But there is no mystery about one thing: not everyone who climbed into Lifeboat 14 will climb out three weeks later. Suspicion among the mostly female passengers at Hardie’s motives and whisperings that he is hiding a treasure add to the tension and mystery aboard. With dwindling supplies and the boat sitting dangerously low, the passengers come to believe Hardie’s early admonishment: “Unless we lighten the load, we’ll sink like a bloody stone.” Indeed, the idea of sacrifice recurs in a spectrum of circumstances, even echoed later by Grace’s attorney. Alliances form and crack, foreshadowing the convolutions of the brewing Great War. Moments of exquisite faith give way to bleakest despair, when rain, a true gift from God, becomes a mammoth storm inflicted by a vengeful Poseidon. Though far outnumbered by the women, the men clearly run the ship and hold the power.ĭebates crest and ebb. Hardie establishes the rules and protocols of food, water, waste disposal, and safety aboard the rudimentary, unsheltered craft. Over the 21 days before their rescue, those on Grace’s boat experience physical and spiritual evolution and devolution, death and survival. ![]() Under the direction of an experienced and able-bodied ship’s mate, John Hardie, three men and one woman row away frantically from the sinking ship, moving ruthlessly through the sickening, thickening soup of bodies and debris, beating back any swimmers attempting to board. But Henry can arrange a spot only for Grace, as the last of 39 escapees on Lifeboat 14, an open cutter provisioned with four oars, a tarp, and sundry limited supplies. Grace and her wealthy new husband, Henry, have been secretly married in London and are heading home to New York to meet his potentially disgruntled family. Hundreds swarm the decks in search of escape. Įvents start with a literal bang as the ocean liner Empress Alexandra, unfortunately named for the ill-fated wife of Russian Czar Nicholas, suffers a major explosion in the center of the hull. Grace’s “memory book” of the 21 days, prepared to help her defense, forms the literary premise of the book. Having come through the ordeal, just barely alive, Grace finds herself again at the mercy of tidal forces, for she is now on trial for her life for her part in a death aboard the lifeboat. However, the book actually begins at a later point and has a larger focus. Through her narrator, Grace Winter, 22 years old, 10 weeks married and six weeks widowed, we hear the story of a small boat stranded for 21 days in the North Atlantic in late summer 1914. It is these questions that writer and architect Charlotte Rogan sets out to explore in her carefully- plotted and cleverly-paced debut novel The Lifeboat. ![]() I, for one, have never forgotten the power of Oscar Schisgall’s 1,000-word parable “Take Over Bos’n,” a gem of a story I read in middle school, which tells of 10 desperate men on a 19th-century lifeboat facing their final day of drinking water.īut what drives us back to these tales of suffering and fortitude in extreme conditions, where hope is at once an indulgence and an obligation? Are we held in the grip of the ultimate question of ethics and survival, “What would you do?” Do we need continued affirmation of the universality of our basest instincts? Or are we simply unable to resist a “ripping yarn?” As far-flung as the flooded earth of Genesis, the oceanless Andes of Alive or the uniquely uncharted waters of Life of Pi, they often are steeped in loneliness and anguish, but gilded in courage and nobility. Within the canon of seafaring misfortune, lifeboat tales present an impressive subgenre of their own. Even today, our 100-year-old passion for anything connected with the sinking of HMS Titanic and the 1,500 souls who perished with her shows no sign of flagging. Terrifying yet strangely satisfying, these stories range from “Gilgamesh” to Robinson Crusoe to The Lord of the Flies. Tales of shipwrecks and disasters at sea have steadily, if morbidly, fascinated people for millennia.
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