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Copywork
About This Passage
These three sentences sit at the chapter's emotional center. The first piles up sober, practical reasons — no fuel, no water, no instruments, the season late — that force Captain Morrell to turn back even as 'an entirely open sea' beckons him toward the pole; notice how the long, clause-heavy sentence enacts the weight of those 'overruling considerations.' The second sentence releases the tension into pure possibility: had he only been able to continue, he believed he could have sailed nearly to the pole. Then the third quietly pivots from Morrell to the narrator himself, who promises that his 'own subsequent experience' will test whether Morrell was right. Copying it trains the eye to see how Poe braids documentary fact, thwarted longing, and a sly authorial promise into a single passage — and how a writer can hand a reader hope and suspense in the very act of reporting a failure.
Being nearly destitute of fuel and water, and without proper instruments, it being also late in the season, Captain Morrell was now obliged to put back, without attempting any farther progress to the ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: how Captain Guy, acting on word picked up at Tristan da Cunha, gives up the planned route up Patagonia and turns the Jane southward toward the pole; how the narrator then pauses to survey every prior attempt — Cook twice halted by walls of ice, Weddel pressing farthest of all yet doubting any polar land, Morrell astonished to find the sea grow warmer and open beyond the sixty-fifth degree, and Briscoe sighting and claiming new land while Reynolds disputes the experts' conclusions; and how the chapter closes on nearly three hundred unexplored degrees still waiting, with the narrator promising his own voyage will settle the matter. Pause where the explorers' reports most contradict one another and explain why.
Discussion Questions
- Poe opens the chapter by having Captain Guy abandon the planned route up Patagonia and steer south on little more than word picked up at Tristan da Cunha. How might that decision set the chapter's whole attitude toward the unknown south, and why would Poe begin here? Use details from the chapter.
- Weddel sailed farther south than any navigator before him yet 'discourages the idea of land,' while Cook concluded the ice he met 'reached the southern pole or was joined to a continent.' How should we weigh two expert eyewitnesses who read similar signs in opposite ways, and why is that so hard? Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Led or persuaded to take a particular action.
Item 2
Blocked or slowed in progress.
Item 3
Caught sight of something distant or hard to see.
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Critical Thinking
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