【英语语言学习】探索北极的神秘

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The journey of the USS Jeannette in 1879 came out of the dreams of a lot of wise men who might have known better. It set sail from San Francisco in July of that year with 32 men to find what they hoped would be a kind of unspoiled verdant¹ paradise at the top of the world - the claimant of the name of American exploration. It was commanded by one of the time's heroes, George Washington DeLong, and funded by one of the age's great characters, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald². Hampton Sides, the author of previous bestsellers that include "Ghost Soldiers" and "Blood and Thunder" has written an adventure story about an ill-fated venture in the Kingdom of Ice, the grand and terrible polar voyage of the USS Jeannette. Hampton Sides joins us from NPR West. Hampton, thanks so much for being with us.

HAMPTON SIDES: Great to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: How did people in these times - we're talking about fill in that great blank space that was the Arctic?

SIDES: I think it's really, you know, hard for us to understand now how obsessed³ people were with what was up there. You know, people just did not know whether it was ice, whether it was sea, whether it was land, whether there was civilization up there. And there were a lot of weird⁴ theories about holes in the earth and, of course, this one big theory that drove this expedition which was this notion that there was an open polar sea fed by warm water currents and that if you could just find those currents that would soften⁵ up the ice cap, you would find a gateway⁶ to this open polar sea and sail. And, of course, the Jeannette expedition found very quickly just how wrong this idea was.

SIMON: Let me ask you about some of the personalities⁷ that are the center of this story. Let's begin with George Washington DeLong. His personal motto sounds like something out of Star Trek⁸ - do it now.

SIDES: Do it now. Yeah, this was a guy who really wanted to do big things - graduate of the Naval⁹ Academy, had just missed the Civil War by a matter of months and wanted to make up for lost time. And he decided¹⁰ that the way to do that was to become an Arctic explorer. And the U.S. Navy at that time that was quite anemic - quite in its infancy¹¹ - and so in addition to working with the Navy, he had to find a sponsor who would pay for everything.

SIMON: James Gordon Bennett publisher of the New York Herald.

SIDES: You can't invent a more outlandish character than James Gordon Bennett. This great Gilded¹² Age half-mad Playboy, a womanizer, a guy who was ostracized¹³ from New York society - and he was into spectacle and had sent Stanley to find Livingstone in Africa - had enjoyed enormous success with that series of dispatches. And he was looking for an encore. And that's how he became interested in bankrolling an Arctic expedition.

SIMON: Not surprisingly, the Jeanette got trapped in pack ice. But help us understand how difficulties began to accumulate two years into the voyage.

SIDES: The main problem was that the ship was constantly leaking. Even though it had been massively reinforced for the Ice, the pressures on the whole of the ship were enormous in that ice pack. And eventually, after nearly two years of drifting almost 1,000 miles through the ice cap, making their way, incidentally, sort of in the direction of the North Pole - they were heading in the right direction anyway. Finally, the hole was fatally breached¹⁴ and the ship sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, leaving these, you know, these 30 odd guys and their dogs out on the ice cap to fend¹⁵ for themselves.

SIMON: Yeah, which raised the question, so what you do when you're stranded¹⁶ on an ice cap a thousand miles north of Siberia in the days before radio cell phones, phones, text messages, airplanes, helicopters?

SIDES: You're SOL, you know? It's a really, really harrowing situation and really one of the great survival stories of all time. And these guys had to drag these three open boats over some 600 miles of shifting ice pack. That's one of the things that made it even more difficult as they would struggle for weeks. Then they would take a reading only to find out they'd actually retrogressed, you know? They'd gone backwards¹⁷ because the ice over which they were slogging was actually moving north faster than they were moving south. And they finally did make it to open water.

SIMON: In many ways, the narrative¹⁸ is then taken over by George Melville who was the chief engineer.

SIDES: Yes, when the expedition reached open water, the three boats took off only to encounter a huge gale¹⁹ with separated the three boats. And the three boats have very different fates. One of the boats was commanded by Melville, and Melville was a distant relative of Herman Melville. He was a Naval engineer - a brilliant guy. And his group landed first and had a much easier time of it, although no one had an easy time of it. And the story really becomes the story of the three separate fates of these three different boats and how they finally are reunited on the mainland of Russia's Lena Delta²⁰.

SIMON: I don't know if we give away anything with this question - do we know how for sure George DeLong met his fate?

SIDES: Well, this is something that I decided to do in terms of telling the story is to not in, you know, talking about it or in the book jacket itself, to not really say what happened specifically to anyone because I found that the story is just obscure enough that, although, of course, you can Google it - you can find out what happened to these men - there's a certain compelling qualities to the not knowing exactly what happens, where it happens, why it happens. So I don't talk much about it other than to say that there were actually 33 men. Thirteen made it home.

SIMON: We'll just note that there were a couple of Congressional Gold Medals that came out of it. That's how publicized this venture was.

SIDES: Yes, I mean, you know, the survivors²¹ came home to great acclaim²². They were welcomed as heroes. The Jeannette was the subject of best-selling books and paintings and poems and monuments. And yet, now, you know, I think if you polled 100 people, maybe one has vaguely²³ heard of this expedition. And so I just felt like it was one of these great harrowing classic adventure stories that needed to be resurrected. And one of the real hallmarks of this expedition is that DeLong - he obliterated²⁴ all the leading theories of that time. There was no thermo-metric gateway. There was no open polar sea. And it was the last time anyone ever tried to do that. It was the last time that anyone ever tried to sail to the North Pole. The irony²⁵, of course, is that the climate change experts tell us that there very well might be an open polar sea in the not-too-distant future. So maybe he wasn't crazy or quixotic. Maybe, DeLong was just off by 140 years.

SIMON: Hampton Sides - his new book "In the Kingdom of Ice." Hampton, thanks for being with us.

SIDES: Thank you, Scott.

SIMON: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.

1 verdant   

adj.翠绿的，青翠的，生疏的，不老练的

参考例句：

• Children are playing on the verdant lawn.孩子们在绿茵茵的草坪上嬉戏玩耍。
• The verdant mountain forest turns red gradually in the autumn wind.苍翠的山林在秋风中渐渐变红了。

2 herald   

vt.预示...的来临，预告，宣布，欢迎

参考例句：

• In England, the cuckoo is the herald of spring.在英国杜鹃鸟是报春的使者。
• Dawn is the herald of day.曙光是白昼的先驱。

3 obsessed   

adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的

参考例句：

• He's obsessed by computers. 他迷上了电脑。
• The fear of death obsessed him throughout his old life. 他晚年一直受着死亡恐惧的困扰。

4 weird   

adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的

参考例句：

• From his weird behaviour,he seems a bit of an oddity.从他不寻常的行为看来，他好像有点怪。
• His weird clothes really gas me.他的怪衣裳简直笑死人。

5 soften   

v.(使)变柔软；(使)变柔和

参考例句：

• Plastics will soften when exposed to heat.塑料适当加热就可以软化。
• This special cream will help to soften up our skin.这种特殊的护肤霜有助于使皮肤变得柔软。

6 gateway   

n.大门口，出入口，途径，方法

参考例句：

• Hard work is the gateway to success.努力工作是通往成功之路。
• A man collected tolls at the gateway.一个人在大门口收通行费。

7 personalities   

n. 诽谤，（对某人容貌、性格等所进行的）人身攻击； 人身攻击；人格, 个性, 名人( personality的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• There seemed to be a degree of personalities in her remarks.她话里有些人身攻击的成分。
• Personalities are not in good taste in general conversation.在一般的谈话中诽谤他人是不高尚的。

8 trek   

vi.作长途艰辛的旅行；n.长途艰苦的旅行

参考例句：

• We often go pony-trek in the summer.夏季我们经常骑马旅行。
• It took us the whole day to trek across the rocky terrain.我们花了一整天的时间艰难地穿过那片遍布岩石的地带。

9 naval   

adj.海军的，军舰的，船的

参考例句：

• He took part in a great naval battle.他参加了一次大海战。
• The harbour is an important naval base.该港是一个重要的海军基地。

10 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

11 infancy   

n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期

参考例句：

• He came to England in his infancy.他幼年时期来到英国。
• Their research is only in its infancy.他们的研究处于初级阶段。

12 gilded   

a.镀金的，富有的

参考例句：

• The golden light gilded the sea. 金色的阳光使大海如金子般闪闪发光。
• "Friends, they are only gilded disks of lead!" "朋友们，这只不过是些镀金的铅饼！ 来自英汉文学 - 败坏赫德莱堡

13 ostracized   

v.放逐( ostracize的过去式和过去分词 )；流放；摈弃；排斥

参考例句：

• He was ostracized by his colleagues for refusing to support the strike. 他因拒绝支持罢工而受到同事的排斥。
• The family were ostracized by the neighborhood. 邻居们都不理睬那一家人。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

14 breached   

攻破( breach的现在分词 )； 破坏，违反

参考例句：

• These commitments have already been breached. 这些承诺已遭背弃。
• Our tanks have breached the enemy defences. 我方坦克车突破了敌人的防线。

15 fend   

v.照料（自己），（自己）谋生，挡开，避开

参考例句：

• I've had to fend for myself since I was 14.我从十四岁时起就不得不照料自己。
• He raised his arm up to fend branches from his eyes.他举手将树枝从他眼前挡开。

16 stranded   

a.搁浅的，进退两难的

参考例句：

• He was stranded in a strange city without money. 他流落在一个陌生的城市里， 身无分文，一筹莫展。
• I was stranded in the strange town without money or friends. 我困在那陌生的城市，既没有钱，又没有朋友。

17 backwards   

adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地

参考例句：

• He turned on the light and began to pace backwards and forwards.他打开电灯并开始走来走去。
• All the girls fell over backwards to get the party ready.姑娘们迫不及待地为聚会做准备。

18 narrative   

n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的

参考例句：

• He was a writer of great narrative power.他是一位颇有记述能力的作家。
• Neither author was very strong on narrative.两个作者都不是很善于讲故事。

19 gale   

n.大风，强风，一阵闹声（尤指笑声等）

参考例句：

• We got our roof blown off in the gale last night.昨夜的大风把我们的房顶给掀掉了。
• According to the weather forecast,there will be a gale tomorrow.据气象台预报，明天有大风。

20 delta   

n.（流的）角洲

参考例句：

• He has been to the delta of the Nile.他曾去过尼罗河三角洲。
• The Nile divides at its mouth and forms a delta.尼罗河在河口分岔，形成了一个三角洲。

21 survivors   

幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The survivors were adrift in a lifeboat for six days. 幸存者在救生艇上漂流了六天。
• survivors clinging to a raft 紧紧抓住救生筏的幸存者

22 acclaim   

v.向…欢呼，公认；n.欢呼，喝彩，称赞

参考例句：

• He was welcomed with great acclaim.他受到十分热烈的欢迎。
• His achievements earned him the acclaim of the scientific community.他的成就赢得了科学界的赞誉。

23 vaguely   

adv.含糊地，暖昧地

参考例句：

• He had talked vaguely of going to work abroad.他含糊其词地说了到国外工作的事。
• He looked vaguely before him with unseeing eyes.他迷迷糊糊的望着前面，对一切都视而不见。

24 obliterated   

v.除去( obliterate的过去式和过去分词 )；涂去；擦掉；彻底破坏或毁灭

参考例句：

• The building was completely obliterated by the bomb. 炸弹把那座建筑物彻底摧毁了。
• He began to drink, drank himself to intoxication, till he slept obliterated. 他一直喝，喝到他快要迷糊地睡着了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

25 irony   

n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄

参考例句：

• She said to him with slight irony.她略带嘲讽地对他说。
• In her voice we could sense a certain tinge of irony.从她的声音里我们可以感到某种讥讽的意味。