I’ve been enjoying The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. Many great excerpts from this dire tale of survival.
On hunger and despair:
“Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”
“Was God seeing the things they did out here? Bulkeley still sought solace from The Christian’s Pattern, but a passage in it warned, ‘Hadst thou a clear conscience, thou could not fear death. It were better to avoid sin than to flee death.’ Yet was it a sin to want to live?”
“The men toiled even as many of them confronted the debilitating effects of malnourishment: their bodies thinned to the bone, their eyes bulging, their strawlike hair falling out. Bulkeley said of the castaways, ‘They are in great pain, and can scarce see to walk.’ Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.”
On death at sea:
“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea,” one sailor recalled. “The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss… There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
On the island they become stranded upon:
“They were discovering how the climate was marked by incessant tempests. A British captain who passed by the island nearly a century later noted how the fierce squalls beat down from the ever-present clouds, that engulfed the surrounding lonely heights, and called it a place where ‘the soul of man dies on him’.”
On empire:
“The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”
“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
I was happily painting a sign the other night listening to the utter crushing depths of despair and senselessness man are made to weather in the name of meaning and sheer survival.