Abject survival on the ice

At 3:30 A.M. on the 26th of April 1832, the whaler Shannon of Hull, running before a southeast gale, slammed bow first into an iceberg. The captain ran forward in the darkness and laid his hands to the wall of ice even as it continued past them, ripping open the ship's starboard side. They were awash in minutes. Sixteen men and three boys were swept away. The survivors clung to each other beneath a sail, on a part of the ship kept afloat by trapped air. They were without food or water. They survived, with the death of but three more, by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe. A man who left their deck shelter to commit suicide spotted two Danish brigs on the 2nd of May. The survivors, save the captain, were all frostbitten. "The rescue," writes a historian of the arctic whale fisheries, "was one of those providential affairs of which many instances could be related."

I think of a final image of devastation: the remnant of several whaling crews found in a frozen stupor behind a sea wall of dead bodies, stacked up to protect them from the worst of the heavy seas in which their small floe rolled and pitched. (p. 218)

From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez