普通高中課程標(biāo)準(zhǔn)實驗教科書英語選修高三選修9 Unit 2 Sailing the oceans-Using Language

所屬教程:普通高中課程標(biāo)準(zhǔn)實驗教科書英語選修高三

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THE GREATEST NAVIGATIONAL JOURNEY:A LESSON IN SURVIVAL

I am proud to have sailed with Captain Bligh on his journey of over 40 days through about 4,000miles in an open boat across the Pacific Ocean in 1789. Our outward voyage in the "Bounty" to Tahiti had been filled with the kind of incidents that I thought would be my stories when I returned home. But how wrong I was! On our departure from Tahiti, some of the crew took over the ship.They deposited the captain into a small boat to let him find his own way home. But who else was to go with him? Those of us on board the "Bounty" were caught in a dilemma. Was it better to risk certain death by sitting close together on a small, crowded open boat with very little food and water? Or should one stay on the "Bounty" with the crew and face certain death from the British Navy if caught? The drawback of staying on the ship seemed to grow as I thought about how wrong it was to treat Captain Bligh in this way. So I joined him in the small boat. As dusk fell, we seemed to face an uncertain future. We had no charts and the only instruments the captain was allowed to take with him were a compass and a quadrant.

Once we were at sea, our routine every day was the same. At sunrise and sunset the captain measured our position using the quadrant and set the course using the compass. It was extremely difficult for us to get a correct reading from the quadrant as the boat moved constantly. The captain used a system called "dead reckoning". He knew there was land directly northwest of our original position. So his task was to make sure we stayed on that course. As you can see from the map we kept to a straight course pretty well. In addition, the captain kept us all busy reading the tables to work out our position. Although this took a great deal of time, it didn't matter. Time was, after all, what we had a lot of!

Our daily food was shared equally among us all: one piece of bread and one cup of water. It was starvation quantities but the extreme lack of water was the hardest to cope with psychologically. Imagine all that water around you, but none of it was safe to drink because the salt in it would drive you mad! All the time the captain tried to preserve our good spirits by telling stories and talking hopefully about what we would do when we got back to England. We only half believed him.

The tension in the boat got worse as the supply of food and water gradually disappeared. We could foresee that we would die if we could not reach land very soon and we sank gradually into a sleepy, half-alive state. The captain was as weak as the rest of us, but he was determined not to give up. He continued his navigational measurements every day. He kept us busy and tried to take our minds off our stomachs and our thirst. He kept us alive.

You could not imagine a more disturbing sight than what we looked like when arriving in Timor over forty days after being set loose in our small boat. Our clothes were torn, we had fever and our faces showed the hardships we had suffered. But after a rest, some good meals and some new clothes, everything changed. We couldn't stop talking about our voyage and everybody wanted to hear about it. We were the heroes who had escaped the jaws of death by completing the greatest navigational feat of all time!