Blog Six:Enurance Pg. 187

The mood in this novel really travels like the contour of a mountain.  In the beginning the hopes were as would be suspected and generally high.  As they made progress and showed signs of good things their spirits soured.  However, the progress was soon halted and all spirits went down hill from there.  As this quote shows, anything new can bring the spirits of the men up even if it is only slightly. "That soot blackened floe which had been their prison for nearly four months-whose every feature they knew so well, as convicts know each crevice of their cells; which they had come to despise, but whose preservation they had prayed for so often-belonged now to the past.  They were in the boats...actually in the boats, and that was all that mattered(Lansing 141)."  The men's spirits were down for so long after the Endurance went down that anything of change would naturally bring their spirits up.  More often than not, anything that was an expected or hoped for change would only bring good things for them.