When reading this, I related the crew's determined behavior to my own life: when I am 'knocked down,' I have to get back up and not let one thing ruin me. Although the manner in which the men bounced back from the dispiriting sinking of the Essex was inspiring to me, I still felt anxious and somewhat doubtful as to see if there determination would deliver them safely to land. For the question I was asking myself was "how twenty men in three boats could get out of a plight like this alive " (Philbrick 91). .
The second point at which the words on the page seemed to evoke various kinds of emotions was when the men made the decision to butcher and consume the third man to die. At first, I felt revulsion and disgust when I learned that the men had succumbed to ingesting their fellow crew mate. On the other hand, the men were suffering from extreme starvation and "'judgment, conscience, etc. were obliged to submit to the more prevailing arguments of' " their craving appetites (Philbrick 165). After getting over the shock that the men had resorted to cannibalism, I began to experience sympathy because the conditions were so harsh that consuming their crew mates was the only option they had left in order to have a slight chance of surviving. Moreover, a human being's instincts are to survive, and when they are put into a situation that is life-threatening, almost anything would be done in order to do so. With now understanding the decisions of eating the deceased crew member due to human instincts, I do not think that the ways in which the men pursued to eat the other members were humane. Instead of dreading the death of another man and only eating him due to the lack of provisions, the men secretly hoped for another man to die in order to be fed a feast. Once the fifth person died, he was "eaten in only seven day " and the sixth "died and was eaten " (Philbrick 170). As the crew's starvation progressed along with their journey, the men became immune to the task of consuming their fellow crew mates and ate them as if it was not anything out of the ordinary.
