“A few pages before came the account of the loss of the Shannon, when on April 26, 1832, at 58°20’N, she ran into an iceberg during a gale. The ship fell apart under them and partially sank. The captain and what crew members who had not been washed overboard survived on salvaged provisions under a shelter rigged up from a sail. “A Shetlander suggested to the surgeon of the Shannon ‘that he should bleed him, that he might drink his own blood to quench his intolerable thirst.’ The surgeon had his lancet in his pocket; he opened one of the man’s veins and collected the blood in an old shoe. The man drank his own blood with delight.” The surgeon then bled a dying man to offer him the same meal, but he died, and the shoeful of blood was offered around to the seventeen survivors “and it had an astonishing effect in reviving them. One by one, Captain Davey and the 16 men were then bled in succession, the doctor even bled himself. Some mixed the blood with flour, others drank straight from the shoe, but one and all found themselves wonderfully refreshed.” They were rescued by “two Danish brigs bound for Davis Straights with passengers,” the Hvalfisken and the Navigation, the latter headed by a Captain Bang, six days and seven nights after the wreck.
I read these stories and ate a small, fragrant, fresh-baked cinnamon snail (see Swedish baking) and some chocolate, along with a shot of calvados and some tea in the warm saloon, looking out occasionally at the snow blowing sideways up here at the Seven Islands north of Latitude 80 on September 12, 2011.”
Rebecca Solnit, from ‘Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition’
