath the leaden sky, it becomes difficult to do anything but laugh at your fears.
Reading Haines is like looking into the mountains.

Annapurna

Maurice Herzog

Some fifty patients awaited the Doctor Sahib. They had all kinds of diseases, mostly inflammation or unaccountable fevers. It would have taken a long time to see all the patients and required a lot of medical supplies, not to speak of endless patience on Oudot’s part. He drew up a standard questionnaire:
1) How old are you?
2) Do you sleep well at night?
3) Have you a good appetite?
4) Where is the pain?
5) Do you cough?
This questionnaire was given to Noyelle who translated it into English for G.B.’s benefit, with the help of a few words of Hindustani, and G.B. translated it into Gurkhali. The replies had to follow the reverse order, but after all these intermediaries they were often pretty queer. The Sherpas were doubled up with laughter. They could only understand part of the conversation—the last bit that began in Hindustani, went on into Gurkhali and then came back in Hindustani. By this stage it had suffered a farcical change!
Oudot had tremendous prestige. People came long distances to see him, for he had become a sort of god. We admired the touching simplicity of these creatures who put their health and sometimes their lives in the hands of a complete stranger. It was the first time they had been examined by a real doctor. When they were ill they consulted the village witch doctor, or so-called “healer.” The great panacea was always the same—an ointment of cow-dung.
The patients were not always very tractable; they were bound by the dictates of their religion, and they didn’t like it when Oudot touched them. The hardest job was to examine the women, who were excessively modest and would not allow themselves to be touched on any account, still less undressed. On one occasion Oudot succeeded in getting all the finery off a Nepalese girl. When she was half undressed Sarki, who had been helping, discreetly left the tent. Nothing would then persuade the girl to proceed any further.
Medicine had to be dealt out to all of them. Whenever he could, Oudot gave them something relevant to their ailment; otherwise he distributed inoffensive pills which had mainly a psychological effect. But there was no knowing what they might do with the things. They would unhesitatingly swallow anti-sunburn ointment or the most solid of plasters, and cheerfully swap medicines, given for particular illnesses. But they showed great courage in any surgical treatment.
One day an unfortunate youth came along with a double compound fracture of the wrist. The radius stuck out from a mass of pus, the arm was enormous, and the hand swollen out of all recognition. He was certainly in a bad way. Oudot-always by the same complicated process of interpretation—discovered that the accident had happened a fortnight ago. He told the parents that amputation of the arm was the only way of saving their son. They refused, and made it plain that all they wanted was dressing. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Oudot gave the patient morphia and then tried to get things back in place: he succeeded after a fashion and finally put the arm in plaster.

This story, a couple paragraphs at the backend of a weighty expedition report, pretty much covers everything that happened on that expedition and maybe everything that happens to climbers all over the world.

“What will happen?” I asked Oudot anxiously. There would be no one to change the dressing, and in a few days the wound would begin to suppurate again.
“There’s nothing else to be done. He’ll probably be dead in a fortnight.”

In the Heart of the Sea

Nathaniel Philbrick

First they saw bones--human bones--littering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat were the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered with sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates.

Of the twenty men who escaped the whale-crushed ship, only eight survived. The two men rescued by the Dauphin had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific--farther by at least 500 miles than Captain William Bligh's epic voyage in an open boat after being abandoned by the Bounty mutineers and more than five times farther than Sir Ernest Shackleton's equally famous passage to South Georgia Island.

One of the great shipwreck stories of seafaring lore; the shipwreck of the Essex was the inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick. We humans rarely recognize the amount of luck that allows us to continue in the belief that we dominate nature. When nature gets angry, technology suddenly reveals how rotten and weak its fibers are.