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Title: Heart of Oak, vol. 2 of 3
       A Three-Stranded Yarn

Author: William Clark Russell

Release Date: June 12, 2020 [EBook #62378]

Language: English

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LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.




HEART OF OAK

VOL. II.




PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON




HEART OF OAK

A THREE-STRANDED YARN


BY

W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF
'THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR' 'THE PHANTOM DEATH'
'THE CONVICT SHIP' ETC.


[Illustration: Decoration]


IN THREE VOLUMES--VOL. II.


LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895




CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME

CHAPTER                                  PAGE
   XI. THE CREW LEAVE                       1

  XII. MR. SELBY TAKES UP THE STORY        41

 XIII. THE HULL                            69

  XIV. STILL ADRIFT                        92

   XV. THE ICE IN THE SOUTH               120

  XVI. THE AURORA AUSTRALIS               145

 XVII. THE THICK OF IT                    169

XVIII. IMPRISONED                         192

  XIX. MR. MOORE CONTINUES THE STORY      221




HEART OF OAK




CHAPTER XI

THE CREW LEAVE


The sail shone like a peak of ice against a belly of soft snow-cloud
right ahead--that is, ahead as the hull's bows lay. I should have
supposed it ice, but for the captain, who stood close beside the
companion holding the ship's glass: he said, 'There she is, miss.'

'Is she coming this way?' cried I, shivering with cold and passion.

'I can't tell as yet. She's only just been sighted. Bear a hand with
the first empty tar barrel you can get hold of,' he bawled, moving
forwards, and he continued to shout, but I could not gather the
instructions he delivered.

Presently Mrs. Burke joined me, and then Mr. Owen swathed to the
nostrils.

'It's almost too good to credit,' he exclaimed! 'Can they be mistaken?
Is it ice? If it should prove a ship!'

He went sliding and staggering towards some men in the waist, and stood
questioning them, heedless of the captain.

With the promptitude of seamen the crew collected a lot of stuff for
making a smoke; they stacked a large heap of material near the gangway
and set fire to it, and in about ten minutes a thick body of blue smoke
was rolling over the rail, and clouding upwards with many a sparkling
ruddy gleam shooting up tongue-shaped or arrow-like into the throat of
the sooty pouring.

It was wide daylight and the antarctic day young, but the clouds rimmed
the horizon with the shadow of night, and the crimson light of the
flare promised as swift an intelligence of our forlorn condition as
the smoke. The seamen continued to feed the fire; and all the while
Captain Burke was stretching his telescope at the distant gleam; the
men again and again turning their eyes from it to him with looks
growing dark with impatience and consuming anxiety. Mr. Owen had
fetched his binocular glass and strained his eyes through them without
intermission. Mrs. Burke and I standing in the companion, which was
the one sheltered part of that long stretch of frozen deck and smashed
bulwarks, gazed without speech.

Suddenly a sailor, one who had been most active in feeding the fire,
sprang on to the rail: he grasped a spear-shaped projection of ice,
which broke short off and he fell on his back; he sprang again with an
oath, and after looking, turned to others who were standing near the
fire and roared:

'Mates, she's leaving us, by God!'

'She takes us for a whaler trying out. There's no good in smoke as a
signal down here,' said a sailor.

'It's our chance,' bawled the fellow who had sprung and fallen, now
throwing himself back on to the deck. 'There mayn't come another for
weeks. What's to happen then? Are we to drive about in this fired ocean
till we ends as froze-up corpses? I'm for following her.'

'Take her bearings, bo'sun, while she's in sight,' shouted a seaman,
and the huge sailor, as obedient as though the captain had given the
command, rolled aft and put the sharp of his hand upon the compass bowl.

'Captain Burke,' exclaimed one of the seamen, in a voice startling with
its sudden savage note of revolt, 'we've had enough of this. There's
nothen that's a-going to be of any use to us in them booms.' He pointed
behind him with his thumb. 'There's our chance. We'll run ourselves
into her sight and she'll pick us up.'

'Hold your jaw, you Johnson!' said Captain Burke, who was as white
as the deck in the face, though his eyes showed dangerously, like a
madman's who watches his chance to leap upon you.

'Hold _my_ jaw?' growled the seaman, a hairy scowling man in a yellow
sou'-wester, dropping his head into an insolent butting posture.
'Why, so I will arter I've told yer that when them masts went we was
quit of your blistered articles, and here's one as ain't for stopping
one bloomin' minute longer to mess and muck about with jury-masts,
pennorths of parasol to be blowed over the bows as soon as they're up.
Mates,' he yelled, 'I'm after that ship whilst there's time. Who's for
coming?'

As though there had been something quickening and thrilling as
magnetism in the sailor's shout, the whole of the men made a jump for
the boat, one of the first being the boatswain who was coming aft from
the compass when the seaman bawled the invitation.

The smoke of the flare had flittered down into a curl of pale blue
vapour, which blew over the rail feather-shaped to the sea. The captain
stood this side of it, watching the men in a staring idle way whilst
they went to work at the boat with gleaming knives, hacking and cutting
at her fastenings--he seemed as though deprived of his reason--then he
roared out:

'Leave that boat alone. Don't touch that boat. She belongs to the ship.
She's my property. Overboard and swim for that vessel there if she's
your chance, you dogs! But leave that boat alone.'

A few turned their heads to look at him and then went on passing their
knives through the lashings, clearing away the booms and so forth.

'Stop him!' shrieked Mrs. Burke. 'Help, Mr. Owen! What can he do?
What's the use of it? They'll kill him!' and I too screamed when I saw
the captain rush upon the nearest of the men regardless of their naked
knives; he struck out right and left, flooring two, but a third--none
of them I observed offering to hit him back--crooked his leg at the
poor man's heels, and he fell, fetching the iron-hard snow-coated plank
a thump that left him motionless.

Mrs. Burke rushed to his side. The boatswain cried out:

'He's no right to stop us, mum. It's our lives we're working for and
thinking of. You and him and the lady'll come along too. Now, mates,
whilst there's daylight, for God's sake!'

Mr. Owen crossed to the captain's side and assisted Mrs. Burke to drag
him aft. His figure slipped over the frozen snow as though he was
lifeless, but they had not dragged him a dozen paces in the direction
of the companion-hatch when he cried out and struggled. Mr. Owen let
go; with the help of his wife he got on his feet.

'Get me some brandy,' said he.

I heard him and made with what speed I might for the cabin, my face
bloodless and my heart beating as fast as a watch ticks. That brief
scene of conflict, like to one of those terrible mutinies I had read
of in sea tales, had been shocking to witness, on top as it was of our
helpless and awful situation, and all the anguish of expectation and
fear which had filled the past few days. I was sick and nearly fainted.
I sat down to catch my breath and press my temples. Before I found
strength to rise, Mrs. Burke descended, followed by her husband.

He seated himself at the table, upon which he lay his right arm and
buried his face in it. She coaxed him after a little into taking some
brandy, and then observing my state she got me to take a sip.

Meanwhile overhead I heard the crew busy with the long-boat; her keel
thundered as they ran her to the side for launching. Their movements
were full of feverish bustle; in truth they were working for life or
death; they meant to catch the ship and there remained but a very few
hours of daylight.

'Does your head pain you, Edward?'

'No,' he answered, and strained his hearing to catch what was passing
above.

'Will they let us know when they're ready to take us?' I cried.

'Take us!' the captain exclaimed, with a sudden anger in his whole
manner as he turned towards me. 'They may take you, but I stop here.'

'No, no, Miss Marie,' cried my poor old nurse, 'they must not take you
without me, and my place is by my husband's side wherever he is. Think
if they should miss the ship, which is more than likely: they'll be in
an open boat in this frozen ocean! Fancy being in an open boat in such
weather as that of the night before last! You would not live to see
to-morrow's dawn. And how should their going concern us? If they fall
in with the ship they'll report we are here and the vessel may return.
If they miss her they are in an exposed open boat, and we are in a dry,
comfortable hull, with a good warm cabin to sit in, and no worse off
than if all the crew were aboard. For what can they do? If the ship
comes, she'll come whether the crew are on board or not.'

'But are the three of us to be left alone?' I exclaimed.

'The dogs could have helped me,' muttered the captain. 'We blew
northwards yesterday and to-day we sighted a sail. They are villains to
steal my boat, the only remaining boat. But I am too few for them--I am
too few for them.' He clasped his hands upon the back of his head as
though he was in pain there.

Just then four or five seamen came tumbling down the companion-ladder:
one held a lighted lantern. This man exclaimed:

'Capt'n, the boat's alongside, and all's ready.'

'What are you doing down here?' thundered the captain.

'The victuals we want are in the lazarette,' answered the man. 'No good
lifting the main-hatch and overhauling the cargo when all we need's
handy here.'

Even whilst he spoke the rest had pulled up a little square hatch
cover with an iron ring in it; it fitted a large manhole a few paces
abaft the companion-ladder; this hatch conducted to a part of the
after-hold called the lazarette, a sort of store-room in which the
cabin provisions and wines with other commodities were stowed.

Captain Burke jumped from his seat; his wife fell upon him shrieking,
and with her arms about his neck forced him to sit, beseeching him to
have patience, to let the men have their way, to attempt no violence
or they would kill him. He trembled with rage and weakness and grief,
but he understood his powerlessness--which was merciful, for there was
an angry stubbornness in the hurry and motions of the men which was as
good as advising their captain, with a curse and a threat wrapped up in
the hint, not to meddle with them, not to offer to hinder them if he
valued his life.

Very promptly the lot emerged from the lazarette, bearing cases and
sacks, hams, cheeses, and so forth. They no doubt guessed they'd come
to want plenty of provisions should they miss the ship they were
after. They ran headlong up the ladder, none heeding us, but not above
two minutes afterwards the boatswain's burly figure showed in the
companion-way, and he bawled down:

'Capt'n Burke, we're all ready, and there isn't a second to lose. Ain't
you going to join us along with the ladies?'

He received no reply.

He repeated the question, roaring it out in a bull-like bellowing, and
then came a step or two down the ladder to stretch his neck that he
might see us. I cried out:

'Are we to be left alone?' for I cannot express the horror that chilled
me when I thought of the sailors leaving us to save themselves,
insomuch that they might be on board another ship sailing towards the
sun ere the Southern Cross was trembling in the south that night,
whilst the three of us who stayed--two of them women--might go on
rolling about in a wrecked and crusted hull till she grew sodden and
sank, or split against an iceberg.

'Come you along with us, miss, if the captain and his wife won't leave
the vessel!' cried the boatswain.

'No!' shrieked Mrs. Burke. 'Would you expose a delicate young lady in
these seas in an open boat? Fools are you yourselves to go. You'll be
heard of no more.'

The boatswain without another word withdrew his great developed bulk
from the hatch, but he was instantly replaced by another figure, and
Mr. Owen's voice, shrill with excitement and hurry, cried down:

'Mrs. Burke, Miss Otway, aren't you coming? They'll be putting off
without you if you pause.'

'He does not ask my husband to join them,' screamed Mrs. Burke, 'the
wretch! does he think I would leave my husband?'

Mr. Owen came swiftly down into the cabin and talked like a man in
delirium.

'You have no right to keep this young lady with you. Captain Burke
sticks to his hull from sordid motives. That's his look-out. Life's
more precious than cargo. Miss Otway was entrusted to my care. I insist
upon her being permitted to accompany us. Her father looks to me for
her well-being. She is eager to go with us and you will not suffer it.'
Thus he raved on.

'Leave this cabin,' cried the captain, springing up. His face was full
of blood, his blue eyes blazed; he had already been worked up into
madness, and I was certain by his insane manner of starting from his
chair, if the doctor did not go instantly the captain would destroy him.

But it was at that moment that the boatswain bawled on deck. 'Come
up!' were the words I caught, sounding through the companion-hatch in
a muffled note of thunder. 'Up with them who's going.' More was said
which I did not hear.

'By keeping her, you are murdering her, and her blood is on your head!'
cried Mr. Owen like a woman in a frenzy of passion, and rushed up the
ladder.

'Don't believe him,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, grasping my hand, with a
wild, short, passionate laugh that had the note of an hysteric sob.
'You shall see the boat presently. You shall see it out upon the
water. You will judge then who would kill you. Oh, not I, not I, my
flower; not I, your poor old nurse!'

I clasped her round the neck and sobbed. When I looked up Captain Burke
had left the cabin.

We were apparelled for the deck, and finding the captain gone, we
followed, and though scarcely five minutes had elapsed since the
boatswain bawled, already the long-boat was some ship's lengths
distant, bowed almost to the line of her lee rail by a great square of
white canvas, shaded here and there where the moisture had not dried
out of it. She looked full of people as she rose to the head of the
folds, ripping through it with the icy breeze fresh off her bow, till
the lift of the foam sparkled in a fountain-like arch right athwart her
forward, and her speed raised two humps of froth on either quarter,
and shot a long milk-white glance of wake, bright as a meteor's line
of light, far astern of her, lifting and falling on the swell, and
defined to its extremity even amidst the smoke and snap of the running
seas.

Captain Burke with one hand grasping the edge of the companion stood
watching her. When we came up his first words were, after a brief pause:

'They'll overhaul the ship if they can only get a sight of her. Look
how she sails, and how finely she is handled.'

'She may be the means of saving us,' cried Mrs. Burke. 'What use were
they on board of us? But they're useful there. They'll be sighted and
rescued, and we shall be hunted after.'

But I did not want her nor her husband after I had watched the boat
a little to tell me that, unless they quickly encountered succour,
their situation, crowded together in a small exposed space, would be
terrible. Also, since Mrs. Burke would not have left her husband, I
should have been the only woman in her. I cannot say how the mere
sight of her as she swept onwards, dwindling as you gazed into a mere
toy, regularly sinking out of sight till nothing showed but a gleaming
curve of her topmast cloths, wan and slender as a distant sea-fowl's
pinion, then taking the slope till she leaned, poised and foaming for
a breathless instant, upon the flying summit: I cannot tell you, I
say, how solemnly and awfully that mere toy, full of human beings,
emphasised to my perception the vastness and the loneliness of this
cold, green, heaving breast of ocean.

Captain Burke took the telescope out of the companion and swept the sea
for some little distance on either hand the boat's bows, pausing on the
lee side of the fabric where, my sight being good, I spied a point like
a light tipping the sea-line against some dark clouds there whenever
the hull soared.

'That's the ship,' said he, pointing. 'They may catch her! Why, had I
thought of it--but who's going to make proposals to mutineers?--the
scoundrels have stolen my only boat. How do they know in leaving us
what's to become of us without a boat?'

'Had you thought of what?' said his wife.

'I'd have given them a handful of rockets.'

We stood watching the boat till the white spot she became was one with
the breaking seas. The hull looked indescribably forlorn. The sense of
all life, saving us three, having gone out of her, brought a deeper
spirit of desolation into her labouring shape. Oh, the heart-sickness
that came into you out of her dismal regular rolling in the trough!
The swell lifted her, the seas burst upon her weather side as against
a rock, broke into smoke, and smote the hollow they sprang from with
the loud hissing of a hail squall. There was a constant dreary gleam of
ice as the fabric swayed, pallid glares along her side, blue glancings
from the long barbs at the catheads; the frozen snow the whole length
of the deck had a shrewd keen sparkle. In places along the working line
of the sea hung motionless the faint marble of bergs; but long before
the boat was lost to view the feather-tip of sail she was pursuing had
vanished.

Captain Burke carefully and closely swept the horizon, then replaced
the telescope.

'A few hours often make a mighty difference at sea,' said he. 'By this
time tomorrow we may be towing northwards.'

'Have the men gone away without a compass?' said Mrs. Burke.

'The bo'sun owned a compass that was a curiosity of casting and
graving: I remember he showed it to the mate. They'll have taken that
with them. And now,' said he, speaking with more cheerfulness than I
had observed in him for some days, 'let us go below and get something
to eat. There's fuel enough to keep the stove going for a long spell.
The hull's as staunch as she was on the day we sailed. Any moment
you may see something that will look like ice climbing the sea into a
whaler's breast of topsail and stump topgallant masts. So call things
at their worst, miss,' said he, 'for then we may believe that their
mending's at hand.'

Mrs. Burke and I went below; the captain remained on deck. Between
us we dressed the dinner table. She did not want me to help her. She
said it was her duty and joy to wait upon me. 'To think of Miss Marie
Otway,' she exclaimed, 'laying a table-cloth and putting knives and
forks upon the table that a plain merchant-skipper and his wife may
dine.'

I kissed and went on helping her; any sort of occupation was welcome:
for, argue as the captain and Mrs. Burke might, the abandonment of
the wreck by the whole of the sailors had raised a horror in me, and
filled my heart with deep secret distress and dread; so that, whenever
I thought of our situation, it was with a shudder at the emptiness of
the rolling broken hull.

I believe the hour was not far from two o'clock. Already the gloom
of the early antarctic night was in the cabin, but the lamp swung in
flashes through the shadow, and you could only have told that the gloom
was gathering when you looked at the portholes. We sat beside the stove
waiting for Captain Burke; by-and-bye his wife grew uneasy, and went on
deck to seek him and call him down to dinner.

I was then alone, and sat very cold and wretched. I had been alone in
this cabin before--that is, since the masts had gone; but then there
had been the tread of feet overhead, the knowledge of a plentiful,
hearty life in the ship. Now all was as hushed as the tomb in that way.

After I had been waiting four or five minutes, I saw two small points
of light in the gloom where a locker ended, and where some few feet
of ship's wall ran clear. I stared, suspecting an illusion, and then
believed it was phosphorus or something jewelled with light by decay as
rotten timber is. But on a sudden the two shining spots came stealing
out into the whiskers and ribbed shape of a huge lean, grey rat. I
jumped up with a shriek and the thing vanished.

My nerves gave way, and, marvelling at Captain and Mrs. Burke's
absence, I went on deck to look for them, trembling with disgust and
terror.

The daylight was small, but the snow along the decks made a whiteness
in the air, so that perhaps even in the darkest hour you would be able
to detect anything in motion betwixt the rails. Here and there about
the leaden rolling ocean broke sudden glares of froth. The shadow had
blended the sea-circle with sky, and nothing was visible save a smoky
thickness of vapour breaking up to windward where it soared, and ashy
in places with rain or snow. I stood in the hatch and looked along the
deck and saw nobody. This so frightened me that I shrieked out Mrs.
Burke's name. Nothing answered. I trembled with dread and the bitter
cold of the wind, and crossing the deck that I might have something
to hold by, went forward, occasionally screaming out the name of Mrs.
Burke, but never getting an answer.

The galley door was open: nobody was in it. I was half fainting with
terror; I could not imagine what had become of my companions. Was
I alone in the ship? Oh, never could I make you understand what my
feelings were whilst I stood running my eyes first forward and then
aft, straining along the ghostly slanting glimmer of the decks for a
sight of one or another of my friends, hearing nothing but a strange
moaning noise of wind in the sky, and the long rolling thunder of
moving mountains of water, the early night darkening fast down all
round, the closing in upon the ghastly, weary, tumbling hull, lifting
its bowsprit and splintered stumps of masts in postures of agony
defined as existence itself could make them!

I had just sucked in my breath to send forth another scream, when I saw
a figure in the little hatch called the forescuttle, which led into the
forecastle.

'Who is that?' I cried.

'Is that you, Miss Marie?' called the voice of Mrs. Burke, and she rose
through the hatch.

'I thought you were lost. I thought I was alone,' I cried, beginning to
sob with a sudden passion of hysteric relief.

'My husband went down into the forepeak to get some coal,' said she,
not perceiving that I cried. 'He asked me to help him by pulling up
some buckets as he filled them. We are not quite done, but do not stay
on deck, my dear. We shall be with you in a very few minutes now.'

On this I returned to the cabin, but much shaken, and so low-spirited,
I had never before felt more miserable.

I entered the cabin with eyes a-search for the rat, and could not sit
still beside the stove for thinking of the beast, for at every moment
I was coining the lights of its eyes, the gaunt crouched shape of it,
out of some shadow here or there; and if I saw it not in imagination,
I figured it as under my chair. However, soon after I had returned,
the captain and Mrs. Burke entered the cabin, the captain bearing two
buckets and his wife one, full of coals.

'Now,' he exclaimed, 'for a little wash after that job!' and he took
a kettle of water off the stove and carried it to his cabin. His wife
followed him.

They came back soon and we sat down at the table. Whilst we ate Mrs.
Burke explained how her husband had attached a block to a beam in the
forecastle and rove a rope through it with a hook at one end, and how,
standing in the forecastle, she had hauled up the buckets as he filled
them deep down in the forepeak.

I told them of the horrible rat I had seen.

'Don't let it scare you, miss,' said the captain. 'Rats at sea haven't
the viciousness of the beasts ashore. They'll drown themselves in a
man's savings of molasses. They'll creep into his bunk and nibble his
toe-nails. That's about the worst that I can recollect. They may be
destructive to ships and cargo, but they've got their instincts, and
know when on the ocean they're dependent on sailors.'

He doubtless said this to hearten me. Mrs. Burke changed the subject by
speaking of the melancholy appearance of the forecastle. The hammocks
swung, she said, as though every one held a man; the sailors' chests
were scattered about, there was a smell of tobacco in the place as
though the sailors had scarcely extinguished their pipes. The captain
had put out the forecastle lamp. It was alight when they entered.
Not that it would have set fire to the ship. It was sputtering and
smelling, with a thick coil of slush rank smoke spreading in a little
cloud under the deck out of a small greasy flame.

'The silence is shocking,' she said to her husband. 'I looked to see
the heads of men peering at me over the edges of the hammocks.'

'There may be heads of men nearer than we think,' said he. 'I'll
give ourselves a chance this night.' He looked up at the clock under
the skylight and seemed to calculate, and then said, 'The boat went
swiftly. She may have run into the ken of the ship--some box-ended
waggon of a south seaman, no doubt, slow as a baulk of timber working
to windward on a two-knot tide.'

'What will you do?' said his wife.

'I'll send up a rocket occasionally. If she picks up our people she
might stand down to look for us--she might. I'll do more,' he added
after a pause. 'I'll give them a flare or anything else that may be a
bright light to see us by--a lantern on the stump of the foremast, or,
better still, under the bowsprit where it'll dance.'

'Can a hull like this remain long afloat?' said I.

'Ay, miss.'

'I thought when a vessel was dismasted she became a wreck, and went
quickly to pieces.'

'Over and over,' said he, 'you may have heard, you must have read, of
derelicts, whose log-books showed they'd been washing about for months,
sliding north and south, east and west through the summers and winters
of the ocean. A well-built ship is so hard to knock to pieces that
when she's abandoned she's as dangerous to navigation as an uncharted
rock. Again and again they talk of sending gunboats to blow derelicts
to pieces and clear the road. They're hard to extinguish, even with
gunpowder, as hard to expel as a madman's fancies. This craft is safe,
believe me, and will provide us with a secure sea-home until we're
fallen in with, which may be tomorrow.'

This sort of talk did me a world of good, and I began to cheer up and
feel something like my old self. I was now used to the motion of the
hulk, at least in such a sea as then ran, though a landsman coming on
board for the first time would have been instantly thrown, so swift,
abrupt, and shooting were the rolls. This afternoon we did not notice
any particular weight in the race and lift of the swell and sea; there
had been a dumbness in the looks of the weather throughout the day,
though a fresh wind blew with a flaying, razor-like edge of frost in
it. Captain Burke said he expected a quiet night; that is, no more wind
than had blown through the day. He built up a good fire for us, and got
his wife to boil some coffee, whilst he fetched a number of rockets to
carry on deck.

With the wish to amuse me he asked if I would like to see a rocket
fired, and whilst Mrs. Burke made some coffee I followed him above.
Night was upon the sea, and its shadow was as a wall for the ice spears
along our rails to brandish their gleams upon. The captain fitted a
candle-shaped thing into a rocket in the bulwarks near the wheel and
fired it, and the rocket sprang high in a line of sparkles, leaving a
red ball of flame floating close against the clouds, which reflected
the radiance as though to a touch of sunset. I watched the red ball
float down the wind and expire.

'We'll send up a second for luck,' said the captain.

This was a white light and the dazzle of the flash was lightning-like:
a thin long wake of the brilliance dimly glanced, serpentine, off the
peaks and slants of the heaving waters and the sky opened as to a
star. But the night was the darker for that light when it went.

'Now, who's to tell,' said Captain Burke, 'what eye has seen those
rockets? Never give up heart at sea, miss. We'll go below for a cup of
hot coffee, and then the brightest burning lantern aboard shall be made
fast in some place where it can be seen.'

I returned to the cabin with a little spirit of elation working in
me, a strange possession in the presence of that reeling shadow of
frosted hull and the blackness winding round about, pallid here and
there with the wild dim light of froth. It was occasioned, no doubt,
by the sending up of the rockets, by some faint hope or fancy of their
being seen, with a half-formed vision of the ship the crew that day had
pursued staggering down towards us then, a pale shaft aslant, gaunt
with lean canvas breasting slowly, with many eyes on the look-out.

The three of us sat drinking coffee, and our talk ran in the way of our
deliverance. The captain named our chances.

'Yes,' cried I, 'but if a ship should refuse to tow you, you will not
surely remain on board this hull and keep us with you! Sooner----'

I broke off.

'Sooner what, miss?' said he, rounding his face upon me, crimson on one
side of it with the fire.

'Sooner than that we should remain here in the hope of saving the
property you possess in the hull, I would give you under my hand an
undertaking that my father will make good the amount of your loss.'

'We'll see you safe; we'll see you safe,' he exclaimed with a slow
smile. 'Anyhow, you're better here than in the long-boat where you'd be
if Mr. Owen could have had his way.'

'Ay, if they're not aboard a ship they are cold now, I warrant, those
poor men in that open boat,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke. 'And if the breeze
should come on to freshen so as to fling spray over them, that must be
the freezing part. Not to be able to get up and walk, and to feel the
brine raining upon your back and hardening into a mask of ice about
your neck!'

The captain got up, but as I did not watch him, I know not whether he
went on deck or to a cabin. When he returned he held a large ship's
lantern, a globe of white glass framed with metal. He fetched some oil
from the pantry, carefully trimmed and then lighted the lantern.

'This will handsomely jewel the bowsprit,' said he. 'She'll make a
starry dance of it there, toss it as proudly as though it were a gem on
her brow, and she was still clothed in her last week's beauty of white
wings. Heigh-ho! 'Tis no time for fine fancies. Sit ye here, miss;
I'll not have you again expose yourself above; but, wife, you can rig
yourself up so as to give me a ten minutes' hand on deck. I may want to
seize a block to the bowsprit and run this light out.'

She clothed herself for the bitter cold, and bidding me not be afraid
though a hundred rats should come and stare, she went up the steps
after her husband in the almost noontide light of the lantern that
swung in his hand.

The emotion of light-heartedness was ended; it had been but as the
gleam of a star in black water on a cloudy night--the sky was folded
up, my heart was dark again, I found no light nor life of hope in
it. They say that hope springs eternal; I vow to God then I felt as
hopeless as if my end was at hand whilst I sat alone when they had gone
to show a light on the hull. I closed my eyes that I might not see the
rat should it come, and so, sitting with the glow of the lire upon my
face, I beheld a vision of my house: it rose upon my darkened gaze; I
saw the wintry scene of Channel waters, the glance of foam through the
flying clouds of snow; I saw myself walking with my sweetheart upon the
stretch of sands, pausing to gaze at the beauty of the forming breaker
and to hearken to the cries of the skyful of blown gulls. I saw my
father; but what I chiefly remembered was the sensation of bitter cold
which had sunk chill to heart and marrow, when I entered for the first
time the cabin I was now occupying.

I shivered and buried my face and rocked myself, my eyes still sealed.
I may have lost thought of time in musing; I started, looked round,
and found by the hour that they had been on deck nigh twenty minutes.
I thought this was a long time for Captain Burke to keep his wife
exposed, and still I concluded that the job of securing a lantern to
the bowsprit might run into time aboard a dancing, jumping, slippery
hulk; so I continued to wait, all the while straining my ears, till
hearing was made an anguish of by the constant cheats of sound.

I could bear it no longer. They had been absent half an hour and five
minutes. I did not expect to hear their footfalls through the frozen
snow on the planks; nor would their voices reach me if they remained
forward; but why did not they come? I waited another ten minutes, then
went on deck.

I looked, and was almost paralysed with terror; had I been an instant
sooner, an instant later, it could not have been; but my eye went
to it as I rose through the hatch at the breathless moment of its
happening--and this was it: low over the sea in some quarter I could
not name hung the moon, red as the sun in fog; she had just broken
out through a mass of heavy black vapour; a ragged edge as of scud
was floating off her upper limb like a last lingering shadow of
eclipse, as I looked; and right athwart the orb, centering it, was
the body of a bird, doubtless an albatross; and the instant picture
was that of some wondrous, gigantic, glowing shield hanging over the
sea, and approaching the hull on the back of a huge seafowl. But in a
heart's beat the deception went: the bird whose distance created that
marvellous illusive perspective curved in its flight and winged out of
the illuminated circle and was gone, and in the next breath a lift of
black stuff like the dingy smouldering of a candle-wick overspread the
moon and hid her.

I looked along the deck, and as before, so now, I beheld nothing
moving. I tried to reason with my terrors by supposing that the captain
had again gone below to shovel up more coal, and that his wife waited
in the forecastle to help him. But whilst I looked and strained my ears
I heard a moan; again and yet again it came; I could not be mistaken.
I went forward and heard the moaning whilst I advanced, and when I was
close to the galley I saw a figure on the forecastle and heard the
moaning again.

I stepped close, my heart almost stopped, my blood almost frozen. The
white of the deck made a light of its own, as I have told you, and
I saw Mrs. Burke lying on her side. She lay close to the fluke of
an anchor that was stowed upon the forecastle on the starboard, or
right-hand side. She moaned and continued to moan; I dropped on my
knees, and grasping her hand cried, with my face close to hers to see
if her eyes were open, for her moaning was that of a dying person: 'It
is I. What has happened? Are you ill? Where's your husband?'

She answered feebly, moaning at every other word:

'He has fallen overboard. He went on to the bowsprit with a lantern and
slipped. Oh, God, my heart breaks, my heart breaks! I ran and fell and
I cannot rise. I have lost him--oh, my heart!'

I cried in a passion of horror and terror, 'Captain Burke drowned!' and
then, figuring him battling for life alongside, I sprang to my feet
and went to the rail and looked over. But there was nothing to be seen
save an inky cloudiness of moving waters, shaping and dissolving, and a
dim light of foam when the ship's bows pitched, and there was no other
sound but that of the washing of brine pouring along the side, and a
noise of wind overhead.

I went back to Mrs. Burke and knelt by her again, and cried:

'Cannot you rise that I may help you to get to the cabin?'

She moaned, but did not speak.

Then my heart gave way wholly, and as I knelt by her side I clasped my
hands, and looked up into the darkness, and cried out of my loneliness:
'What shall I do? What shall I do?'




CHAPTER XII

MR. SELBY TAKES UP THE STORY.


Having been blown considerably to the southward of our course by a
succession of hard northerly gales, the barque 'Planter,' from London
to Adelaide, on a dark, bitter, raw morning of July 1860, was breaking
the seas close hauled, looking up for as much northing as the seating
of the wind would allow.

Our long topgallant masts were down on deck, and we showed nothing
above the topmast cross-trees. Under single-reefed topsails and reefed
foresail we rolled sluggishly onwards, making small way; the swell was
wide and strong, but the wind blew without spite, save for its edge,
and the seas ran small.

My name is Ralph Selby. I was chief mate of that barque, a vessel of
four hundred and sixty tons, Walter Parry, master, John Newman, second
mate. I had charge of the forenoon watch, and it was now about nine
o'clock, but dark as at any hour of the night. All my sight had been
going for ice whilst it remained black; throughout this had been so
with the rest of us, since seven o'clock of the preceding evening we
had nearly fallen foul of ice mountains three times. At midnight,
indeed, the air being then like fog with snow, a loud and fearful cry
from the forecastle had preserved us by the dark of our nails, we were
in time by a few heart beats only; the whole mass looked aboard us as
we surged past with our helm hard up, floating off on a heave of black
fold that carried us clear, though it nearly thumped the channels off
our sides with the lumps of loose ice it slided us into. The paleness
of that mountain went up into the sky high above our mast-heads; the
roar of the sea bursting at its base was louder than any surf I ever
heard ashore; rock-blasting shocks in thunder echoes came out of the
heap, which perhaps sank two leagues backwards into the blackness.

We drove clear and lost it, but for the rest of the night those who had
the watch kept staring with all their eyes.

Whilst I leaned over the side searching the darkness off the bow, there
broke over the starboard quarter the cold pale day of that desolate
part of the world. The dim light seemed to sift to the zenith through
the clouds like steam under the rolling sky. In twenty minutes it was
daylight all round, the ocean a dirty freckled green, swollen in folds,
and flashful with the short running seas of the then light breeze. The
horizon opened into a hard green distance, working like a revolved
corkscrew against the stooping soot past it, though overhead it was
middling fine weather, streaks of dim green sky veining, into a look
of marble, a surface of compacted yellow stuff; down which the brown
scud was sailing south-west.

Crossing the deck to peer to leeward, I instantly caught sight of a
sail, a white square of canvas which, coming and going this side the
horizon, puzzled me during the moments I kept my naked eye upon it. I
fetched the glass and on pointing it resolved the object into a ship's
long-boat, full of people. She was heading to close us, but did not
look as though she lay nearer than we; I observed no distress signal. I
thought I could count eight or nine heads. The gleam of oilskins came
off the men as the boat lifted. With the sheet flattened right aft the
little fabric shredded through it nobly, flinging the water away in
smoke, and rising with the dance and skill of the galley-punt of the
Downs to the head of every hurdling sea.

The sight of her put a full spirit of civilisation into the desolate
scene; and yet I guessed that exquisite distress lay dumb for distance
only in that open leaping boat, gone now behind a hill of brine, now
straining her square of cloths aslant on a rolling peak.

I sang out to the fellow at the wheel to let her go off by a point, and
was going to make my report to the captain when he appeared. His eye
caught the boat in a moment, and exclaiming, 'What have we here?' he
levelled the glass and said:

'Pretty nigh a whole ship's company adrift.'

We closed her rapidly and were presently within hail.

'Take us aboard for God's sake, sir! Half of us are dead with the
cold,' cried a lamentable voice, no man, whoever he was that spoke,
rising nevertheless.

We manoeuvred that she might sheer alongside; we then backed our
topsail yard and her sail dropped with a run. But the men seemed
scarcely to have life enough to catch hold of the coil of rope that
was flung to them, and then when she lay hard by you saw by the rise of
her to the height of our topgallant sail, then by the fall of her into
a hollow twenty feet deep, that if those men were to be rescued they
must be whipped aboard.

So a tackle was secured to the main yard-arm, and the rope slackened
away to let the boat soar and sink fair under the whip; the captain
then sang out for the strongest to send the weakest, themselves
following. A huge, fine fellow with red whiskers answered with a
paralytic flourish of his hand, and without delay the whip end was
secured to one of the people and quickly as might be he was swayed
aboard.

I was too busy with superintending these proceedings to do more than
glance at the first of them as they hauled him over the side; and just
took notice that he was a short man, cloaked and thickly wrapped,
with bushy hair, not a sailor, and he looked frozen to death. He was
carried into the cabin and another man was got aboard; he too seemed
lifeless. There were nine or ten, I am not sure. One by one we swayed
them over the rail, the last man to come being the big fellow with the
red whiskers.

Those who seemed dead--of these there were four--were carried into
the cabin; the others who were able to crawl were helped into the
forecastle.

'What's to be done with the boat, sir?' said I to the captain.

'Oh, what can be done with her?' said he, with a shrug and an askant
look of longing at the fine little craft. 'We should drown her if we
towed her, and we can do nothing with her now. Let her go.'

I went forward by the captain's orders and saw to the men who had been
sent into the forecastle. Hot grog and food were given to them; they
were partially unclothed and chafed and wrapped in blankets. The only
one who did not seem to need this care was the burly, red-whiskered
seaman. He had stripped himself of his waterproofs, and after
swallowing a couple of steaming glasses of grog, and eating pretty
heartily of cold beef and biscuit, he asked for some warm water to wash
the frost out of his face; which done, he fell to clapping his arms
upon his breast, and shooting them out to right and left, kicking his
legs about likewise; then turning upon me who stood watching, he said
he was ready to step aft and spin his yarn to the captain.

We were a barque with a short poop; I took him into the cuddy, and
there left him in order to look after the ship, so that I did not
learn the story of this crew until a little while after he had related
it to the captain. When I regained the poop the boat was showing and
vanishing some distance astern. It made me shudder to think of exposure
in her in these seas, and under the wild sky that was stormily sipping
the sea-line with its black lips of vapour, though on high, over our
staggering mast-heads, the heavens continued to lie a little open.

I saw them coming and going with steaming stuff from the galley, and
guessed they were ministering to the poor frozen wretches in the cuddy.
By-and-by the red-whiskered man went forward, and a little later up
came Captain Parry. He approached me, and with a shocked look on his
honest sailorly face said:

'I'm afraid three of the four are dead. We can't put any life into
them. The fourth man stirred after some chafing, and when some hot grog
had been spooned down his throat, and he's now got his mind. But I
don't like to think how it's going to prove with him; his fingers and
thumbs look to be mortified, and if his boots are pulled off his toes
'll come away.'

'Which man is that, sir?'

'The first man we got aboard, a man with bushy hair. He was doctor in
the ship.'

'And the others are dead?'

'I never saw a frozen to death body. Newman says they're dead. He's
been groping after any hint of life and finds none.'

John Newman, as I have said, was our second mate. He had been bred to
medicine, changed his mind, and gone to sea at two-and-twenty, and was
now, at the age of thirty, with a master's certificate of competency in
his desk, earning five pounds a month as third in charge of a little
barque. We all looked up to Newman as a medical authority; he had
during the passage doctored some of us very skilfully; in pronouncing
the man dead he knew what he was talking about.

'This is their yarn,' said the captain, and now I repeat in brief what
he related.

Their ship was the 'Lady Emma.' She sailed from the Thames April 2. A
few days before this time--namely, on July 2--she was thrown on to her
beam ends by a terrific squall; they cut away to right the ship and
all three masts went smack-smooth saving the foremast, of which there
remained a jagged stump of some twelve foot. To this next day they
secured an arrangement of boom and square-sail, which blew over the
bows on the wind suddenly freshening.

The captain was a little broken in his spirits and weakened in his
intellect by this calamity; also it was said forward that it weighed
upon him to remember that a strange man wearing his face and aspect
had walked on the forecastle one night. His hope was to blow north and
fall in with something that would give him a tow to a port, he (it was
understood) having a considerable uninsured venture in the vessel.
The crew sickened of his notion, seeing no good nor hope in it; and
on catching sight of the topmost canvas of a ship they launched a
long-boat, hastily provisioned her, and went away in pursuit, leaving
behind the master, his wife and a young lady passenger: but through no
fault of the men, as the captain and the others declined to accompany
them.

They lost the ship and wore for the hull afresh, missed her, and
stood north-east by a compass which did not appear to have been very
trustworthy. They were exposed for two nights and very nearly two days,
and another night must have killed them all. The dead men were the
steward, a Dutch seaman who had been ill for weeks with rheumatism, and
another.

'How should the wreck bear now, do you think?' said Captain Parry.

I reflected, and after recalling the weather, and estimating the
boat's sailing powers and the like, I answered if she was to be
sought she might be found about one hundred and fifty miles distant
west-south-west.

'I make her further than that,' said the captain.

'Perhaps so, sir.'

'But your bearings about tally with mine. I think it's our duty to give
those people a chance for their lives. Three of them! and two of the
three, women, Mr. Selby! And the passenger, I understand from Wall the
bo'sun, is the daughter of an English baronet--the skipper's wife was
her old nurse--she was sent out for her health.'

He looked thoughtfully round the sea, then told me to get the yards
braced in, and going to the wheel, shifted the course, making a fair
wind of the breeze, and the ship drove along.

The main difficulty lay in the shortness of the time of daylight. We
were not going to hunt for a large becalmed craft, clothed like a
pyramid to the trucks, and courting the eye like an iceberg, but for
a low dismasted hull, which might slide past us within musket-shot in
some hour of blackness, and no man dream it was near. But the captain
was resolved to give the poor people a chance: there could be no
question that the master of the ship, his wife, and a young lady were
alive, locked up, helpless and hopeless, aboard a hull which at any
hour might float away in staves from the side of an icehill; and it
was right, it was our duty, it was a service that God would expect of
us, that humanity required of us, to search, even at some peril to
ourselves--loss of time counting for nothing when the errand is one
of mercy--seeing that the hull lay, perhaps, within two hundred miles
off, and her inmates in a situation to continue alive for a long while,
the boatswain Wall having told Captain Parry that she was plentifully
stocked with coal, provisions, and liquor.

All that day, till night blackened out the scene, we kept an eager
watch upon the sea. It held fairly clear, a slender promise overhead
in greenish streaks of an opening heaven, though the horizon scowled
with snow-clouds. We sighted several icebergs, but saw nothing of the
wreck. When it fell dark that afternoon, we shortened sail to two
close-reefed topsails, furling the foresail, and rolled onwards slowly.
The swell was high and ran strong from the westward, but the sea curled
lightly. A few wan stars blinked in the rifts. The cold was intense.
The rigging seemed to take a new thickness of ice when the night came,
and the running gear was as stiff as bar-iron in the shears.

I guessed that Captain Burke (as I was told his name was) would show a
light every night: he had lanterns and oil and an altitude that, with
his freeboard, might give him twenty feet above the water in his stump
of foremast. But we searched in vain for a sparkle. For my part, I
took but a halfhearted view of the quest; yet it was a thing not to be
omitted by an English seaman: no man of the slenderest mercy of heart
would have foregone it.

I had charge of the middle watch, and being a man of some imagination,
I cast my mind into the misery of the poor people who were somewhere
out upon those black, swollen waters in a flat wallowing hull, and
I shuddered and grieved when I thought of them. The life of a lofty
superstructure of masts and spars, with canvas to spread or reduce
at will, was in our ship; I felt the buoyant rise of her on hills
of ink rolling invisible; I'd step aft to search the gloom astern
and on either quarter, and mark the dim snow of the wake sheeting to
the taffrail with the droop of her stern, and hear the grind of the
wheel-chains, and see the illuminated disc of card trembling the course
at the lubber's mark betwixt faithful oscillations, as though it were
the spirit of the ship, naked and shining, and revealed in all its
sublime guiding and informing motions; and then my mind would go again
to that dismantled hull somewhere out in the freezing blackness here or
there, a coffin of a ship with three live people locked up in it!

It came on to blow in hissing snow-squalls a little before daybreak. I
got two hours' sleep after eight o'clock and turned out for a mouthful
of breakfast: when that meal was ended, the dull day had whitened
through the snow upon the skylight glass, and in a cabin window I saw
the sea, lifting close with the ship's lurches, rolling astern and
quickly out of sight into the blowing flakes.

The captain came below: he shook the snow off him by the stove and said:

'No signs of the hull. Nothing can be done if the weather don't clear.
It's as thick as smoke all round, and if we go on making southing in
this fashion we shall be running down the South Shetlands.'

'To pick up a wreck like this, sir,' said I, 'you may need to cross and
re-cross your track a hundred times over.'

'I should never be able to sail away with a good conscience either,'
said he. 'To leave three people to wash about down here, to perish
certainly after a horrible time of it! Though it should cost a week of
cruising to rescue them--'twould be like murder.'

He stepped into his cabin with unsettled looks and a face of agitation.

He was one of the humanest men I ever met whether at sea or ashore. He
was not what would be called a gentleman by birth, but he was a man of
God's best moulding, a simple, generous, just person, beloved of his
crew, his officers' friend and companion, and their kindly counsellor
as well as commander. I never heard a coarse word escape him nor a
harsh one to even the most provoking of his people. He was an honour to
the flag of his Service.

When I went on deck the weather had somewhat cleared round the ship,
but the snow was whirling grayly against the soft dark thickness to
leeward, whilst the windward sky was black with cloud of a true Horn
pattern, low-flying, shredding off its edges, and swollen with burdens
of hail and sleet.

I went to the starboard rail to take a long, careful look round, never
knowing but that all on a sudden, in a flying way, the hull might leap
into sight out of some green trough dim with salt breeze. Mr. Newman,
heavily clad in sea boots and yellow oilskins, was standing for shelter
under a square of canvas seized in the mizzen rigging. For my part I
never wore an oilskin in my life. I was to-day clothed as I always went
in bitter weather, north or south: in a thick pilot coat, thick pilot
cloth trousers, a warm fur cap with ear-covers, thick mittens, and a
shawl round my neck.

I was straining my sight into the whirling gray thickness over the bow,
the ship then being under two close-reefed topsails and stern main
trysail, and surging over the high swell and through the broken rugged
seas at about five knots; when a man who was descending the starboard
fore-shrouds with a coil of rigging round his neck missed a ratline
with his foot and slapped at another with his hand: it parted at the
seizing and he fell overboard backwards.

In the swift glance I had shot, my sight being already bent that way, I
saw the ratline he had clapped hold of stand out from the shroud like a
bar of steel.

I roared 'Man overboard!' and shouted to the fellow at the wheel to
put the helm hard down. In the same breath I caught a lifebuoy off its
pin and flung it at the body of the man who was then floating on the
top of a swelling fold within a pistol-shot astern, fast sliding off.
This buoy, like others in the ship--a device of the captain's--when
it struck the water freed a red staff with a length of red bunting
attached: the staff stood up on the buoy and the streamer like a tongue
of fire blowing out made a beacon for a swimmer as well as for a boat
in daylight.

Meanwhile the second mate was yelling for all hands and bawling 'Man
overboard!' and shouting for seamen to lay aft and heave the vessel
to. The captain came running up on deck. I called the tragic news to
him, pointing aft, and then sprang for a jolly-boat as we termed the
thing, which hung in davits upon the starboard quarter. A number of
men came crowding around; the boat was swiftly cleared away, and I and
three sailors jumped into her.

'Keep all fast till way is lost,' shouted the captain. 'Stand by to
unhook handsomely or she'll drown ye.'

In a few minutes, which seemed as long as months, the boat sank to
the water's edge and was waterborne: a sea lifted her half-way to her
davits again; in that upward rush we unhooked, got oars over, and away
we went for the red streamer which I could see faintly glimmering
through a mist of spume.

She was a fat lubberly boat, better for this work than our longer
whale-ended quarter-boats. She jumped like something alive and
distracted, sometimes sped end on, made with headlong plunges into the
valleys, sweeping up the acclivity with her nose to the sky, doing
her work dryly but so wildly that the men could scarcely plunge their
blades for a drag upon her. A couple of spare oars were lashed along
her bottom under the thwarts. I had nearly cut them adrift, meaning
to help the others, fisherman-fashion, with one, and I never cease to
thank my God I did nothing of the sort.

I steered for the man, but he was not to be seen. I had never from the
moment of marking him fall doubted that he had plumbed the bottom like
a lead, weighted as he was with heavy sea boots, painted clothes, and a
coil of rigging round his neck; but it was not to be admitted: the man
was overboard, the ship was to be hove-to, and the poor fellow searched
for and saved if so willed.

All in a breath, when we were within fifty strokes of the streaming red
flag, the boat was capsized on an apex of pyramidal sea, that poled
her sheerly bottom up at the instant that a blinding snow-squall came
seething along, whitening the water into hissing salt, and thickening
down the sea within a biscuit-toss. This I had been observing at the
very instant the boat was flung keel up, and I recollect that I carried
the memory of that scene of snow-squall under water, scarce realising
but that I was in a dream, happening as it did too swiftly to give the
mind time to catch a hold on reality.

When I came to the surface I was bubbling and spitting in a smother of
froth hard against the side of the boat. There were two others. I got
my senses quickly and sputtering the brine out of my mouth roared, 'We
must right her. We can't hold on. We shall freeze off her dead men in
five minutes. Together now.'

The three of us got a hold of the keel, and a sea helping us, we
righted her, swaying down upon the little fabric with the strength of
the madness that fights for life; but in righting she struck one of the
men under, and he went down like a shot whilst I and the other got into
the boat.

A large copper baler attached to a lanyard lay at the bottom. I plunged
my hand down, groped for, and found it, and fell with fury to casting
out the water, the other baling with his sou'-wester with all his
might. The sea repeatedly broke over us, but we toiled with superhuman
effort for our lives. I believe the filled boat would have sunk under
our united weight but for a couple of empty breakers secured in the
bows and aft. We laboured with rage, flashing the water out of the
boat, and presently she was showing some little height of side. Then
to slenderly provide against a second surprise of capsizal which would
signify certain death to us, I lashed the two spare oars that were
under the thwarts to the painter and chucked them overboard; this
brought the boat head to sea, and we went on baling.

The spite of the squall had gone out of the wind, but it was snowing
heavily, and strain my sight as I would I could see nothing of the
ship. In a flaw in the thick feathery fall I caught sight of the red
tongue of bunting; the buoy then was about a cable's length distant; it
was closed out quickly and all became a tumbling, gyrating blackness;
yet I had drawn some faint comfort from the sight of it. I guessed
the ship could not be far off and that she must spy us the instant it
cleared, which might happen at any minute. Meanwhile we baled for our
lives.

My companion was an able seaman named Tom Friend. After he had been
throwing out the water for some while, when the boat was perhaps still
about a quarter full, I meanwhile baling with the same sort of fury
that possesses a drowning man when he clutches and catches and beats
in the air for life, he said to me:

'Mr. Selby, if we aren't rescued soon I'm a dead man.'

'No, no, keep up your spirits,' I shouted. 'They'll have us. Bale, man.
We must keep afloat to be picked up.'

He went to work afresh with his sou'-wester, stooping and flinging; the
wind smote the brine into smoke as we hove it over the side. We did not
cease till but a little water was left in the bottom of the boat, and
we sat and gasped and stared about us.

I know not how long this business had occupied. It seemed to me that
the shadow of the night was already in the air. It may have been no
more than the darkness of the thick black cloud out of which the snow
was tumbling in immense flakes. All the time I was expecting to see the
dye of the ship's fabric oozing out of the whiteness, plunging out of
the smother into her clear shape within easy earshot of us; but that
did not happen.

After we had been in this situation about two hours Friend put his two
hands together, and began to waggle his body as he sat on the midship
thwart fronting me; his face was blue. He made shocking grimaces of
anguish and fell a-moaning most piteously, crying: 'Oh, the cold! Oh,
the cold! Oh, Jesus, support me! I can't stand it!'

Though my own sufferings were inexpressible, I was still sensible of
a good stock of vitality; but I cannot tell why I should have better
resisted the cold than Friend, who was a lump of a man, broad-backed as
a table, though a little stout. I was soaked to the skin, and coat and
breeches were already frozen hard upon me; they cracked when I stirred
as glass might. The thwarts were glazed and ice half an inch thick
sheathed the timber.

Friend let his sodden and frozen sou'-wester lie; and he looked wild
and dreadful with icicles pendent from his hair. In a sudden sharp leap
of the boat to the summit of an ugly sea, that broke and curled white
as milk on a line with our gunwales, he pitched towards me, slipped
over the thwart he struck, and lay motionless at my feet. He groaned
twice but spoke not.

What could I do? Chafe his hands? As well the thwart he had been flung
over. I had not a drop of spirit for his throat, and myself felt dying.
I could not but let him lie, and I believe he gave up the ghost very
shortly after he had uttered his second groan.




CHAPTER XIII

THE HULL


After Friend had lain at my feet for about an hour I stripped the
oilskins off the body and put them on; they diminished the sense of
deadly cold. I dragged the body into the bows, and after baling hard
sat down, sure that my death was at hand, but seeking consolation in
the thought that suffering ceases some while before you die of cold,
and that death from this cause is as easy as drowning after the first
agony.

It never ceased to snow until the night fell, and then when it was
black the weather cleared--that is, I could see the flash of froth at a
distance; but stare as I might I beheld nothing of the ship, no smudge
nor deeper dye upon the darkness anywhere to indicate her presence.
I stood up and looked and looked, waiting for the toss of the sea to
strain my gaze; then, with an awful despair in my heart, and the full
rushing weight of my doom upon my spirits, I threw myself down into the
stern sheets to die.

That I should have lived through that night is the miracle of my life.
There is no lack of suffering in the maritime records, but I vow that
mine in those hours of darkness which I passed in that open boat is
not to be topped, though it may be matched. Perhaps it was that all my
organs were sound, whilst Friend perished from the shock of immersion,
and from failure of some vital power--doubtless the heart.

Be this as it may, I lived through that night and through the icy
darkness of the morning, till daylight came crawling in a sallow
green over the sky, low, broken and flying. It might be that Friend's
oilskins preserved my life by excluding the needle-like tide of
frost-black wind from my flesh. When it was fairly daylight I stood
up. My sight was clear; but I felt as though formed of stone. I could
poise my figure to the wild leaping of the boat, but I could not lift
my arms: each shoulder felt brittle as glass; it seemed to me that if
either limb should be grasped and pulled, it must break short off.

The body of Friend lay ghastly in the bows. It was on its side, the
cheek on the floor of the boat, and every time the little craft dived,
the water in her boiled about the figure, which bristled with ice, and
the head seemed nailed to the bottom boards by long spikes of crystal.
I could not bear it, and made a step to cast it overboard, but, finding
my arms helpless, stood still and looked round for the ship.

No wilder, drearier dawn ever broke over that cold, stormy, and
desolate ocean. I guessed the wind about north; a strong wind, with
a shriek as shrill as salt as it fled spray-charged past the ear,
flaying as though it were a naked edge of sharp steel. A large squall
was darkening the sea to leeward of the boat; when I was thrown up I
saw the dim whiteness of ice in several places. I gazed slowly around
in a broken way, for in every other breath there stood a wall of water
betwixt me and the horizon.

All on a sudden when my eyes went astern I saw, not above a mile
distant, a dark object: it reared and sank, came and went; sometimes
froth leapt in a light of snow about it. I stared, scarcely daring
to hope as yet that it was more than an illusion of the vision, a
reappearing shape of green surge, a hard reforming moulding of brine,
looking like--looking like----

And then with a short choking cry of transport I recognised it. It was
the dismasted hull: that wreck of the 'Lady Emma' we had been in search
of.

I watched her to make sure, dreading some cheat of delirious
imagination--but it was the wreck; I marked her rise with the sea, a
firm, defined, black shape against the root of the thick large squall
that was blowing to leeward of her. A dim sheen of the gloomy day was
in her wet side or sheathing as she soared, heeling not above a mile
off and dead to leeward.

The sight gave life to my dead limbs, as it put spirit into my dying
heart. I got the use of my arms and hands with a sudden frenzy of
resolution, like to the effect of the panic terror that will compel a
bedridden man to rise, though till thus started he has lain helpless as
the mattress he springs from. I went into the bows, and getting hold
of the body of Friend turned it over the gunwale. The corpse as I have
said was that of a stout burly man, yet I found it light as a baby.
How was that? Unless it was that the strength of half a dozen had come
into me with the passion of life and hope the sight of the wreck had
inspired.

I pulled in the pair of oars the boat had been riding to and took my
chance of the broadside send of sea; the fierce sweep and sharp angle
nearly flung me overboard, and thrice whilst I was clearing the oars
which were heavy and difficult with ice, the boat was almost capsized.
In a few minutes I got an oar over the stern and sculled the boat's
head round for the wreck. She shot forward, and I sat square that
my back might break any smaller sea which should foam tall and curl
faster than the boat could rise. For the rest--for the peril of a great
sea, for the swamping by seething waters uniting on either side the
gunwale--I was in God's hands.

The wind and the sea swept me so swiftly onwards that the hull was
close ahead all on a sudden, a large black mass, rolling heavily with
violently quick recoveries; she lifted her channels foaming, and again
and again a sea shot up her side in a height of white brine, which
blew into the water on the other side of her in a cloud like steam.
There was nothing for it but to drive for her stem on and take my
chance. I tore off the oilskins for the freer use of my limbs, and
when I was close to the wreck, having headed the boat fair for the
main-chains, I sprang forward and seized the end of the painter; the
boat's nose smote the hull as she was roaring from me. I got a turn
with the painter round a chain plate; the boat swung in, but so swift
were the motions of the hull that she was rolling down upon me even in
that time, and, letting go the painter, I jumped in a single bound into
the chains and was stumbling over the rail, spiked with ice, as the
hulk swept her streaming side out again from the sea, with such a slant
of deck that if I had not flung myself into a squatting posture and
made the athwartship run of the hard frozen surface on my hams, I must
have broken my neck or fled sheer overboard through the openings where
the bulwarks had been smashed level.

I was crazy with hunger and thirst and cold, and could think of nothing
but shelter and food and drink. I took a hurried look along the deck
hoping to see smoke from the galley or cabin chimney, for I reckoned
of course upon finding the three people the 'Planter' had searched
for alive in this hull. I saw no signs of life. I cautiously crawled
aft, and coming to the companion-way tried to open it; the doors
were thickly glazed, whence I judged they had been kept closed for
some time. I pulled out my clasp knife--all that I carried was in my
pocket as it had been before the boat capsized--and after scraping
and dislodging the ice in sheets like plate glass, I got one of the
companion-doors open and descended, pulling the door to behind me.

After the long hours of exposure and the ceaseless crackling noises of
warring waters, the shelter, the comparative warmth and stillness down
here, were like the gift of a new life. It was dark, yet not so gloomy
but that I could see. The daylight lay upon the snow on the skylight,
and that large square of whiteness sifted a sort of dim illumination of
its own into the dusk.

My first look was for those whom the boatswain Wall had told us the
crew left behind them when they abandoned the hull. Nobody was here. An
unlighted lamp swung violently over the table. I beheld a dull gleam
of looking-glasses upon the ship's side, and thought in the glance I
cast round that I could make out the equipment of a small, comfortable
state cabin. I quickly spied a rack half circling the trunk of the
mizzenmast; in it were some decanters; three were half full of red
and yellow wine. I put the mouth of one to my lips and drank heartily
of its contents, but whether it was claret or sherry I could not say;
excessive thirst seemed to have robbed my palate of the power of
tasting. I then went straight to the first cabin my eye rested upon,
intending to go the rounds for the pantry; but this cabin proved to
be the pantry, where, after a short hunt, I found cheese, biscuit,
preserved meat, and jams. I fell to wolfishly, breaking off only to
fetch another decanter of the wine from the cabin.

And now having eaten with a dangerous heartiness, and drank as much as
would have brimmed two tumblers, I stepped into the cabin, refreshed
and warm, a new man, almost my old self again, needing little more
to perfectly comfort me than a shift of clothes, which might be
obtained by seeking. But first I stood still, holding by the table to
listen. I heard nothing but the sounds of the labouring of the hull.
Had the captain and the two women been taken off the wreck? I should
have believed so but for having found the companion-doors closed and
glazed; ice could not have collected to the thickness I had found it
had people been coming and going by the companion-way. And yet it is
true they might have been taken off, and before going some one of the
rescuing party had closed the companion-door with a kick or a thrust as
he stepped on deck.

I saw no fire in the stove; the lamp was out; it did not seem as if
there were human life in the hull. I went to a door on the starboard
side, the next to or second door past the pantry, and entered a berth.
I could scarcely see. The porthole was submerged every other moment
and the sight blinded with a sudden plunge of foam-thick twilight.
After gazing awhile I made out that this berth had been occupied by the
captain and his wife. I observed a quantity of male and female apparel
hanging from a row of pegs running along the bulk-head; also I made out
two bunks, a table with certain navigating appliances upon it, a couple
of chronometer cases on a shelf, and sundry other matters not worth
cataloguing. I lifted a locker, and after groping came across some
flannel garments and under-linen. If the captain were aboard I guessed
that in any case he would give me leave to help myself, so, after
feeling over the clothes upon the bulk-head, I shifted to the frozen
flesh of me.

Scarcely was I warmly and dryly clothed, when so heavy a drowsiness
came upon my eyelids that I could instantly have sunk upon the deck
in a sound sleep. But first I was resolved to ascertain the condition
of the hull; likewise whilst it was daylight to see if there were any
signs of the 'Planter,' and if the weather gave me any promise of her.
The idea of falling into a trance-like sleep which might run into
hours, from which, for all I could tell as things stood, I should be
awakened by finding myself strangling in a cabin full of water, and the
hull already fathoms under, put such a fear and horror into my spirits
as enabled me to thrust back into my brain the heavy, stupefying weight
of slumber, that was making my eyes ache as though the balls of vision
had been wrung and unseated. I shook my body as a dog does when fresh
from the water, and beat my arms upon my breast with all my strength;
then, with a wild yawn, strode into the stateroom and went up the steps.

The first thing I saw was the boat I had gained the wreck in: she was
flinging and leaping upon the seas about a hundred fathoms off on the
port quarter; being light and released she had blown away quickly.
Every time a surge forked her on high the pouring blast smote and
swirled her further yet to leeward. This would go on till she filled.
I hardly took thought of her, abhorring her as I did as the theatre
of that drama of anguish and hopelessness I had been forced to act in
during the long black hours of the past night: and yet I very well
understood that she had been bound to go adrift, as I had taken but a
slippery turn with the painter round the chain plate at the instant
when the hull brought her main chains crushing down upon me for that
spring by which I had saved my life.

I crossed to the port bulwarks to hold on by: t'other side was full of
ugly yawns and rents, a dangerous, ragged wreckage of bulwark through
which down the ice-hard slant a man would shoot, with a sudden roll,
to his death. The galley was standing: all the boats were gone: the
wheel and binnacle remained, and the apparatus of the helm looked
sound. The decks were littered with frozen gear. Nothing showed of the
main and mizzen masts but a barbed block, scarce a foot high above the
mast-coats. But the stump of the foremast rose to perhaps twelve feet.
The pumps were frozen: the sounding rod lay close to, but I could do
nothing with it. Yet, as an old hand, I could feel the life of a ship
in my feet, and I was sure, by the hull's buoyant jumps, her cork-like
recovery from the headlong dives, and the loneliness of her rolls that
there was nothing in the water she had drained in so far to make me
uneasy.

Cheered by this conviction, I pushed forwards, clawing along by the
pins in the rail, by whatever else came to my hand, till I was abreast
of the galley, whose port sliding-door lay half open, and going to it
and looking in, there on the deck I saw lying on her back the body of
a woman. I peered close, the light being weak. The body was warmly but
plainly clothed; the colour of the face fresh as though she slept.
I should not have guessed her dead by her looks: it was her lying
there that made me know it. She seemed a woman of between forty and
forty-five, flat of face, treble-chinned, and she showed as a person
that had been fat and heavy in life.

The sight startled me: I had not thought to find anything dead. Had she
been the wife of the captain? Where was _he_? And where the young lady
that had sailed as passenger with them? Were they both lying frozen in
other parts of the vessel? But there yet remained two or three cabins
below to look into.

I came out of the galley shocked and low-spirited, and, still pushing
forward, came to the forecastle and called down the hatch. I got no
answer and descended. Here I found a number of hammocks, a few sea
chests, and some odds and ends of seamen's apparel scattered about the
deck. The forecastle lamp swung black under its grimy beam. I could
scarcely see. Water--though no depth of it--seethed over the planks as
the vessel pitched and rolled: this water I reckoned had tumbled down
the forecastle hatch, and when I returned on deck I drew the slide of
the scuttle over.

I went to the stump of foremast that was ringed with some pins, and
holding on by one of them, looked round and round the sea, waiting for
every lofty heave to dart my glances; but there was nothing in sight
save ice, the peaks of bergs afar, coming and going past the rounds
of the swell, and the rush of the surge flickering into foam. It was
blowing half as strong again as it had been an hour before, and the
seas were racing with a weight and spite of headlong yeast which must
have drowned me out of hand in the jolly-boat. A low sky of thick black
cloud coiling, revolving, like sooty pourings from countless factory
chimneys, was sweeping southwards. I crawled aft for the shelter of
the cabin--the wind was marrow-freezing; and scarce was I within the
comparative warmth and stillness of the interior, when slumber again
oppressed me; and nature now giving out I stretched myself upon a
cushioned locker and was asleep in a minute.

When I awoke I started instantly into an upright posture, beholding a
figure gazing at me; in some muddled fashion I seemed to realise my
situation, whilst I imagined that the cabin was half full of people
who had come to save me. Then, getting my wits fully, I made out that
the person who stood close was a young woman. Her figure was inclined
towards me, and so she stood despite the swaying of her with the
motions of the deck: it was a posture of fear, incredulity, amazement,
incommunicable in words.

It was too dim in that cabin to note more of her than that incomparable
attitude of fright and astonishment.

It had been past noon when I lay down to sleep: the strong feeling
of refreshment within me was assurance, true as the sun's evidence
could have been, that I had slept through more than the two remaining
hours of daylight. It was daylight now, consequently I understood that
whatever might be the hour, I had been sleeping since noon on the
previous day.

I stared at the girl, for a young girl I now perceived her to be, and
exclaimed:

'Are you Miss Otway?'

'Oh!' she shrieked, 'have you come to save me?' and she dropped on her
knees and grasped my hand. 'Save me!' she cried, 'I am alone here. I
have been alone for days. I am in darkness. When did you come? Where
are your companions? Why were you sleeping here? And take me on deck.
Is your ship near? If the boat that brought you can live in this sea
she can carry me on board your vessel.'

I cannot express the agony of heart in her voice. Her terror at seeing
me had been changed into another passion by my naming her.

'Where's the captain?' said I, obliging her to rise, and seating her on
the locker beside me.

'He is drowned,' she answered.

'When?'

'A long time ago. Seven or eight days ago. I have lost the day. I do
not know how long I have been alone. Why don't we go on deck? Is the
sea too rough for your boat to leave this wreck?'

'Why, poor young lady,' said I, trying to catch a fair view of her
face; but it was too dim for that, and then again she was thickly
furred about the neck, and her hat, that seemed of velvet without a
brim, sat low. 'I would take you away from this rolling hulk at once
if I could. Under God I may yet save you. I am as much shipwrecked as
you are. But we needn't despair. This hull dances tightly; she has been
washing about now for some days, and I should doubt by the feel of her
jumps if there's two foot of water in her hold. Who's that dead woman
in the galley?'

'The captain's wife,' she answered, staring at me.

'How came she to perish there?'

'She went with her husband to help him affix a lantern to the bowsprit.
He slipped overboard with the light and was drowned. I waited for them
here and went to find them, and saw Mrs. Burke lying on the deck. She
had fallen and broken her leg. I was too weak to carry or drag her into
this cabin and I pulled her into the galley for the shelter of it, and
there she lay, and I could not help her,' she cried, clasping her hands
with strange, piteous, involuntary motions of her head. 'I don't know
whether she died of grief, or from the injury of her fall, or whether
the cold killed her. It was black in the galley, and I could not see
her. I often called her name, but she never answered me. Oh, what an
awful time was that night! I stayed by her until long after I knew she
was dead, and then came down here, and have remained in this place ever
since--no, three times I have been on deck to look for a ship: it was
always snowing--it has been enough to drive me mad,' said she, passing
her hand with a wild gesture across her eyes.

'Mad indeed!' said I to myself, all thought of my own situation
vanishing in the presence of the anguish of this poor gentle young
woman: she had a sweet soft voice: I supposed she had been alone in
this labouring hulk for hard upon a week. It was wonderful she should
have kept her mind. Indeed it put a sort of craziness even into _my_
seasoned head when I paused in contemplation of her, and realised
how it might have been with _me_ had I been alone in this straining,
creaking, wallowing fabric with no one aboard beside myself but a dead
woman, an atmosphere of stinging cold, nigh twenty hours of blackness
every day.

'But you've not been starving all this while?' said I.

'When there was daylight,' she answered, 'I'd get some food and wine
from yonder;' she pointed to the pantry. 'I took a little stock to my
cabin. Where is your ship? Have you no companions? Take me on deck to
see your boat and the vessel,' and she extended her hand.

I saw she had not understood me, and I told her how it had come to
pass that I was on board the hulk with her. She listened in silence,
saying nothing when I spoke of the men who had been lifted aboard
the 'Planter' out of the 'Lady Emma's' long-boat, frozen to death,
and nothing whilst I described what I myself had undergone in the
jolly-boat. She seemed slow to understand; but at last, when I was
done, after continuing to stare at me, for our faces were a sort of
glimmer one to the other in that gloom, she gave a shriek, and crying
'There is no hope for me, then! there is no hope for me, then!' buried
her face and shook and swayed in a passion of weeping.




CHAPTER XIV

STILL ADRIFT


I could do nothing but let her cry; yet, knowing there is no better
medicine for such misery and fear as hers than action and the sight of
it, I got up and went to the pantry for materials to trim and light the
lamp. I found oil and bundles of wick, but no matches. I returned and
asked the poor weeping young lady to tell me if she knew where I might
find a box of matches; she went to a cabin which I supposed was hers,
one on the port side, almost aft. I was struck by her walk: not once
did she stumble or pause, wild as the play of the plank was. In a few
minutes she rejoined me with a box of wax lights, and, unhooking the
lamp, I filled and trimmed it and hung it up, and it swung burning
brightly.

Now I could see Miss Otway, and as much of her face as showed was
remarkable for delicacy and refinement. She was very pale, her eyes
light, whether blue or grey I could not then tell; her hair was of a
soft, rather dark amber. She had perfectly even small white teeth,
but her lips were pale and marked a want of red blood. She was of
medium height, but of a shape not to be guessed at, heaped as her form
was with clothes. What she wore was very rich and fine, and a little
diamond sparkled in each ear. She seemed fragile, in delicate health,
just the sort of girl to whom the doctors, despairing of their physic,
would recommend the breezes of the world's oceans.

Her eyes were red with weeping, and when I glanced at her after hanging
up the lamp I found her staring at me with looks of anxiety and
expectation piteous with passion.

'This,' said I, casting up my gaze at the lamp, 'makes the cabin
cheerful. I hope there is plenty of oil aboard to keep us in light till
we are taken off.'

'When will that be?' she cried.

'Why, perhaps to-day and perhaps tomorrow,' said I. 'My ship can't be
far off; her captain is one of the humanest hearts afloat. He thinks
three of you are aboard here, and he'll cruise for you. If he don't
find us the reason will lie in the weather, not in his not hunting.'
Then, looking towards the stove, I exclaimed, 'You'll have been ice
cold down in this well. Let's build a fire, there's plenty of coal in
the hull: the boatswain Wall said so.'

'Who were the dead?' she exclaimed.

'Two seamen and the steward. A fourth--the doctor--lies fearfully
frostbitten. He stands to lose his feet and hands.'

'They wanted to take me with them,' she cried. 'Captain Burke would not
let me go; Mrs. Burke was against it: had I gone I might now be safe
in your ship.'

'Don't imagine that,' said I, deeply pitying as I looked at her. '_You_
capable of enduring two nights of exposure in the seas in that open
boat! They proved sound friends who kept you here. _Here_ you're alive
and you shall be saved--you shall be saved!' I exclaimed heartily.

A faint smile put a look of spirit into her pale face. I went to the
stove, and beside it, secured so they should not fetch away, were three
or four buckets of coal, but no wood. I was in no temper to rummage
the ship for a faggot, and, having noticed a chopper in the pantry,
I fetched a bunk-board from the captain's cabin and split it, and
presently had a roaring fire.

'Did the crew cook their victuals here before leaving?' said I,
noticing a kettle, a frying-pan, and other galley furniture lying near
the stove.

She answered that some cooking had been done for the crew in this cabin.

'Pray sit you here,' said I, catching her gently by the wrist and
bringing her close to the stove, and seating her on a small cleated
sofa beside it. 'I believe a pannikin of hot drink--tea, coffee, or
cocoa--and something to eat, will do us both good. Keep you here and
thaw through and through whilst I get a kettleful of water.'

She was watching me with some life: the cuddy fire threw a warm,
cheerful colour upon her face, and the flames shone in her eyes,
filling them as with a dance of courage. When I spoke of fetching some
fresh water, she cried out eagerly, extending her arms:

'Oh! mind you do not slide overboard. The decks are deadly. I can't be
left alone again.'

I smiled and bade her not fear for me, and picking up the kettle and
dropping the chopper into my coat pocket--it was an immensely thick
pilot-cloth coat I had found in the captain's cabin and put on--I went
on deck.

This was a lead-coloured day with a confusion of ragged black cloud
thronging southward where the vapour was crowded and darkening into a
look of thunder. I saw no signs of the 'Planter,' nothing but the ice
afar. Secretly I had no hope that Captain Parry would persevere in his
quest. I made no doubt he would suppose all hands in the jolly-boat had
been drowned, which, God knows, was very near the truth; and this would
dispirit him, his forecastle working strength would be weakened also,
for, saving Wall, the 'Lady Emma's' men were of no use, and I reckoned
he would be glad to stick his ship north, clear of the perils of the
ice and the blinding snow-storms.

But whether it was because I was a young fellow of a heart naturally
lively, or whether because I had escaped a dreadful death, so that
the being on board this hull was almost as a rescue, 'tis true I felt
no depression, no despondency in any marked degree when I looked round
on stepping on deck and saw the leaden, rolling, frosting ocean bare,
and viewed the tumbling, dismasted, mutilated hull, white fore and aft,
bright with a hundred figures in ice, a most forlorn and dismal object
as she bowed her naked bowsprit into the sallow trough, wearily leaning
off the slant, with cataracts of foam hissing from the channels and
scaling her sloping side. I could not but reflect that, though we were
far south, whalers in plenty were to be met with in these seas, and
that the hulk was stout and buoyant, and bade fair to last us our time
in her, which might not extend beyond the morrow.

So, with a good heart and a vow besides to do my manhood's best to
cheer up my poor companion, to make her as comfortable as the means of
the hulk and my sailor's judgment would allow, and to help preserve her
life in God's own time, I looked along the deck, and then seeing how
it must be, went to a scuttlebutt lashed forwards of the port gangway,
and finding it half full, went to work on it with the chopper, knocked
the hoops off, and the staves tumbled to the deck, letting slip a mass
of fresh-water ice, shaped cask-wise. I struck off as much as would
fill a kettle, leaving the rest to lie, and returned to the cabin.

'Now,' said I, knowing the tonic worth of work in a time like this,
'melt this for us, if you please. When the kettle boils we'll go to
breakfast.'

'Is your ship in sight?' said she, getting up and taking the kettle and
ice.

'No,' I answered, 'but something will be coming along soon. This is a
great whaling ocean, you know.'

'What is your name?' she asked.

'Ralph Selby,' I replied.

'How did you know my name?'

'Wall, the boatswain, was full of you and Captain Burke and his wife
when he was brought aboard out of the long-boat.'

'Yes, yes, I understand,' said she. 'I should have guessed it.'

'There are things to be done whilst you get the kettle to boil,' said
I. 'You move about very easily, I see.'

'I am used to this dreadful monotonous rolling,' she answered.

'Can you lay your hands upon what we may want in the pantry?'

'Oh, yes. I know what's there. Shall I boil some coffee?'

'If you please,' said I, smiling to find her talking with a show
of life. 'I am going to the captain's cabin to look to one or two
matters,' and with that I left her.

I entered the berth I had shifted myself in, and which I knew had
been the captain's by its appointments, and first I looked at the
chronometers, and, finding them still going, carefully wound them
afresh, guessing by the revolutions of the key that they would have
stopped shortly. I then sought for and found the ship's papers, and
overhauled them to gather the character of the supplies aboard. The
cargo consisted of stout, brandy, and whiskey; samples of preserved
potatoes and articles of potted food, a quantity of theatrical scenery,
builders' stuff, such as doors and window frames; patent fuel, oil
cake, india rubber, and certain other commodities. I observed that
amongst the samples was a quantity of preserved milk: there was also a
consignment of one hundred iron cases, each containing two hundred and
fourteen biscuits, weighing one pound each, and specified as six inches
square by one and a half inches thick.

In short the paper indicated half a shipload of food and liquor. But I
made nothing of this then. Such a plenty was not likely to seem of any
use to two people who looked to be taken off the wreck in a few days at
the outside, and for whom therefore a single cask of beef, a single
barrel of ship's bread, along with the little stock of delicacies I had
observed in the pantry, would be more than enough.

I lingered to overhaul the nautical appliances, intending, should a
phantom of sun show, to get an observation. It was very gloomy here.
I found a small brass clock ticking stoutly, and this I wound up, the
plain silver watch in my pocket having stopped when the jolly-boat
capsized: the time by the little clock was a quarter after eleven. I
went out and set a clock under the skylight to this hour. I guessed
it would comfort the girl's eye to see the time. Nothing in such a
situation as ours could make one feel more outcast, more hopelessly
removed from human reach and sympathy, than a lifeless clock silently
telling the same hour always. It would be as though time itself had
abandoned one.

The ice was melted and the kettle boiling, and Miss Otway was making a
potful of coffee. She had lifted the fiddles and spread a cloth, and
put some preserved meat, cheese, jam, biscuit, and the like upon the
table. The lamp and the flames in the grate made a light like noon,
and, now looking round, I beheld a very rosy interior, a quantity of
books, mirrors for decoration, comfortable armchairs and couches, and
sundry fal-lals; all designed, no doubt, to render the voyage of Miss
Otway cheerful and pleasant.

Turning, she cried out: 'Oh, Mr. Selby, you cannot imagine what it is
to see someone--to have someone to speak to. Only God could say how
lonely I have felt. The dreadfully long nights; the endless hours of
darkness----' Her voice broke and her head drooped.

'No need to tell me what you have undergone,' said I. 'Never in all
sea story did any girl suffer upon the ocean as you have. But you've a
brave look. You'll keep up your tears now. I'm a sailor and I give you
my word we are very well off. We need but patience, and faith in that
God who has watched over us both.'

On this she raised her head and viewed me a little while steadily, as
one who stares critically to make sure of another.

I took the pot of coffee from her and we seated ourselves. She
had suffered so long from what I may truly call a very anguish of
loneliness--and, indeed, one had need to be locked up in that same
rolling hull, in the blackness and the cold, with the seas roaring
outside, and within always the same soul-maddening noise of creaking
bulkheads and harshly strained fastenings, to realise what this poor,
gentle, delicate lady had endured--that I was sure she'd find a
wonderful ease in talking freely. I therefore questioned her whilst we
sat eating, and she told me who she was, where she lived, how the wife
of the master of the vessel had been her old nurse, with other matters
which she herself relates.

She warmed up in talking. I think she found a sort of hope in merely
speaking of her father and her home and the gentleman, Mr. Archibald
Moore, to whom, but for her health, so she told me, she would have been
married some months before the date of her sailing. I so questioned
her that the early despair in her manner died out when she talked of
her father and sweetheart. I took care to converse as though they were
within reach, and the meeting a matter of a little waiting only. In
short, my resolution to cheer her mastered her fears and perhaps her
convictions; and even whilst we sat I beheld a new life stealing into
her, speaking in her raised, hopeful, more eager voice, and softening
the haggard, wild look in her eyes.

Presently she put some question which I had to fence with.

'My dread,' she said, 'all the while I was alone here, was ice; the
ship lies helpless; I never knew but that an iceberg was close to,
and that every next hurl of the sea would dash the wreck against some
frozen cliff. Is there any ice in sight?'

'Yes,' I answered, 'but a good way off.'

'Suppose we drift towards an iceberg, what shall we do?'

'No good in _supposing_ at sea,' I said. 'Time enough to deal with a
difficulty when it's within hail.'

'Does the hull remain in one place? Or are we being driven by the seas
and the wind?'

'If the sun will put his nose out,' said I, with a glance at the
thickly snow-coated skylight, 'I'll find out where we are.'

'Do you understand navigation?'

I replied with a grave nod.

'If we are moving at all, which way are we driving, do you think?'

'The sextant will tell us,' said I.

Thus she plied me, straining her poor eyes with consuming anxiety. I
answered warily but always on the side of hope.

When I was going on deck she wanted to accompany me, but I bade her
stop where she was till I had stretched some lifelines along. When I
looked out I saw there was no chance of obtaining an observation. The
sky was near, and thick with rolling clouds: the windy dusk had shrunk
the sea-girdle, and the distant ice was out of sight: the leaden surge
broke in against the snow-soft gloom. No more desolate ocean-picture
had I ever viewed; its spirit sank into me in a depression that brought
me to an idle halt for some minutes whilst I wrestled with myself. I
started, and my very soul shrank within me when I asked myself: If we
are not fallen in with what is to become of us? Where are we drifting?
Then I plucked up with the reflection that we were in navigated seas;
any moment might give me the sight of a sail; and my immediate
business therefore was to render our distress a visible thing upon the
face of the rolling waters.

I shut the companion doors that the girl might be warm below, and, that
I might move with security, went to work to stretch lines along the
deck. A great plenty of gear lay frozen all about; I got hold of an end
and worked a length into some sort of suppleness, and with much hard
labour succeeded in setting up life-lines in short scoops, so as to
bring them taut, for the winch and capstan were frozen motionless, and
I could do nothing with them.

This business carried me abreast of the galley, where I saw with a
sudden recoil once again the body of the captain's wife. She seemed
asleep, so fresh, living and breathing she looked, with even a sort
of colour in her face, and the expression of her mouth easy and
placid. But since she was dead it was fit she should be buried, and
as her presence added to the ghastliness of this picture of wreck,
and weighed like an assurance of doom upon the spirits, I resolved to
turn her over the side without ado; so, with averted face--for I could
not bear to look upon her, she lay so life-like: it was like drowning
rather than burying her--I took the body under the arms, and with all
reverence gently dragged it to a great gap of smashed bulwark, when,
just whispering, 'May God receive you, poor woman, and may He have
mercy upon those who are left,' I slided her overboard, and instantly
quitted the side, not choosing to get a memory of her as she lay
floating ere the drenched clothes sucked her under.

Constantly I cast my eyes into the north for a sight of the sun; but
he never showed himself. There stood about twelve foot of splintered
foremast. I meant to fly a flag by day and hoist a lighted lantern by
night; but how to shin up so as to secure a block at the head?

I mused a bit, and then went in search of the carpenter's chest, which
I found in the forecastle. It was a huge chest, cleated and lashed down
against the bulk-head that divided the men's sea-parlour from the hold,
and it lay in such gloom that I could make nothing of it, so I returned
to the cabin for a lantern. I found a couple of bull's-eye lamps in the
pantry. Whilst I filled and trimmed one of them, Miss Otway came from
the stove to the door and stood looking in.

'Can't I help you?' said she.

'No,' said I.

'What are you going to do?'

'I am going to hoist a distress signal.'

'Is there anything in sight?' she shrieked.

I shook my head.

'Why won't you let me help you?' said she. 'It's horrible to be left
alone down here. Make me of use. It will do me good to help you.'

But I would not allow her to come on deck merely to look on and be
frozen to the marrow by the pouring wind; so, cheerily saying I'd find
her employment by-and-by, I carried the lighted bull's-eye on deck and
made my way to the forecastle, holding by the life-lines, so that I
moved as briskly as if the hull lay quiet.

I quickly found what I immediately wanted, namely, a quantity of long
iron spikes. I took a handful of these and a hammer on deck and drove a
spike deep into the wood, a little above the other; and thus I made a
ladder of spikes, every projection of iron yielding me room for my foot
and for a grip of one hand. When I had driven in the spikes as high
as was needful, I came down, and after hunting over the gear upon the
deck found a small block through which I rove a line that looked like
a length of the fore-royal signal halliards. I climbed the mast again
with this block and line and, driving a spike into the head of the
stump, I secured the block to it and descended for good, this business
being finished.

I had taken notice of a flag locker under a grating abaft the wheel; I
went to it and found a complete code of Marryatt's signals, a large and
small ensign, and a jack. There was too much bunting in the big ensign
for such weather as this, and for such winds as might burst upon us at
any moment: so I bent on the small ensign to my halliards and ran it,
jack downwards, to the head of the stump of foremast, where it flared
bravely, chattering like a thing of life.

Yet I found it but a mocking signal after all, when I sent my glance
from it round the thick swollen and breaking seas, and noticed that
even already the dye of the early night seemed in the air, and that in
little more than an hour that streaming, flame-like appeal would, as a
call to the eye, be as useless as the stump it blew from.

I was now extremely anxious to ascertain the depth of water in the
hold, and went to the pumps to see what was to be done with the ice
there. The sounding tube was perhaps solid with ice half-way to the
hold; I thought then I would try and draw one of the pumps, and having
the pantry chopper in my hand, let fly, bruising and splintering so as
to free the bucket. In the midst of my chopping Miss Otway called out.
I stopped and saw her head in the companion way.

'Oh,' she cried, with a note in her voice that sounded almost like joy,
pointing with a gesture of rapture to the inverted ensign, 'that will
bring help to us! That will be seen for miles and miles. How clever!
How did you manage to climb that slippery mast?' And then, catching
sight of the spikes, she exclaimed, 'I see. I see. It's wonderfully
done.'

'It's too cold for you on deck,' said I, scarcely keeping grave over
this girlish praise. 'Remain below in the warmth. No use taking a
voyage for your health only to lose your toes and fingers as your
doctor has.'

But paying no heed to this, she stepped out of the companion way, and
putting her thickly-gloved hand upon one of the life-lines, came to
where I was letting fly at the pump and watched me.

It was the best light I had yet viewed her in; and now indeed I
perceived that she was a very delicate, sweet-looking young lady,
about two-and-twenty years of age, pale, but of a transparency of
complexion that made a beauty of her pallor; nor were her eyes wanting
in expression, though they would be too light to faithfully reflect the
deeper and subtler passions and sensations of her spirit.

I thought her the most refined-looking lady I had ever seen; which
perhaps is not saying much, seeing how many of my years had been passed
upon the ocean. I saw the quality and breeding of her in her face and
heard it in her voice, and I think anyone, no matter how inexperienced
in such things, but would, on looking at her, have said to himself,
this is an English lady.

After chopping and hammering for some time, I freed the bucket and
drew the pump; and, the sounding-rod lying handily by, I dropped it,
and after several casts, so hard did I find it to get the level of the
water betwixt the swift abrupt rolls of the hull, I made a little more
than a foot and a half. I was astonished, but wonderfully heartened.
Here was a hull that had not been pumped out for eight or ten days: she
had been straining heavily in the hollow hour after hour: and yet there
was no more water in her than a single spell of a watch on deck at the
pumps might free her of!

I refitted the pump and fell to work at the brake and brought up some
water.

'Let me help you,' said Miss Otway.

'It won't hurt you,' said I, and brought a coil of rope across the
deck for her to stand on, that her feet might be clear of the water as
it washed with the slant of the planks. We then went to work: the water
bubbled, the clank of the brake ran a noise of life through the hulk;
the exercise flushed the girl's face, and, in a pause for breath, I
told her it would do her more good than sitting by the fire.

In that same pause whilst she breathed quickly she glanced with a
sudden look of pain and consternation in the direction of the galley,
and exclaimed:

'The body of my poor old nurse lies there. I had forgotten her.'

'I buried her,' said I.

'Where?'

I told her. She was shocked and her eyes filled, and she turned her
head to hide her face.

'It was not a thing to keep,' said I.

'Oh no,' she cried, looking round at me, eagerly and yet piteously.
'I don't mean that. You threw her into the sea as she lay--without a
prayer----'

'No,' said I, shortly.

She viewed me a little gratefully. I grasped the brake: she put her
hand upon it, and we fell to afresh.

We worked in this fashion for above half an hour, and then Miss Otway,
glowing with the labour and in no wise distressed by it, saving that
her breathing was quick, went below. I fetched the telescope and
stayed to carefully search the horizon before it fell dark. But point
the tubes as I would they gave me nothing. The near sea-line tumbled
dimly in long ragged wings of dark vapour, which as they lifted with
the wind stretched overhead like lengths of smoke; and betwixt them
I spied a higher platform of cloud, mouse-coloured here and there as
though touched by some wild stormy light. I saw no ice, but the wind
blew as though ice were close aboard: the sting of it was insufferable
when you faced it standing. A noise of rattling sometimes came from
the forecastle as though the spray froze in leaping, and fell with the
weight of hail in the tropics, and already the pump we had been plying
was as thick and hard bound as the other.

And still I lingered, not indeed with the hope of sighting a sail
before the blackness fell upon us, but with the idea of making some
sort of blind guess at the drift of the hull. The strong breeze blew
out of the north, and the tall coils of sea ran in wide flashings from
that quarter, but the large ocean swell was about north-west. I was
not very well acquainted with these waters and scarcely knew what to
recollect of the currents hereabouts. I was aware that the set of the
ice was to the northwards. But then the bergs struck deep root into
motions of the sea which had no influence atop; so that there might
be very well a surface-trend to the southward through wind and surge
and swell, when, some fathoms under, the body of the water was slowly
streaming in another direction.

A dismal picture with the sadness of despair coming into me out of it,
when I looked at that square of bunting flaming in mute appeal from the
stump-head to the blind horizon! But we had life, and so there must be
hope, and rallying my spirits with a will, I strode the length of the
life-line to the halliards, hauled the flag down, and went to the cabin
to find and trim a lantern to hoist in its place.




CHAPTER XV

THE ICE IN THE SOUTH


I left a light burning brightly at the mast-head: the wild meteoric
dance of that gleam was a sort of hope: no ship sighting it but would
guess from the rapidity of its oscillations that it danced on an open
boat, or shone from some short height upon a dismasted hull.

The wind was freshening with a long deep moan in the rush of it through
the flying dusk when I left the deck: but I gathered from a general
atmospheric hardening all round, a firmer line in the curl of the
surge, a distincter flash in the foam of it, that it was to be a clear
night, with perhaps a star or two by-and-by. The hull made good play:
she was like a live thing; and no helm and no fragment of canvas
vexing her, she took up her own position and wallowed dryly, save that
now and again in a sharp pitch she'd meet some lateral run of sea and
whiten in the air forward into the look of a snow-storm: but the froth
mostly blew clear, and the water when it came streaming aft quickly
froze into the snow.

Miss Otway sat beside the stove: she had removed her hat, otherwise was
wrapped up to the throat in furs; her yellow hair was shot with amber
light when the swing of the lamp flashed the radiance upon it, but her
looks were white, and something wild with grief, anxiety and fear. She
asked me if there was any ice in sight.

'None that I can see in the dusk,' I answered.

'I'm all the while dreading the ice,' said she. 'I should not fear this
high sea and our lying dismasted in it, if it were not for the ice.'

'There's none near to hurt us just now,' said I.

'When I first came into this cabin,' she exclaimed, 'in the Thames,
a chill ran through me that was cold as ice itself. It was warm, and
yet I shivered as though freezing. Was it an omen? The memory has been
haunting me in my time of loneliness here. A little while before we
were dismasted we sighted a huge iceberg that was like a cathedral: it
had a beach of frozen foam, and the snow whirled in white dust on one
side of it against the dark clouds. Oh, Mr. Selby,' she cried, 'think
of this helpless hull striking against such a mountain of ice as that,
and our getting upon it and perishing with the cold--the awful cold!'

'Why, Miss Otway,' said I with a bustle of voice and manner as I got up
to set the kettle on the stove. 'This sort of talk is good for neither
of us. Do you believe in omens? But don't be scared till danger's come,
and not then. There's plenty to eat and drink in this ship and I'm for
faring heartily for the sake of hoping heartily, and working heartily,
should work be wanted. Come, you shall fry some ham; it's my turn to
prepare the table.'

Presently we were seated as before. I talked more reassuringly than I
had ventured on earlier, for now that her hat was off I saw her face
very clearly, how refined she was, how gentle, how well nurtured;
my very heart pitied her: I felt as though commanded by God Himself
to take charge of her, to watch over her, to keep her heart up; I
can't express indeed how she appealed to me out of her gentleness and
refinement, the horrible situation she was in, the unspeakably dreadful
time she had passed through alone.

And often I would catch her in the intervals of our speech eyeing me
under drooping lids with an eager searching look of enquiry, as though
she would comfort her poor little self by finding out what sort of a
man was I who had come into this rolling hull where she was alone? I
wished her to find out quickly that she might be easy; but we both
needed time, I to act and she to discover.

I cleared the table and went on deck. The lantern burned brightly. The
night lay black, but the atmosphere was hard as when I had gone into
the cabin, and you found a distance in the gloom. All was as well with
the hull as one could dare hope for, and, closing the companion doors,
I re-entered the cabin.

It was about six o'clock then. I lighted a bull's-eye and went into the
captain's berth for the log-book which I had noticed upon the table,
and to overhaul a bag of charts. I brought the log-book and the chart I
wanted to the cabin table: Miss Otway seeing me at this, came opposite
and stood there looking on. I wished to see the last entry in the
log-book; which done, I opened the chart, and was startled to observe
that, supposing the drift of the vessel to have been continuously to
the southward, as somehow I imagined it was, that group of islands
called the South Orkneys, stretching some sixty-five miles east and
west, could not be farther than twenty-five or thirty leagues.

'Are you finding out where we are?' said Miss Otway.

'I shall know exactly when I get an observation,' said I, and carried
the log-book and chart back into the captain's cabin.

But I confess my heart was sunk. To be sure, throughout I had vaguely
known our place--could have named it within fifty or eighty miles
perhaps--yet the business I had been about ever since I woke up
stopped me from realising till I looked on the chart, when of course I
understood that if our drift was south we stood to go to pieces upon
land that would be the most God-forsaken on the wide face of the oceans
of the globe, if it were not that, hard by them, covering a range of
eight or nine degrees of longitude, lay groups of rocks with a range
of mountainous continent stretching due south (magnetic) even more
desolate, naked and iron-sheathed.

But we were not ashore yet: nor could I know certainly that our drift
was south; and then there was to-morrow's daylight with its hope of
succour.

I sat beside the stove and talked with Miss Otway. She spoke of the
voyage and of the apparition which had haunted the memory and depressed
the spirits of Captain Burke down to the hour of his death. I sought
to amuse her by relating certain experiences of my own; and she forgot
her situation whilst listening to some of my yarns. The truth is I
had gone to sea at the age of thirteen and had followed the life
fourteen years, during which I had served in several capacities in many
kinds of vessels, though my experiences lay chiefly in the India and
China trade. I had plenty then to talk about: it amused me to yarn,
and she listened with more life and intelligence than I should have
expected in one with so fixed an expression of dismay, of hearkening
consternation and mourning.

After satisfying myself with a look around on deck, I returned, and
going to the bookshelves, read the names of some of the volumes. It
was a good collection of books: the best of the poets and novelists
were there, with odds and ends of scrappy reading like Hone's and
D'Israeli's. Here I found dear old 'Peter Simple,' and carrying
the tale to the stove, I read bits aloud, and once or twice she
laughed. Then something suggesting the topic, I got telling her about
shipwrecks, my notion being to let her understand how much better off
were we than others who had suffered from disasters at sea. I talked
of the raft of the 'Medusa,' described that pathetic, lamentable scene
in the round-house of the 'Abergavenny'--the wax-lights, the captain
clasping his daughters to him--related the loss of the 'Amphitrite,'
as told to me by a man I had sailed with who had been one of the
survivors of that most tragic of shipwrecks, which littered the
Boulogne sands with scores of bodies of handsome, finely built young
women.

'Are there instances of people,' she asked, 'who have been wrecked upon
icebergs and survived?'

I spun her a few yarns of polar experiences in this way: of Russian
seamen found floating on ice: of a whaler half full of men stranded on
a berg and floating in her giant cradle down into open waters where she
was boarded and the people taken out of her.

'How long had they been locked up?'

'Several months.'

'Were their sufferings great?'

Not knowing, I had to invent, and to cheer her, said: 'Oh, no.
They kept up good fires, had plenty of beef and tobacco, heartened
themselves by singing songs, telling stories, playing at games of their
own invention, and fashioning ornaments out of whale ivory. It came
right with them. When things come right it's the same as if they never
were wrong. Nothing counts but the loss of time whilst you're waiting
for the settlement. How soon, when you get well, you forget that you
were ill! How quickly you forget the weather! Who's it says it's always
too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, but that God so contrives it,
at the end of the year it's all the same? Keep up your heart, Miss
Otway, and reflect that when this is ended and you're safe ashore with
your people it'll be no more than an experience to talk about.'

'Yes,' said she, with a faint smile, 'it will be all right when I _am_
ashore; but who's that other person who says, philosophy triumphs over
past and future ills, but present ills triumph over philosophy?'

This passed my plain understanding, and I let the subject go.

I went on deck for more ice to melt and boil, and found it blowing
pretty strong. A high sea, ridged in lines of ebony against the light
of their own foam, and melted in roaring snowdrifts under the hull
that was topping them with a wonderful buoyancy. I looked for a star,
but all was sweeping blackness aloft, save the point of light at the
stump-head.

Knowing this hard heave of sea must certainly give us a steady trend
southward, helped as the hull was by the blast every time she soared
into the icy howl of it, I fetched a bull's-eye, and observing by the
binnacle that the hulk's head pointed about east by north, I went to
the starboard rail and overlay it, staring with desperate searching
eyes into the hard gloom till I was almost frozen. But I could see
nothing that looked like ice, no faintness, no spectral sheen, all that
glared was foam running from the arched back of the surge; so I went
below, where I boiled some coffee, and, shortly after eight, Miss Otway
withdrew to her berth.

I took the bull's-eye to find me more clothes in the captain's cabin,
and when I was wrapped up to the bigness of a Greenland's-man, I
returned to the stove, dimming the lamp to a light that was just enough
to see by, and lay down upon a couch. Presently I was startled out of
a reverie by seeing a great rat come close to the fire, as though for
the warmth. Very quietly putting my hand in my pocket, I pulled out my
clasp knife, which I opened; the blade was dagger-shaped. Then, quick
as lightning, I lanced the weapon at the beast and half severed its
head. This pleased me, for in the course of our talks Miss Otway had
said that in her time of loneliness, a huge rat had come into the cabin
and looked at her till she was motionless with disgust and fear. I
could not know, however, that this was the rat that had so served her;
though it made one less aboard, and I dropped it into a coal-bucket to
chuck over the side next day.

The sight of the bleeding, lifeless beast set my thoughts running
on the hours the girl, whilst alone, had spent in this hull, and I
wondered when I looked at the rat and listened to the shrieking and
grinding noises, that she had not days before gone off her head. I
guessed that her mind had been cast in a heroic mould; never else could
she have come through such a term of loneliness with her wits all
right. Less had driven strong men overboard, gaping madmen.

Whilst I sat following the wild and flying motions of the hull,
testing them by sensation to gather if the buoyancy diminished, I
was addressed. I looked round with a sudden surprise that was nearly
fright: it was Miss Otway, furred and clothed from head to foot as she
had left me.

'Are you going to sit up all night?' she exclaimed.

'I'm going to sit here,' I answered. 'I shall snooze at intervals.'

'Let me watch whilst you sleep,' said she.

'There's nothing to watch,' I answered, 'nothing to keep a look-out
for.'

'A ship might see our lantern and come down to us.'

'She could do nothing in this weather.'

'But to think of being asleep whilst a vessel is coming down to see
what the light means! Think of her hailing, getting no answer and
passing on. It might be our only chance.'

I told her that might happen even though we both kept watch all night
in the cabin. How, down here, should we hear a hail from the water?
We'd need to keep a look-out on deck, which would kill her quickly and
me soon after.

'Pray go and rest,' said I, 'and trust me to see anything that may come
along and to hear anything that may hail.'

She looked reluctant, very white, her eyes dim and large with tragic
expectancy as though she never knew but that in the next minute
something frightful would happen.

I picked the rat up by the tail. 'Is this your friend?' said I.

She shrieked, believing it alive; then, shuddering and shuddering,
staggered somewhat blindly in the direction of the cabin.

I jumped up and supported her, encouraging her by every promise and
hope my brain could frame.

'You have not slept for nights,' said I, pausing at her door. 'Best now
that I am here, if only that you may have strength enough to leave the
hull and health enough to carry you to your home.'

She had removed her gloves: I grasped her ice-cold hand and returned to
my couch.

The night crept away. I dozed at intervals, visiting the deck perhaps
half a dozen times. In the morning watch I slept soundly upon the couch
by the stove, and when I awoke it was nine by the clock under the
skylight, still black as thunder, and the hull rolling heavily. I was
cold to the heart, and before quitting the cabin kindled a fire to boil
some water for a hot drink, then went up the steps to take a look.

It was still blowing fresh, but the wind had shifted north-west,
and the sky was a clear, sparkling heaven of stars from sea-line to
sea-line, the sea running in steady hills of ink to where you saw the
horizon throbbing close under the pale lights of the night low down,
so clear was the gale. The mast-head lamp burned dimly; but it would
be daybreak shortly. I stared around the sea, and saw nothing north
and west and east, but my sight going south was arrested by a low,
irregular, dim line: it rose with the heave of the hull, and it was
as far off as the horizon. It looked like the sheen of a long face of
coast covered with snow: it was a mere attenuated film of faintness
stretched where sky and water met, and I looked and looked, believing
it a bank of cloud that would dissolve whilst I watched; but it hung
steady, and still it was so elusive that sometimes I saw it, and when
the hull sprang from the trough again it was gone; and yet again, when
she roared to the height of a surge, it was there.

Well, daylight was at hand to resolve it. For my part I had no doubt
it was ice; indeed it had astonished me to find these seas so open at
this time of the year; only, if that sheen out in the morning darkness
under the stars was ice, the drift had been ours to carry us to a sight
of it: which signified a slide of keel running into knots: for that
steamlike hovering down there had not been in sight two or three hours
earlier, when my eye, as now, followed the hard curls of sea working
into distance, though the sky was not starry.

I went below, trimmed the lamp, and prepared the table for breakfast.
Whilst I was thus occupied, Miss Otway appeared. She came straight to
the stove and held her hands to the blaze, and asked me when it would
be daylight. I answered, 'Within an hour.'

'This almost perpetual darkness,' she exclaimed, 'is one of the most
awful parts of this dreadful time.'

'I hope you slept well?'

'Yes, I slept soundly, and awoke only about a quarter of an hour ago.
What is the time?' I named the hour. 'You've seen no signs of a ship
during the night, I fear?'

'Nothing. It has blown hard. It still blows a fresh breeze of wind.
This is the most seawardly vessel that was ever launched. It is lucky
for us her cargo is a light one. Think of her laden to her chain-plate
bolts with some dead weight of iron goods. She would have been under
water day and night, and by this time have ceased to be a hull.'

'When were you last on deck, Mr. Selby?'

'I'm just now from the deck.'

'Is there anything in sight?'

'I'm waiting for daybreak to make sure.'

My answer caused her to make a step from the stove, and to advance her
white face whilst she stared at me.

'Is there ice near us?' she asked.

'I find an appearance in the southward that may prove ice,' said I.
'But what else are you to expect in these seas?' I added carelessly.
'Here we are somewhere down in sixty degrees, and, since I have been
aboard, the horizon has been almost clear. What shall we have for
breakfast? Will you boil some coffee whilst I search the pantry?
Suppose daylight should reveal ice--it may also show us a whaler
fishing in the thick of the bergs!'

And assuming a cheerful, bustling manner I lighted a bull's-eye,
whistling some sea tune the while, and went into the pantry, where,
after a brief overhaul of the closet and shelves, I laid hands upon a
tin of herrings, sardines, and some kind of delicate sausage.

'I am making free,' said I, putting the stuff upon the table.

'These things were laid in for you. I'll take an inventory of what's
left by-and-by; I allow that everything for cabin use will be stowed
in the lazarette. When you're transhipped the delicacies must go along
with you. The whaleman's our chance, and his cupboard has no reputation
for dainties.'

I waited for her to sit, attended upon her, then fell to myself. But
all the while we remained seated she was straining her eyes at the
porthole facing her, then turning to the porthole behind her as though
she thought through the gleaming ebony of the glass, white with the
foam it rose from, to behold the ice I had spoken about.

Day broke before I had breakfasted; it lay white in the snow on the
skylight ere I rose, and the grey of it in the cabin windows was
growing blue when I went on deck accompanied by Miss Otway. And now I
looked at what, for the hour past, I had dreaded to see. The day had
dawned in cold splendour; the sun was flashing in rose, at this moment
perhaps two degrees above the horizon; a number of small clouds were
floating near his face and looked like bits of gilt scaling off the
rayless target-like luminary; otherwise the heavens sloped clear in a
sheer vault of deeply dark blue, under which ran the sea of the rich
hue of the sky, but full of gleams and the snow of melting crests,
and here and there spaces of an exquisite ice-like green snaking
currentwise over the heaving waters.

It no longer blew hard, but it was still a fresh breeze, spray-clouded
in the frequent guns of it that shrieked in gusts over the bulwarks to
the loftier lifts of the hull. But what my sight went to and remained
fastened upon whilst, I own, my breath came and went quickly with
the surprise of the magnificent, but to us the terrible, sight, was
the scene of the southern quarter of the sea. There, stretching for
miles and miles, was ice in bergs which to the naked sight looked to
lie so close, the picture was that of a compacted coast of alabaster,
broken with pinnacles and acclivities of a thousand shapes, curving in
places as though in bays, the whole on either hand dying out in films
of white, whilst over the bows and over the stern, too, every time we
rose to the height of a sea I saw ice, plentiful as the breasts of the
canvas of a vast fleet; and through the southern sky low down ran a
long glinting line or gleam as though a continent of ice was reflected
in its face; it was like the pearly radiance that hovers just off the
edges of sails when lightly swelling in the tropics against a soft blue
sky.

I glanced at Miss Otway: she was staring at the sight with large
nostrils and a gaze of terror under the little frown that the strain
of her gaze had knitted her brows into.

'That is ice,' she cried.

'Ay, miles of it' said I. 'But is there nothing good for us amidst that
prodigious huddle of sail-like stuff?'

I took the telescope out of the companion and knelt with it to steady
the tubes, and slowly and carefully swept the whole of that wonderful
range, from film to film blue in the air. The sun's rosy light was full
upon it; only the brush of an artist could show you what I saw as the
surge ran me into a clear view of the horizon. It looked like a hundred
cities of marble and alabaster, all of them going to pieces. It was
no compact coast. There were many wide gaps, titanic streets fit for
the tread of such ocean giant-spirits as would inhabit those colossal
structures of crystal. The nearest point seemed about ten miles
distant. All was clear sea between, and northwards I saw no ice.

Miss Otway stood beside me holding by a belaying pin in the rail. Again
and again she would say:

'Do you see any signs of a ship? Is not that the canvas of a
ship--_there_, just where your telescope now points?'

I saw no ship, but I looked with impassioned intentness till my eyeball
seemed to melt dim through the lens under the brass it was pressed
against, conceiving that in so vast an arm of ice some vessel might lie
embayed.




CHAPTER XVI

THE AURORA AUSTRALIS


Whilst slowly sweeping the ice with the glass, I saw, or seemed to
see, when the lenses pointed a little to the eastward of south, a blue
shadow of land in the air. I took my eye away from the telescope and
then the shadow was gone: I looked again through the glass and there it
was, a dim, scarcely distinguishable liquid dye whitening as it climbed
till it melted in the azure.

I very well knew that shadow must be land, probably one of the
mountainous rocks of the South Orkneys; unless indeed it was that group
which lies north-east of the South Shetlands--forming one of them, in
short: but I could not persuade myself that our drift to the westwards
had been so considerable. I said to Miss Otway:

'Do you see a shadow in the air yonder?'

She looked, preserving the frown of an intense stare, and replied:

'No; I see no shadow.'

I directed the glass; she put her eye to it and cried quickly, 'Yes; I
see it.'

'It is land,' said I.

She looked eagerly at me and said, 'Inhabited land?'

'I'll not say so, but I believe they go sealing there. I've heard of
whalers heaving-to and sending ashore.'

'For what?'

'I don't know.'

I put away the glass and said:

'I've been afraid of that land; but when I think of it, best after all
for us, Miss Otway, it should be there. Only, how to come at it? What's
our drift and where are we? Shall we wash perhaps round yonder point of
film, clearing the whole blocking mass, to light, may be, upon some
spouter crawling northwards from ten degrees lower south? Or--or----'
But I broke off, for what was the good of conjecturing unless I could
say something to bring a little of the poor girl's heart into her eyes?

On the chance of something lying hidden round a point of crystal I
went forward, lowered the lantern, and ran the red flag aloft, jack
down. This done, I fetched a sextant from the captain's cabin and stood
with Miss Otway in the shelter of the companion-way waiting for the
sun to cross his meridian, meanwhile searching the line of the ice,
beholding the phantasy of a ship's white sails over and over again, and
conversing with the girl.

The sea came ridging steadily out of north-west, the vast westerly
swell of the mighty Southern Ocean pulsing through it in rounds so
majestically regular, you didn't notice the heave of it. I had never
beheld a more glorious breast of ocean. All was dark blue sparkling
billows, heads of froth tossing into silken veils upon the wind, a
roaring, flashing scene, deep blue above, looking in its silence down,
and the ice southward, like a coast cut in ivory white, motionless,
shining, coming and going as the hull sank and soared.

I got an observation and eagerly went below to work it out. Miss
Otway followed me into the captain's cabin and watched me whilst I
calculated. I made the latitude sixty degrees ten minutes south, and
the longitude exactly forty-five degrees west. Then, looking at the
chart, I judged that that shadow of land which was showing miles past
the barrier of ice was some central mountain of Coronation Island,
towering high four thousand five hundred feet. I marked the hull's
place on the chart, and said:

'This is where we are.'

She peered, and after a pause exclaimed: 'It is all desolation down
here! Look how far we are off from Cape Horn. There is no nearer
civilisation than the Falkland Islands--how many hundreds of miles
distant! Oh!' she cried, lifting her head and clapping her hand to
her face, 'if we could but hoist even a little sail to save us from
drifting to the ice and certain death.'

'No,' I exclaimed, 'death's not aboard yet, not even in sight. Sixty
degrees south! The whalers make nothing of that. The Great Circle
carries you lower;' but I would not add 'not here.'

Then, my eye going to a bookshelf, I spied a volume which I pulled down
quickly. It was a directory to these seas. I searched the pages, and,
putting my finger upon a paragraph, said:

'See here now, Miss Otway: men have visited this land, they have named
it, surveyed it, sounded round about it, described it. Where one has
been others may venture. Look at this,' and I read: '"At daylight on
the morning of the 12th January 1823, we saw some pigeons and at six
o'clock perceived the east end of the islands of South Orkneys bearing
W. by S. distant about eleven leagues. We carried all possible sail to
get under the land, but the wind soon became light and left us almost
at the mercy of a heavy swell in the midst of ice islands, which made
our navigation truly hazardous."'

'Their ship had masts and sails,' she exclaimed, 'and was under
command.'

I read on, eager to learn all the book could tell me.

'"Being now close under the land I sent a boat from each vessel to
explore them. We continued to tack the vessels about in a bay. The
icebergs which form in the bays in winter and break away in the summer
now produced so much drift ice that we had frequently to tack ship to
avoid striking it."'

'That's it!' she cried. 'Their ship was under command.'

I proceeded: '"This coast is, if possible, more terrific in appearance
than the South Shetland. The tops of the islands for the most part
terminate in craggy towering peaks, and look not unlike the mountain
tops of a sunken island. The loftiest of these summits, towering up to
a point, I denominated Noble's Peak. This peak in a clear day may be
seen at the distance of fifteen leagues."'

'Is that the shadow?' she asked.

'Possibly.'

'Oh! look at the book, Mr. Selby, and see if it says that the island's
inhabited.'

'It's not inhabited,' I answered.

Then I stood with my finger upon the page musing upon the brief
account. There was little to interest outside of what I had read aloud:
the rest told of bearings and distances, and what had been brought up
by the lead.

'But,' said I, looking at the girl, 'we are not stranded yet. That
we've drifted south is sure; but how much westing has there been in
this tumbling drive? Here's all about the currents shown here,' and I
turned the leaves of the book and read:

'"Ten miles south of Cape Horn the ocean stream flows east-north-east,
half to one mile in the hour." That should be good for us. Let this
wind shift south or west, and the swell and the run of the sea will
drive the hulk out of sight of the barrier.'

But I had something more to do just then than talk, basing chat on
small hope and weak conjecture. I saw to the fire in the stove, then
went on deck to sound the well; the pump was hard frozen as before. I
freed it and got a cast, and found that no water had drained in since
I last sounded. I'll not swear to an inch or two, but the depth was
quite unimportant, and after readjusting the pump I took the glass for
another long look at the ice.

It was land, sure enough, at the back of the barrier; the pearly blue
shadow stood a clear shape in the lens, and I seemed to see it now
with my bare sight when I looked a little away to right or left of it.
I carefully took its bearings, also the bearings of certain defined
features of what I call the barrier, though, as I have said, it was a
length of dislocated stuff full of yawns and wide winding openings,
with a menace of the revelation of many grotesque mighty shapes,
startling miracles of form beyond the reach of the dreams of fever,
should we be set close. There was a sort of salt sparkle upon the range
in some places; and now, whilst looking over the side, I saw, streaming
up the slant of a surge, a pistol-shot distant, a mass of the giant
kelp of these waters: but I observed no birds, nothing more than that
kelp to hint at the meaning of that distant shadow in the air.

It was miserable that I could not get the least idea of our drift save
by waiting and watching, which presently became a sort of anguish.
I sought, but could nowhere find, the deep-sea lead, or certainly I
should have dropped it over the side, taking my chance of its finding
bottom, and lying there to show by the angle of the line into what
quarter of the sea we were drifting--whether we were making straight
for the heart of the range, as it looked, or laterally rolling towards
the south-western extremity of the ice.

The weather continued of a clear cold splendour, the horizon
sharp-edged against the sky as the rim of a tumbler. The sea ran hard
in spiteful foaming slopes which kept on shouldering the hulk dead
to leeward, and within an hour the growth of the ice told me we were
closing it; in fact, by the bearings I had taken I saw that the drive
of the hull was as fair for the heart of the barrier as if she was
being steered for it!

What was to be done? I had been cast in my time in many situations of
peril, yet had never known myself despairful even in the blackest hour
of my troubles: but I own my heart fell now, my spirits sank, hope
died when I looked at those leagues of horizon of ice and reflected
upon my helplessness. Could I have summoned the help of but another
pair of hands I might have made some desperate effort with capstan and
leading-blocks to cap the stump of the foremast with another height of
spar, and get a jib stretched that her head might pay off and bring
her under some sort of control to enable me to thread the waterways
betwixt the bergs. But, single-handed, I could do nothing. There was no
height of foremast for the setting of any sort of rag that would round
her head away and keep her before it--I mean, in a fashion to hold her
responsive to the helm.

When I made the discovery that the hull was setting dead on to the
ice, Miss Otway was in the cabin boiling some cocoa for a scrambling
afternoon meal; she came up while I stood swaying on the heave of the
plank, my arms tightly folded, my eyes rooted to the ice; instantly it
was as clear to her as to me whither our drift was tending, and she
uttered a low cry as though she had been struck.

The mere sight of her, however, did me good--it quickened perception of
my obligations as a man. Her face was white as the foam over the side;
her pale lips moved, but the shrill wind sheared with icy-edge through
her words as they came to her lips. She sent a blind, staggering glance
round the western and northern sea line, and, knitting her face into a
look of resolution, she said:

'It is God's will. But, Mr. Selby, it is a dreadful death to die.'

'I am pleased when you look so,' said I, 'but not when you speak so.
It is God's will, as you say. But what is that will? What's to be our
fate? Look how those blue shadows in the ice open and widen. The bergs
appear close together; hundreds of fathoms separate them in reality,
and if we are to drift into the huddle why shouldn't we scrape through?'

'To where?'

'To where?... There may be open water beyond, and a ship.'

'No, no, land!' she cried, 'land! See the shadow of it. It was visible
in the telescope only a little while ago: now I see it like a forming
cloud. It will be all ice to the rocks, and some break will let us in
and we shall drift deep and be locked up and left--and left----'

And now she could scarcely articulate for some spasm in her throat, and
her poor white face was all awork with the horrors of her imagination.

It made me sullen to hear her, she reasoned so well, beyond any trick
that I had for cheering her.

'We must wait and hope,' said I; 'we are not in the ice yet; there may
come a ship.'

And setting my teeth I swung the glass out of its brackets fiery with
some passing mood of wrath born of hopelessness and helplessness; for
no sailor will stand at gaze and be deserted by his spirit as a man
whilst there is a chance for life, though it be dim as a corposant in a
burst of wet squall; but put him in my place--as I then was; aboard a
dismasted hull rolling to her waterways in a steady pouring sea, a doom
of ice filling the horizon to leeward: how should a sailor act as a man
_then_ save by a stony endurance that sounds gallantly if you call it
heroic fortitude?

But the girl had boiled some cocoa: it waited: so I begged leave to
hand her below out of the ceaseless howl of the ice-charged wind. Yet
neither of us stayed long. She could not eat, and for my part 'twas as
much as I could do to gulp down the steaming cocoa, good as it was.

I believe the sun set soon after two; the sky was everywhere of a
wild crimson, flashing gorgeously where the luminary was; the sea
came running in hard green lines, tall with passing heads, out of the
splendour; _then_ the ice was a wonderful scene indeed, delicately
tinctured as it was with the redness. The shadow of the land hung afar
in a dim, pink cloud, but though the barrier had been plain in view for
some while I could not swear that within the last hour we had sensibly
closed it. This gave me a little hope--though I didn't know any: I bade
Miss Otway note it and she agreed with me--she had a sailor's eye for
atmospheric distance--that the ice looked no nearer than it had within
the past hour.

'Can we be in the grip of a westerly current?' thought I. Then, before
the blaze faded in the west, I hauled down the flag and hoisted the
burning lantern, for the delicate figures of the ice in the remote
recesses where the film of it died out were so cheating in their
likeness to ships lifting canvas and heading for us, that I could
not persuade myself but one _must_ prove a vessel--if not now, then
presently.

I obliged Miss Otway to go below when the night fell. It was too cold
for her. She was like to freeze to death. The ice loomed as a range
of snow-covered cliff to leeward: it showed of a savage and deadly
paleness under the stars which sheeted down weakly to it, though here
and there one brighter than the rest glowed like a lighthouse lantern
on some faint point. It was a wonderfully brilliant night, however,
no moon that I remember, but overhead the larger stars had the rich
tremble you see in the tropics; I had never seen such a field of
brilliants--the stardust hovered like mist, and the height of the sky
that night was awful to my solitary gaze.

At about eight o'clock we were, as I reckoned, about five miles distant
from the nearest elbow of the ice. But though a tall sea still ran,
giving the hull the lofty motions of a stately dancer, the wind was
sensibly taking off. A frightful time was this! for if the hull struck
on the hurl of such a surge as still roared under us, she would go to
pieces in the twinkling of an eye. I was constantly looking over the
side, reckoning to find us setting on to some detached mass of drift
stuff, flat, but not the less deadly for being awash, but saw none.
Suddenly I perceived a light upon the horizon right over the bows. I
fancied my vision deceived me, that the trend of the ice was not as I
imagined it to be in that darkness, that the light was some burning
mountain far past the barrier, and that a shift of wind or change of
stream or tide had altered the bearings: this I conceived and rushed
headlong for a bull's-eye, which I flashed upon the compass; but no!
the indications were as before.

What, then, was that light ahead? Miss Otway had followed me when I
fled up the companion steps with a lighted bull's-eye.

'What is it?' she cried.

'What's that?' I exclaimed, pointing ahead in the starlight.

But now, looking, I beheld a luminous arched cloud: it soared, always
arched, increasing in brightness till the brow of it stood about
twenty degrees above the horizon: the brightest of the stars shone
wanly through it: then, whilst we watched, flashes of fire, darting
like lightning, leapt from it; they changed into spiral columns of the
brilliance of sunlight, scores of them, and they went twisting and
streaming out of the cloud with the look of the rush of the Milky Way
to the Zenith, whirling and winding their strands of fire into a very
rope of flame, whose end seemed to search the furthest stardust. This
wonderful, beautiful, sublime scene of joyous dancing, inwreathing
lights, faded, but was quickly followed in the same quarter where the
fiery curved cloud had shone by rich, straw-coloured arches of flame,
linking and sinking and soaring, changing on a sudden with a vast
spread of light, exactly fan shaped, and jewelled with colours manifold
as the rainbow, as though it reflected some giant prism.

'What is it?' said Miss Otway, standing close beside me and speaking in
a voice subdued by awe and astonishment.

'The Aurora Australis,' I answered, knowing it must be that by
descriptions I remembered.

We lost all sense of time in watching. In some of the sublimest
recesses of that show of fire it was as though the heaven of God were
opening: one held one's breath not knowing what the next revelation
would be, what spectacle of winged spirit shapes would glance upon
one's mortal vision out of those chasms of splendour which looked,
with the glory that burned in them, to have been cloven to the very
Throne.

'Mark this!' I cried, and as I spoke--the vast fan of light then fading
and no more lightning-like fire leaping--the wind that had been a fresh
breeze dropped as if by magic: the sky over the bows darkened into its
night of stars: the sea fell into a sloppy tumble, and within a quarter
of an hour the hull was rolling quietly upon the long, wide swell of
these seas with so oil-like a calm upon the steady run of the folds
that, close to our port quarter, I watched the image of a bright star
lengthen and shrink as it rode, till, but for the intense, dread cold
of the atmosphere, you would have thought yourself becalmed near the
line.

'We may drift north and go clear after all,' said I, taking the lighted
bull's-eve out of the companion and looking at the binnacle by it.

'Do you hear the thunder?' said Miss Otway, following me.

I listened: it was not thunder but the crackling of ice. There was
no roar of sea, no howl of gale now to kill that sound; it rolled
up through the night from the southward in bursts and shocks like
explosions of heavy artillery; it swept over the smooth swell which
looked liked smoking grease as the huge rounds noiselessly floated
eastward, and it sounded as though a thunderstorm were raging over the
ice.

And still that brief peace that was in the night, spite of the distant
thundering of the ice, was a wonderful refreshment to the spirits after
the ceaseless flush of the surge to the side and the steady roar of the
gale on high, shrieking as it split upon the barbs of ice the length of
bulwarks bristled with. More: a change of weather might now happen to
drive us northward, to drift us clear of the bergs, at all events, and
so extend our chance of being fallen in with and rescued.

I stayed on deck till after nine watching anxiously for any signs of
a change of weather. Miss Otway came and went: she was too restless
and fearful to linger below, but the frost in the night wind was too
stinging to allow her to remain long above. When I went into the cabin
I left the hull rolling slowly upon a swell of the sea polished as
ebony; nay, so glass-like was that swollen mirror that all about us the
water was sprinkled with the images of stars, with one ice-like wake
swinging like a pendulum as the silver of it seemed to sink.

I mixed a tumbler of hot rum and sat down before the stove to smoke a
pipe, with the young lady's consent; there was a good stock of tobacco,
cigars, and a little collection of pipes in the cabin that had been
occupied by Captain and Mrs. Burke. Our talk was, you will suppose, all
about our situation. I assured her there was little to fear saving the
ice; and talked--the thing then coming into my head--of a sailor who
had gone sealing for three years with one Captain Smyley; this same
skipper having spent nearly half a century betwixt the River Plate and
the South Shetlands.

'These waters are plentifully frequented,' said I. 'A century ago in
such a case as this we shouldn't have had much to hope for. What was
to come? In half a year a score of yellow, humpbacked, round bowed
waggons blowing away under bladder-like sails, with topmast struck
and nothing but the log to tell the longitude--that was about the
sum of the navigation. There was no Australia then; nothing but a
Western American coast yielding a month's saunter from Acapulco to the
Philippines--wonderful that they should have ever got a Spaniard to
face the ice down here.'

'Did they?'

'Why, yes; they sent treasure to Europe in galleons named after saints,
and when they saw a waterspout they held up their swords as crosses,
and bade the thing be off in Latin.'

'Ships were as safe then as they are now,' said she, pulling off a
thick glove and toasting her hand, on which sparkled a diamond or two.
'Why should this vessel have been dismasted? What progress is there to
boast of when you think of this hull? Can't they plant masts which will
keep erect?'

'Had that been, you and all others who were here when the squall struck
you would be deeper under water than the fangs of the biggest iceberg
afloat,' I answered, with a half smile at her eager gravity, as though
there were nothing to interest us now but shipbuilding!

'If my life is preserved I'll never go to sea again,' she said.

'You'll have had enough of it.'

'I came for my health and it seems I have come to die.'

'Has your health improved?'

'Yes--perhaps; I don't feel whilst I talk as if the voyage had done me
much good.'

'You'll write an account of these experiences when you return, and the
Queen will send for you that she may see and converse with as wonderful
a heroine as ever flourished in her reign.'

'What have I done to be a heroine?'

I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned to lift the tumbler
of grog that was yet half full; when my hand was arrested as though
paralysed by an extraordinary noise, smooth, fierce, seething. I
listened a moment, then sprang to the companion steps.




CHAPTER XVII

THE THICK OF IT


My instant belief was we were foul of ice, scaling some side of crystal
mountain smooth as though chiselled. But when I opened the companion
door I was nearly flung to the bottom of the steps by a very volcanic
shock of gale, white as a cloud with snow and hail. I sprang again
and gained the deck, and, shutting the door, got to leeward of the
companion.

A furious Cape Horn squall was blowing over the ocean in smoke--from
what quarter I had then to find out. The still scene of starlight night
and sluggish rolling ocean was vanished. Already, with the magical
swiftness of the weather of these regions, a sea was got up and
beginning to race and foam. There was nothing to see. The night was
blind with howling storm. When I had left the deck there was not so
much as a rag of cloud to be seen in the sky; and now it was blowing a
whole gale, which looked to boil with the snow that fled with it, and
everywhere it was of a midnight blackness.

The rush of the wind was over the port quarter; but then the hull would
be slewing for the trough, and how her head was when I had gone below I
could not have told. Keeping this bearing of the wind in mind, I rushed
to the cabin, picked up the burning bull's-eye, and, springing to the
captain's berth, darted the flame on to the tell-tale, and saw that
this squall or gale was out of about south-south-west.

When I took my eyes from the compass I saw Miss Otway standing, white
as milk, in the doorway.

'What is it?' she asked.

'A heavy squall--perhaps the first of a gale: but that,' said I, with
a flourish of the bull's-eye to the compass, 'gives us good news; we
shall blow clear of the ice. The wind is sou'-sou'-west. What do you
say to that?' and, forcing the noise of a jolly laugh, I came out of
the berth and hooked up the bull's-eye ready to my hand.

We had seen the ocean all day long, clear of ice north and east;
icebergs we knew were there, but their summits had settled--our drift
had put leagues betwixt them and us; therefore I was not immediately
fearful--on the score of ice, I mean. But if it was going to blow as
hard as I had just now felt it, what was to become of the hull? Such
fury and weight of wind must speedily raise the seas into cliffs, and
then God knows how it would fare with the sheer hulk with not a rag,
nor the means of stretching a rag, to enable her to look up to it,
to shoulder it off with her bow, to lie hove to, in short, as a ship
should.

In an hour, the dance was wild even to madness; my own brain reeled to
it; sick I was _not_ in the sense of nausea. Was it sickness of soul
then? But I recollect that many times when the hull fell off the top
of a sea into the valley, sliding as though she was shooting off some
Niagara-like edge, a horrible feeling of faintness and prostration
attended the descent. Never before had I suffered so at sea; but then,
never before had I been tossed in a dismasted hull in a gale of wind
sixty degrees south latitude.

Miss Otway lay almost lifeless. I shored her up on a couch by backs
of chairs which I lashed; I heaped clothes from her bed on her, and
got hot brandy for her, and encouraged her as best I could. There was
nothing to be done on deck. The sea was flying in white sheets over
the waist and forecastle; the glare of the brine breaking close aboard
showed you the snow; but looking around was like staring into a well.

It was a strange sort of snow, too, that fell. Once in the cabin I took
notice of it on my coat: it was in small grains, round as shot, of a
size from mustard seed to buckshot; a dry, pure white: not hail.

But two hours after the gale began, the snow ceased and the wind
lessened; I watched from the companion-way, and observed but little
water flying athwart. With such observations I was forced to be
satisfied, and spent the hours in the cabin, keeping an eye on the
stove, boiling a hot drink now and again for the life and support of
it, tending Miss Otway, from time to time peering through the hatch
where the iron sweep of the wind seemed to unflesh the face, wondering,
for ever wondering, whether the next hurl would be followed by a crash
of the side, and how long we should be in perishing when the hull split.

I should have in agined myself too anxious--nay, to put it plainly, too
alarmed to sleep, and it seemed that I went up many times to take a
look around; and still I must have slept, for I started from my chair
in a sudden terror of dream or noise, and with a lurch of the hull fell
upon my knees, but was up instantly.

The motion of the craft had changed; the moment I had my wits I felt
that the sea was pyramidal, which told me there had been a quite
recent shift of wind. I cannot imagine anything more dislocating,
more unnerving, more brain sickening, than the leaps and rolls of the
hull upon the sea that, by the movement, I knew was darting in almost
perpendicular thrusts, spear shaped billows lifting in ebon darts and
daggers, and putting a frightful wildness into the flings of the fabric.

Miss Otway lay with her eyes shut, and seemed asleep; a small fire
glowed in the stove, and the lighted lantern swung in the centre of the
cabin as though some invisible hand grasped it, seeking to jerk it off
its hook. I took the bull's-eye and went on deck, and found the wind a
dry gale, but observed a thickness as of fog in it, but it was too dark
to make sure. I staggered to the binnacle and saw the wind was blowing
out of north again: a cruel shift! I stared and smelt for ice, but saw
no loom, and tasted no more than the freezing coldness of the blast.

What was the hour? I went below and found it half-past eight o'clock.
Oh! what an interminable darkness was that! Where was the ice? It could
not be far off. What and whither was our drift? I felt like a madman
then.

Miss Otway slept on. I believe it might have been an hour and a half
after I had awakened that, not knowing but that the poor young heart in
her had been stopped by terror, or the delicate blood in her frozen,
I stooped to view her face, the lamp burning dimly; she showed like
a piece of exquisitely chiselled marble: I can't tell why, but her
whiteness seemed to my mood to exactly fit the bitterness of this
time, the frost, the snow, the ice, the wild gale and foaming waters;
was I as mad then as I had felt some time before, to bend over her and
get a fancy of her into my head as a spirit of these wild and desolate
parts? Put yourself in my place and you'll not wonder to find your brow
hot with fancies more desperately and tragically strange than such a
crazy notion as this.

She opened her eyes whilst I looked, and I stood erect with a sigh of
relief, half turning to fling my cap down whilst I ran the length of my
sleeve along my forehead for the refreshment of the wet of the snow.
She sat up and watched me, whilst I saw in her face she was heeding the
extravagant tumbling of the hull.

'It seems to be blowing a gale,' she said.

'Ay,' said I, 'but we're still alive. Feel these jumps: no empty cask
could better them.'

'Will you remove these chairs that I may sit up?'

I did so. Whilst I knelt beside her to cast the lashings adrift she
eyed me intently, as though she would read my very brain; she then
sighed, but said nothing, and the road being clear she drew her feet
out of the covering and sought to rise, but, after a short struggle
with the furious deck, sat again.

I stood before the stove waiting for daybreak, my eye glancing from one
frothing cabin window to another and thence to the skylight. At last
she said:

'You've a brave heart, Mr. Selby, but it can hold out no longer; I read
despair in your face. If the end is to come, may it come quickly. You
have behaved to me with a noble kindness. I can but thank you--I can
but thank you,' and she held out her hand with her eyes full of tears.

I bowed my head over her hand; it was an excuse to fetch a breath or
two, I would not just then trust myself to speak. Then said I:

'I'll not disguise the truth: our situation is perilous, as God, who,
let us believe, is watching over us, knows. But I should be no true man
to feel the despair you tell me you read in my face. Daylight may find
us a sight to hearten us.'

She shook her head.

'Well, but don't let your spirits die. If a wish could help us I'd be
above, if _your_ safety was to be got at so small a cost. But see, now,
I'll run up on deck and let you know if there's anything like the loom
of ice about. It _may_ prove all right with us--it _may_ end in our
lives being preserved.'

But all the same, with a heart as heavy as ever hers could be, I clawed
my way to the companion steps for yet another stare into the blackness.

It was not yet daybreak; but when some while after the faint, grey
light sifted through the blowing, swelling, roaring gloom, the sight
struck to my very heart and I was sure we were doomed. The sea was
running in hills of liquid lead; many clouds of mist were in the wind
and they blew athwart the hull like bursts of steam; snow in places was
rushing in horizontal lines out of dark low clouds flying southwards.
Ice was all about us. The first object that dawn revealed, whilst I
stood in the companion-way watching, was a mountain of ice on the bow;
as features of it stole out a snow-squall looked to have fouled a whole
stack of pinnacles on the left of the berg; it was dark as smoke there,
with snow whirling in a very maelstrom of froth-like whiteness; the
seas slipped their foam up its side to a height of fifty feet, and the
brine flashed in clouds of crystals against the dull, marble-like face,
which showed smooth as a wall through the haze and the whirl of flying
vapour that shrieked athwart our decks to it.

_It_ was but one. I counted twenty coming and going amid the shadows
of the squalls and flying masses of fog. You would have supposed that
a fleet somewhere hidden were firing great guns, so thunderous was the
splintering of those bergs majestically rocking their mighty masses.
The nearest--that on the starboard bow--was about a mile off. Others
showed to port and astern: one heap, like an island, darkened the haze
on the port bow. The gale had apparently broken up the barrier and we
were in the thick of the floating bodies.

Miss Otway came to the foot of the companion steps and waited for me to
make way for her. I stepped out and she ascended the steps and looked
round the sea, but in silence. Her face was hardened into stone by
despair. Hours of suspense and grief, hours spent in the most awful
kind of loneliness the imagination can figure, with the darkness of the
spirit of death for ever upon her heart, had done their work with the
poor young lady: sensation was dumb.

And now there was nothing to do but await the end, come what might. I
let her stand a little, looking, then taking her by the arm, gently but
firmly, conducted her below and seated her where she had lain during
the night. I was resolved that my own despair should not be visible
to her, and partly to cover myself, so to speak, and partly for the
good of the thing, I boiled some coffee, and put food on the deck near
the stove; but one looked at such a repast with the emotions of a
malefactor to whom breakfast is served whilst the hangman waits.

Whilst I was at this work she addressed me calmly:

'There is no doubt, I suppose, that we shall strike the ice?'

'It's most inevitable,' I answered.

'If it happens, shall we be better off down here than on deck?'

'Let it happen,' said I.

'If we are to strike the ice,' she said, 'I should wish to be drowned
quickly. I would rather die at once than be thrown soaked on the ice to
lie a little and freeze--it would take time--I fear the sufferings. I
am not afraid of death, I wish it to be quick.'

'There's no ice nearer to us than a mile, that I can make out,' I said,
then handed her a pannikin of coffee. 'Pray drink this.'

She took it and raised it to her lips.

'If the hull strikes, will it go to pieces instantly?' she asked.

'Who can tell? She might beach herself and find us a home till the berg
floated north, where the smoke of our fire will be seen.'

She sank into silence with her eyes fastened upon the deck. When I
offered her food she shook her head. My breakfast consisted of half a
cup of coffee.

Within a quarter of an hour I was on deck again, but the scene was the
same as before, saving that the ice mountain that had been upon our
starboard bow was now right ahead, whilst on our starboard quarter,
within perhaps half a mile, was a small island of ice, about sixty feet
high, not before visible. The compass gave me the wind blowing steadily
from one quarter. But then I could make nothing of bearings within
three or four points on board a helpless hull, swinging in a high sea,
with a send of her head when she was rushed out of a hollow that made
me sometimes think she was going to give her stern to the weather.

At one o'clock it was a savage and tremendous scene of warring
waters and flying sky of soot, and giant forms of ice vanishing and
reappearing amid headlong flights of wool-white vapour, and through
all, in deep notes, ran the thunder of the surge-smitten, frozen
heights, with frequent rending and crashing noises of dislocation. I
was now very sure that our drift was not less than three miles an
hour, and perhaps four. This I gathered by observing a vast shape of
ice that suddenly showed off the starboard bow. It was nearly a mile
long, and I should think two hundred feet high. It was a grand, truly
sublime ocean piece, with its numerous lofty arches and caverns, out of
which the sea, in recoil, flashed in immense bursts of foam. I spied
the white wings of birds glancing upon it, but I had it not often
very clear in sight, for the steam-like smother drove down at quick
intervals, leaving some pale eminence gleaming on high against the
whirl of the clouds, to vanish in some swift outfly of snow, so that
the whole thing would be as completely gone to the eye as if it had
sunk.

But by staying and watching it as often as it emerged in whole or
in part, I got at the rate of our drift. It was quickly on our port
bow with others coming out of the thickness to leeward, all wild and
terrific in that dull light of storm, with the glare of the leaping
foam at their base and their own ghastly stare through the rent
curtains of cloud flying under the dark sky.

Soon after two, when it was almost dark, I thought we were lost, for
I saw the loom of an iceberg right abeam to leeward; but whether it
was God's guidance of the devoted hull, or that the set of the long
rolling sea ran a sort of sweep of tide round these floating islands,
when we were within a musket shot of the mass, with an occasional
shock of loose ice sounding through the hulk, our drift made a little
departure. I vow it was for all the world as though the fabric was
alive and, dreading her fate, avoided it, or as though she were under
command, with a cool hand and a critical eye for sea measurement at the
helm. Certain it is we drove past clear; it might be that we owed our
preservation to the rebound of the sea.

It was almost black with the night when that berg was on our lee
quarter, but I knew by a sudden enormous roar of water, and by an
indescribably hissing sound lasting for a few minutes, as though a
thousand locomotives were blowing off steam, that an immense mass of
the island had fallen, not very many ships' lengths distant, which I
have no genius to do justice to, nor even to communicate, though I need
but close my eyes to behold the terrible picture, with its uproar of
trampling seas, and howling wind, and cracking masses. A little after
four in the morning, whilst I sat in the cabin with Miss Otway, every
instant expecting the hull to strike, her motions grew suddenly quiet.
I felt her rise and fall upon a long swell, and knew instinctively by
the feel of her that she was under the lee of something.

I sprang to my feet and ran on deck. It was pitch dark, with a strange
phantasmal glimmer on either hand, so vague, so indeterminable I could
not see it when I looked at it. The roar of the gale, the hiss and
beat of the driven seas, came as from a distance. Thrice as high as the
masthead of a ship sounded the low, continuous thunder of the wind, as
though it blew over mountain tops; but down where we were it was calm.
Icy gusts came in moans from half a dozen quarters. The long, invisible
heave was as rhythmic as the ocean pulse of swell. I understood we were
embayed and foresaw certainly now that our being stranded, or being
hammered to pieces against the ice, was only a question of minutes.

I went into the cabin with a loathing of life coming into me out of
the sheer despair that was as frost on my heart, caring not a curse
how it went, so sick I was of it all after the unendurable hours of
watching and expectation I had passed through; and then again I felt
that, whatever was to happen, it was right I should be by the poor
girl's side: not that it was in my power to comfort her--not, indeed,
if the hull went to pieces, that I could be of the least use to her or
myself, but I was company for her, and out of me she'd get some solace
of companionship in what I reckoned these dying minutes of ours.

'Has the wind fallen? Where are we?' she shrieked as I approached her.

'We are embayed,' I answered. 'We are got under the lee of something.'

Just as I spoke those words a harsh, grating roar ran through the hull;
the vessel trembled as though in the first throe of bursting; another
like roar succeeded; I felt the thrill of the scraping of the bilge and
keel as the fabric was rushed by some ponderous heave of swell. Again,
another huge thrust of the sea, another long roar of scraping keel and
bilge, another quiver and thrill throughout the hulk as though every
timber was straining ere flying to the shock of an explosion. She lay
right over to starboard. The lamp swung and lay hard against the upper
deck. Whatever was movable fetched away. So acute was the angle that
Miss Otway, unable to maintain her seat upon the couch, shot from it to
me; but I was firmly planted, saw her coming, and received her so that
she was not hurt, and with a vigorous swing I cleared and placed her
breathless and moaning in a cleated armchair that stood close to where
I sat.

The blind, soft, thunderous thrusts of the sea continued. I heard the
water in tons washing over the decks, but every time this happened a
roar of grinding and scaling shook the hull as she was driven by the
wash of the swell higher and yet higher. The companion was closed and
no water descended. I knew by the noise of the sea that the hull lay
broadside to the swing of the swell. I got out of my chair, but was
heavily thrown, and could scarcely regain my feet, so extreme was the
slant, and so completely did it pin me against the cabin wall.

As regular as the rush of the floating folds was the thrust of them,
and now I grew sensible that the heave was like to strand us high and
dry, the job of it being a different labour than rocks or the grit of
the beach of earth would have made, so greasy was the ice. The water
poured over the decks every time the swell struck the hull, but in a
little while I found each volume to be weakening in weight, and after
the fabric had been driven in this grinding way in a sort of pulsing of
blows, deafening with the bursts of the brine against the side and over
the decks, each onward slide grew shorter and shorter, until presently
she lay without motion, with an occasional shudder running through her
from the beat of the sea, but at intervals so varying as to persuade
me she was fairly high and dry, and within the wash of the foam of the
larger rollers only.

But the list or angle was horrible. I was unable to move without going
on all fours. I crawled in this wise to Miss Otway, and told her to
remain where she was, not to attempt to stir lest she should break her
neck, whilst I crept on deck to take a look at our situation if it was
visible.

'What has happened do you think?' she cried.

'We are stranded upon some beach of an ice island I expect,' I replied.

'Hark to that!' she shrieked, as a sudden sea smote the bilge and
roared in foaming recoil. 'If you go on deck you'll be washed away.'

'I'll see to it. That blow was weak. We have been thrust high. Feel
what a desperate slope it is. I pray God no sudden shock of sea may
launch us afresh.'

With that I crawled to the companion steps, every bone aching like
rheumatism with the contortions of my figure in my efforts to move.




CHAPTER XVIII

IMPRISONED


I might have guessed there would be no more to see now than when I had
first looked. I stood in the companion with my head just out, holding
the door as close shut as it would lie with my body in the way; and
hardly had I put my head through when a whole green sheet of water
tumbled over the port bulwarks and roared in a cataractal deluge down
the steep, boiling white, through the wreckage of smashed bulwarks. I
ducked, but not in time to stop a rush into the cabin.

I guessed, by the uncommon blackness, that we were in a hollow betwixt
high cliffs; I beheld an illusive paleness, the vague, spectral
faintness of rocks of ice or snow-covered acclivities on either hand,
but no features of them were in the least degree discernible. I durst
not let go of the companion to look over the side, but I judged by the
deep, hollow noise overhead that a strong gale still blew, and from a
distance came the strong, coarse seething of a high sea.

Still, the beat of the swell against the hull was not often now, which
made me suspect it was no iceberg we had stranded on but land, one of
the New Orkneys or South Shetlands group, because the bating of the
swell told that a tide ran, and I had read in that book about the South
Atlantic in the cabin that the rise and fall of the tide down here was
very considerable, that gales of wind often swelled the water high
above its natural level, as was shown by the many skeletons of whales
found lying twenty or thirty feet above high-water mark.

But until the dawn broke nothing could be imagined; I closed the
companion door and crawled back to where Miss Otway sat.

She was so postured by the angle of the deck that she could not get out
of her chair; she begged me to help her; I drew her out and held her
until she had sunk upon the floor, and then I sat down beside her on
the hard plank, the carpet having been rolled up and stowed away when
the cabin was flooded in the outfly that had dismasted the 'Lady Emma.'
Not so much water as I supposed had tumbled down; it lay the length of
the cabin wall and was fast draining off.

'Have you been able to see where we are?' she exclaimed.

'No. But though there's no doubt we've beached on ice, I believe the
land's close aboard.'

'What land?'

'Coronation Island, if any. That was the island in the way of our
drift; we've been making a straight course for it.'

We paused to hearken to a heavy flooding of water overhead, but the
blow that had sheeted the brine over the hull was as weak as a summer
ripple is to an angry surge compared with the thumps which had driven
us to where we now lay.

'The sea will have made a clean sweep of the decks,' said she.

'There was little to go. What but the galley? The companion has
weathered it out, happily for us.'

'Oh, Mr. Selby, what can we now do? What is to become of us?' she cried
with sudden hysteric passion of grief and terror.

'We must find out where we are. Better here, anyway, than knocking
about among the ice outside, with the prospect every next minute of
being squashed into pulp. Oh, _that_ was too terrible to have gone
on bearing! The perpetual apprehension was like to have driven us
overboard, mad. Why, this is peace, this is rest.'

'What a time it has been! What a time it is!' she cried. 'When will the
day break? If we are upon an iceberg----'

She was arrested by a second thunder-shock of water overhead, yet weak
as a blow of the sea, though the hull trembled fore and aft.

The lamp glowed and shed a good light, the body of it lying hard
against the upper deck, so sharp was the angle; it was strange to see
it stirless there, strange to feel the stillness of the hull, save when
a blow of swell made her quiver. The fire was out; but even had not all
the fuel fetched away into the wash of the wet, I had not dared kindle
a fresh one, lest in the trembling fit then upon me, and on such a
roof-like slope as that, I should stumble, or by some helpless flourish
set the ship in flames.

I crawled on my knees to the couch, and pulled the clothes from it and
covered Miss Otway with them, swathing her head and so wrapping her
that nothing showed but a little piece of the face. The poor girl's
teeth chattered, and she shivered ceaselessly. By carefully crawling I
got upon the table and managed to get hold of a glass and a decanter
of wine. She drank a little and I took a good pull of the wine myself.
Indeed it was an extraordinary situation--the hull on her beam ends,
the cabin alight, we two crouched on the deck, the stillness after the
fury we had come through, the stillness, I say, saving a low roar of
distant sea, with an occasional beat of the swell upon the hulk, and
the scaling and rushing of water overhead. An amazing situation indeed;
there is nothing like it, nothing stranger in the maritime records,
that I can recollect.

At last the starboard cabin windows, high in the broadside, showed of a
pale steel grey; I went on my hands and feet to the steps and reached
the deck. I stood a little while in the companion-way thunderstruck; I
was confounded and could not credit my sight. The hull lay stranded
in a very well of ice. Ahead and astern rose masses of cliffs to an
altitude of four or five hundred feet. The vessel lay on a frozen
beach; 'twas a sloping sweep of the stuff, apparently linking the
iceberg astern to the ice over the bows. The bight or bay we had
drifted into was ramparted by the iceberg which sank from a vast
terrace to a point in an arm of natural breakwater like marble; but the
ice ahead was fixed to the face of the land. After looking a little I
spied the iron frown of dusky rocks perpendicular and smooth as though
planed, showing amidst the snow.

Past the hinder ice and beyond the giant limb of marble-like breakwater
was the rolling ocean. It still blew hard, the seas raced angrily.
Whatever of ice they smote they flashed upon; over the lower parts
of the ice terrace the surge was bursting in lofty clouds, bright as
light. The heave came round the point in a wide swell, which did not
break in foam upon the beach where we lay, but swept silent, in a
glass-green volume, along the slope, just as the foamless lift of the
sea washes past the side of a ship; it broke only where it met with
anything rugged, and quickly lost its weight in the curve, soundlessly
recoiling from the base of the iceberg astern, though mightily
troubling the surface of the water by conflict with the succeeding
heave.

The sky between the cliffs was wild with flying scud and rusty brown
masses of vapour rushing southwards. The vessel lay close in to the
land; she rested on her side at an angle of hard upon fifty degrees.
On either hand was open sky, the picture of it to port showing as
at the extremity of an immense ravine. Save but for sudden, quick
shootings of little short-lived draughts and blasts, the calm and even
the repose down here was as though we were in a well. The swell never
swept nearer to us than twenty feet. I crept to the side and lay over,
watching anxiously, and thus made sure of this after following the
quiet sweep of at least twenty successive heaves of brine.

The desolation was awful! The picture savage, forbidding, terrifying
beyond imagination to one immured with its clouded crystal heights over
the bows, and the rugged slopes of ice over the stern forking into
fifty shapes of pinnacle, turret, spire, column, tower, as though on
the flat of the summit were the ruins of a city of marble.

The decks were swept of everything save the companion. Wheel, binnacle,
capstans, galley, all were gone. I watched the ocean rolling past the
arm of ice astern, it was but a bit of it. The great berg that formed
the bay blocked the view of the deep; there was nothing to see but the
abrupt white walls ahead and astern, and the flying soot overhead and
away down to port, and, on the right, tall cliffs of ice and snow
glazing the land, with here and there a space of staring, black rock.

Our isolation was shocking. My heart seemed to stop whilst I looked
around, realising the terrors and hopelessness of this new imprisonment
by the granite-hued light that was gaining a little in power. Though a
whaler stood within half a mile of the coast, how should she see us? It
would be hard enough to discern the speck of wreck we made had the bay
of ice in which we rested gaped naked to the sea, but we were as much
hidden here as if we had gone to the bottom. We were worse off, indeed,
than had we stranded upon a floating berg, because in _that_ case we
might have fallen in with the ice which might have split and freed us;
but now we were aground upon ice hardening into the face of an island
and stationary; months might pass before the body we were upon broke
away and became a water-borne bulk, and then, in the throes of the
liberation of the frozen cliffs, what of splintering, of volcanic-like
upheaval and disruption might happen to crush the little toy of hull
lying after many months as she lay now?

I don't doubt I stared about me with something of a madman's wildness,
glancing up at the inaccessible heights, then at the sea rolling in
white lines beyond the limb of ice, then into the desolation of the
whirling sky on the left, till, recollecting that I had a companion
who looked to me for heart and encouragement, whom, by God's mercy,
wonderful as it would afterwards appear, I might yet be the means of
delivering from this hideous situation, I pulled my wits together and
returned to the cabin.

The poor young lady was on the deck before the black stove as I had
left her. She could not have stood upon that angle of plank without
danger and distress. She began to question me in a voice that shuddered
with the cold. I answered I would talk with her when I had lighted a
fire, for I had now some spirit and saw things a little clearly, and
was no longer afraid of setting the hull in flames.

I split up a bunk board, and picked a bucket full of capsized coal out
of the wash to leeward, as I may call it, and made a fire; but I moved
with pain and difficulty; the decks were wet, and as slippery as though
coated with ice, and the slope was that of a ship bulwarks under.

When the fire was blazing I helped the young lady to sit close beside
it, and went on deck for some life-lines for this cabin. I moved with
less trouble above, for the life-lines I had before set up were still
stretched along. Every rope that I handled was like bar iron, but with
infinite trouble I succeeded in getting a length below and stretching
it here and there, which done I was able to use my legs with some
freedom.

The stove was violently aslant, but it was possible to boil a kettle,
and whilst I waited for a hot drink I crouched beside the girl,
grateful for the comforting heat of the flames. I told her plainly that
we were stranded and ice-locked; that we must resolve to exert our
patience and make the best of our deplorable situation. She cleared
her head of the cover I had wrapped about her, and stared at me dumbly
for a minute or two with a face as white as though moonlit, and her
fair hair full of sparkles with the light of the lamp that still glowed
hard-slanted against the upper deck.

'Do I understand,' she exclaimed in a low voice, painful to hear with
the tremulous gasps that shook it, 'that we are to remain in this
condition until--until----' She stopped, then added, 'but until _when_?
We are stranded and hidden and must perish.'

'Listen to me,' said I, 'for this is our chance as I see it is as a
sailor: suppose us beached for months as we now are--though who's to
predict _that_?--for within twenty-four hours may come a gale out of
another quarter that shall free us and drive us amongst the ice to our
destruction--take it we are to be stranded here: I have read the ship's
papers, know the contents of the hold, and promise you, though no
chance of rescue should happen for a twelvemonth, nay, for a couple of
years, help, when it comes, shall find us alive so far as life may be
kept in us by food and drink and warmth.'

She buried her face: I think it nearly killed her to hear me talk of
a twelvemonth or two years. Then, flashing upon me as it were with a
sudden dropping of her hands and the stare of her desperate grief and
horror, she cried:

'Is there no hope beyond the waiting for the deliverance which may
never happen?' and without stopping for an answer she went on: 'How are
we to live even for a week in a hull we cannot move about on?'

'That's the very least of our troubles,' said I. 'Come, you have
spirit--the heart of an Englishwoman beats in you. You must put some
face of courage and faith upon this business. We are alive. Keep on
thinking of _that_. Consider what we have come through. We might have
been thrown upon the ice without this shelter.'

'We have stranded on an island, you say?'

'I think so.'

'What island?'

I answered her.

'Is there no harbour in it, no place where ships touch, no place where
men are? If they came fishing down here for whales and seals there
should be a port.'

I put my hand upon a life-line and walked to the captain's cabin. It
was as dark as night there, for the heel of the hulk depressed the
cabin windows to within arms' reach of the beach, as it looked. I
lighted a bull's-eye, and, finding the chart I required, returned with
it.

It was a chart of the discoveries made in these waters between 1819 and
1843. It outlined Graham Land down to sixty-eight degrees south, and
a little more than sixty-eight degrees west, and submitted a shaded
tracing of the South Shetlands; but I was very certain that our island
was none of _them_. I put the chart on Miss Otway's knee and threw the
lamplight upon it, and said, pointing to Coronation Island and then to
Laurie Island:

'Which of them this is I can't tell you, but I should guess by our
drift that it's the bigger of the two, and that our lodgment's here,'
and I put my finger upon a bight named Palmer's Bay. 'Here's a mountain
at back of it, you see,' said I, 'towering to a height of nigh four
thousand five hundred feet; it was the blue shadow we saw in the air,
and our drift was nigh hard straight for that.'

She put her face close to the chart, listening, meanwhile, greedily to
me.

'But here are many English names,' said she--'Cape Dundas--Despair
Rock--Saddle Island.' She read thus a little; then went on: 'Surely an
island that has been named in this fashion is inhabited?'

'Well, it may be. I hope it is,' said I.

'Here are big islands,' she cried, pointing to the South Shetlands.
'Aren't there people upon _them_? And if so, couldn't we manage to get
to the place where they're settled? It's not far,' she added, looking
up at me.

'It's a long way,' said I, 'for all it looks but the span of a hand on
this paper, and we have no boat.'

'People must have been in some such another dreadful situation as this
before now,' she exclaimed. 'How did they manage?'

'We'll manage, depend on't', said I, with all the hearty cheerfulness
I could summon. 'We'll write letters to the sea, telling our distress,
and send them adrift in bottles. I'll fashion rafts out of some of the
theatre stuff in the hold and send them afloat with the story of our
condition mastheaded on them in cans. It's not for us to be hopeless.
Wouldn't you rather be here than knocking about amongst the ice?'

'Oh yes,' she cried; 'but if we are locked up--hidden away?'

She started as if she would rise, and asked me to take her on deck that
she might see where we were, but I thought proper to keep her below in
the warmth and encourage her, and rouse her spirits by representations
of our prospects of deliverance, before letting her view the situation
of the hull; in truth I could not look at her and observe how delicate
and fragile she was, and reflect on the depressing, heart-subduing
influence of the terrors and experiences she had passed through,
without fearing the effect of a sudden shock, such as might prove the
sight of the savage wildness of the frowning, frozen cradle in which
the hull lay as in a tomb.

I went about to get some breakfast. When I got on deck with a chopper
to fill the kettle, I found that the mould of fresh-water ice I had
split out of the scuttlebutt was gone. I had no mind to enter the
hold; indeed, I had not strength enough then to break open the frozen
hatch-covers; and water being wanted for a cup of hot coffee, I chipped
at a spear of ice on the bulwark and found it sweet, and perhaps
sweeter than the water we had been drinking. Why? Because nearly all
those frozen heads and devices of barbs and spikes were frozen snow and
mist. But never could we lack fresh water in this part of the world;
the cliffs ahead and astern were fresh; we were beached in fresh-water
ice. Even in that early time of my distress, whilst I sucked a little
piece of ice off the bulwarks to learn its quality, I found myself
lifting up my eyes with amazement at those giant heights, formed, as I
knew, of the vapour of the air and the sleet of the cloud and the gale.
It was like thinking of some vast, soft fog clinging to the face of
the land and freezing there into precipitous iron-hard rocks.

Whilst making my way to the hatch with the ice, I heard a sudden great
roar astern; a sharp tremble ran through the hull as though a mine had
been sprung close alongside; the noise was exactly that of a broadside
from a liner, every great gun discharged at once. Yet I saw no movement
in the ice, nor heard any sound as of a fall. This put it into my head
to fancy it might not be long before the great berg that was linked
astern of us was sundered and on its way to join the rest of the mighty
fleet, every one of which had had a like berth and such a despatch as
awaited this.

I clawed my way to the side and looked over. The beach that held the
berg to the main was perhaps a quarter of a mile long; I could not
be sure; it went out of sight in a slope on the port hand. But, in
comparison with the mighty bulk it yoked to the island, it was a
slender tie indeed, to be snapped in any moment of storm as you'd break
a clay pipe-stem. I peered down, wondering if the severance happened
whether we should go with the berg or be left a-dry under the cliff as
we now lay; but it was a hopeless and therefore a silly speculation;
though all the same I prayed heartily whilst I stood staring about me
that the berg would go, and speedily, whether it took us or left us,
since, whilst we lay hidden by it, there was not the remotest chance,
that I could imagine, of our being rescued.

I remember thinking, as I turned from the rail and made with the ice
in my hand towards the companion, that one of the hardest parts of
this terrible experience for the poor girl below, though she would
have to be dumb on the subject, was the prospect of being locked up
with me--alone with a young man, a sailor, who was a stranger without
existence to her a few days ago; to be locked up, I say, it might
be for months, with a threat even of years in the run of time, with
a person whose character and history she knew nothing about, whose
calling sunk him far below her socially. This ran in my head with the
swiftness of thought whilst I was going below, and after I was in the
cabin going about the business of boiling coffee for a meal.

How could I make her mind easy, on the score, I mean, of our
association, so that something at least of the weight of our
distressful tragic situation should be lifted off her poor young heart?
But the answer my good sense gave me was the answer it had before
returned, namely, she could only find me out by time, though to be sure
I might shorten the period of her fear of me by a behaviour that could
leave her in no doubt of my resolution to act as a man.

I can't express how deeply I pitied her, how my very soul was moved
to its depths by the sight of her as she sat in her loneliness and
helplessness, a trueborn lady, gentle and fair, watching me, with her
white face turning after me, as I moved; sitting upon that desperate
slope of deck with the red glow of the fire upon her, herself a
shapeless bulk of furs and coverings in the lamplight that was growing
dim.

When I drew to the stove she questioned me afresh upon our situation,
and begged me to conduct her on deck. I answered presently, when she
had broken her fast. She said:

'Only think how it would be with me if I were alone.'

I stopped in what I was about, and looking at her a little steadily,
but with a smile, I said:

'I'm glad my presence is welcome to you. It will be owing to no fault
of mine if it's not always so whilst we're together.'

A grateful look freshened her face with an expression of life that was
like colour and a smile.

'Think of me alone here!' she said in a low voice. 'I should have gone
mad days ago. It never could have come to my knowing that this hull
had stranded amongst the ice. I should have destroyed myself in my
craziness.'

'You have gone through too much,' said I, 'to miss of being rescued.
You'll be saved and so shall I, and for no other reason, I dare say,
than because I'm with you. I have some hope that this hulk will take a
more comfortable posture. Did you hear a roar like an explosion just
now astern?'

'Yes. Was it the ice?'

'Ay. But should it trim us, I hope it will not send us afloat.'

She listened whilst I told her of the huge berg that lay linked to the
island by the beach of ice on which the hull rested. Then I talked
as cheerfully as I could of making this interior a tight, dry, warm
room for her whilst we lay waiting for that help which was bound in
some shape of whaler or sealer to come along. She shuddered and looked
around her with a face of sudden imploring grief; but I went on,
speaking as heartily as I could.

'We'll make this cabin dry and warm,' said I. 'I'll get that water to
leeward there baled out. I'll rout the carpet up on deck and see what
the breeze will do for the brine in it. They've managed very well over
and over again up in the Arctic latitudes for months and months with
meaner accommodation and a poorer hold. I'll stock this cabin that
things may be handy. There's plenty of oil aboard I hope. There'll be
coal to last us in the forepeak; we shall be helped out of this before
it's all used up.'

'How long,' she asked, 'are we likely to remain here?'

'It was a saying of Nelson that at sea everything is possible and
nothing improbable. It's certain these islands are visited. My
intention is, Miss Otway, since we're here, so to provide for ourselves
that we may be alive when help comes. Do you see that?'

'Oh yes.'

'Don't be scared, then, because I talk of provisioning and securing
ourselves as though we were to be locked up for years.'

Whilst I talked I was at work getting breakfast. The angle of the
deck was an abomination and a terrible hindrance, but I made no
further trouble of it than my laboured motions expressed. Yet beyond
the boiling of the kettle there was nothing to be done in the way of
cooking owing to the slant of the stove. The discomfort was incredible.
It was like being in a ship poised on her beam ends on the edge of a
sea, magically arrested in her downward rush, and hanging fixed, as
though capsizing.

All was as hushed in the interior as though we were in harbour. The
seethe coming from the flashes of silent swell, whenever the dark green
folds, blindly sweeping, tore themselves against some edge of ice,
was too faint to invade us: the noise of the sea was shut out by the
heights of ice astern, and no echo of the booming of the gale sweeping
over the frozen summits penetrated. But for the insufferable posture
of the hull my heart might have beaten with some sort of restfulness
and even gratitude; for, dreadful as our situation was, it lacked the
terrors of the past days and nights; we were at least safe for the
time being, whilst in any hour gone by we might have been crushed to
pieces; we had a right to look forward with some hope, because we were
plentifully supplied with food; the hull was a stout shelter, and I
could not conceive, unless there happened some convulsion of ice, that
the swell of the bay, however enraged by storm, could hurt us; it might
thump and thrust us high, further out of its reach--that was all--and
trim the vessel by so doing into a habitable structure.

These were my thoughts as I put some breakfast on the deck for my
companion. It was impossible for her to help herself. I had to place
the fiddles on the deck to save the food from slipping from her hand.
I talked with so much confidence that, when she had made a light meal,
I heard something like a note of her spirit in her voice, and saw a
little light of kindling hope in her eyes. Presently she begged me to
take her on deck, on which I helped her to stand, and, catching hold of
her arm, conducted her to the companion steps.

She ascended painfully. I stepped out on deck and brought her to my
side; and then, emerging, she looked around. Never can I forget that
poor young lady's face as she gazed at the savage, desolate, frozen
scene, realising the significance of it slowly. She shrank, she
cowered in the companion way; she shuddered violently, whilst her hand,
with a wandering gesture, came to my arm. I see her now in memory
turning her white face towards the towering mass astern, then looking
at the dumb blankness of the ice cliffs ahead, with the bows of the
beam-ended hulk rising to them as though upon a lift of sea.

'Is this it? Is this it?' she whispered.

She stared straight up at the flying gloom, blacking off the ghastly
white edge of the iceberg in shadows of a ragged, smoke-like stuff;
she strained her eyes at the little space of sea showing in angry,
dark, flashing ridges past the huge ice projection that made the bay,
shutting out from our sight all the rest of the ocean too. Then,
turning to me, she tried to speak, swayed, with an effort to cover her
face, and fainted.




CHAPTER XIX

MR. MOORE CONTINUES THE STORY


No news of Marie reached us after we received a letter by a brig called
the 'Queen of the Night' which had spoken the 'Lady Emma' in the North
Atlantic. She had sent us a sort of diary or journal: it was meant for
her father and me: she wrote in spirits which, the entries showed,
were gaining in brightness, and there was no doubt that her health had
greatly improved. Some of her descriptions were very fine: she seemed
to have thrown herself into the very life of the voyage and wrote of
the sails, rigging, discipline and manoeuvres of the vessel with the
easy familiarity of an old sailor.

We gathered that she was perfectly happy with Captain and Mrs. Burke,
and of Mr. Owen she spoke with gratitude for his attention and sympathy.

I was told, however, by one or two seagoing acquaintances not to wonder
if we did not hear again from Marie until the ship arrived at her first
port, Valparaiso. A vessel might be ninety days upon the ocean and yet
not 'speak' another. A friend spoke of an Indiaman that, in the whole
voyage from Bombay to the Thames--not allowing, of course, for the
ships seen on touching at Capetown--had sighted nothing but the topmast
canvas of a vessel whose hull was sunk out of sight below the horizon.

I was living in rooms out of Bond Street. One morning in 1860, it was
October 2, and Marie had then been absent from England six months,
during which, after the arrival of the Liverpool brig, we had received
no news whatever either of her or the 'Lady Emma.' I say, on October 2,
whilst at breakfast, I picked up a morning newspaper and began to turn
it about. After reading for some time my eye lighted upon a paragraph
headed, 'Loss of the ship "Lady Emma."' I trembled and felt sick; I
wanted courage to read the paragraph, though the paper was shuddering
in my hands, and my eyes were upon the news, yet before reading I
caught myself reasoning; it is another 'Lady Emma'--it cannot be
Marie's ship--there may be ten or twenty 'Lady Emmas' afloat--and then
I read.

The paragraph--I have not preserved it--was to this effect:

The barque 'Planter,' being to the eastwards of Cape Horn, fell in with
a ship's long-boat full of men. The captain took the unfortunate people
on board, but some were found to be lifeless, having been frozen to
death during the night. Their story was, they were the boatswain (Wall)
and survivors of the ship 'Lady Emma,' Burke, master, that sailed
from the Thames bound to Valparaiso on April 2. She had been driven
to the southward and eastward by heavy weather, and when she was in
about fifty-nine degrees south latitude, she was totally dismasted by
a sudden hurricane. After fruitless efforts to erect a jury-mast, the
crew abandoned her in the long-boat. With them went the ship's doctor
(Owen). The master refused to quit the ship, and remained aboard with
his wife and a young lady passenger. Very shortly after the long-boat
had been met with, one of the crew of the 'Planter' fell overboard.
A boat was lowered in charge of the chief mate, Mr. Ralph Selby, but
before she could reach the man a sea capsized her, and the mate and the
three men who were in her were drowned. Within a week of picking up the
survivors of the 'Lady Emma's' crew, the 'Planter' transferred them
to a vessel bound to Monte Video, where they were forwarded by H.B.M.
Consul by steamer to this country, arriving yesterday at the West India
Docks. Mr. Owen died before the arrival of the vessel at Monte Video,
and was buried at sea. It is supposed that the 'Lady Emma' foundered
prior to the rescue of her crew, as Captain Parry of the 'Planter,'
which is a barque of four hundred and sixty tons, cruised at great risk
amongst the ice in the neighbourhood of the spot where the hull was
supposed to be lying without seeing anything of her.

I sat as one paralysed, read the account through again, scarcely even
then believing that the ship was the same that my betrothed had sailed
in. Next, thrusting the newspaper into my pocket, I jumped up, ran into
the street, and, jumping into a cab, bade the man drive me to Messrs.
Butcher and Hobbs, at such and such a number in the Minories. It was
about a quarter to ten o'clock.

Butcher and Hobbs were the owners of the 'Lady Emma'--of her and a
little fleet of smaller vessels. I had been introduced by Captain
Burke to Mr. Hobbs, and now it came to me as I was driven fast,
with my brain in a whirl, half mad with consternation, grief, the
hundred emotions which must needs throng upon so abrupt a disclosure
of dreadful news as this I had just read--it came to me, I say, that
Mr. Hobbs in my presence had very earnestly advised Captain Burke to
insure some goods he was taking out as a speculation of his own; and I
recollected the captain replying, with an arch, laughing air, full of
strong confidence, that insurance would only render him indifferent:
he had no fear as to the safety of the ship. If he insured and she was
lost, it would be said he sank or stranded her.

On my arrival in the Minories I entered an old-fashioned, grimy office,
in which sat a tall, stoutly-built seaman with immense whiskers, both
hands on his knees; he stared idly, as though waiting. I went to a
desk, and asked for Mr. Butcher or Mr. Hobbs. The clerk may have
recollected me; he instantly rose, entered an inner office, and
returning, begged me to step in.

Mr. Hobbs was alone: a large fat man, yellow-haired and bearded,
with staring, watery eyes. As I entered he stood up, with an air of
deep dejection, and extending his hand, bowed over it, looking down,
exclaiming:

'I know the business that has brought you here, sir. It is terrible--it
is shocking! But----' He then stood erect, and shrugged his shoulders,
with a roll of his eyes upwards.

'The report in the paper is true, then?' said I.

'I grieve to say it is,' he replied.

I so trembled with grief I could scarcely speak to the man.

'Are we to entertain no hope whatever?' I said, leaning upon the table
for support. He placed a chair; I sank into it and proceeded: 'Surely
we need not certainly conclude the dismasted ship sunk after the
long-boat left her merely because----' and here, forgetting the names,
I brought out the newspaper to refer to--' the "Planter" failed to find
her after a few hours' search in, perhaps, thick weather, and amongst
the ice, which may have been numerous?'

'Oh, of course,' he exclaimed, 'we must not abandon hope. As you justly
put it, the "Planter's" search counts for little, considering how
brief it was, and the state of the weather. I'll not pretend I have
much hope myself, but the sea provides many chances. Again and again
you hear of rates rising, till no further risk is taken; then the ship
is posted, her end made sure of, and one fine morning she's signalled
off some Channel station, blowing leisurely along with the loss of her
foretop-mast and her bottom beach-like with weed. I don't despair, sir;
yet I must honestly own my hope is not strong.' He paused, then said,
'I believe one of the crew of the "Lady Emma's" in the front office.'
He walked to the door and looked out. 'Would you like to see him? He
was the boatswain of the ship. His name is Wall.'

I eagerly begged him to bring him in. He called, and the big sailor
I had noticed entered. I immediately recollected that Marie, in the
fragment of journal she had sent us, had described and praised him for
his civility and his qualities as a seaman. He stood before us, cap in
hand, his back slightly arched by years of stooping and hauling and
curling of his body over yards and booms; his weather-coloured face
was hard as leather, and rugged and knotted with muscle; one of those
seafaring faces, impenetrable to the chisel of ocean experience which
fifty tragedies of the deep would no more mark than the human anguish
in shipwreck alters the face of the rock which stares through the salt
smoke down upon the scene.

'This gentleman,' said Mr. Hobbs, 'is Mr. Archibald Moore. The young
lady passenger aboard the "Lady Emma" was----' he dropped his head and
was silent.

I gazed at the seaman with consuming interest; he had been among the
last--he might have been the last--who had seen, who had spoken to
Marie.

'You'll not tell me,' said I, in a broken voice, 'there's no hope for
the three you left behind you?'

'No, sir, I'll not tell you that,' answered the man in deep tones,
which trembled upon the ear with the power of their volume. 'I've said
all along that if the ice only lets the hull keep afloat, there was
nothen to prevent her being fallen in with. She wasn't so far south,'
continued he, looking at Mr. Hobbs, 'as to be out of the way of half a
dozen chances a week if the weather opened out the sea, and gave a view
of her as she lay flat, with but twelve foot of foremast standing.'

'Why were they left behind?' I cried. 'Why were they left to wash
about in a dismasted hulk amongst ice, to perish horribly after days of
suffering perhaps?' and I beat the table with my fist.

'Mr. Moore, the capt'n refused to quit,' said the seaman, speaking
calmly in his deep voice, and viewing me with an air of respectful
pity. 'My mates'll tell you I entreated of him and the ladies to enter
the boat, likewise did Mr. Owen, the doctor. We wasn't listened to. The
captain was all for waiting for something to come alongside, and take
the hulk in tow. He was for jury-rigging her--on a twelve-foot stump of
foremast!' said he, slowly regarding Mr. Hobbs. 'The consarn blew over
the bows. What in that way was going to stand down there?'

'You should have used force,' I said.

'With the capt'n?' he exclaimed, with a slow, astonished shake of his
head.

'Had you got the captain into the boat, the ladies would have
followed.'

'Neither 'ud have been alive next morning. The young one would have
froze to death in a few hours. You should have heard the strongest
amongst us groaning with the cold when we lost sight of the craft we
were making for, and when the night drawed down, and we were for the
hull, all hands of us mad for the shelter of her and the warmth of
our blankets and the hot drinks to be got. I tell ye, sir,' he added,
calmly and respectfully, 'that the captain knew more about it than we
did, and was right to keep the ladies aboard; for if they was to die,
better comfortably in a warm cabin than in an open boat with spray
sheeting over them at every plunge.'

'What was the situation of the hull when the crew abandoned her?' I
asked.

Mr. Hobbs pulled open a drawer, and read aloud a copy of an entry in
the log-book of the 'Planter' in which the meeting with the long-boat
was minuted. The situation as there stated was Latitude 58 degrees 45' S.,
Longitude 45 degrees 10' W. This copy of the logbook entry had been handed by
Captain Parry of the 'Planter' to the master of the ship to whom the
crew had been transferred.

A yellow glazed map of the world hung in the office over the
mantelpiece. My eye went to it, and I made a step, saying to the
boatswain Wall:

'Show me to the place. What land lies nearest to it? What is the usual
track of ships passing Cape Horn?'

He hung back, evidently ignorant of maps and of latitude and longitude.
Mr. Hobbs, picking up a ruler, approached the mantelpiece, and, peering
close at the dingy map, presently put the end of the ruler upon a part
of it and said:

'This, as nearly as possible, will be the place where the crew
abandoned the hull.'

'Is that land there?'

Mr. Hobbs slanted his head to read, and exclaimed; 'Ay; in this little
group we have--my sight is not what it was--ah! the South Orkneys.
These to the left--' with straining sight and some difficulty he spelt
out 'South Shetlands.'

'What sort of islands are they?' I asked.

'About the most desolate, froze-up, oninhabited rocks on that side of
the world,' answered Wall. 'There's nothen to be thought of along o'
them.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Because going ashore there would be like hittin' ice. In the swell
that's always a-running, the hull 'ud go to pieces with the first blow,
like a loosed faggot. Their one chance,' he added, in a voice of deep
conviction, 'lies in their being fallen in with and taken off. That may
have happened. If so, it'll be a question of waiting.'

'If so,' cried Mr. Hobbs, with a raised manner of cheerfulness that
was scarcely sincere I thought, 'Captain Burke will bear in mind the
suspense and anxiety you and the young lady's father are suffering, and
exert his experience as an old seaman to promptly communicate, so that,
let us trust, if there be good news in store, we'll get it quickly.'

'Suppose the hull should have been thrown upon an iceberg,' I
exclaimed, addressing Wall, 'must she inevitably go to pieces?'

'That 'ud depend upon how she took the ice,' he answered.

'If she stranded and lay dry--such things have happened--could the
three live in her?'

'Yes, sights more comfortably than if she was afloat.'

'For how long?'

'She was freighted,' said Mr. Hobbs, 'with an abundance of the
necessaries of life.'

'How long could a vessel remain on the ice in a habitable state?'

'Years,' answered Wall, 'if she's let alone. Give her a snug berth
clear of the wash of the sea and tumbling blocks, and what's to hurt
her?'

Mr. Hobbs was staring at me earnestly. 'I could wish to persuade you,'
he exclaimed, with a melancholy inclination of his head, 'to discard
the notion of the hull finding a berth in an iceberg. Our hope must
take a practical form. Let us, then, believe that the wreck has been
encountered by one of the many whalers and other vessels which frequent
those seas, and that Captain Burke and his companions are at this
present moment safe.'

I turned to Wall and plied him with questions. What was the condition
of the hull? What had been the state of Miss Otway's health? Did he
believe, by recalling her looks when he last saw her, that she had
the strength to outlive the horrors, trials, suspense, suffering, of
even one week of a dismasted hull, rolling about amidst the ice in
dangerous, desolate seas?--the wildest in the world and in their
mid-winter? Was Captain Burke, singlehanded, aboard the wreck, as a
man, capable of doing anything to help them into safety? If not, why
had he stuck to the ship? What madman's nightmare of imagination could
have induced him to remain with two women aboard a vessel he could do
nothing with?

I almost raved my questions at the man, so wild grew my heart with
grief whilst I listened to his plain answers, full of an old practical
seaman's good sense, though several times he repeated that the captain
was right to keep his wife and Miss Otway aboard, as they never could
have survived the first night in the long-boat.

He increased my distress by hinting somewhat doubtfully that Captain
Burke had fallen a little weak in his mind during the voyage; he spoke
of an apparition that had been seen to walk on the ship's forecastle;
it had been clothed in the likeness of the captain, and ever after he
had ceased to be quite the same man.

'Can you imagine,' I cried, rounding upon Mr. Hobbs, 'that the loss of
the ship is owing to Captain Burke having gone mad?'

'You wouldn't say so?' he answered, looking at Wall.

'No, sir,' answered the seaman, 'there was no madness in that job of
dismasting, if it wasn't in the weather.'

'But,' I exclaimed, picking up the ruler Mr. Hobbs had used, and laying
the end of it upon the map, 'what was the captain's motive in carrying
this vessel so far south? See where the Horn is? What, in God's name,
was he doing so high?'

'He was blowed there,' answered the man.

'I understand,' said Mr. Hobbs, 'that a succession of hard northerly
gales settled the vessel to the southward and eastward, considerably
out of the usual course.'

'The "Planter" was also blowed south,' said Wall.

I continued to question with impassioned anxiety, eagerness, and
grief, till I found I was likely to become an intruder in the office,
on which, asking the boatswain Wall for his address, and ascertaining
that he did not mean to look about him for another berth at present, I
shook hands with Mr. Hobbs, and walked to my place of business in the
City--a private bank near Gracechurch Street.

Sir Mortimer Otway was at this time at Paris on a visit to some
friends. I had heard from him two days before, and understood that he
would return on the fourth or fifth. His health was not good. Of late
he had become very anxious about his daughter. He thought it was time,
after six months, that he should receive news of her, or that the 'Lady
Emma' should be reported. This being so, I resolved not to write, but
to wait until his return, when I would tell him of the wreck of the
ship, if, indeed, the account of it did not reach him through other
hands, or the newspapers in Paris.

For my own part I was so shocked, so stunned, there was something so
terrible to my imagination in the character of this wreck, in every
circumstance of it, having regard to the loneliness of the three, the
wild and stormy breast of waters where the hull had been left plunging
helpless by her crew, that I could not hold up my head. I could not
speak. I sat in a sort of stupor. My father reasoned with me; he
pointed out that the hull was afloat, a stout, seaworthy vessel when
the crew left her; that being dismasted she was less likely to beat
against the ice than were she moving through the water under sail; that
a vessel had been seen and pursued by the crew; that where one was
there must be others; and so on, and so on.

I heard him and that was all.

I cannot tell how great was my love for Marie. I felt that I had acted
as a wretch, betrayed the darling of my heart to her destruction,
in sanctioning her father's scheme of sending her away alone--and
she must be alone if she was without me--on a long voyage in a
comparatively small sailing ship. The fancy of her in that rolling,
dismasted hull was a dreadful oppression to my imagination and worked
in me like madness itself. I had seen the ship, and so the figure of
her as she tumbled dismasted amidst the heavy seas far south of Cape
Horn was easy to paint. To think of my Marie, that delicate, fragile,
timid girl, imprisoned in such a hulk, enduring hours and perhaps days
of anguish in poignant suspense and heartbreaking expectation of death,
all alone as she was, countless leagues away from me, from her father,
with no other companion than her old nurse, who, let her devotion be
what it might, must surely fail her at such a time.

My mind felt crazed. I could not lift my head nor speak.


END OF THE SECOND VOLUME


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