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The first part Nukushiva
Max islands! The name alone can arouse your whimsy about the hinterland!
Tibi people in herman melville
The crew of the three whaling ships soon realized that the Essex would not sink immediately, and they still had time to save more daily necessities, so they rowed back to the shipwreck and cut off all the rigging with axes. Without a mast, the Essex staggered up by two-thirds. Although the ship is broken now, the crew can still climb up and cut a path on the deck to the cabin. Before 3 pm, they rescued 600 pounds of intact food on board and filled each light whaling ship with about 65 gallons of water as much as possible. In order to repair the ship urgently, they also brought a musket, a small pot of black powder, some nails, several files and two files to rescue several live turtles that were originally locked in a big ship and ready to supply fresh meat-they are the traditional spare food for whalers. As night fell and the wind increased, three ships hesitated on the leeward side of the wreckage, connected one by one with a long rope, like small drops of water on a thin line.
On that gloomy night, Owen Chase took the opportunity to reflect on the sperm whale's attack on the ship and came to the conclusion that the sperm whale was deliberately provocative. It attacked the Essex from among the hunted whales, looking very angry and full of resentment. With this in mind, Chase guessed that it had calculated the frontal collision angle, so that the joint collision speed of the hull and it would have the greatest effect. Although there have been examples of whales hitting the ribs of ships, Chase has never heard of whales hitting ships with their heads. He is convinced that the blow of sperm whales is devastating. "The structure and strength of the whale's head are very suitable for this attack," he commented. "The most protruding part of it is as hard as iron. I really can't compare with it except the inside of the horseshoe."
At dawn, Captain Pollard faced a painful choice. Obviously, three small boats can't stay next to the Essex, because it will sink sooner or later. An overloaded whaling ship must dock, but on which land should it dock? Essex was attacked in the widest ocean on earth. It is known that the nearest land is the remote Marquesas Islands at 0/400 miles southwest/Kloc, and the opposite South American coast is also more than 2,000 miles away. Surprisingly, Captain Pollard chose to sail, on the grounds that despite the slim chance of survival, all the crew members survived, and Thailand was discovered by other ships-often some whaling ships cruised around to increase their harvest and closely monitored the movement at sea; Another possibility of survival is to land on the nameless island, because the Pacific chart is still very rough, and new islands are occasionally missed. In addition, the prevailing wind direction at that time was favorable for sailing to South America, while the shorter voyage had a very unfavorable factor: Maxas Island's reputation was appalling, and sailors said that there were ferocious cannibals living on the island. The crew of Essex feared that even if they could reach Marquesas alive, they would be taken alive and eaten raw. However, this decision proved to be the greatest irony in marine history.
The first part cannibalism nightmare
The voyage of three whaling ships was a nightmare. A group of twenty people were divided into three boats as evenly as possible, including seven people on two boats, and the boat commanded by Chase was the oldest, with only six people. These three ships not only drifted together for 3 1 day, but also escaped the strong winds and waves that forced people to flee. It is said that most of them rely on the first-class navigation skills of whaling ships and the legendary mercy of the sea. Their lingering concern is, of course, the reduction of food and drinking water. The crew is expected to arrive in the mainland in 60 days, so each person can only have a boat full of food and half a pint of water every day. In order to make up for the lack of food, they had to scrape off new barnacles from the ship to eat, slaughter imprisoned turtles, eat their meat, drink their blood, and some even tried to drink their own urine. On the 3rd1day, they saw a dot on the horizon and thought it was Dixie Island, so they jumped for joy. Contrary to expectations, however, this is just an uninhabited place with an unknown map-it was later named HendersonIsland, which is a barren island that can only accommodate the lowest level of life. A week after landing, they ate up all the shellfish, seagull eggs and wild birds they could catch on the island. The only clear water on the island is Koizumi they found on the beach at low tide. They spent a miserable Christmas here, and two days later, the three of them stayed on the island-the most people the island's resources can support. Three small boats set sail again for the distant eastern island.
Surprisingly, these three boats with bigger and bigger cracks were able to drift together, and it was not until the 53rd day of this severe test that they were blown away by a strong wind. Before that, someone died on Chase's boat and the deceased was buried in the sea. Soon after, the body of another person who died in the hot sun was also thrown into the sea. When Isei Cole, a crew member, went into a state of spasm and then died at four o'clock in the afternoon on the eighty-first day, the other three survivors decided to eat a little muscle left on the body. At that time, they only had three days of ship food left. They cut off the limbs of the dead body through brutal slaughter to cut the muscles on it, then cut open the skinny body of the dead body, cut off the heart, sew up the trunk and throw it into the sea together with the bones of the limbs. On the same day, they ate the heart and some other meat first, then cut the rest of Kohler's meat into thin slices and hung it on the rigging to dry. The sliced meat turned green soon, and they roasted it. 10 days later, Chase and two sailors in the same boat were already dying when they were rescued by Indians on a brig in London.
The fate of the other two whaling ships on the Essex is even more tragic. One of the ships and its crew was never heard from again. The other is a small boat commanded by Captain Pollard. Like Chase's crew, he and his six crew members are suffering from more and more hunger and thirst. The only difference between them is that Captain Pollard adopted a murder method similar to cannibalism. So, two people who died of sun exposure and malnutrition on board were immediately eaten, and then four living people drew lots to decide whose body was responsible for feeding others; As a result, cabin attendant OwenCoffin drew a short sign. As he was Captain Pollard's nephew, another crew member volunteered to take his place, but Covent insisted on self-sacrifice. After he was killed by a musket, his flesh kept others alive for ten days. Then, he killed another person-this time he didn't need to kill anyone, and he also sacrificed someone else's "five zang-organs temple". Just 96 days after the Essex was killed, Captain Pollard and Charles Ramsdell, two survivors who shot Covent with muskets, were rescued by another southern Tackett whaling ship, the French Crown Prince. The captain of this ship is Qin Rui Coffin, and both Captain Pollard and the cabin attendant that Lanxi Dai ate are his relatives. This is the whaling world closely related to South Tackett.
It is not surprising that Chase's book can be a sensation, and it also has a far-reaching impact on Melville. Aside from the cannibalism in the book, this book is just a complicated boat trip-although Owen Chase and Captain Pollard's whaling ship drifted more than 4,500 miles in three months, the reason why this book really won public attention was the terrible thing of cannibalism. Everyone was not only horrified at the terrible ending of being eaten, but also disgusted with the murder of others and the poor cabin attendant being eaten (strangely, these resentments did not affect the lives of survivors. The three people who stayed on Henderson Island were rescued by a ship specially sent to pick them up. These eight people not only returned to their old jobs, but also became captains of whaling ships.
Ironically, if Captain Pollard had decided to sail to "cannibal Maxas" instead of South America, perhaps cannibalism would not have happened. A century later, anthropologists who study Maxim still can't find strong evidence to prove that the terrible Maxim is an ogre-a reputation they used to be famous for. In the frequent racial wars in Maxas, in order to turn the samurai's "magic" or soul into a winner, the samurai's body sometimes does become a good meal for others. However, the victims of accidental shipwrecks are not the source of "magic". If it is a cannibal, it is only a small-scale cannibalism. Generally speaking, the fierce "Maxas cannibalism" is a modified myth, which not only deceives the unfortunate sailors on the Essex, but also makes people believe it even if time flies. Melville is the main figure who makes this cannibalism myth spread through the ages. At the peak of his writing career, he became famous not because of Moby Dick, but because he lived among cannibals.
The first part of the forward Max Sass
Melville's two myths Moby Dick and Cannibal took me to Nukushiva, the main island of Marquesas. It was late September, and the flight from Tahiti was the only local air connection, which showed the remoteness of these islands. The plane flew northeast over the seascape without ships and boomed for three and a half hours. In the endless blue sea, only a group of gray full moons and new moons appear, which are atolls in Tua Motos. Earthwork atoll is a fragile vegetation, similar to the yellow-green marks left by sea monsters on the surface of piles and abandoned ships. From a bird's eye view, you can distinguish the shadow in the water. This is the ring where the navigable waterway collides with the reef, forming an aquarium-style lagoon there. Along the beach, there are about twelve huts dotted with a row of palm trees. Located 20 feet below sea level, these huts are so fragile that they have to be ravaged by hurricanes and tsunamis.
The scenery in the marquesas islands is completely different. It emerged from the surface of the ocean. There are no scattered coral reefs beside the big volcanic blocks. The peaks on the island are always shrouded in low clouds, and there are many gullies on the steep black slope, which are covered with dense green plants. There are fifteen islands in Maxas, and nine are uninhabited. These islands block the vast Pacific horizon stretching for thousands of miles, and any place is thousands of miles away from here (it is not an exaggeration to call those places neighbors). Living in such a remote place, the aborigines on the island call their island "TheLandofMan", and they know nothing about the existence of human beings in other places. They were sea immigrants who arrived in Melanesia, Tonga and Samoa through stepping stones centuries ago. The isolated Marquesas Islands are also the place where great Polynesians began to migrate again: huge double canoes brought Polynesians from New Zealand, a land of long white clouds, and these people parted ways in Marquesas Islands. When Melville and other whaling ships landed, the Maxas seemed to have lost their memories of these things. So for newcomers, the isolation and introspection of isolated islands are actually frightening and barbaric.
When I arrived, a French tricolor flag was hung on the flagpole next to the runway. In the northwest corner of Nukusiwa, there is a landing zone leveled by a rugged volcanic platform. The landing area is close to the cliff, facing the trade wind, so the French flag flutters in the breeze. Maxas was first discovered and renamed by Polynesian explorers, but later the Spanish ignored it. Captain Cook, who has visited here, and the United States and Britain are all drooling over the island. Before Melville arrived, a French expeditionary force had not finished claiming these islands for the Paris government. The marquesas islands have obviously always been an overseas territory of France. I saw four young French gendarmes with bronzed skin. Wearing short-sleeved military uniforms and military caps, they casually checked the documents of 12 islanders and 6 returning tourists, just like in the summer on the blue coast (C? Ted'Azur) is on duty. Here, people speak French, but they can't hear marquesas. The six cars parked in the airport building are all French. Unlike police cars, these cars are quite old. When passengers leave the cabin, new passengers board the plane again, the plane flies away, and people on the ground climb into their vehicles and leave the airport. Everyone will give up the airport until the next plane arrives in three days. I brought the only taxi, an outdated pickup truck, and the wheels were worn out. French tourists have hotel drivers waiting, so I am the only passenger in the taxi.
The rugged and winding road around the island is really terrible. The car climbed over the eroded mountainside of Terredesert, which is a "barren land" unsuitable for human habitation. Small pine trees cover the rolling hills, trying to prevent this barren land from being dug out of deeper valleys and gullies again. The pickup truck can only bump at the speed of 15 miles per hour at the earliest. On the one hand, the road is too rugged, on the other hand, it is obvious that no one is in a hurry to go to Nukusiwa recently. If you meet someone, the person you will meet will never go out. Frankly speaking, tourists have nothing to do and there will be no surprises. Although Nukusiwa is the capital of Marquesas, it is still backward, so visitors had better relax and appreciate the cuts around.