Week 8

"In the Heart of the Sea" is a good example of what happens when a bunch of testosterone gets together. First of all, I feel like the whole situation could have just about been avoided if the men had decided not to take the route they took with the limited supplies they had in storage. The Nantucketers seemed to look at themselves as some of the toughest, most able men on the sea, and they payed the price for their cockiness. After their ship had been rammed by the whale, the men were forced to make an emergency voyage back to land in their twenty-five foot whaling rafts. The men viewed this as just another challenge which they would have no problem passing.

"The perils of whaling had given the Nantucketers a high tolerance for danger and suffering. They had been tossed in the air by the flukes of a whale; they had spent hours clinging to the battered remnants of a capsized whaleboat in a cold and choppy seas. 'We are so accustomed to the continual reocurrence of such scenes as these,' Chase wrote, 'that we become familiarized to them, and consequently always feel that confidence and self-possession, which teaches us every expedient in danger, and inures the body, as well as the mind, to fatigue, privation, and peril, in frequent cases exceeding belief.' Only a Nantucketer in November 1820 possessed the necessary combinatio of arrogance, ignorance, and xenophobia to shun a beckoning (albeit unknown) island and choose instead an open-sea voyage of several thousand miles." (pg. 99-100)

This quote from the book shows just how arrogant the men were. They viewed themselves as invincible because they were Natucketers and they could not possibly be harmed on the open sea. This instance actually reminds me of a time when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I was hanging out with my friends and we decided to go on a bike ride. We started out from Alexandria(hickville), Ohio and rode to Newark, Ohio. It was a pretty cloudy day and there was actually thunderstorms in the forecast for that day. But that didn't stop us. When we got to Newark, the clouds were very dark and there was that smell of storm in the air(come on, storms do have a smell). We probably should have called our parents to have them pick us up and wait at the Dairy Isle we drove to but nope, we were all macho men and nobody wanted to be the one to "wimp out" by bringing up the fact that it was about to storm with the hour trip we still had to make back to my friend's house. So we set out and the rain started.... then the hail started... then the lightning started... But we felt like heroes riding our METAL bikes in the middle of a thunderstorm. At the moment, it was pretty cool... Looking back at it now, it was pretty stupid. We are pretty lucky we weren't hurt from the hail of attracted a lightning bolt. I feel like this story ties in pretty well with the situation the men got into in the book. Their dire situation could have been suppressed by hanging out at the island but the men had to be arrogant go for the more challenging situation because they were Nantucketers! When my friends and I finally got back to the house, we couldn't wait to tell the older guys what we had just done. We were dripping with rain and sweat, it was glorious! We told about how we rode home through the hail and the lightning. We sounded so cool and the older guys couldn't believe that we had actually rode our bikes through what was going on outside at the moment. I think our desire to share our "heroic tale" also relates to the book.

"Like many survivors, Pollard was animated by a fierce and desperate compulsion to tell his story. Just as the gaunt, wild-eyed Ancient Mariner of Coleridge's poem poured forth each harrowing detail to the Wedding Guest, so did Pollard tell them everything: how his ship had been attacked 'in a most deliberate manner' by a large sperm whale; how they had headed south in the whale boats; how his ship had been attacked once again, this time by 'an unknown fish'; and how they had found an island where a 'few fowl and fish was the only sustenance.'... Later that night, once he returned to the Diana, Captain Paddack wrote it all down, calling Pollard's account 'the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.'"(Pg. 189)

Pollard, like my friends and I, was so anxious to tell his story of survival. Pollard seemed to take enjoyment in sharing his gruesome tale of survival, and it sounds like the crew may have been interested in hearing about the story. Nobody likes a dull story. In order for a story to be good, there has to be severe conflict and Pollard's story had alot of conflict. There is something innate in humans who seem to take some kind of enjoyment in hearing about someone undergoing the worst possible conditions, and then prevailing. I understand the prevailing part, but why must a human go through a terrible situation in order for their story to become interesting? It certainly adds excitement to a story, but it seems like we seek out stories of tribulation. Actually, it today's world it seems like our culture likes to focus on the bad times of a story more than the prevailing moments. For example, look at the Saw movie series. Not more than 1 or 2 people survive in each movie. Most of the others die a horrid and gruesome death and it seems like those deaths are the majority of the entertainment. Do you think that "In the Heart of the Sea" would be anywhere near as interesting if cannibalism was not involved? I don't think so. I mean, the whale attackes and almost starving to death made for an interesting read, but the whole eating each other and killing each other for meat just escalated the entire story, in my opinion. It's a weird, and in some cases sick, desire that we have as humans to hear about grotesque stiuations. Very intriguing to think about though.