The Costs of Survival

"I like it as well as any other." (176).

When I read, "In the Heart of the Sea," I was in the same breath horrified and captivated. To resort to cannibalism in order to survive? The questioning of right and wrong over starvation? I mean, geez, what would I pick?


These questions of choice are always difficult for a reader. The "your choice" and"what ifs" make you question things you never even want to think about. For example: would you die, and be eaten, or would you allow yourself to murder and eat another human being.


Kill or be killed.

My God, may I never have to make choices like this.

I would like to say that I'd rather be eaten, and I think I would. I think. But then again, I have a few things inside of me that make me wonder whether or not that would be my choice.

Question one: am I the leader? I know it may sound crazy, but you don't kill the leader. Usually if the brains of the operation goes, the rest are quick to follow. It made sense to me that the starving sailors of the Essex ate Owen despite the Captain's request to take the sentence himself. He is still a leader figure. Therefore, the lot is not his. Besides, the laws of survival are dictated though luck. Also, as survival goes, the kid was the weakest link. How sick is it to think like that? Also, there are questions of alliance to be asked. "Within a feral community, it is not uncommon for subgroups to develop a collective form of defense against the remorseless march of horror," (172).

Question two: How violent am I? Could I stand the bloodshed? Would my practicallity outweigh my anguish? Would my hunger cage my spirit, my nobility?

Question three: Would I be able to survive the guilt, even if we made it out alive? I guess so. Just to make sure the sacrifice wasn't in vain.

Now, since this is American Lit, I found myself relating the whaleship tragedy to the American struggle for survival, and, of course, the corporate climb.

Humanity has some basic traits, and no matter how we grow and develop, the best and the worst of us still lingers on, programmed into our brainstems. Now it seems to me that this "kill or be killed" mentality has followed us through out the quarter. Get the witches before we get us, get the gold or we get executed in a Spanish prison, kill the white settlers before they destroy Indian culture, etc. So what about dog eat dog? What about the Capitalistic way in which the wealthy eat the poor. Here I go with poverty again. But really. Is darwinism to blame for our current economic situation?

On another note of classwide themes, there was one quote about Shackleton's journey through the Antartic that actually made me laugh out loud. It was courtesy of Shackleton's associate Frank Worsley, and it went like this: "So great was his care of his people that, to rough men, it seemed at times to have the touch of the woman about it, even to the verge of fussiness." (168).

So apparently, if you don't let your men die in the snow or the waves or let them eat each other, that makes you womanly and fussy. Seriously? Next time I'll decide to eat you, and then we'll see whether or not you think mercy is a fussy thing.

In 1914, Shackleton headed up what he titled the "Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition." He had already been knighted for his efforts getting down to the South Pole, but he wanted to cross the continent. On the way down, however, his ship Endurance was trapped in the ice, and Shakleton was forced to take six men and some provisions on a rescue mission while the rest of the crew was trapped on Elephant Island. Eventually Shackleton managed to save them all, 22 men in total.

(Shackleton, Ernest. South: The Endurance Expedition. London: Penguin Classics, 2004. Print.
Worsley, FA. Shackleton's Boat Journey. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.)

So that's what it means to be womanly, huh? We all survive?

Sounds good to me.

"Hope was all that stood between them and death." (168).