[Lansing] (Endurance) Theme Two: Justified Savagery (Vocabulary Word: Imagery)

Hunting was a common occurrence for the crew of the Endurance. Even while the ship was locked between two floes, hunting was a job intended to minimize the consumption of the provisions in the ship's cargo. The crew's provisions were extremely limited after the loss of the ship, and even though some supplies was salvaged from the endurance, hunting for food eventually became a necessity. As their situation became more desperate, the methods of procuring meat became more brutal, and Lansing provided a kind of shock imagery to accompany that changing brutality: "Killing the seal was usually a bloody business...This involved approaching the animal cautiously, then stunning it across nose with a ski or a broken oar and cutting its jugular vein so that it bled to death... Another technique was to brain the seal with a pickaxe."

At first the crew was reluctant about killing the seals in such a way, but the need for food allowed survivalist instincts to take over. The need eventually became so dire that Shackleton called for the gradual killing of their dogs for meat. Despite the emotional attachments to the dogs, the crew followed Shackleton's orders. When their food was almost depleted, the killing of a sea leopard had Shackleton calling for feasting on its liver. To me, this seemed like justified savagery, allowing their instincts to take over and ignore personal feelings in order to survive.

This struggle to adapt to a survivalist mindset reminded me of chapter four of William Golding's Lord of the Flies when Jack and several others bring back a dead pig and celebrate in a primitive and almost ritualistic form. During the celebration they chanted, "Kill the pig, cut her throat, bash her in." Ralph and Piggy then confronted Jack in saying the the celebration was immature. In both situations, both groups eventually embraced the ways of survival instead of being civilized. Jack's chant and Shackleton's call for feasting on the liver both show a livid imagery that both Golding and Lansing depicted in detail.