There was perhaps something in keeping with the icy spell of death upon this vessel in the figure of the man who was bowed over the table, for he looked as though he slept; but the other mocked the view with aspectrumof the fever and passion of life. You would have sworn he had beheld the skeleton hand of the Shadow reaching out of the dimness for him; that he had started back with a curse and cry of horror, and expired in the very agony of his affrighted recoil.
The interior was extremely plain: the bulkheads of a mahogany colour, the decks bare, and nothing in the form of an ornament saving a silver crucifix hanging by a nail to the trunk of the mainmast, and a cage with a frozen bird of gorgeous plumage suspended to the bulkhead near the hatch. A small lanthorn of an old pattern dangled over the table, and I noticed that it contained two or three inches of candle. Abaft the hatchway was a door on the starboard side which I opened, and found a narrow dark passage. I could not pierce it with my eye beyond a few feet; but perceiving within this range the outline of a little door, I concluded that here were the berths in which the master and his mates slept. There was nothing to be done in the dark, and I bitterly lamented that I had left my tinder-box and flint in the boat, for then I could have lighted the candle in the lanthorn.
"Perhaps," thought I, "one of those figures may have a tinder-box upon him."
Custom was now somewhat hardening me; moreover I was spurred on by mortal anxiety to discover if there was any kind of food to be met with in the vessel. So I stepped up to the figure whose face I had touched, and felt in his pockets; but neither on him nor on the other did I find what I wanted, though I was not a little astonished to discover in the pockets of the occupants of so small and humble a ship as this schooner a fine gold watch as rich as the one I had brought away from the man on the rocks, and more elegant in shape, a gold snuff-box set with diamonds, several rings of beauty and value lying loose in the breeches pocket of the man whose face was hidden, a handful of Spanish pieces in gold, handkerchiefs of fine silk, and other articles, as if indeed these fellows had been overhauling a parcel of booty, and then carelessly returned the contents to their pockets.
But what I needed was the means of obtaining a light, so, after casting about, I thought I would search the body on deck, and went to it, and to my great satisfaction discovered what I wanted in the first pocket I dipped my hand into, though I had to rip open the mouth of it away from the snow with the hanger.
I returned to the cabin and lighted the candle, and carried the lanthorn into the black passage or corridor. There were four small doors, belonging to as many berths; I opened the first, and entered a compartment that smelt so intolerably stale and fusty that I had to come into the passage again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to the odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the bottom of the hold.
I held up the lanthorn and looked about me. A glance or two satisfied me that I was in a room that had been appropriated to the steward and his mates. A number of dark objects, which on inspection I found to be hams, were stowed snugly away in battens under the ceiling or upper-deck; a cask half full of flour stood in a corner; near it lay a large coarse sack in which was a quantity of biscuit, a piece of which I bit and found it as hard as flint and tasteless, but not in the least degree mouldy. There were four shelves running athwartships full of glass, knives and forks, dishes, and so forth, some of the glass very choice and elegant, and many of the dishes and plates also very fine, fit for the greatest nobleman's table. Under the lower shelf, on the deck, lay a sack of what I believed to be black stones until, after turning one or two of them about, it came upon me that they were, or had been, I should say, potatoes.
Not to tease you with too many particulars under this head, let me briefly say that in this larder or steward's room I found among other things several cheeses, a quantity of candles, a great earthenware pot full of pease, several pounds of tobacco, about thirty lemons, along with two small casks and three or four jars, manifestly of spirits, but of what kind I could not tell. I took a stout sharp knife from one of the shelves, and pulling down one of the hams tried to cut it, but I might as well have striven to slice a piece of marble. I attempted next to cut a cheese, but this was frozen as hard as the ham. The lemons, candles, and tobacco had the same astonishing quality of stoniness, and nothing yielded to the touch but the flour. I laid hold of one of the jars, and thought to pull the stopper out, but it was frozen hard in the hole it fitted, and I was five minutes hammering it loose. When it was out I inserted a steel—used for the sharpening of knives—and found the contents solid ice, nor was there the faintest smell to tell me what the spirit or wine was.
Never before did plenty offer itself in so mocking a shape. It was the very irony of abundance—substantial ghostliness and a Barmecide's feast to my aching stomach.
But there was biscuit not unconquerable by teeth used to the fare of the sea life, and picking up a whole one, I sat me down on the edge of a cask and fell a-munching. One reflection, however, comforted me, namely, that this petrifaction by freezing had kept the victuals sweet. I was sure there was little here that might not be thawed into relishable and nourishing food and drink by a good fire. The sight of these stores took such a weight off my mind that no felon reprieved from death could feel more elated than I. My forebodings had come to nought in this regard, and here for the moment my grateful spirits were content to stop.
So long as I moved about and worked I did not feel the cold; but if I stood or sat for a couple of minutes I felt the nip of it in my very marrow. Yet, fierce as the cold was here, it was impossible it could be comparable with the rigours of the parts in which this schooner had originally got locked up in the ice. No doubt if I died on deck my body would be frozen as stiff as the figure on the rocks; but, though it was very conceivable that I might perish of cold in the cabin by sitting still, I was sure the temperature below had not the severity to stonify me to the granite of the men at the table.
Still, though a greater degree of cold—cold as killing as if the world had fallen sunless—did unquestionably exist in those latitudes whence this ice with the schooner in its hug had floated, it was so bitterly bleak in this interior that 'twas scarce imaginable it could be colder elsewhere; and as I rose from the cask shuddering to the heart with the frosty motionless atmosphere, my mind naturally went to the consideration of a fire by which I might sit and toast myself.
I put a bunch of candles in my pocket—they were as hard as a parcel of marline-spikes—and took the lanthorn into the passage and inspected the next room. Here was a cot hung up by hooks, and a large black chest stood in cleats upon the deck; some clothes dangled from pins in the bulkhead, and upon a kind of tray fixed upon short legs and serving as a shelf were a miscellaneous bundle of boots, laced waistcoats, three-corner hats, a couple of swords, three or four pistols, and other objects not very readily distinguishable by the candle-light. There was a port which I tried to open, but found it so hard frozen I should need a handspike to start it. There were three cabins besides this; the last cabin, that is the one in the stern, being the biggest of the lot. Each had its cot, and each also had its own special muddle and litter of boxes, clothes, firearms, swords, and the like.
Indeed, by this time I was beginning to see how it was. The suspicion that the watches and jewellery I had discovered on the bodies of the men had excited was now confirmed, and I was satisfied that this schooner had been a pirate or buccaneer, of what nationality I could not yet divine—methought Spanish from the costume of the first figure I had encountered; and I was also convinced by the brief glance I directed at the things in the cabin, particularly the wearing apparel, and the make and appearance of the firearms, that she must have been in this position for upwards of fifty years.
The thought awed me greatly:twenty years before I was bornthose two men were sitting dead in the cabin!—he on deck was keeping his blind and silent look-out; he on the rocks with his hands locked upon his knees sat sunk in blank and frozen contemplation!
Every cabin had its port, and there were ports in the vessel's side opposite; but on reflection I considered that the cabin would be the warmer for their remaining closed, and so I came away and entered the great cabin afresh, bent on exploring the forward part.
I must tell you that the mainmast, piercing the upper deck, came down close against the bulkhead that formed the forward wall of the cabin, and on approaching this partition, the daylight being broad enough now that the hatch lay open on top, I remarked a sliding door on the larboard side of the mast. I put my shoulder to it and very easily ran it along its grooves, and then found myself in the way of a direct communication with all the fore portion of the schooner. The arrangement indeed was so odd that I suspected a piratical device in this uncommon method of opening out at will the whole range of deck. The air here was as vile as in the cabins, and I had to wait a bit.
On entering I discovered a little compartment with racks on either hand filled with small-arms. I afterwards counted a hundred and thirteen muskets, blunderbusses, and fusils, all of an antique kind, whilst the sides of the vessel were hung with pistols great and little, boarding-pikes, cutlasses, hangers, and other sorts of sword. This armoury was a sight to set me walking very cautiously, for it was not likely that powder should be wanting in a ship thus equipped; and where was it stowed?
There was another sliding door in the forward partition; it stood open, and I passed through it into what I immediately saw was the cook-house. I turned the lanthorn about, and discovered every convenience for dressing food. The furnaces were of brick and the oven was a great one—great, I mean, for the size of the vessel. There were pots, pans, and kettles in plenty, a dresser with drawers, dishes of tin and earthenware, a Dutch clock—in short, such an equipment of kitchen furniture as you would not expect to find in the galley of an Indiaman built to carry two or three hundred passengers. About half a chaldron of small coal lay heaped in a wooden angular fence fitted to the ship's side, for the sight of which I thanked God. I held the lanthorn to the furnace, and observed a crooked chimney rising to the deck and passing through it. The mouth or head of it was no doubt covered by the snow, for I had not noticed any such object in the survey I had taken of the vessel above. Strange, I thought, that these men should have frozen to death with the material in the ship for keeping a fire going. But then my whole discovery I regarded as one of those secrets of the deep which defy the utmost imagination and experience of man to explain them. Enough that here was a schooner which had been interred in a sepulchre of ice, as I might rationally conclude, for near half a century, that there were dead men in her who looked to have been frozen to death, that she was apparently stored with miscellaneous booty, that she was powerfully armed for a craft of her size, and had manifestly gone crowded with men. All this was plain, and I say it was enough for me. If she had papers they were to be met with presently; otherwise, conjecture would be mere imbecility in the face of those white and frost-bound countenances and iron silent lips.
I thrust back another sliding door and entered the ship's forecastle. The ceiling, as I choose to call the upper deck, was lined with hammocks, and the floor was covered with chests, bedding, clothes, and I know not what else. The ringing of the wind on high did not disturb the stillness, and I cannot convey the impression produced on my mind by this extraordinary scene of confusion beheld amid the silence of that tomblike interior. I stood in the doorway, not having the courage to venture further. For all I knew many of those hammocks might be tenanted; for as this kind of bed expresses by its curvature the rounded shape of a seaman, whether it be empty or not, so it is impossible by merely looking to know whether it is occupied or vacant. The dismalness of the prospect was of course vastly exaggerated by the feeble light of the candle, which, swaying in my hand, flung a swarming of shadows upon the scene, through which the hammocks glimmered wan and melancholy.
I came away in a fright, sliding the door to in my hurry with a bang that fetched a groaning echo out of the hold. If this ship were haunted, the forecastle would be the abode of the spirits!
Before I could make a fire the chimney must be cleared. Among the furniture in the arms-room were a number of spade-headed spears; the spade as wide as the length of a man's thumb, and about a foot long, mounted on light thin wood. Armed with one of these weapons, the like of which is to be met with among certain South American tribes, I passed into the cabin to proceed on deck; but though I knew the two figures were there, the coming upon them afresh struck me with as much astonishment and alarm as if I had not before seen them. The man starting from the table confronted me on this entrance, and I stopped dead to that astounding living posture of terror, even recoiling, as though he were alive indeed, and was jumping up from the table in his amazement at my apparition.
The brilliance of the snow was very striking after the dusk of the interiors I had been penetrating. The glare seemed like a blaze of white sunshine; yet it was the dazzle of the ice and nothing more for the sun was hidden; the fairness of the morning was passed; the sky was lead-coloured down to the ocean line, with a quantity of smoke-brown scud flying along it. The change had been rapid, as it always is hereabouts. The wind screamed with a piercing whistling sound through the frozen rigging, splitting in wails and bounding in a roar upon the adamantine peaks and rocks; the cracking of the ice was loud, continuous, and mighty startling; and these sounds, combined with the thundering of the sea and the fierce hissing of its rushing yeast, gave the weather the character of a storm, though as yet it was no more than a fresh gale.
However, though it was frightful to be alone in this frozen vault, with no other society than that of the dead, not even a seafowl to put life into the scene, I could not but feel that, be my prospects what they might, for the moment I was safe—that is to say, I was immeasurably securer than ever I could have been in the boat, which, when I had emerged into this stormy sound and realized the sea that was running outside, I instantly thought of with a shudder. Had the rock, I mused, not fallen and liberated the boat, where should I be now? Perhaps floating, a corpse, fathoms deep under water, or, if alive, then flying before this gale into the south, ever widening the distance betwixt me and all chance of my deliverance, and every hour gauging more deeply the horrible cold of the pole. Indeed I began to understand that I had been mercifully diverted from courting a hideous fate, and my spirits rose with the emotion of gratitude and hope that attends upon preservation.
I speedily spied the chimney, which showed a head of two feet above the deck, and made short work of the snow that was frozen in it, as nothing could have been fitter to cut ice with than the spade-shaped weapon I carried. This done, I returned to the cook-room, and with a butcher's axe that hung against the bulkhead I knocked away one of the boards that confined the coal, split it into small pieces, and in a short time had kindled a good fire. One does not need the experience of being cast away upon an iceberg to understand the comfort of a fire. I had a mind to be prodigal, and threw a good deal of coals into the furnace, and presently had a noble blaze. The heat was exquisite. I pulled a little bench, after the pattern of those on which the men sat in the cabin, to the fire, and, with outstretched legs and arms, thawed out of me the frost that had lain taut in my flesh ever since the wreck of theLaughing Mary. When I was thoroughly warm and comforted I took the lanthorn and went aft to the steward's room, and brought thence a cheese, a ham, some biscuit, and one of the jars of spirits, all which I carried to the cook-room, and placed the whole of them in the oven. I was extremely hungry and thirsty, and the warmth and cheerfulness of the fire set me yearning for a hot meal. But how was I to make a bowl without fresh water? I went on deck and scratched up some snow, but the salt in it gave it a sickly taste, and I was not only certain it would spoil and make disgusting whatever I mixed it with or cooked in it, but it stood as a drink to disorder my stomach and bring on an illness. So, thought I to myself, there must be fresh water about—casks enough in the hold, I dare say; but the hold was not to be entered and explored without labour and difficulty, and I was weary and famished, and in no temper for hard work.
In all ships it is the custom to carry one or more casks called scuttlebutts on deck, into which fresh water is pumped for the use of the crew. I stepped along looking earnestly at the several shapes of guns, coils of rigging, hatchways, and the like, upon which the snow lay thick and solid, sometimes preserving the mould of the object it covered, sometimes distorting and exaggerating it into an unrecognizable outline, but perceived nothing that answered to the shape of a cask. At last I came to the well in the head, passed the forecastle deck, and on looking down spied among other shapes three bulged and bulky forms. I seemed by instinct to know that these were the scuttlebutts and went for the chopper, with which I returned and got into this hollow, that was four or five feet deep. The snow had the hardness of iron; it took me a quarter of an hour of severe labour to make sure of the character of the bulky thing I wrought at, and then it proved to be a cask. Whatever might be its contents it was not empty, but I was pretty nigh spent by the time I had knocked off the iron bands and beaten out staves enough to enable me to get at the frozen body within. There were three-quarters of a cask full. It was sparkling clear ice, and chipping off a piece and sucking it, I found it to be very sweet fresh water. Thus was my labour rewarded.
I cut off as much as, when dissolved, would make a couple of gallons, but stayed a minute to regain my breath and take a view of this well or hollow before going aft. It was formed of the great open head-timbers of the schooner curving up to the stem, and by the forecastle deck ending like a cuddy front. I scraped at this front and removed enough snow to exhibit a portion of a window. It was by this window I supposed that the forecastle was lighted. Out of this well forked the bowsprit, with the spritsail yard braced fore and aft. The whole fabric close to looked more like glass than at a distance, owing to the million crystalline sparkles of the ice-like snow that coated the structure from the vane at the masthead to the keel.
Well, I clambered on to the forecastle deck and returned to the cook-room with my piece of ice, struck as I went along by the sudden comfortable quality of life the gushing of the black smoke out of the chimney put into the ship, and how, indeed, it seemed to soften as if by magic the savage wildness and haggard austerity and gale-swept loneliness of the white rocks and peaks. It was extremely disagreeable and disconcerting to me to have to pass the ghastly occupants of the cabin every time I went in and out; and I made up my mind to get them on deck when I felt equal to the work, and cover them up there. The slanting posture of the one was a sort of fierce rebuke; the sleeping attitude of the other was a dark and sullen enjoinment of silence. I never passed them without a quick beat of the heart and shortened breathing; and the more I looked at them the keener became the superstitious alarm they excited.
The fire burned brightly, and its ruddy glow was sweet as human companionship. I put the ice into a saucepan and set it upon the fire, and then pulling the cheese and ham out of the oven found them warm and thawed. On smelling to the mouth of the jar I discovered its contents to be brandy.[1]Only about an inch deep of it was melted. I poured this into a pannikin and took a sup, and a finer drop of spirits I never swallowed in all my life; its elegant perfume proved it amazingly choice and old. I fetched a lemon and some sugar and speedily prepared a small smoking bowl of punch. The ham cut readily; I fried a couple of stout rashers, and fell to the heartiest and most delicious repast I ever sat down to. At any time there is something fragrant and appetizing in the smell of fried ham; conceive then the relish that the appetite of a starved, half-frozen, shipwrecked man would find in it! The cheese was extremely good, and was as sound as if it had been made a week ago. Indeed, the preservative virtues of the cold struck me with astonishment. Here was I making a fine meal off stores which in all probability had lain in this ship fifty years, and they ate as choicely as like food of a similar quality ashore. Possibly some of these days science may devise a means for keeping the stores of a ship frozen, which would be as great a blessing as could befall the mariner, and a sure remedy for the scurvy, for then as much fresh meat might be carried as salt, besides other articles of a perishable kind.
I had a pipe of my own in my pocket; I fetched a small block of the black tobacco that was in the pantry, and, with some trouble, for it was as hard and dry as glass, chipped off a bowlful and fell a-puffing with all the satisfaction of a hardened lover of tobacco who has long been denied his favourite relish. The punch diffused a pleasing glow through my frame, the tobacco was lulling, the heat of the fire very soothing, the hearty meal I had eaten had also marvellously invigorated me, so that I found my mind in a posture to justly and rationally consider my condition, and to reason out such probabilities as seemed to be attached to it.
First of all I reflected that by the usual operation of natural laws this vast seat of "thrilling and thick-ribbed ice" in which the schooner lay bound was steadily travelling to the northward, where in due course it would dissolve, though that would not happen yet. But as it advanced so would it carry me nearer to the pathways of ships using these seas, and any day might disclose a sail near enough to observe such signals of smoke or flag as I might best contrive. But supposing no opportunity of this kind to offer, then I ought to be able to find in the vessel materials fit for the construction of a boat, if, indeed, I met not with a pinnace of her own stowed under the main-hatch, for there was certainly no boat on deck. Nay, my meditations even carried me further: this was the winter season of the southern hemisphere, but presently the sun would be coming my way, whilst the ice, on the other hand, floated towards him; if by the wreck and dissolution of the island the schooner was not crushed, she must be released, in which case, providing she was tight—and my brief inspection of her bottom showed nothing wrong with her that was visible through the shroud of snow—I should have a stout ship under me in which I would be able to lie hove to, or even make shift to sail her if the breeze came from the south, and thus take my chance of being sighted and discovered.
Much, I had almost said everything, depended on the quantity of provisions I should find in here and particularly on the stock of coal, for I feared I must perish if I had not a fire. But there was the hold to be explored yet; the navigation of these waters must have been anticipated by the men of the schooner, who were sure to make handsome provision for the cold—and the surer if, as I fancied, they were Spaniards. Certainly they might have exhausted their stock of coal, but I could not persuade myself of this, since the heap in the corner of the cook-room somehow or other was suggestive of a store behind.
I knew not yet whether more of the crew lay in the forecastle, but so far I had encountered four men only. If these were all, then I had a right to believe, grounding my fancy on the absence of boats, that most of the company had quitted the ship, and this they would have done early—a supposition that promised me a fair discovery of stores. Herein lay my hope; if I could prolong my life for three or four months, then, if the ice was not all gone, it would have advanced far north, serving me as a ship and putting me in the way of delivering myself, either by the sight of a sail, or by the schooner floating free, or by my construction of a boat.
Thus I sat musing, as I venture to think, in a clearheaded way. Yet all the same I could not glance around without feeling as if I was bewitched. The red shining of the furnace ruddily gilded the cook-house; through the after-sliding door went the passage to the cabin in blackness; the storming of the wind was subdued into a strange moaning and complaining; often through the body of the ship came the thrill of a sudden explosion; and haunting all was the sense of the dead men just without, the frozen desolation of the island, the mighty world of waters in which it lay. No! you can think of no isolation comparable to this; and I tremble as I review it, for under the thought of the enormous loneliness of that time my spirit must ever sink and break down.
It was melancholy to be without time, so I pulled out the gold watch I had taken from the man on the rocks and wound it up, and guessing at the hour, set the hands at half-past four. The watch ticked bravely. It was indeed a noble piece of mechanism, very costly and glorious with its jewels, and more than a hint as to the character of this schooner; and had there been nothing else to judge by I should still have sworn to her by this watch.
My pipe being emptied, I threw some more coals into the furnace, and putting a candle in the lanthorn went aft to take another view of the little cabins, in one of which I resolved to sleep, for though the cook-room would have served me best whilst the fire burned, I reckoned upon it making a colder habitation when the furnace was black than those small compartments in the stern. The cold on deck gushed down so bitingly through the open companion-hatch that I was fain to close it. I mounted the steps, and with much ado shipped the cover and shut the door, by which of course the great cabin, as I call the room in which the two men were, was plunged in darkness; but the cold was not tolerable, and the parcels of candles in the larder rendered me indifferent to the gloom.
On entering the passage in which were the doors of the berths, I noticed an object that had before escaped my observation—I mean a small trap-hatch, no bigger than a manhole, with a ring for lifting it, midway down the lane. I suspected this to be the entrance to the lazarette, and putting both hands to the ring pulled the hatch up. I sniffed cautiously, fearing foul air, and then sinking the lanthorn by the length of my arm I peered down, and observed the outlines of casks, bales, cases of white wood, chests, and so forth. I dropped through the hole on to a cask, which left me my head and shoulders above the deck, and then with the utmost caution stooped and threw the lanthorn light around me. But the casks were not powder-barrels, which perhaps a little reflection might have led me to suspect, since it was not to be supposed that any man would stow his powder in the lazarette.
As I was in the way of settling my misgivings touching the stock of food in the schooner, I resolved to push through with this business at once, and fetching the chopper went to work upon these barrels and chests; and very briefly I will tell you what I found. First, I dealt with a tierce that proved full of salt beef. There was a whole row of these tierces, and one sufficed to express the nature of the rest; there were upwards of thirty barrels of pork; one canvas bale I ripped open was full of hams, and of these bales I counted half a score. The white cases held biscuit. There were several sacks of pease, a number of barrels of flour, cases of candles, cheeses, a quantity of tobacco, not to mention a variety of jars of several shapes, some of which I afterwards found to contain marmalade and succadoes of different kinds. On knocking the head off one cask I found it held a frozen body, that by the light of the lanthorn looked as black as ink; I chipped off a bit, sucked it, and found it wine.
I was so transported by the sight of this wonderful plenty that I fell upon my knees in an outburst of gratitude and gave hearty thanks to God for His mercy. There was no further need for me to dismally wonder whether I was to starve or no; supposing the provisions sweet, here was food enough to last me three or four years. I was so overjoyed and withal curious that I forgot all about the time, and flourishing the chopper made the round of the lazarette, sampling its freight by individual instances, so that by the time I was tired I had enlarged the list I have given, by discoveries of brandy, beer, oatmeal, oil, lemons, tongues, vinegar, rum, and eight or ten other matters, all stowed very bunglingly, and in so many different kinds of casks, cases, jars, and other vessels as disposed me to believe that several piratical rummagings must have gone to the creation of this handsome and plentiful stock of good things.
Well, thought I, even if there be no more coal in the ship than what lies in the cook-house, enough fuel is here in the shape of casks, boxes, and the like to thaw me provisions for six months, besides what I may come across in the hold, along with the hammocks, bedding, boxes, and so forth in the forecastle, all which would be good to feed my fire with. This was a most comforting reflection, and I recollect springing out through the lazarette hatch with as spirited a caper as ever I had cut at any time in my life.
I replaced the hatch-cover, and having resolved upon the aftmost of the four cabins as my bedroom, entered it to see what kind of accommodation it would yield me. I hung up the lanthorn and looked into the cot, that was slung athwartships, and spied a couple of rugs, or blankets, which I pulled out, having no fancy to lie under them. The deck was like an old clothes' shop, or the wardrobe of a travelling troop of actors. From the confusion in this and the ajoining cabins, I concluded that there had been a rush at the last, a wild overhauling and flinging about of clothes for articles of more value hidden amongst them. But just as likely as not the disorder merely indicated the slovenly indifference of plunderers to the fruits of a pillage that had overstocked them.
The first garment I picked up was a cloak of a sort of silk material, richly furred and lined; all the buttons but one had been cut off, and that which remained was silver. I spread it in the cot, as it was a soft thing to lie upon. Then I picked up a coat of the fashion you will see in Hogarth's engravings; the coat collar a broad fold, and the cuffs to the elbow. This was as good as a rug, and I put it into the cot with the other. I inspected others of the articles on the deck, and among them recollect a gold-laced waistcoat of green velvet, two or three pairs of high-heeled shoes, a woman's yellow sacque, several frizzled wigs, silk stockings, pumps—in fine the contents of the trunks of some dandy passengers, long since gathered to their forefathers no doubt, even if the gentlemen of this schooner had not then and there walked them overboard or split their windpipes. But, to be honest, I cannot remember a third of what lay tumbled upon the deck or hung against the bulkhead. So far as my knowledge of costume went, every article pointed to the date which I had fixed upon for this vessel.
I swept the huddle of things with my foot into a corner, and lifting the lids of the boxes saw more clothes, some books, a collection of small-arms, a couple of quadrants, and sundry rolls of paper which proved to be charts of the islands of the Antilles and the western South American coast, very ill-digested. There were no papers of any kind to determine the vessel's character, nor journal to acquaint me with her story.
I was tired in my limbs rather than sleepy, and went to the cook-room to warm myself at the fire and get me some supper, meaning to sit there till the fire died out and then go to rest; but when I put my knife to the ham I found it as hard frozen as when I had first met with it; so with the cheese; and this though there had been a fire burning for hours! I put the things into the oven to thaw as before, and sitting down fell very pensive over this severity of cold, which had power to freeze within a yard or two of the furnace. To be sure the fire by my absence had shrunk, and the sliding door being open admitted the cold of the cabin; but the consideration was, how was I to resist the killing enfoldment of this atmosphere? I had slept in the boat, it is true, and was none the worse; and now I was under shelter, with the heat of a plentiful bellyful of meat and liquor to warm me; but if wine and ham and cheese froze in an air in which a fire had been burning, why not I in my sleep, when there was no fire, and life beat weakly, as it does in slumber? Those figures in the cabin were dismal warnings and assurances; they had been men perhaps stouter and heartier in their day than ever I was, but they had been frozen into stony images nevertheless, under cover too, with the materials to make a fire, and as much strong waters in their lazarette as would serve their schooner to float in.
Well, thought I, after a spell of melancholy thinking, if Iamto perish of cold, there's an end; it is preordained, and it is as easy as drowning, anyhow, and better than hanging; and with that I pulled out the ham and found it soft enough to cut, finding philosophy (which, as the French cynic says, triumphs over past and future ills) not so hard because somehow I did not myself then particularly feel the cold—I mean, I was not certainly suffering here from that pain of frost which I had felt in the open boat.
Having heartily supped, I brewed a pint of punch, and, charging my pipe, sat smoking with my feet against the furnace. It was after eight o'clock by the watch I was wearing. I knew by the humming noise that it was blowing a gale of wind outside, and from time to time the decks rattled to a heavy discharge of hail. All sounds were naturally much subdued to my ear by the ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with the hatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself a quality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. It was like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it was hollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seas commingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splitting ice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded the inward silence with unearthly tones, which my lonely and quickened imagination readily furnished with syllables. The lanthorn diffused but a small light, and the flickering of the fire made a movement of shadows about me. I was separated from the great cabin where the figures were by the little arms-room only, and the passage to it ran there in blackness.
It strangely and importunately entered my head to conceive, that though those men were frozen and stirless they were not dead as corpses are, but as a stream whose current, checked by ice, will flow when the ice is melted. Might not life in them be suspended by the cold, not ended? There is vitality in the seed though it lies a dead thing in the hand. Those men are corpses to my eye; but said I to myself, they may have the principles of life in them, which heat might call into being. Putrefaction is a natural law, but it is balked by frost, and just as decay is hindered by cold, might not the property of life be left unaffected in a body, though it should be numbed in a marble form for fifty years?
This was a terrible fancy to possess a man situated as I was, and it so worked in me that again and again I caught myself looking first forward, then aft, as though, Heaven help me! my secret instincts foreboded that at any moment I should behold some form from the forecastle, or one of those figures in the cabin, stalking in, and coming to my side and silently seating himself. I pshaw'd and pish'd, and querulously asked of myself what manner of English sailor was I to suffer such womanly terrors to visit me; but it would not do; I could not smoke; a coldness of the heart fell upon me, and set me trembling above any sort of shivers which the frost of the air had chased through me; and presently a hollow creak sounding out of the hold, caused by some movement of the bed of ice on which the vessel lay, I was seized with a panic terror and sprang to my feet, and, lanthorn in hand, made for the companion-ladder, with a prayer in me for the sight of a star!
I durst not look at the figures, but, setting the light down at the foot of the ladder, squeezed through the companion-door on to the deck. My fear was a fever in its way, and I did not feel the cold. There was no star to be seen, but the whiteness of the ice was flung out in a wild strange glare by the blackness of the sky, and made a light of its own. It was the most savage and terrible picture of solitude the invention of man could reach to, yet I blessed it for the relief it gave to my ghost-enkindled imagination. No squall was then passing; the rocks rose up on either hand in a ghastly glimmer to the ebony of the heavens; the gale swept overhead in a wild, mad blending of whistlings, roarings, and cryings in many keys, falling on a sudden into a doleful wailing, then rising in a breath to the full fury of its concert; the sea thundered like the cannonading of an electric storm, and you would have said that the rending and crackling noises of the ice were responses to the crashing blows of the balls of shadow-hidden ordnance. But the scene, the uproar, the voices of the wind were real—a better cordial to my spirits than a gallon of the mellowest vintage below; and presently, when the cold was beginning to pierce me, my courage was so much the better for this excursion into the hoarse and black and gleaming realities of the night, that my heart beat at its usual measure as I passed through the hatch and went again to the cook-room.
I was, however, sure that if I sat here long, listening and thinking, fear would return. A small fire still burned; I put a saucepan on it, and popped in a piece of the fresh-water ice, but on handling the brandy I found it hard set. The heat of the oven was not sufficiently great to thaw me a dram; so to save further trouble in this way I took the chopper and at one blow split open the jar, and then there lay before me the solid body of the brandy, from which I chipped off as much as I needed, and thus procured a hot and animating draught.
Raking out the fire, I picked up the lanthorn and was about to go, then halted, considering whether I should not stow the frozen provisions away. It was a natural thought, seeing how precious food was to me. But, alas! it mattered not where they lay; they were as secure here as if they were snugly hidden in the bottom of the hold. It was the white realm of death; if ever a rat had crawled in this ship, it was, in its hiding-place, as stiff and idle as the frozen vessel. So I let the lump of brandy, the ice, ham, and so forth, rest where they were, and went to the cabin I had chosen, involuntarily peeping at the figures as I passed, and hurrying the faster because of the grim and terrifying liveliness put into the man who sat starting from the table by the swing of the lanthorn in my hand.
I shut the door and hung the lanthorn near the cot, having the flint and box in my pocket. There was indeed an abundance of candles in the vessel; nevertheless, it was my business to husband them with the utmost niggardliness. How long I was to be imprisoned here, if indeed I was ever to be delivered, Providence alone knew; and to run short of candles would add to the terrors of my existence, by forcing me either to open the hatches and ports for light, and so filling the ship with the deadly air outside, or living in darkness. There were a cloak and a coat in the cot, but they would not suffice. The fine cloak I had taken from the man on the rocks was on deck, and till now I had forgotten it; there was, however, plenty of apparel in the corner to serve as wraps, and having chosen enough to smother me I vaulted into the cot, and so covered myself that the clothes were above the level of the sides of the cot.
I left the lanthorn burning whilst I made sure my bed was all right, and lay musing, feeling extremely melancholy; the hardest part was the thought of those two men watching in the cabin. The most fantastic alarms possessed me. Suppose their ghosts came to the ship at midnight, and, entering their bodies, quickened them into walking? Suppose they were in the condition of cataleptics, sensible of what passed around them, but paralyzed to the motionlessness and seeming insensibility of death? Then the very garments under which I lay were of a proper kind to keep a man in my situation quaking. My imagination went to work to tell me to whom they had belonged, the bloody ends their owners had met at the hands of the miscreants who despoiled them. I caught myself listening—and there was enough to hear, too, what with the subdued roaring of the wind, the splintering of ice, the occasional creaking—not unlike a heavy booted tread—of the fabric of the schooner—to the blasts of the gale against her masts, or to a movement in the bed on which she reposed.
But plain sense came to my rescue at last. I resolved to have no more of these night fears, so, blowing out the candle, I put my head on the coat that formed my pillow, resolutely kept my eyes shut, and after awhile fell asleep.
It was pitch dark when I awoke, and I conceived it must be the middle of the night, but to my astonishment, on lighting the lanthorn and looking at the watch, which I had taken the precaution to wind up overnight, I saw it wanted but twenty minutes of nine o'clock, so that I had passed through twelve hours of solid sleep. However, it was only needful to recollect where I was, and to cast a glance at the closed door and port, to understand why it was dark. I had slept fairly warm, and awoke with no sensation of cramp; but the keen air had caused the steam of my breath to freeze upon my mouth in such a manner that, when feeling the sticky inconvenience I put my finger to it, it fell like a little mask; and I likewise felt the pain of cold in my face to such an extent that had I been blistered there my cheeks, nose, and brow could not have smarted more. This resolved me henceforward to wrap up my head and face before going to rest.
I opened the door and passed out, and observed an amazing difference between the temperature of the air in which I had been sleeping and that of the atmosphere in the passage—a happy discovery, for it served to assure me that, if I was careful to lie under plenty of coverings and to keep the outer air excluded, the heat of my body would raise the temperature of the little cabin; nor, providing the compartment was ventilated throughout the day, was there anything to be feared from the vitiation of the air by my own breathing.
My first business was to light the fire and set my breakfast to thaw, and boil me a kettle of water; and some time after I went on deck to view the weather and to revolve in my mind the routine of the day. On opening the door of the companion-hatch I was nearly blinded by the glorious brilliance of the sunshine on the snow; after the blackness of the cabin it was like looking at the sun himself, and I had to stand a full three minutes with my hand upon my eyes before I could accustom my sight to the dazzling glare. It was fine weather again; the sky over the glass-like masts of the schooner was a clear dark blue, with a few light clouds blowing over it from the southward. The wind had shifted at last; but, pure as the heavens were, the breeze was piping briskly with the weight and song of a small gale, and its fangs of frost, even in the comparative quiet of the sheltered deck, bit with a fierceness that had not been observable yesterday.
The moment I had the body of the vessel in my sight I perceived that she had changed her position since my last view of her. Her bows were more raised, and she lay over further by the depth of a plank. I stared earnestly at the rocky slopes on either hand, but could not have sworn their figuration was changed. An eager hope shot into my mind, but it quickly faded into an emotion of apprehension. It was conceivable indeed that on a sudden some early day I might find the schooner liberated and afloat, and this was the first inspiriting flush; but then came the fear that the disruption and volcanic throes of the ice might crush her, a fear rational enough when I saw the height she lay above the sea, and how by pressure those slopes which formed her cradle might be jammed and welded together. The change of her posture then fell upon me with a kind of shock, and determined me, when I had broken my fast, to search her hold for a boat or for materials for constructing some ark by which I might float out to sea, should the ice grow menacing and force me from the schooner.
I made a plentiful meal, feeling the need of abundance of food in such a temperature as this, and heartily grateful that there was no need why I should stint myself. The having to pass the two figures every time I went on deck and returned was extremely disagreeable and unnerving, and I considered that, after searching the hold, the next duty I owed myself was to remove them on deck, and even over the side, if possible, for one place below was as sure to keep them haunting me as another, and they would be as much with me in the forecastle as if I stowed them away in the cabin adjoining mine.
Whilst I ate, my mind was so busy with considerations of the change in the ship's posture during the night that it ended in determining me to take a survey of her from the outside, and then climb the cliffs and look around before I fell to any other work. I fetched the cloak I had stripped the body on the rocks of and thawed and warmed it, and put it on, and a noble covering it was, thick, soft, and clinging. Then, arming myself with a boarding-pike to serve as a pole, I dropped into the fore-chains and thence stepped on to the ice, and very slowly and carefully walked round the schooner, examining her closely, and boring into the snow upon her side with my pike wherever I suspected a hole or indent. I could find nothing wrong with her in this way, though what a thaw might reveal I could not know. Her rudder hung frozen upon its pintles, and looked as it should. Some little distance abaft her rudder, where the hollow or chasm sloped to the sea, was a great split three or four feet wide; this had certainly happened in the night, and I must have slept as sound as the dead not to hear the noise of it. Such a rent as this sufficed to account for the subsidence of the after-part of the schooner and her further inclination to larboard. Indeed, the hollow was now coming to resemble the "ways" on which ships are launched; and you would have conceived by the appearance of it that if it should slope a little more yet, off would slide the schooner for the sea, and in the right posture too—that is, stern on. But I prayed with all my might and main for anything but this. It would have been very well had the hollow gone in a gentle declivity to the wash of the sea, to the water itself, in short; but it terminated at the edge of a cliff, not very high indeed, but high enough to warrant the prompt foundering of any vessel that should launch herself off it. Happily the keel was too solidly frozen into the ice to render a passage of this description possible; and the conclusion I arrived at after careful inspection was that the sole chance that could offer for the delivery of the vessel to her proper element was in the cracking up and disruption of the bed on which she lay.
Having ended my survey of the schooner, I addressed myself to the ascent of the starboard slope, and scaled it much more easily than I had yesterday managed to make my way over the rocks. I climbed to the highest block that was nearest me on the summit, and here I had a very large view of the scene. Much to my astonishment, the first objects which encountered my eye were four icebergs, floating detached but close together at a distance of about three miles on my side of the north-east trend of the island. I counted them and made them four. They swam low, and it was very easily seen they had formed part of the coast there, though, as the form of the ice that way was not familiar to me, and as, moreover, the glare rendered the prospect very deceptive, I could not distinguish where the ruptures were. But one change in the face of this white country I did note, and that was the entire disappearance of two of the most beautiful of the little crystal cities that adorned the northward range. The gale of the night had wrought havoc, and the unsubstantiality of this dazzling kingdom of ice was made startlingly apparent by the evanishment of the delicate glassy architecture, and by those four white hills floating like ships under their courses and topsails out upon the flashing hurry and leaping blue and yeast of the water.
It was blowing harder than I had imagined. The wind was extraordinarily sharp, and the full current of it not long to be endured on my unsheltered eminence. The sea, swelling up from the south, ran high, and was full of seething and tumbling noises, and of the roaring of the breakers, dashing themselves against the ice in prodigious bodies of foam, which so boiled along the foot of the cliffs that their fronts, rising out of it, might have passed for the spume itself freezing as it leapt into a solid mass of glorious brilliance. The eye never explored a scene more full of the splendour of light and of vivid colour. Here and there the rocks shone prismatically as though some flying rainbow had shivered itself upon them and lay broken. The blue of the sea and sky was deepened into an exquisite perfection of liquid tint by the blinding whiteness of the ice, which in exchange was sharpened into a wonderful effulgence by the hues above and around it. Again and again, along the whole range, far as the sight could explore, the spray rose in stately clouds of silver, which were scattered by the wind in meteoric scintillations of surpassing beauty, flashing through the fires of the sun like millions of little blazing stars. There were twenty different dyes of light in the collection of spires, fanes, and pillars near the schooner, whose masts, yards, and gear mingled their own particular radiance with that of these dainty figures; and wherever I bent my gaze I found so much of sun-tinctured loveliness, and the wild white graces of ice-forms and the dazzle of snow-surfaces softening into an azure gleaming in the far blue distances, that but for the piercing wind I could have spent the whole morning in taking into my mind the marvellous spirit of this ocean picture, forgetful of my melancholy condition in the intoxication of this draught of free and spacious beauty.
Satisfied as to the state of the ice and the posture of the schooner, viewed from without, I sent a slow and piercing gaze along the ocean line, and then returned to the ship. The strong wind, the dance of the sea, the grandeur of the great tract of whiteness, vitalized by the flying of violet cloud-shadows along it, had fortified my spirits, and being free (for a while) of all superstitious dread, I determined to begin by exploring the forecastle and ascertaining if more bodies were in the schooner than those two in the cabin and the giant form on deck. I threw some coal on the fire, and placed an ox-tongue along with the cheese and a lump of the frozen wine in a pannikin in the oven (for I had a mind to taste the vessel's stores, and thought the tongue would make an agreeable change), and then putting a candle into the lanthorn walked very bravely to the forecastle and entered it.
I was prepared for the scene of confusion, but I must say it staggered me afresh with something of the force of the first impression. Sailors' chests lay open in all directions, and their contents covered the decks. There was the clearest evidence here that the majority of the crew had quitted the vessel in a violent hurry, turning out their boxes to cram their money and jewellery into their pockets, and heedlessly flinging down their own and the clothes which had fallen to their share. This I had every right to suppose from the character of the muddle on the floor; for, passing the light over a part of it, I witnessed a great variety of attire of a kind which certainly no sailor in any age ever went to sea with; not so fine perhaps as that which lay in the cabins, but very good nevertheless, particularly the linen. I saw several wigs, beavers of the kind that was formerly carried under the arm, women's silk shoes, petticoats, pieces of lace, silk, and so forth; all directly assuring me that what I viewed was the contents of passengers' luggage, together with consignments and such freight as the pirates would seize and divide, every man filling his chest. Perhaps there was less on the whole than I supposed, the litter looking great by reason of everything having been torn open and flung down loose.
I trod upon these heaps with little concern; they appealed to me only as a provision for my fire should I be disappointed in my search for coal. The hammocks obliged me to move with a stooped head; it was only necessary to feel them with my hand—that is, to test their weight by pushing them in the middle—to know if they were tenanted. Some were heavier than the others, but all of them much lighter than they would have been had they contained human bodies; and by this rapid method I satisfied my mind that there were no dead men here as fully as if I had looked into each separate hammock.
This discovery was exceedingly comforting, for, though I do not know that I should have meddled with any frozen man had I found him in this place, his being in the forecastle would have rendered me constantly uneasy, and it must have come to my either closing this part of the ship and shrinking from it as from a spectre-ridden gloom, or to my disposing of the bodies by dragging them on deck—a dismal and hateful job. There were no ports, but a hatch overhead. Wanting light—the candle making the darkness but little more than visible—I fetched from the arms-room a handspike that lay in a corner, and, mounting a chest, struck at the hatch so heartily that the ice cracked all around it and the cover rose. I pushed it off, and down rolled the sunshine in splendour.
Everything was plain now. In many places, glittering among the clothes, were gold and silver coins, a few silver ornaments such as buckles, and watches—things not missed by the pirates in the transport of their flight. In kicking a coat aside I discovered a couple of silver crucifixes bound together, and close by were a silver goblet and the hilt of a sword broken short off for the sake of the metal it was of. Nothing ruder than this interior is imaginable. The men must have been mighty put to it for room. There was a window in the head, but the snow veiled it. Maybe the rogues messed together aft, and only used this forecastle to lie in. Right under the hatch, where the light was strongest, was a dead rat. I stooped to pick it up, meaning to fling it on to the deck, but its tail broke off at the rump, like a pipe-stem.
Close against the after bulkhead that separated the forecastle from the cook-room was a little hatch. There was a quantity of wearing-apparel upon it, and I should have missed it but for catching sight of some three inches of the dark line the cover made in the deck. On clearing away the clothes I perceived a ring similar to that in the lazarette hatch, and it rose to my first drag and left me the hold yawning black below. I peered down and observed a stout stanchion traversed by iron pins for the hands and feet. The atmosphere was nasty, and to give it time to clear I went to the cook-house and warmed myself before the fire.
The fresh air blowing down the forecastle hatch speedily sweetened the hold. I lowered the lanthorn and followed, and found myself on top of some rum or spirit casks, which on my hitting them returned to me a solid note. There was a forepeak forward in the bows, and the casks went stowed to the bulkhead of it; the top of this bulkhead was open four feet from the upper deck, and on holding the lanthorn over and putting my head through I saw a quantity of coals. If the forepeak went as low as the vessel's floor, then I calculated there would not be less than fifteen tons of coal in it. This was a noble discovery to fall upon, and it made me feel so happy that I do not know that the assurance of my being immediately rescued from this island could have given a lighter pulse to my heart.
The candle yielded a very small light, and it was difficult to see above a yard or so ahead or around. I turned my face aft, and crawled over the casks and came to under the main-hatch, where lay coils of hawser, buckets, blocks, and the like, but there was no pinnace, though here she had been stowed, as a sailor would have promptly seen. A little way beyond, under the great cabin, was the powder-magazine, a small bulkheaded compartment with a little door, atop of which was a small bull's-eye lamp. I peered warily enough, you will suppose, into this place, and made out twelve barrels of powder. I heartily wished them overboard; and yet, after all, they were not very much more dangerous than the wine and spirits in the lazarette and fore-hold.
The run remained to be explored—the after part, I mean, under the lazarette deck to the rudder-post—but I had seen enough; crawling about that black interior was cold, lonesome, melancholy work, and it was rendered peculiarly arduous by the obligation of caution imposed by my having to bear a light amid a freight mainly formed of explosives and combustible matter. I had found plenty of coal, and that sufficed. So I returned by the same road I had entered, and sliding to the bulkhead door to keep the cold of the forecastle out of the cook-room, I stirred the fire into a blaze and sat down before it to rest and think.
After the many great mercies which had been vouchsafed me, such as my being the only one saved of all the crew of theLaughing Mary, my deliverance from the dangers of an open boat, my meeting with this schooner and discovering within her everything needful for the support of life, I should have been guilty of the basest ingratitude had I repined because there was no boat in the ship. Yet for all that I could not but see it was a matter that concerned me very closely. Should the vessel be crushed, what was to become of me? It was easy to propose to myself the making of a raft or the like of such a fabric; but everything was so hard frozen that, being single-handed, it was next to impossible I should be able to put together such a contrivance as would be fit to live in the smallest sea-way.
However, I was resolved not to make myself melancholy with these considerations. The good fortune that had attended me so far might accompany me to the end, and maybe I was the fitter just then to take a hopeful view of my condition because of the cheerfulness awakened in me by the noble show of coal in the forepeak. At twelve o'clock by the watch in my pocket I got my dinner. I had a mind for a lighter drink than brandy, and went to the lazarette and cut out a block of the wine in the cask I had opened; I also knocked out the head of a tierce of beef, designing a hearty regale for supper. You smile, perhaps, that I should talk so much of my eating; but if on shore, amid the security of existence there, it is the one great business of life, that is to say, the one great business of life after love, what must it be to a poor shipwrecked wretch like me, who had nothing else to think of but his food?
Yet I could not help smiling when I considered how I was carrying my drink about in my fingers. What the wine was I do not know; it looked like claret but was somewhat sweet, and was the most generous wine I ever tasted, spite of my having to drink it warm, for if I let the cup out of my hand to cool, lo! when I looked it was ice!
Whilst I sat smoking my pipe it entered my head to presently turn those two silent gentlemen in the cabin out of it. It was a task from which I shrank, but it must be done. To be candid, I dreaded the effects of their dismal companionship on my spirits. I had been in the schooner two days only; I had been heartened by the plenty I had met with, a sound night's rest, the fire, and my escape from the fate that had certainly overtaken me had I gone away in the boat. But being of a superstitious nature and never a lover of solitude, I easily guessed that in a few days the weight of my loneliness would come to press very heavily upon me, and that if I suffered those figures to keep the cabin I should find myself lying under a kind of horror which might end in breaking down my manhood and perhaps in unsettling my reason.
But how was I to dispose of them? I meditated this matter whilst I smoked. First I thought I would drag them to the fissure or rent in the ice just beyond the stern of the schooner and tumble them into it. But even then they would still be with me, so to speak—I mean, they would be neighbours though out of sight; and my eagerness was to get them away from this island altogether, which was only to be done by casting them into the sea. Why, though I did not mention the matter in its place, I was as much haunted last night by the man on deck and the meditating figure on the rocks as by the fellows in the cabin; and, laugh as you may at my weakness, I do candidly own my feeling was, if I did not contrive that the sea should carry those bodies away, I should come before long to think of them as alive, no matter in what part of the island I might bear them to, and at night-time start at every sound, hear their voices in the wind, see their shapes in the darkness, and even by day dread to step upon the cliffs.
That such fancies should possess me already shows how necessary it was I should lose no time to provide against their growth; so I settled my scheme thus: first I was to haul the figures as best I could on to the deck; then, there being three, to get them over the side, and afterwards by degrees to transport the four of them to some steep whence they would slide of themselves into the ocean. Yet so much did I dread the undertaking, and abhor the thought of the tedious time I foresaw it would occupy me, that I cannot imagine any other sort of painful and distressing work that would not have seemed actually agreeable as compared with this.
My pipe being smoked out, I stepped into the cabin, and ascending the ladder threw off the companion-cover and opened the doors, and then went to the man that had his back to the steps, but my courage failed me; he was so lifelike, there was so wild and fierce an earnestness in the expression of his face, so inimitable a picture of horror in his starting posture, that my hands fell to my side and I could not lay hold of him. I will not stop to analyse my fear or ask why, since I knew that this man was dead, he should have terrified me as surely no living man could; I can only repeat that the prospect of touching him, and laying him upon the deck and then dragging him up the ladder, was indescribably fearful to me, and I turned away, shaking as if I had the ague.
But it had to be done, nevertheless; and after a great deal of reasoning and self-reproach I seized him on a sudden, and, kicking away the bench, let him fall to the deck. He was frozen as hard as stone and fell like stone, and I looked to see him break, as a statue might that falls lumpishly. His arms remaining raised put him into an attitude of entreaty to me to leave him in peace; but I had somewhat mastered myself, and the hurry and tumult of my spirits were a kind of hot temper; so catching him by the collar, I dragged him to the foot of the companion-steps, and then with infinite labour and a number of sickening pauses hauled him up the ladder to the deck.
I let him lie and returned, weary and out of breath. He had been a very fine man in life, of beauty too, as was to be seen in the shape of his features and the particular elegance of his chin, despite the distortion of his last unspeakable dismay; and with his clothes I guessed his weight came hard upon two hundred pounds, no mean burden to haul up a ladder.
I went to the cook-house for a dram and to rest myself, and then came back to the cabin and looked at the other man. His posture has been already described. He made a very burly figure in his coat, and if his weight did not exceed the other's it was not likely to be less. Nothing of his head was visible but the baldness on the top and the growth of hair that ringed it, and the fluffing up of his beard about his arms in which his face was sunk. I touched his beard with a shuddering finger, and noted that the frost had made every hair of it as stiff as wire. It would not do to stand idly contemplating him, for already there was slowly creeping into me a dread of seeing his face; so I took hold of him and swayed him from the table, and he fell upon the deck sideways, preserving his posture, so that his face remained hidden. I dragged him a little way, but he was so heavy and his attitude rendered him as a burthen so surprisingly cumbrous that I was sure I could never of my own strength haul him up the ladder. Yet neither was it tolerable that he should be there. I thought of contriving a tackle called a whip, and making one end fast to him and taking the other end to the little capstan on the main deck; but on inspecting the capstan I found that the frost had rendered it immovable, added to which there was nothing whatever to be done with the iron-hard gear, and therefore I had to give that plan up.
Then, thought I, if I was to put him before the fire, he might presently thaw into some sort of suppleness, and so prove not harder than the other to get on deck. I liked the idea, and without more ado dragged him laboriously into the cook-room and laid him close to the furnace, throwing in a little pile of coal to make the fire roar.
I then went on deck, and easily enough, the deck being slippery, got my first man to where the huge fellow was that had sentinelled the vessel when I first looked down upon her; but when I viewed the slopes, broken into rocks, which I, though unburdened, had found hard enough to ascend, I was perfectly certain I should never be able to transport the bodies to the top of the cliffs, I must either let them fall into the great split astern of the ship, or lower them over the side and leave the hollow in which the schooner lay to be their tomb.
I paced about, not greatly noticing the cold in the little valley, and relishing the brisk exercise, scheming to convey the bodies to the sea, for I was passionately in earnest in wishing the four of them away; but to no purpose. I had but my arms, and scheme as I would, I could not make them stronger than they were. It was still blowing a fresh bright gale from the south; the sea, as might be known by the noise of it, beat very heavily against the cliffs of ice; and the extremity of the hollow, where it opened to the ocean but without showing it, was again and again veiled by a vast cloud of spray, the rain of which I could hear ringing like volleys of shot as the wind smote it and drove it with incredible force against the rocks past the brow of the north slope. I thought to myself there should be power in this wind to quicken the sliding of even so mighty a berg as this island northwards. Every day should steal it by something, however inconsiderable, nearer to warmer regions, and no gale, nay, no gentle swell even, but must help to crack and loosen it into pieces. "Oh," cried I, "for the power to rupture this bed, that the schooner might slip into the sea! Think of her running north before such a gale as this, steadily bearing me towards a more temperate clime, and into the road of ships!" I clenched my hands with a wild yearning in my heart. Should I ever behold my country again? should I ever meet a living man? The white and frozen steeps glared a bald reply; and I heard nothing but menace in the shrill noises of the wind and the deep and thunderous roaring of the ocean.
It was mighty comforting, however, on returning to the cabin to find it vacant, to be freed from the scare of the sight of the two silent figures. I drew my breath more easily and stopped to glance around. It was the barest cabin I was ever in—uncarpeted, with no other seats than the little benches. I looked at the crucifix, and guessed from the sight of it that, whatever might be the vessel's nation, she had not been sailed by Englishmen. I peeped into poor Polly's cage—if a parrot it was—and the sight of the rich plumage carried my imagination to skies of brass, to the mysterious green solitude of tropic forests, to islands fringed with silver surf, in whose sunny flashing sported nude girls of faultless forms, showing their teeth of pearl in merry laughter, winding amorously with the blue billow, and filling the aromatic breeze with the melody of their language of the sun. Ha! thought I, sailors see some changes in their time; and with a hearty sigh I stepped into the cook-room.
I started, stopped, and fell back a pace with a cry. When I had put the figure before the fire he was in the same posture in which he had sat at the table, that is, leaning forward with his face hid in his arms; I had laid him on his side, with his face to the furnace, and in that attitude you would have supposed him a man sound asleep with his arms over his face to shield it from the heat. But now, to my unspeakable astonishment, he lay on his back, with his arms sunk to his side and resting on the deck, and his face upturned.
I stared at him from the door as if he was the Fiend himself. I could scarce credit my senses, and my consternation was so great that I cannot conceive of any man ever having laboured under a greater fright. I faintly ejaculated 'Good God!' several times, and could hardly prevent my legs from running away with me. You see, it was certain he must have moved of his own accord to get upon his back. I was prepared for the fire to thaw him into limberness, and had I found him straightened somewhat I should not have been surprised. But there was no power in fire to stretch him to his full length and turn him over on his back. What living or ghostly hand had done this thing? Did spirits walk this schooner after all? Had I missed of something more terrible than any number of dead men in searching the vessel?
I had made a great fire and its light was strong, and there was also the light of the lanthorn; but the furnace flames played very lively, completely overmastering the steady illumination of the candle, and the man's figure was all a-twitch with moving shadows, and a hundred fantastic shades seemed to steal out of the side and bulkheads and disappear upon my terrified gaze. Then, thought I, suppose after all that the man should be alive, the vitality in him set flowing by the heat? I minded myself of my own simile of the current checked by frost, yet retaining unimpaired the principle of motion; and getting my agitation under some small control, I approached the body on tiptoe and held the lanthorn to its face.
He looked a man of sixty years of age; his beard was grey and very long, and lay upon his breast like a cloud of smoke. His eyes were closed; the brows shaggy, and the dark scar of a sword-wound ran across his forehead from the corner of the left eye to the top of the right brow. His nose was long and hooked, but the repose in his countenance, backed by the vague character of the light in which I inspected him, left his face almost expressionless. I was too much alarmed to put my ear to his mouth to mark if he breathed, if indeed the noise of the burning fire would have permitted me to distinguish his respiration. I drew back from him, and put down the lanthorn and watched him. Thought I, it will not do to believe there is anything supernatural here. I can swear there is naught living in this ship, and am I to suppose, assuming she is haunted, that a ghost, which I have always read and heard of as an essence, has in its shadowy being such quality ofmuscleas would enable it to turn that heavy man over from his side on to his back? No, no, thought I! depend upon it, either he is alive and may presently come to himself, or else in some wonderful way the fire in thawing him has so wrought in his frozen fibres as to cause him to turn.
Presently his left leg, that was slightly bent towards the furnace, stretched itself out to its full length, and my ear caught a faint sound, as of a weak and melancholy sigh. Gracious heaven, thought I, heisalive! and with less of terror than of profound awe, now that I saw there was nothing of a ghostly or preternatural character in this business, I approached and bent over him. His eyes were still shut, and I could not hear that he breathed; there was not the faintest motion of respiration in his breast nor stir in the hair, that was now soft, about his mouth. Yet, so far as the light would suffer me to judge, there was a complexion in his face such as could only come with flowing blood, however languid its circulation, and putting this and the sigh and the movement of the leg together, I felt convinced that the man was alive, and forthwith fell to work, very full of awe and amazement to be sure, to help nature that was struggling in him.
My first step was to heat some brandy, and whilst this was doing I pulled open his coat and freed his neck, fetching a coat from the cabin to serve as a pillow for his head. I next removed his boots and laid bare his feet (which were encased in no less than four pairs of thick woollen stockings, so that I thought when I came to the third pair I should find his legs made of stockings), and after bathing his feet in hot water, of which there was a kettleful, I rubbed them with hot brandy as hard as I could chafe. I then dealt with his hands in the like manner, having once been shipmate with a seaman who told me he had seen a sailor brought to by severe rubbing of his extremities after he had been carried below supposed to be frozen to death, and continued this exercise till I could rub no longer. Next I opened his lips and, finding he wanted some of his front teeth, I very easily poured a dram of brandy into his mouth. Though I preserved my astonishment all this while, I soon discovered myself working with enthusiasm, with a most passionate longing indeed to recover the man, not only because it pleased me to think of my being an instrument under God of calling a human being, so to speak, out of his grave, but because I yearned for a companion, some one to address, to lighten the hideous solitude of my condition and to assist me in planning our deliverance.