House of Leaves (32 page)

I.

On September 20th, 1519 Ferdinand Magellan
embarked from Sanlücar de Barrameda to sail
around the globe. The voyage would once and for all
prove the world w
as round and revolutionize peopl
e’s
thoughts on navigation and trade, but the journey
would also be dangerous, replete with enough
horror and hardship that in the end it would cost
Magellan his life.

In March of 1520 when Magellan’s five vessels
reached Patagonia and sailed into the Bay of St.
Julian, things were far from harmonious, Fierce winter weather, a shortage of stores, not to mention
the anxiety brought on by the uncertainty of the future, had caused tensions among the sailors to increase, until on or around April Fools Day, which also happened to be Easter Day, Captain Gaspar Quesada of the
C
oncepcion
and his servant Luiz de Molino planned and executed a mutiny, resulting in the death of at least one officer and the wounding of many more.
[169—While mutiny is not terribly common today, consider the 1973 Skylab mission where astronauts openly rebelled against a mission controller they felt was too imperious. The incident never resulted in violence, but it does emphasize how despite constant contact with the society at home, plenty of food, water, and warmth, and only a slight risk of getting lost, tensions among explorers can still surface and even escalate.

Holloway’s expedition had none of the amenities Skylab enjoyed. 1) There was no radio contact; 2) they had very little sense of where they were; 3) they were almost out of food and water; 4) they were operating in freezing conditions; and
5)
they suffered the implicit threat of that ‘growl’.] [155—In describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how “when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within.”]
Unfortunately for Quesada, he never stopped to consider that a man who could marshal an expedition to circle the globe could probably marshal men to retaliate with great ferocity. This gross underestimation of his opponent cost Quesada his life.

Like a general, Magellan rallied those men still loyal to him to retake the commandeered ships. The combination of his will and his tactical acumen made his success, especially in retrospect, seem inevitable. The mutineer Mendoza of the
Victoria
was stabbed in the throat. The
Santo Antonia
was stormed, and by morning the
Concepcion
had surrendered. Forty-eight hours after the mutiny had begun, Magellan was again in control. He sentenced all the mutineers to death and then in an act of calculated good-will suspended the sentence, choosing instead to concentrate maritime law and his own ire on the three directly responsible for the uprising: Mendoza’s corpse was drawn and quartered,
Juan de Cartagena was
marooned on a barren
shore and Quesada was
executed.

Quesada, how
ever was not hung, shot
or even forced to walk
the plank. Magellan
had a better idea.
Molino, Quesada’s
trusty servant, was
granted clemency if he
agreed to execute his
master. Molino
accepted the duty and
together both men were set in a shallop and directed back to their ship, the
Trinidad,
to fulfill their destiny.
[171—Taken from
Zampanô
’s journal: “As often as I have lingered on Hudson in his shallop, I have in the late hours turned my thoughts to Quesada and Molino’s journey across those shallow waters, wondering aloud what they said, what they thought, what gods came to keep them or leave them, and what in those dark waves they finally saw of themselves? Perhaps because history has little to do with those minutes, the scene survives only in verse:
The Song of Quesada and Molino
by [XXXX].[172—Illegible.] I include it here in its entirety.”
[175—See Appendix E.]

Then:

“Forgive me please for including this. An old man’s mind is just as likely to wander as a young man’s, but where a young man will forgive the stray,
[
177
—
For instance, youth’s peripatetic travail’s in The PXXXXXXX Poems; a perfect example why errors should be hastily exised
]
[178—i.e. The Pelican Poems.]
[179—
See Appendix II
-B. — Ed.]
an old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it. It took me twenty years to unlearn the fortunes found in a swerve. Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don’t think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead.”]
[173—You got me.
[176—See Appendix B.]
Gnome aside, I don’t even know how to take ‘I’ve killed many men.’ Irony? A confession? As I already said ‘You got me.’]
[174—For reasons entirely his own, Mr. Truant de-struck the last six lines In footnote 171. — Ed.]

Like Magellan, Holloway led an expedition into the unknown. Like Magellan, Holloway faced a mutiny. And like the captain who meted out a penalty of death, Holloway also cent
e
red the cross-hairs upon those who had spurned his leadership. However unlike Magellan, Holloway’s course was in fact doomed, thus necessitating a look at Henry Hudson’s fate.

II.

By April of 1610, Hudson left England in his fourth attempt to find the northwest passage. He headed west across arctic waters and eventually ended up in what is known today as the Hudson Bay. Despite its innocuous sounding name, back in 1610 the bay was Hell in ice. Edgar M. Bacon in his book
Henry Hudson
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907) writes the following:

On the first of November the ship was brought to a bay or inlet far down into the south-west, and hauled aground; and there by the tenth of the month she was frozen in. Discontent was no longer expressed in whispers. The men were aware that the provisions, laid in for a limited number of months, were running to an end, and they murmured that they had not been taken back for winter quarters to Digges Island, where such stores of wild fowl had been seen, instead of beating about for months in “a
labyrinth without end.

[italics added for emphasis]

This labyrinth of blue ice drifting in water cold enough to kill a man in a couple of minutes tested and finally outstripped the resolve of Hudson’s crew. Where Magellan’s men could fish or at least enjoy the cove of some habitable shore, Hudson’s men could
only stare at shores of ice.
[180—Though written almost two hundred years after Hudson’s doomed voyage, it is hard not to think of Coleridge’s
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner,
especially this fabled moment—

With sloping masts and dripping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as Emerald.

The land of ice, and

of fearful sounds

where no living thing

was to be seen.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken —

The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound!

Till a great sea-bird

called the Albatross…

At length did cross an Albatross,

Through the fog it came…

This was not some feverish world concocted in a state of delirium but a very real place which Hudson had faced despite the evident terror it inflicted upon everyone, especially his crew. Nor was such terror vanquished by the modern age. Consider the diary entry made in 1915 by Reginald James, expedition physicist for Shackleton’s
Endurance
which was trapped and finally crushed by pack ice off the coast of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea: “A terrible night with the ship sullen dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her… seeming like the cries of a living creature.” See also Simon Alcazaba’s
Historic Conditions
(Cleveland: Annwyl Co., Inc., 1963) as well as Jack Denton Scott’s “Journey Into Silence”
Playboy,
August 1973, p. 102.]

Inevitably, whispers rose to shouts until finally shouts followed action. Hudson, along with his son and seven o
thers, was forced into a shallow
without food and water. They were never heard from again, lost in that
labyrinth without end.
[
170
—
Also see
The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XX VIII
(San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1886).
]

Like Hudson, Holloway found himself with
men who, short on reserves and faith, insisted on
turning back. Like Hudson, Holloway resisted.
Unlike Hudson, Holloway went
willingly into that
labyrinth.

Fortunately for audiences everywhere, only Hudson’s final moments continue to remain a mystery
.

For one thing, Hollywood films rely on sets, actors, expensive film stock, and lush effects to recreate a story. Production value coupled with the cultural saturation of trade gossip help ensure a modicum of disbelief, thus reaffirming for the audience, that no matter how moving, riveting, or terrifying a film may be, it is still only entertainment. Documentaries, however, rely on interviews, inferior equipment, and virtually no effects to document real events. [181—Consider Stephen Mamber’s definition of cinema v
é
rit
é
which seems an almost exact description of how Navidson made his film:

Cinema
vérité
is a strict discipline only because it is in many ways to simple, so “direct.” The filmmaker attempts to eliminate as much as possible the barriers between subject and audience.. These barriers are technical (large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment, special lights, costumes and makeup), procedural (scripting, acting, directing), and structural (standard editing devices, traditional forms of melodrama, suspense, etc.). Cinema
vérité
is a practical working method based upon a faith of unmanipulated reality, a refusal to tamper with life as it presents itself. Any kind of cinema is a process of selection, but there is (or should be) all the difference in the world between the cinema
vérité
aesthetic and the methods of fictional and traditional documentary film.

Stephen Mamber,
Cinema Vérité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974), p. 4.] Audiences are not allowed the safety net of disbelief and so must turn to more challenging mechanisms of interpretation which, as is sometimes the case, may lead to denial and aversion. [182—not included]

While in the past, live footage was limited to the aftermath—the oral histories given by survivors of photographs taken by pedestrian—these days of the proliferation of affordable video cameras and tapes has created more of an opportunity for someone to record a place wreck or bank robbery as it is actually taking place.

Of course, no documentary is ever entirely absolved from at least the suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed—much of which these days is openly carried out under the appellation of “reenactment.”

By now it is common knowledge that Flaherty recreated certain scenes in
Nanook
for the camera. Similar accusations have been made against shows like
America’s Funniest Home Videos
. For the most part, professionals in the field do their best to police, or at least critique, the latest films, well aware that to lose the public’s trust would mean the death rattle for an already besieged art form.

Currently, the greatest threat comes from the area of digital manipulation. In 1990 in
The New York Times
, Andy Grundberg wrote:

“In the future, readers of newspaper and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist the temptations of electronic manipulation, as they are likely to do, the credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished by a climate of reduced expectations. In short, photographs will not seem as real as they once did.” [184—Andy Grundberg, “Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie,”
The New York Times
, August 12, 1990, Section 2, 1, 29. All of which reiterates in many ways what Marshall McLuhan already anticipated when he wrote: “To say ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.”]