RE: Daily quotes
June 6, 2013 at 9:34 am
(This post was last modified: June 6, 2013 at 9:40 am by Angrboda.)
Warning: spoilers, re: the documentary on the Greely Arctic expedition.
Quote:
After being stranded in the Arctic for two years, Horace Greeley and his expedition abandoned camp to trek
southward in hopes of meeting a rescue party halfway.
"At Fort Conger [in the high Arctic] they had everything they needed. They had a wonderful station that was warm
and secure. There was ample game. They could have lived there for years, probably unhappily, but they could have
lived there for years."
"It just made absolutely no sense to leave Fort Conger. Many of the men wrote in their private diaries that this was
absolutely foolish. It was insane to do this."
At three o'clock on the afternoon of August 9th, 1883, Sergeant Brainard shuttered the doors at Fort Conger, and hurried
to join the crowd of sullen, fearful men waiting in the boats. Greely had ordered the abandonment of Fort Conger, and
Brainard dutifully carried out his orders.
Two weeks after they left Fort Conger, the ice seized up. With the steamboat hopelessly trapped, Greely no longer had any choice.
Reluctantly, the men dragged the supplies and their two fragile whaleboats onto an ice floe. Now they were at the mercy of the winds and tides.
Greely's officers seethed with anger, but they agreed with him on one point: the scientific records would not be left behind.
For more than a century [after their rescue] his records gathered dust, until once again the Arctic captured the world's attention.
"We are now using Greely's data to understand how global warming happens, to understand how the climate has changed over
the last hundred years. The irony is that the data is of interest today but not because it offers the key to an understanding of nature,
but because it offers a key to how human beings have changed nature."
"One afternoon [Sgt.] Brainard was standing near the galley and one of the crew asked him, what he was doing. And he was saying, I was just watching
them throwing out the garbage, and in the last hour he saw enough food thrown out to have saved the lives of their 19 dead."
American Experience: