[Lansing] (Endurance) Part Six: Tide (Vocabulary Word: Diction)

The tides have turned, both literally and metaphorically. The odds are stacked against the crew of the Caird. A twenty two foot boat must navigate nearly a thousand miles of treacherous, rolling waves to literally hit a bulls-eye only a few miles wide. Even the crew of the Caird thought the objective was bleak: "Only very occasionally did they think about South Georgia. It was so remote, so Utopian that it was almost depressing to contemplate. No man could have endured with just that to keep him going." To them, land had become a symbol, an out-of-reach object that became the singular focus of the crew yet impossible to optimistically focus on. Lansing described South Georgia as Utopian, meaning that to find it would require intensive determination to find but seems unlikely to find even for the most seasoned navigator.

In etymology, the word Utopia comes from the Greek ou (not) and topos (a place). Definition of "Utopia" Coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, this word described the perfect society on a small, remote island in his socio-political frame-narrative Utopia. In one word, Lansing effectively described the crew's feeling towards South Georgia while being consistent with the initial use of the word in depicting a small island. Lansing uses precise diction in this case in making South Georgia symbolic to the Utopia's impossibility of existence. This also foreshadows that South Georgia is not a utopia, meaning there are still difficulties ahead, such as the mountainous terrain faced in the next chapter. Although indirect, the use of Utopia shows that the crew longed to be there, but felt that they would not arrive there; hence, the etymology of Utopia, "not a place," is used correctly in both the denotative and connotative sense of the word.

A map of More's Utopia.