More thoughts on the shipwreck
24 February 2018 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI think the reason why my subconscious wasn't really happy with the
'San Demetrio' idea was that it makes Raoul look either stupid or incompetent if he just sits there while drifting further and further away from land, into increasingly certain death. As soon as he realises that they are getting further and further away from land, any desperate measures start to look better than just remaining supinely on the ship. They need some kind of hope to keep them hanging on in rational expectation of an imminent improvement in their circumstances — and they need to be seen to be doing something productive towards their escape, not just sitting around hoping for some fluke to rescue them.
So maybe they try to fix the engine, having discovered that trying to jury-rig the ship to sail out of trouble isn't taking them in the direction they want to go? That could potentially take them a very long time (and I don't suppose Raoul knows the first thing about marine engines — one of the other survivors had better have some idea of how they work!) since they won't have proper facilities on board, but would offer an elusive chimera of hope; as soon as they can get the propeller turning, they can limp back to land or at least up to windward. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Once it works, all their problems are fixed... so it's worth waiting for, right up until the moment when it looks as if they're going to get stuck in the ice.
(Realistically, they probably don't carry enough coal to steam all the way back to land, but there's always the expedient of burning the ship's decks and fittings, as in "Around the World in Eighty Days"!)
Maybe they do fix the engine.
Maybe they actually start steaming back eastward, and it's the strain on the damaged hull caused by running under power that causes the 'Requin' to take on water and finally do a nose-dive, thus forcing them into the boats somewhere near d'Artois' camp ;-p
(An argument between Raoul and Lancard about the possibility? But they don't have a lot of choice; they've got to risk it. Maybe it would have been all right if they hadn't met heavy weather/tried to press on through heavy weather...)
I think that if Raoul is going to have all these colourful extra adventures, then I'm definitely going to need to separate the timelines and leave him presumed dead for the moment in order to come back to that part of the story later — otherwise the action stuff is going to totally overshadow the timeline in which absolutely nothing is achieved and Christine and Erik respectively both start to go stir-crazy as a result...
At least this saves me from the necessity of having to come up with a plausible figure for exactly how much time has elapsed since we last saw Raoul, what with Erik travelling cross-country from Stavanger to Torkelby and then traversing increasingly wild terrain to an unknown destination up by the mountains with a semi-conscious Christine — a time-lapse that I have kept very carefully vague so far, but would need to be accounted for if I'm trying to establish what stage in his salvage Raoul has currently reached!
'San Demetrio' idea was that it makes Raoul look either stupid or incompetent if he just sits there while drifting further and further away from land, into increasingly certain death. As soon as he realises that they are getting further and further away from land, any desperate measures start to look better than just remaining supinely on the ship. They need some kind of hope to keep them hanging on in rational expectation of an imminent improvement in their circumstances — and they need to be seen to be doing something productive towards their escape, not just sitting around hoping for some fluke to rescue them.
So maybe they try to fix the engine, having discovered that trying to jury-rig the ship to sail out of trouble isn't taking them in the direction they want to go? That could potentially take them a very long time (and I don't suppose Raoul knows the first thing about marine engines — one of the other survivors had better have some idea of how they work!) since they won't have proper facilities on board, but would offer an elusive chimera of hope; as soon as they can get the propeller turning, they can limp back to land or at least up to windward. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Once it works, all their problems are fixed... so it's worth waiting for, right up until the moment when it looks as if they're going to get stuck in the ice.
(Realistically, they probably don't carry enough coal to steam all the way back to land, but there's always the expedient of burning the ship's decks and fittings, as in "Around the World in Eighty Days"!)
Maybe they do fix the engine.
Maybe they actually start steaming back eastward, and it's the strain on the damaged hull caused by running under power that causes the 'Requin' to take on water and finally do a nose-dive, thus forcing them into the boats somewhere near d'Artois' camp ;-p
(An argument between Raoul and Lancard about the possibility? But they don't have a lot of choice; they've got to risk it. Maybe it would have been all right if they hadn't met heavy weather/tried to press on through heavy weather...)
I think that if Raoul is going to have all these colourful extra adventures, then I'm definitely going to need to separate the timelines and leave him presumed dead for the moment in order to come back to that part of the story later — otherwise the action stuff is going to totally overshadow the timeline in which absolutely nothing is achieved and Christine and Erik respectively both start to go stir-crazy as a result...
At least this saves me from the necessity of having to come up with a plausible figure for exactly how much time has elapsed since we last saw Raoul, what with Erik travelling cross-country from Stavanger to Torkelby and then traversing increasingly wild terrain to an unknown destination up by the mountains with a semi-conscious Christine — a time-lapse that I have kept very carefully vague so far, but would need to be accounted for if I'm trying to establish what stage in his salvage Raoul has currently reached!