Comparison:
Imagine an airline flight of five months with one brief stop, no movies, porridge for breakfast, salt pork for dinner, and a bottle and a half of fresh water per day.
Peter Stark helps us ponder what life on an 1810 voyage would have been like for crew and passengers on the 269 ton exploration ship Tonquin. Sounds as if the size of your bag for the overhead rack would have been the least of your problems. Other annoying passengers seem to have been a real deal.
Context:
When the Tonquin had rounded Cape from Horn she had sailed 9,165 miles New York Harbor, according to her officers' calculations. Another roughly 7,200 miles brought them to the Hawaiian Islands, for a total distance of more than 15,000 miles and five months simply to reach Hawaii, trapped with one's enemies in a cargo-jammed space one hundred feet long, surrounded by nothing but one another and the infinite wilderness of the sea.
Nothing in our daily world remotely compares to this extreme confinement, except perhaps space travel or a winter in Antarctica. Imagine an airline flight of five months with one brief stop, no movies, porridge for breakfast, salt pork for dinner, and a bottle and a half of fresh water per day. The cultural clashes between factions-American sailors, Scottish fur traders, French-Canadian voyageurs, and naval heroes-exacerbated the pressures of extreme confinement, a phenomenon noted by modern psychological studies of crews that winter in Antarctica stations.
Citation:
Stark, Peter. Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier. Ecco, 2014, p. 57.
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