【正文】
gan to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats. These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of Moby Dick. Even in todays world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then. No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. No search party was ing to look for these men. So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what its like to be afraid. We know how fear feels, but Im not sure we spend enough time thinking about