Friday, April 24, 2015

How To Survive on Land and Sea

I found How to Survive on Land and Sea  at a book sale. I paid twenty-five cents for this  United States Naval Institute publication which was first written in 1943. It has 365 glossy pages and a table of contents to make any survivalist drool.
Check it out
1. Survival Hints-subtopics include Think before acting and testing food.
2. Orientation and Traveling- among many other enthralling subjects, Keeping a course, detours, base lines, concealment, quagmires, mountain snowfields...
5. Wild Animal food-details ten different ways to catch fish, a ton of traps and dead fall configurations.
10. Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare-the latest revision on this work was in 1968 and I realize much of our weapon sophistication occurred post Vietnam. However, I look forward to reading a survival manual written from a Nation-at-War point of view. We had sailors surviving 84 days on a raft. This is not just theory, or camera friendly stuff.

Complete with scores of diagrams, real life photos of high sea survivors, lesson plans and lecture themes, this volume seems to have it all.

One of my favorite excepts after initial perusal is found on page 144:
High moral will bring you through. Without it you may fail. Living without equipment in an open boat on the high seas is the severest test of morale. Don't' let your thoughts and imagination become your greatest enemy. Keep fishing and experimenting to the limit, for activity is the best cure for depression.
Remember: "Life's battles do not always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But sooner of later the man who wins, 
Is the man who thinks he can.

If you decide to hunt this publication down, the Library of Congress Catalog number is  57-21769. Prepared by Frank C. Craighead, JR. PhD. and John J. Craighead, PhD, Wildlife Biologists, United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Stay tuned for juicy info I glean from this fascinating work.

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