Pot roast

[igenlode]

I spent a long time writing a post about the ethics of cannibalism among shipwrecked sailors, but unfortunately accidentally cancelled it before posting while attempting to correct my blog tags for the Code Napoleon.

So here instead is a picture of my Monday Sunday-lunch (delayed from yesterday):


I managed to pot-roast a £10 joint of venison very successfully while I was out singing; I was given the instructions when I bought it to 'roast for 20 minutes per pound', but as it was only just over a pound in weight to start off with that didn't seem like a very good idea. (Twenty minutes in the oven would barely reheat a precooked dish.)

So I pot-roasted it for two hours instead, in half an inch of water with some onions and beetroot. I don't know if I should have removed the string tying up the rolled joint first, but I didn't, which led to some interesting moments when trying to slice it!

Definitely a success, with some delicious (albeit beetroot-pink) resulting gravy.

Comments

[pedanther]

On the subject of shipwrecked sailors, there's been some revived interest in the wreck of Shackleton's Endurance in 1915, after the wreck site was discovered at the beginning of this month. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the men who went to fetch help, the entire crew was rescued before it came to cannibalism, but one of the articles I read noted that the crew included one Perce Blackborow, who originally came aboard as a stowaway and reportedly had agreed that if it did come to the worst it would only be fair that he be eaten first.

[igenlode]

I was a bit puzzled by this, as neither Shackleton's nor Frank Worsley's books on their ordeal mention anything about stowaways (they both start with the loss of the "Endurance" rather than the beginning of her voyage), while Shackleton's account mentions Blackborrow quite a lot, mainly as (a) the youngest and (b) the one who had such bad frostbite that his toes had to be amputated on Elephant Island -- mercifully they did in fact discover the remnants of the chloroform for the operation, such as it was, although at the time Shackleton left him it was still believed that the amputation, should it prove essential, would have to be done without :-(

Not realising just how bad his feet were, Shackleton "helped him, perhaps a little roughly, over the side of the boat" in order to give the youngest member of the expedition the honour of being the first to set foot on Elephant Island, hitherto untouched by man, whereupon "he promptly sat down in the surf and did not move. Then I suddenly remembered what I had forgotten, that both his feet were frostbitten badly.... It was rather a rough experience for Blackborrow, but, anyhow, he is now able to say that he was the first man to *sit* on Elephant Island. Possibly at the time he would have been willing to forgo any distinction of the kind."

(Rereading Worsley's "Great Antarctic Rescue", I realise just how closely I had originally cribbed from that for the chapter I'm currently trying to edit, and how much d'Artois' character subconsciously owes to Worsley's version of Shackleton... unfortunately in the modern fanfic climate it's very hard to get the explorers' accounts of extreme physical proximity and dependence ("crawling and wriggling on chest and stomach, you insinuated yourself between the ballast and the thwart... then came a gentle nudge from the next man's head or shoulder against your after-end, and you again moved reluctantly forward", "While I steered, his arm thrown over my shoulder, we discussed plans and yarned in low tones") to come out as anything other than lubricious hints at suppressed slash. Which at the time it was *not*.)

But my illustrated book of Frank Hurley's photographs does go back as far as Buenos Aires and include that anecdote ("The young man was subjected to an eloquent tirade from 'the Boss' that impressed all onlooking seamen. In the end, Shackleton leaned close to Blackborow and said, 'Do you know that on these expeditions we often get very hungry, and if there is a stowaway available he is the first to be eaten?' This was correctly interpreted as official acceptance of his presence, and Blackborow was signed on as steward to help in the galley'.)

The Scott Polar Research Institute gives Blackborow's alleged back-answer ("They'd get a lot more meat off you, sir"):
https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/shackleton/biographies/Blackborow,_Perce/
So this was apparently an example of Shackleton's inimitable -- and very successful -- approach to man-management, rather than anything that was said on Elephant Island (which, according to Worsley, "our men pronounced... with the 't' silent, and an 'h' prefixed" :-P)


One thing that did occur to me (my head being full of the Scott expedition, thanks to tealin), was that Oates could potentially have saved his companions' lives by volunteering to be *eaten*, rather then simply by attempting to relieve them of the burden of carrying him. But given the dynamics in that group, I can't see it happening (Scott, I think, would have been as horrified at the suggestion as was Lady Franklin seventy years earlier) -- and at that point, the problem was *not* that they were starving to death, but that they were struggling to reach the plentiful supplies of food that they knew were just ahead.. and that were indeed present, and freshly topped-up to boot. So far as Oates was aware, it was a transport issue, not a question of lack of meat.

(What killed Scott's group subsequently was simply the fact that they were pinned down by continuous blizzard for over a week, which was, so far as I recall from earlier in the expedition, pretty much without precedent weather-wise -- if they had been able to keep moving, they would have been fine, at least for the moment. And also, it wasn't a situation of men drifting in a lifeboat trying to survive until the last moment in the hopes of rescue or landfall; they had to keep going, and they had to keep going with enough man-power to haul the sledge, because without shelter or equipment to melt the snow they didn't have a hope. Simply sitting in their tent eating one another would have been as certain a death sentence as any other, with the guilt of it to handle as well.)

What *does* seem the case, with hindsight, is that it would have been much more merciful in the long run to have allowed Oates to remain behind in the snow semi-comatose in his sleeping-bag, as he had originally begged them to do, instead of forcing him in the end to take matters into his own hands out in the open on frost-bitten feet. But hindsight is easy...