Nothing worth recording happened that day. The wind slackened, and the ice travelled so slow that at sundown I could not discover that we had made more than a quarter of a mile of progress to the north since noon, though we had settled by half as much again that distance westwards. Whilst I was below I could hear the ice crackling pretty briskly round about the ship, which gave me some comfort; but I could never see any change of consequence when I looked over the side or bows, only that at about four o'clock, whilst I was taking a view from the forecastle, a large block broke away from beyond the starboard bow with the report of a swivel gun.
I had not closed my eyes on the previous night, and was tired out when the evening arrived, and, as no good could come of my keeping a watch, for the simple reason that it was not in my power to avert anything that might happen, I tumbled some further covering over the Frenchman, who had lain on the deck all the afternoon, sometimes dozing, sometimes waking and talking to himself, and appearing on the whole very easy and comfortable, and went to my cabin.
I slept sound the whole night through, and on waking went on deck before going to the cook-house and lighting the furnace (as was my custom), so impatient was I to observe our state and to hear such news as the ocean had for me. It was a very curious day, somewhat darksome, and a dead calm, with a large long swell out of the south-east. The sky was full of clouds, with a stooping appearance in the hang of them that reminded you of the belly of a hammock; they were of a sallow brown, very uncommon; some of them round about sipped the sea-line, and their shadows, obliterating those parts of the cincture which they overhung, broke the continuity of the horizon as though there were valleys in the ocean there. A good part of our bed of ice was gone, at least a fourth of it; but the schooner still lay as strongly fixed as before. I had come to the deck half expecting to find her afloat from the regular manner of her heaving, and was bitterly disappointed to discover her rooted as strongly as ever in the ice, though the irritation softened when I noticed how the bed had diminished. The mass with the ship upon it rose and sank with the sluggish squatting motion of a water-logged vessel. It was an odd sensation to my legs after their long rest from such exercise. The heaving satisfied me that the base of the bed did not go deep, but at the same time it was all too solid for me, I could not doubt, for had the sheet been as thin as I had hoped it, it must have given under the weight of the schooner and released her.
The island lay a league distant on the larboard beam, and looked a wondrous vast field of ice going into the south, and it stared very ghastly upon the dark green sea out of the clouds whose gloom sank behind it. I could not observe that we had drifted anything to the north, whilst our set to the westwards had been steady though snail-like. The sea in the north and north-west swarmed with bergs, like great snowdrops on the green undulating fields of the deep. Now and again the swell, in which fragments of ice floated with the gleam of crystal in liquid glass, would be too quick for our dull rise and overflow the bed, brimming to the channels with much noise of foam and pouring waters, but the interposition of the ice took half its weight out of it, and it never did more than send a tremble through the vessel.
What to make of the weather I knew not. Certainly, of all the caprices of this huge cold sea, its calms are the shortest lived, but this knowledge helped me to no other. The clouds did not stir. In the north-east a beam of sunshine stood like a golden waterspout, its foot in a little flood of glory. It stayed all the while I was on deck, showing that the clouds had scarce any motion, and made the picture of the sea that way beyond nature to my sight, by the contrast of the defined shaft of gold, burning purely, with the dusk of the clouds all about, and of the pool of dazzle at its foot with the ugly green of the water that melted into it.
I went below and got about lighting the fire. The Frenchman lay very quiet, under as many clothes as would fill a half-dozen of sacks. It was bitterly cold, sharper in the cook-house than I had ever remembered it, and I could not conceive why this should be, until I recollected that I had forgotten to close the companion-hatch before going to bed. I prepared some broth for my companion, and dressed some ham for myself, and ate my breakfast, supposing he would meanwhile awake. But after sitting some time and observing that he did not stir, a suspicion flashed into my mind; I kneeled down, and clearing his face, listened. He did not breathe. I brought the lanthorn to him, but his countenance had been so changed by his unparalleled emergence from a state of middle life into extreme old age, he was so puckered, hollowed, gaunt, his features so distorted by the great weight of his years that I was not to know him dead by merely viewing him. I threw the clothes off him, listened at his mouth breathlessly, felt his hands, which were ice-cold. Dead indeed! thought I. Great Father, 'tis Thy will! And I rose very slowly and stood surveying the silent figure with an emotion that owed its inspiration partly to the several miracles of vitality I had beheld in him during our association, and to a bitter feeling of loneliness that swelled up in me.
Yes! I had feared and detested this man, but his quick transformation and silent dark exit affected me, and I looked down upon him sadly. Yet, to be perfectly candid with you, I recollect that, though it occurred to me to test if life was out of him by bringing him close to the fire and chafing him and giving him brandy, I would not stir. No, I would not have moved a finger to recover him, even though I should have been able to do so by merely putting him to the furnace. He was dead, and there was an end; and without further ado I carried him into the forecastle and threw a hammock over him, and left him to lie there till there should come clear water to the ship to serve him for a grave.
All day long the weather remained sullen and still, and the swell powerful. I was on deck at noon, looking at an iceberg half a league distant when it overset. It was a small berg, though large compared with most of the others; yet such a mighty volume of foam boiled up as gave me a startling idea of the prodigious weight of the mass. The sight made me very anxious about my own state, and to satisfy my mind I got upon the ice and walked round the vessel, and to get a true view of her posture went to the extreme end of the rocks beyond her bows, and finally came to the conclusion that, supposing the ice should crumble away from her sides so as to cause the weight of the schooner to render it top-heavy, her buoyancy on touching the water would certainly tear her keel out of its frosty setting and leave her floating. Indeed, so sure was I of this that I saw, next to the ice splitting and freeing her in that way, the best thing that could happen would be its capsizal.
I regained the ship, and had paused an instant to look over the side, when I perceived the very block of ice on which I had come to a halt break from the bed with a smart clap of noise, and completely roll over. Only a minute before had I been standing on it, and thus had sixty seconds stood between me and death, for most certainly must I have been drowned or killed by being beaten against the ice by the swell! I fell upon my knees and lifted up my hands in gratitude to God, feeling extraordinarily comforted by this further mark of His care of me, and very strongly persuaded that He designed I should come off with my life after all, since His providence would not work so many miracles for my preservation if I was to perish by this adventure.
These thoughts did more for my spirits than I can well express; and the intolerable sense of loneliness was mitigated by the knowledge that I was watched, and therefore not alone.
The day passed I know not how. The shadow as of tempest hung in the air, but never a cats-paw did I see to blurr the rolling mirror of the ocean. The hidden sun sank out of the breathless sky, tingeing the atmosphere with a faint hectic, which quickly yielded to the deepest shade of blackness. The mysterious desperate silence, however, that on deck weighed oppressively on every sense, as something false, menacing, and malignant in these seas, was qualified below by the peculiar straining noises in the schooner's hold caused by the swinging of the ice upon the swell. I was very uneasy; I dreaded a gale. It was impossible but that the vessel must quickly go to pieces in a heavy sea upon the ice if she did not liberate herself. But though this excited a depression melancholy enough, nothing else that I can recollect contributed to it. When I reviewed the apprehension the Frenchman had raised, and reflected how unsupportable a burden he must have become, I was very well satisfied to be alone. Time had fortified me; I had passed through experiences so surprising, encountered wonders so preternatural, that superstition lay asleep in my soul, and I found nothing to occasion in me the least uneasiness in thinking of the lifeless shrivelled figure of what was just now a fierce, cowardly, untamed villain, lying in the forecastle.
I made a good supper, built up a large fire, and mixed myself a hearty bowl of punch, not with the view of drowning my anxieties—God forbid! I was too grateful for the past, too expectant of the future, to be capable of so brutish a folly—but that I might keep myself in a cheerful posture of mind; and being sick of my own company took the lanthorn to the cabin lately used by the Frenchman, and found in a chest there, among sundry articles of attire, a little parcel of books, some in Dutch and Portuguese, and one in English.
It was a little old volume, the author's name not given, and proved to be a relation of the writer's being taken by pirates, and the many dangers he underwent. There was nothing in it, to be sure, that answered to my own case, yet it interested me mightily as an honest unvarnished narrative of sea perils; and I see myself now in fancy reading it, the lanthorn hanging by a laniard close beside my head, the book in one hand, my pipe in the other, the furnace roaring pleasantly, my feet close to it, and the atmosphere of the oven fragrant with the punch that I put there to prevent it from freezing. I had come to a certain page and was reading this passage: "Soon after we were on board we all went into the great cabin, where we found nothing but destruction. Two scrutores I had there were broke to pieces, and all the fine goods and necessaries in them were all gone. Moreover, two large chests that had books in them were empty, and I was afterwards informed they had been all thrown overboard; for one of the pirates on opening them swore there was jaw-work enough (as he called it) to serve a nation, and proposed that they might be cast into the sea, for he feared there might be some books amongst them that might breed mischief enough, and prevent some of their comrades from going on in their voyage to hell, whither they were all bound"—I say, I was reading this passage, not a little affected by the impiety of the rascal, for whose portrait my dead Frenchman might very well have sat, when I was terrified by an extraordinary loud explosion, that burst so near and rang with such a prodigious clear note of thunder through the schooner that I vow to God I believed the gunpowder below had blown up. And in this suspicion I honestly supposed myself right for a moment, for on running into the cabin I was dazzled by a crimson flame that clothed the whole interior with a wondrous gush of fire; but this being instantly followed by such another clap as the former, I understood a thunderstorm had broken over the schooner.
It was exactly overhead, and that accounted for the violence of the crashes, which were indeed so extreme that they sounded rather like the splitting of enormous bodies of ice close to, than the flight of electric bolts. The hatch lay open; I ran on deck, but scarce had passed my head through the companion when down came a storm of hail, every stone as big as a pigeon's egg, and in all my time I never heard a more hellish clamour. There was not a breath of air. The hail fell in straight lines, which the fierce near lightning flashed up into the appearance of giant harp strings, on which the black hand of the night was playing those heavy notes of thunder. I sat in the shelter of the companion, very anxious and alarmed, for there was powder enough in the hold to blow the ship into atoms; and the lightning played so continuously and piercingly that it was like a hundred darts of fire, violet, crimson, and sun-coloured, in the grasp of spirits who thrust at the sea, all over its face, with swift movement of the arms, as though searching for the schooner to spear her.
The hailstorm ceased as suddenly as it had burst. I stepped on to the deck, and 'twas like treading on shingle. There was not the least motion in the air, and the stagnation gave an almost supernatural character to the thunder and lightning. The ocean was lighted up to its furthest visible confines by the flames in the sky, and the repeated explosions of thunder exceeded the roaring of the ordnance of a dozen squadrons in hot fight. The ice-coast in the east, and the two score bergs in the north and west leapt out of one hue into another; and were my days in this world to exceed those of old Abraham, I should to my last breath remember the solemn and terrible magnificence of that picture of lightning-coloured ice, the sulphur-tinctured shapes of the swollen bodies of clouds bringing their dark electric mines together in a huddle, the answering flash of the face of the deep to the lancing of each spiral dazzling bolt, with the air as still as the atmosphere of a cathedral for the thunder to roll its echoes through.
There was a second furious shower of hail, and when that was over I looked forth, and observed that the storm was settling into the north-east, whence I concluded that what draught there might be up there sat in the south-west. Nor was I mistaken; for half an hour after the first of the outburst, by which time the lightning played weak and at long intervals low down, and the thunder had ceased, I felt a crawling of air coming out of the south-west, which presently briskened into a small steady blowing. But not for long. It freshened yet and yet; the wrinkles crisped into whiteness on the black heavings; they grew into small surges with sharp cubbish snarlings preludious of the lion's voice; and by ten o'clock it was blowing in strong squalls, the seas rising, and the clouds sailing swiftly in smoke-coloured rags under the stars.
The posture of the ice inclined the schooner's starboard bow to the billows; and in a very short time she was trembling in every bone to the blows of the surges which rolled boiling over the ice there and struck her, flinging dim clouds of spume in the air, which soon set the scuppers gushing. My case was that of a stranded ship, with this difference only, that a vessel ashore lies solid to the beating of the waves, whereas the ice was buoyant, it rose and fell, sluggishly it is true, and so somewhat mitigated the severity of the shocks of water. But, spite of this, I was perfectly sure that unless the bed broke under her or she slipt off it, she would be in pieces before the morning. It was not in any hull put together by human hands to resist the pounding of those seas. The weight of the mighty ocean along whose breast they raced was in them, and though the wind was no more than a brisk gale, each billow by its stature showed itself the child of a giantess. The ice-bed was like a whirlpool with the leap and flash and play of the froth upon it. The black air of the night was whitened by the storms of foam-flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the broken waters increased the horrors of the scene. I firmly believed my time was come. God had been merciful, but I was to die now. As to making any shift to keep myself alive after the ship should be broken up, the thought never entered my head. What could I do? There was no boat. I might have contrived some arrangement of booms and casks to serve as a raft, but to what purpose? How long would it take the wind and sea to freeze me?
I crouched in the companion-way hearkening to the uproar around, feeling the convulsions of the schooner, fully prepared for death, dogged and hopeless. No, I was not afraid. Suffering and expectation had brought me to that pass that I did not care. "'Tis such an end as hundreds and thousands of sailors have met," I remember thinking; "it is the fittest exit for a mariner. I have sinned in my time, but the Almighty God knows my heart." To this tune ran my thoughts. I held my arms tightly folded upon my breast, and with set lips waited for the first of those crashing and rending sounds which would betoken the ruin and destruction of the schooner.
So passed half an hour; then, being half perished with the cold, I went to the furnace, for when the vessel went to pieces it would matter little in what part of her I was, and warmed myself and took a dram as a felon swallows a draught on his way to the scaffold. Were I to attempt to describe the character of the thunderous noises in the ship I should not be believed. The seas raised a most deafening roaring as they boiled over the ice and rolled their volumes against the vessel's sides. Every curl swung a load of broken frozen pieces against the bows and bends, and the shocks resounded through her like blows from cyclopean hammers. It was as if I had been seated in the central stagnant heart of a small revolving hurricane, feeling no faintest sigh of air upon my cheek, whilst close around whirled the hellish tormenting conflict of white waters and yelling blasts.
On a sudden—in a breath—I felt the vessel rise. She was swung up with the giddy velocity of a hunter clearing a tall gate; she sank again, and there was a mighty concussion forward, then a pause of steadiness whilst you might have counted five, then a wild upward heave, a sort of sharp floating fall, a harsh grating along her keel and sides, as though she was being smartly warped over rocks, followed by an unmistakable free pitching and rolling motion.
I had sprung to my feet and stood waiting. But the instant I gathered by the movements of her that she was released I sprang like a madman up the companion-steps. The sea, breaking on her bow, flew in heavy showers along the deck and half blinded me. But I was semi-delirious, and having sat so long with Death's hand in mine was in a passionately defiant mood, with a perfect rage of scorn of peril in me, and I walked right on to the forecastle, giving the flying sheets of water there no heed. In a minute a block of sea tumbled upon me and left me breathless; the iciness of it cooled my mind's heat, but not my resolution. I was determined to judge as best I could by the light of the foam of what had happened, and holding on tenaciously to whatever came to my hand and progressing step by step I got to the forecastle and looked ahead.
Where the ice was the water tumbled in milk; 'twas four or five ship's lengths distant, and I could distinguish no more than that. I peered over the lee bow, but could see no ice. The vessel had gone clear; how, I knew not and can never know, but my own fancy is that she split the bed with her own weight when the sea rose and threw the ice up, for she had floated on a sudden, and the noises which attended her release indicated that she had been forced through a channel.
I returned aft, barely escaping a second deluge, and looked over the quarter; no ice was there visible to me. The vessel rolled horribly, and I perceived that she had a decided list to starboard, the result of the shifting of what was in her when the ice came away from the main with her, and it was this heel that brought the sea washing over the bow. I took hold of the tiller to try it, but either the helm was frozen immovable or the rudder was jammed in its gudgeons or in some other fashion fixed.
Had she been damaged below? was she taking in water? I knew her to be so thickly sheathed with ice that, unless it had been scaled off in places by the breaking of her bed, I had little fear (until this covering melted or dropped off by the working of the frame) of the hull not proving tight. I should have been coated with ice myself had I stayed but a little longer in my wet clothes in that piercing wind, so I ran below, and bringing an armful of clothes from my cabin to the cook-room, was very soon in dry attire, and making an extraordinary figure, I don't question, in the buttons, lace, and fripperies of the old-fashioned garments.
The incident of the schooner's release from the ice had come upon me so suddenly, and at a time too when my mind was terribly disordered, that I scarce realized the full meaning of it until I had shifted myself and fortified my heart with a dram and got warm in the glow of the furnace. By this time she had fallen into the trough and was labouring like a cask; that she would prove a heavy roller in a sea-way a single glance at her fat buttocks and swelling bilge might have persuaded me, but I never could have dreamt she would wallow so monstrously. The oscillation was rendered more formidable by her list, and there were moments when I could not keep my feet. She was shipping water very freely over her starboard rail, but this did not much concern me, for the break of the poop-deck kept the after part of the vessel indifferently dry, and the forecastle and main hatches were well secured. But there was one great peril I knew not how to provide against—I mean the flotilla of icebergs in the north and west. They lay in a long chain upon the sea, and though to be sure there was no doubt a wide channel between each, through which it might have been easy to carry a ship under control, yet there was every probability of a vessel in the defenceless condition of the schooner, without a stitch of sail on her and under no other government of helm than a fixed rudder, being swept against one of those frozen floating hills when indeed it would be good-night to her and to me too, for after such a catastrophe the sun would never rise for me or her again.
Meanwhile I was crazy to ascertain if the schooner was taking in water. If there was a sounding-rod in the ship I did not know where to lay my hands upon it. But he is a poor sailor who is slow at substitutes. There were several spears in the arms-room (piratical plunder, no doubt) with mere spikes for heads, like those weapons used by the Caffres and other tribes in that country; they were formed of a hard heavy wood. I took a length of ratline line and secured it to one of these spears, and carried it on deck with the powder-room bull's-eye lamp; but when I probed the sounding-pipe I found it full of ice, and as it was impossible to draw the pumps, I flung my ingenious sounding-rod down in a passion of grief and mortification.
Yet was I not to be beaten. Such was my temper, had the devil himself confronted me, I should have defied him to do his worst, for I had made up my mind to weather him out. I entered the forecastle, lanthorn in hand, prized open the hatch and dropped into the hold. It needed an experienced ear to detect the sobbing of internal waters amid the yearning gushes, the long gurgling washings, the thunderous blows, and shrewd rain-like hissings of the seas outside. I listened with strained hearing for some minutes, but distinguished no sounds to alarm me with assurance of water in the hold. I could not mistake. I hearkened with all my might, but the noise was outside. I thanked God very heartily, and got out of the hold and put the hatch on. There was no need to go aft and listen. The schooner was by the head, and there could be no water in the run that would not be forward too.
Being reassured in respect of the staunchness of the hull, I returned to the fire and proceeded to equip myself for a prolonged watch on deck. Whilst I was drawing on a great pair of boots I heard a knocking in the after part of the vessel. I supposed she had drifted into a little field of broken ice, and that she would go clear presently, and I finished arming myself for the weather; but the knocking continuing, I went into the cabin where I heard it very plain, and walked as far as the lazarette hatch, where I stood listening. The noises were a kind of irregular thumping accompanied by a peculiar grinding sound. In a moment I guessed the truth, rushed on deck, and by the dim light in the air saw the long tiller mowing to and fro! The beat of the beam seas had unlocked the frozen bonds of the rudder, and there swung the tiller, as though like a dog the ship was wagging her tail for joy!
The vessel lay along, rolling so as to bring her starboard rail to a level with the sea; her main deck was full of water, and the froth of it combined with the ice that glazed her made her look like a fabric of marble as she swung on the black fold ere it broke into snow about her. I seized the tiller and ran it over hard a-starboard, and I had not held it in that posture half a minute when to my inexpressible delight I observed that she was paying off. Her head fell slowly from the sea; she lurched drunkenly, and some tons of black water rolled over the bulwarks; she reeled consumedly to larboard, and rose squarely and ponderously to the height of the surge that was now abaft the beam. In a few moments she was dead before it, the helm amidships, the wind blowing sheer over the stern with half its weight seemingly gone through the vessel running, the tall seas chasing her high stern and floating it upwards, till looking forward was like gazing down the slope of a hill.
My heart was never fuller than then. I was half crazy with the passion of joy that possessed me. Consider the alternations of hope and bitter despair which had been crowded into that night! We may wonder in times of security that life should be sweet, and admit the justice of the arguments which several sorts of writers, and the poets even more than the parsons, use in defence of death. But when it comes to the pinch human nature breaks through. When the old man in Æsop calls upon Death to relieve him, and the skeleton suddenly rises, the old man changes his mind, and thinks he will go on trying for himself a little longer. I liked to live, and had no mind for a wet shroud, and this getting the schooner before the wind, along with the old familiar feeling of the decks reeling and soaring and sinking under my feet, was so cordial an assurance of life that, I tell you, my heart was full to breaking with transport.
However, I was still in a situation that made prodigious demands upon my coolness and wits. The wind was south-west, the schooner was running north-east; the bulk of the icebergs lay on the larboard bow, but there were others right ahead, and to starboard, where also lay the extremity of the island, though I did not fearthatif I could escape the rest. It was a dark night; methinks there should have been a young moon curled somewhere among the stars, but she was not to be seen. The clouds flew dark and hurriedly, and the frosty orbs between were too few to throw a light. The ocean ahead and around was the duskier for the spectral illumination of the near foam and the glimmer of the ice-coated ship. I tested the vessel with the tiller and found she responded but dully; she would be nimbler under canvas no doubt, but it was enough that she should answer her helm at all. Oh, I say, I was mighty thankful, most humbly grateful. My heart was never more honest to its Maker than then.
She crushed along, pitching pitifully, the dark seas on either hand foaming to her quarters, and her rigging querulous with the wind. Had the Frenchman been alive to steer the ship, I might have found strength enough for my hands in the vigour of my spirit to get the spritsail yard square and chop its canvas loose—nay, I might have achieved more than that even; but I could not quit the tiller now. I reckoned our speed at about four miles an hour, as fast as a hearty man could walk. The high stern, narrow as it was, helped us; it was like a mizzen in its way; and all aloft being stout to start with and greatly thickened yet by ice, the surface up there gave plenty for the gale to catch hold on; and so we drove along.
I could just make out the dim pallid loom of the coast of ice upon the starboard beam, and a blob or two of faintness—most elusive and not to be fixed by the eye staring straight at them—on the larboard bow. But it was not long before these blobs, as I term them, grew plainer, and half a score swam into the dusk over the bowsprit end, and resembled dull small visionary openings in the dark sky there, or like stars magnified and dimmed into the merest spectral light by mist. I passed the first at a distance of a quarter of a mile; it slided by phantasmally, and another stole out right ahead. This I could have gone widely clear of by a little shift of the helm, but whilst I was in the act of starboarding three or four bergs suddenly showed on the larboard bow, and I saw that unless I had a mind to bring the ship into the trough again I must keep straight on. So I steered to bring the berg that was right ahead a little on the bow, with a prayer in my soul that there might be no low-lying block in the road for the schooner to split upon. It went by within a pistol-shot. I was very much accustomed to the sight of ice by this time, yet I found myself glancing at this mass with pretty near as much wonder and awe as if I had never seen such a thing before. It was not above thirty feet high, but its shape was exactly that of a horse's head, the lips sipping the sea, the ears cocked, the neck arching to the water. You would have said it was some vast courser rising out of the deep. The peculiar radiance of ice trembled off it like a luminous mist into the dusk. The water boiled about its nose, and suggested a frothing caused by the monster steed's expelled breath. Let a fire have been kindled to glow red where you looked for the eye, and the illusion would have been frightfully grand.
The poet speaks of the spirits of the vasty deep; if you want to know what exquisite artists they are, enter the frozen silences of the south.
Thus threading my way I drove before the seas and wind, striking a piece of ice but once only, and that a small lump which hit the vessel on the bow and went scraping past, doing the fabric no hurt; but often forced to slide perilously close by the bergs. I needed twenty instead of one pair of eyes. With ice already on either bow, on a sudden it would glimmer out right ahead, and I had to form my resolution on the instant. If ever you have been amid a pack of icebergs on a dark night in a high sea you will understand my case; if not, the pen of a Fielding or a Defoe could not put it before you. For what magic has ink to express the roaring of swollen waters bursting into tall pale clouds against the motionless crystal heights, the mystery of the configuration of the faintness under the swarming shadows of the flying night, the sudden glares of breaking liquid peaks, the palpitating darkness beyond, the plunging and rolling of the ship, making her rigging ring upon the air with the reeling of her masts, the gradual absorption of the solid mass of dim lustre by the gloom astern, the swift spectral dawn of such another light over the bows, with many phantasmal outlines slipping by on either hand, like a procession of giant ocean-spectres, travelling white and secretly towards the silent dominions of the Pole?
Half this ice came from the island, the rest of it was formed of bergs too tall to have ever belonged to the north end of that great stretch. It took three hours to pass clear of them, and then I had to go on clinging to the tiller and steering in a most melancholy famished condition for another long half-hour before I could satisfy myself that the sea was free.
But now I was nearly dead with the cold. I had stood for five hours at the helm, during all which time my mind had been wound up to the fiercest tension of anxiety, and my eyes felt as if they were strained out of their sockets by their searching of the gloom ahead, and nature having done her best gave out suddenly, and not to have saved my life could I have stood at the tiller for another ten minutes.
The gear along the rail was so iron-hard that I could not secure the helm with it, so I softened some lashings by holding them before the fire, and finding the schooner on my return to be coming round to starboard, I helped her by putting the tiller hard a port and securing it. I then went below, built up the fire, lighted my pipe, and sat down for warmth and rest.
The weight of the wind in the rigging steadied the schooner somewhat, and prevented her from rolling too heavily to starboard, whilst her list corrected her larboard rolls. So as I sat below she seemed to me to be making tolerably good weather of it. Not much water came aboard; now and again I would hear the clatter of a fall forwards, but at comfortably long intervals.
I sat against the dresser with my back upon it, and being dead tired must have dropped asleep on a sudden—indeed, before I had half smoked my pipe out, and I do not believe I gave a thought to my situation before I slumbered, so wearied was I. The cold awoke me. The fire was out and so was the candle in the lanthorn, and I was in coffin darkness. This the tinder-box speedily remedied. I looked at my watch—seven o'clock, as I was a sinner! so that my sleep had lasted between three and four hours.
I went on deck and found the night still black upon the sea, the wind the same brisk gale that was blowing when I quitted the helm, the sea no heavier, and the schooner tumbling in true Dutch fashion upon it. I looked very earnestly around but could see no signs of ice. There would be daylight presently, so I went below, lighted the fire, and got my breakfast, and when I returned the sun was up and the sea visible to its furthest reaches.
It was a fine wintry piece; the sea green and running in ridges with frothing heads, the sky very pale among the dark snow-laden clouds, the sun darting a ray now and again, which was swung into the north by the shadows of the clouds until they extinguished it. Remote in the north-west hung the gleam of an iceberg; there was nothing else in sight. Yes—something that comforted me exceedingly, though it was not very many days ago that a like object had heavily scared me—an albatross, a noble bird, sailing on the windward close enough to be shot. The sight of this living thing was inexpressibly cheering; it put into my head a fancy of ships being at hand, thoughts of help and of human companions. In truth, my imagination was willing to accept it as the same bird that I had frightened away when in the boat, now returned to silently reproach me for my treatment of it. Nay, my lonely eye, my subdued and suffering heart might even have witnessed the good angel of my life in that solitary shape of ocean beauty, and have deemed that, though unseen, it had been with me throughout, and was now made visible to my gaze by the light of hope that had broken into the darkness of my adventure.
Well, supposing it so, I should not have been the only man who ever scared his good angel away and found it faithful afterwards.
I unlashed the tiller and got the schooner before the wind and steered until a little before noon, letting her drive dead before the sea, which carried her north-east. Then securing the helm amidships I ran for the quadrant, and whilst waiting for the sun to show himself I observed that the vessel held herself very steadily before the wind, which might have been owing to her high stern and the great swell of her sides and her round bottom; but be the cause what it might, she ran as fairly with her helm amidships as if I had been at the tiller to check her, a most fortunate condition of my navigation, for it privileged me to get about other work, whilst, at the same time, every hour was conveying me nearer to the track of ships and further from the bitter regions of the south.
I got an observation and made out that the vessel had driven about fifteen leagues during the night. She must do better than that, thought I; and when I had eaten some dinner I took a chopper, and, going on to the forecastle, lay out upon the bowsprit, and after beating the spritsail-yard block clear of the ice, cut away the gaskets that confined the sail to the yard, heartily beating the canvas, that was like iron, till a clew of it fell. I then came in and braced the yard square, and the wind, presently catching the exposed part of the sail, blew more of it out, and yet more, until there was a good surface showing; then to a sudden hard blast of wind the whole sail flew open with a mighty crackling, as though indeed it was formed of ice; but to render it useful I had to haul the sheets aft, which I could not manage without the help of the tackles we had used in slinging the powder over the side; so that, what with one hindrance and another, the setting of that sail took me an hour and a half.
But had it occupied me all day it would have been worth doing. Trifling as it was as a cloth, its effect upon the schooner was like that of a cordial upon a fainting man. It was not that she sensibly showed nimbler heels to it; its lifting tendency enabled her to ride the under-running seas more buoyantly, and if it increased her speed by half a knot an hour it was worth a million to me, whose business it was to take the utmost possible advantage of the southerly gale.
I returned to the helm, warm with the exercise, and gazed forward not a little proud of my work. Though the sail was eight-and-forty years old and perhaps older, it offered as tough and stout a surface to the wind as if it was fresh from the sailmaker's hands, so great are the preserving qualities of ice. I looked wistfully at the topsail, but on reflecting that if it should come on to blow hard enough to compel me to heave the brig to she would never hull with that canvas abroad, I resolved to let it lie, for I could cut away the spritsail if the necessity arose and not greatly regret its loss; but to lose the topsail would be a serious matter, though if I did not cut it adrift it might carry away the mast for me; so, as I say, I would not meddle with it.
Finding that the ship continued to steer herself very well, and the better for the spritsail, I thought I would get the body of the old Frenchman overboard and so obtain a clear hold for myself so far as corpses went. I carried the lanthorn into the forecastle, but when I pulled the hammock off him I confess it was not without a stupid fear that I should find him alive. Recollection of his astounding vitality found something imperishable in that ugly anatomy, and though he lay before me as dead and cold as stone, I yet had a fancy that the seeds of life were still in him, that 'twas only the current of his being that had frozen, that if I were to thaw him afresh he might recover, and that if I buried him I should actually be despatching him.
But though these fancies possessed, they did not control me. I took his watch and whatever else he had in that way, carried him on deck and dropped him over the side, using as little ceremony as he had employed in the disposal of his shipmates, but affected by very different emotions; for there was not only the idea that the vital spark was still in him; I could not but handle with awe the most mysterious corpse the eye had ever viewed, one who had lived through a stupor or death-sleep, for eight-and-forty years, in whom in a few hours Time had compressed the wizardry he stretches in others over half a century; who in a night had shrunk from the aspect of his prime into the lean, puckered, bleared-eyed, deaf, and tottering expression of a hundred years.
But now he was gone! The bubbles which rose to the plunge of his body were his epitaph; had they risen blood-red they would have better symbolized his life. The albatross stooped to the spot where he had vanished with a hoarse salt scream like the laugh of a delirious woman, and the wind, freshening momentarily in a squall, made one think of the spirit of Nature as eager to purify the air of heaven from the taint of the dead pirate's passage from the bulwarks to the water's surface.
All that day and through the night that followed the schooner drove, rolling and plunging before the seas, into the north-east, to the pulling of the spritsail. I made several excursions into the fore-hold, but never could hear the sound of water in the vessel. Her sides in places were still sheathed in ice, but this crystal armour was gradually dropping off her to the working of her frame in the seas, so that, since she was proving herself tight, it was certain her staunchness owed nothing to the glassy plating. I had seen some strange craft in my day; but nothing to beat the appearance this old tub of a hooker submitted to my gaze as I viewed her from the helm. How so uncouth a structure, with her tall stern, flairing bows, fat buttocks, sloping masts, forecastle-well, and massive head-timbers ever managed to pursue and overhaul a chase was only to be unriddled by supposing all that she took to be more unwieldy and clumsy than herself. What would a pirate of these days, in his clean-lined polacca or arrowy schooner, have thought of such an instrument as this for the practice of his pretty trade? The ice aloft still held for her spars and rigging the resemblance of glass, and to every sunbeam that flashed upon her from between the sweeping clouds she would sparkle out into many-coloured twinklings, marvellously delicate in colour, and changing their tints twenty times over in a breath through the swiftness of the reeling of the spars.
I should but fatigue you to follow the several little stories of these hours one by one; how I got my food, snatched at sleep, stood at the helm, gazed around the sea-line and the like. Just before sundown I saw a large iceberg in the north, two leagues distant; no others were in sight, but one was enough to make me uneasy, and I spent a very troubled night, repeatedly coming on deck to look about me. The schooner steered herself as if a man stood at the helm. The spritsail further helped her in this, for, if the curl of a sea under her forefoot brought her to larboard or starboard, the sail forced her back again. Still, it was a very surprising happy quality in her, the next best thing to my having a shipmate, and a wonderful relief to me who must otherwise have brought her to, under a lashed helm, every time I had occasion to leave the deck.
The seaworthiness of the craft, coupled with the reasonable assurance of presently falling in with a ship, rendered me so far easy in my mind as to enable me to think very frequently of the treasure and how I was to secure it. If I fell in with an enemy's cruiser or a privateer I must expect to be stripped. This would be the fortune of war, and I must take my chance. My concern did not lie that way; how was I to protect this property, that was justly mine, against my own countrymen, suppose I had the good fortune to carry the schooner safely into English waters? I had a brother-in-law, Jeremiah Mason, Esq., a Turkey merchant in a small way of business, whose office was in the City of London, and, if I could manage to convey the treasure secretly to him, he would, I knew, find me a handsome account in his settlement of this affair. But it was impossible to strike out a plan. I must wait and attend the course of events. Yet riches being things which fever the coldest imaginations, I could not look ahead without excitement and irritability of fancy, I should reckon it a hard fate indeed after my cruel experiences, my freeing the vessel from the ice, my sailing her through some thousand of miles of perilous seas, and arriving finally in safety, to be dispossessed of what was strictly mine—as much mine as if I had fished it up from the bottom of the sea, where it must otherwise have lain till the crack of doom.
I remember that, among other ideas, it entered my head to tell the master of the first ship I met, if she were British, the whole story of my adventure, to acquaint him with the treasure, to offer to tranship it and myself to his vessel and abandon the schooner, and to propose a handsome reward for his offices. But I could not bring my mind to trust any stranger with so great a secret. The mere circumstance of the treasure not being mine, in the sense of my having earned it, of its being piratical plunder, and as much one's as another's, might dull the edge even of a fair-dealing conscience and expose me to the machinations of a heavily tempted mind.
Therefore, though I had no plan, I was resolved at all hazards to stick to the schooner, and, with a view to providing against the curiosity or rummaging of any persons who should come aboard I fell to the following work after getting my breakfast. I hung lanthorns in the run and hatchways and cabin to enable me to pass easily to and fro; I then emptied one of the chests in my cabin and carried it to where the treasure was. The chest I filled nearly three-parts full with money, jewellery, &c., which sank the contents of the other chests to the depth I wanted. I then fetched a quantity of small arms, such as pistols and hangers and cutlasses, and filled up the chests with them, first placing a thickness of canvas over the money and jewellery, that no glitter might show through. To improve the deception I brought another chest to the run, and wholly filled it with cutlasses, powder-horns, pistols, and the like, and so fixed it that it must be the first to come to hand. My cunning amounted to this: that, suppose the run to be rummaged, the contents of the first chest were sure to be turned out, but, on the other chests being opened, and what they appeared to contain observed, it was as likely as not that the rummagers would be satisfied they were arms-chests, and quit meddling with them.
Herenow might I indulge in a string of reflections on the troubles and anxieties which money brings, quote from Juvenal and other poets, and hold myself up to your merriment by a contemptuous exhibition of myself, a lonely sailor, labouring to conceal his gold from imaginary knaves, toiling in the dark depth of the vessel, and never heeding that, even whilst he so worked, his ship might split upon some half-tide rock of ice, and founder with him and his treasure too, and so on, and so on. But the fact is I was not a fool. Here was money enough to set me up as a fine gentleman for life, and I meant to save it and keep it too, if I could. A man on his deathbed, a man in such peril that his end is certain, can afford to be sentimental. He is going where money is dross indeed, and he is in a posture when to moralize upon human greed and the vanity of wishes and riches becomes him. But would not a man whose health is hearty, and who hopes to save his life, be worse off than a sheep in the matter of brains not to keep a firm grip of Fortune's hand when she extended it? I know I was very well pleased with my morning's work when I had accomplished it, and had no mind to qualify my satisfaction by melancholy and romantic musings on my condition and the uncertainty of the future. This was possibly owing to the fineness of the weather; a heavy black gale from the north would doubtless have given a very different turn to my humours.
The wind at dawn had weakened and come into the west. There was a strong swell—indeed there always is in this ocean—but the seas ran small. The sky looked like marble, with its broad spreadings of high white clouds and the veins of blue sky between. I wished to make all the northing that was possible, but there was nothing to be done in that way with the spritsail alone. Had not the capstan been frozen I should have tried to get the mainsail upon the ship, but without the aid of machinery I was helpless. So, with helm amidships, the schooner drove languidly along with her head due east, lifting as ponderously as a line-of-battle ship to the floating launches of the high swell, and the albatross hung as steadfastly in the wake of my lonely ocean path as though it had been some messenger sent by God to watch me into safety.
I had been six days and nights at sea, and the morning of the seventh day had come. With the exception of one day of strong south-westerly winds, which ran me something to the northwards, the weather had been fine, bitterly cold indeed, but bright and clear. In this time I had run a distance of about six hundred and fifty miles to the east, and with no other cloths upon the schooner than her spritsail.
I confess, as the hours passed away and nothing hove into view, I grew dispirited and restless; but, on the other hand, I was comforted by the bright weather and the favourable winds, and particularly by the vessel's steering herself, which enabled me to get rest, to keep myself warm with the fire, and to dress my food, yet ever pushing onwards (however slowly) into the navigated regions of this sea.
On the morning of the seventh day I came on deck, having slept since four o'clock. The wind was icy keen, pretty brisk, about west by south; the movement in the sea was from the south, and rolled very grandly; there was a fog that way, too, that hid the horizon, bringing the ocean-line to within a league of the schooner; but the other quarters swept in a dark, clear, blue line against the sky, and there was such a clarity of atmosphere as made the distances appear infinite.
I went below and lighted the fire and got my breakfast, all very leisurely, and when I was done I sat down and smoked a pipe. It was so keen on deck that I had no mind to leave the fire, and, as all was well, I lounged through the best part of two hours in the cook-house, when, thinking it was now time to take another survey of the scene I went on deck.
On looking over the larboard bulwark rail, the first thing I saw was a ship about two miles off. She was on the larboard tack, under courses, topsails, and main-topgallant sail, heading as if to cross my bows. The sunshine made her canvas look as white as snow against the skirts of the body of vapour that had trailed a little to leeward of her, and her black hull flashed as though she discharged a broadside every time she rose wet to the northern glory out of the hollow of the swell with a curl of silver at her cutwater.
My heart came into my throat; I seemed not to breathe; not to have saved my life could I have uttered a cry, so amazed and transported was I by this unexpected apparition. I stared like one in a dream, and my head felt as if all the blood in my body had surged into it. But then, all on a sudden, there happened a revulsion of feeling. Suppose she should prove a privateer—a French war-vessel—of a nation hostile to my own? Thought so wrought in me that I trembled like an idiot in a fright. The telescope was too weak to resolve her, I could do better with my eyes; and I stood at the bulwarks gazing and gazing as if she were the spectre ship of the Scandinavian legend.
There were flags below and I could have hoisted a signal of distress: but to what purpose? If the appearance of the schooner did not sufficiently illustrate her condition, there was certainly no virtue in the language and declarations of bunting to exceed her own mute assurance. I watched her with a passion of anxiety, never doubting her intention to speak to me, at all events to draw close and look at me, wholly concerning myself with her character. The swell made us both dance, and the blue brows of the rollers would often hide her to the height of her rails; but we were closing each other middling fast she travelling at seven and I at four miles in the hour, and presently I could see that she carried a number of boats.
A whaler, thought I; and after a little I was sure of it by perceiving the rings over her top-gallant rigging for the look-out to stand in.
On being convinced of this, I ran below for a shawl that was in my cabin, and, jumping on to the bulwarks, stood flourishing it for some minutes to let them know that there was a man aboard. She luffed to deaden her way, that I might swim close, and as we approached each other I observed a crowd of heads forward looking at me, and several men aft, all staring intently.
A man scrambled on to the rail, and with an arm clasping a backstay hailed me:
"Schooner ahoy!" he bawled, with a strong nasal twang in his cry. "What ship's that?"
"TheBoca del Dragon," I shouted back.
"Where are you from, and where are you bound to?"
"I have been locked up in the ice," I cried, "and am in want of help. What ship are you?"
"TheSusan Tucker, whaler, of New Bedford, twenty-seven months out," he returned. "Where in creation got you that hooker?"
"I'm the only man aboard," I cried, "and have no boat. Send to me, in the name of God, and let the master come!"
He waved his hand, bawling, "Put your helm down—you're forging ahead!" and so saying, dismounted.
I immediately cast the tiller adrift, put it hard over, and secured it, then jumped on to the bulwarks again to watch them. She was Yankee beyond doubt; I had rather met my own countrymen; but, next to a British, I would have chosen an American ship to meet. Somehow, despite the Frenchman, I felt to have been alone throughout my adventure; and so sore was the effect of that solitude upon my spirits that it seemed twenty years since I had seen a ship, and since I had held commune with my own species. I was terribly agitated, and shook in every limb. Life must have been precious always; but never before had it appeared so precious as now, whilst I gazed at that homely ship, with her main-topsail to the mast, swinging stately upon the swell, the faces of the seamen plain, the smoke of her galley-fire breaking from the chimney, the sounds of creaking blocks and groaning parrels stealing from her. Such a fountain of joy broke out of my heart that my whole being was flooded with it, and had that mood lasted I believe I should have exposed the treasure in the run, and invited all the men of the whaler to share in it with me.
They stared fixedly; little wonder that they should be astounded by such an appearance as my ship exhibited. One of the several boats which hung at her davits was lowered, the oars flashed, and presently she was near enough to be hit with a biscuit; but when there the master, as I supposed him to be, who was steering, sung out, "'Vast rowing!" the boat came to a stand, and her people to a man stared at me with their chins upon their shoulders as if I had been a fiend. It was plain as a pikestaff that they were frightened, and that the superstitions of the forecastle were hard at work in them whilst they viewed me. They looked a queer company: two were negroes, the others pale-faced bearded men, wrapped up in clothes to the aspect of scarecrows. The fellow who steered had a face as long as a wet hammock, and it was lengthened yet to the eye by a beard like a goat's hanging at the extremity of his chin.
He stood up—a tall, lank figure, with legs like a pair of compasses—and hailed me afresh, but the high swell, regular as the swing of a pendulum, interposed its brow between him and me, so that at one moment he was a sharply-lined figure against the sky of the horizon, and the next he and his boat and crew were sheer gone out of sight, and this made an exchange of sentences slow and troublesome.
"Say, master," he sung out, "what d'ye say the schooner's name is?"
"TheBoca del Dragon," I replied.
"And who areyou, matey?"
"An English sailor who has been cast away on an island of ice," I answered, talking very shortly that the replies might follow the questions before the swell sank him.
"Ay, ay," says he, "that's very well; butwhenwas you cast away, bully?"
I gave him the date.
"That's not a month ago," cried he.
"It's long enough, whatever the time," said I.
Here the crew fell a-talking, turning from one another to stare at me, and the negroes' eyes showed as big as saucers in the dismay of their regard.
"See, here, master," sung out the long man, "if you han't been cast away more than a month, how come you clothed as men went dressed a century sin', hey?"
The reason of their misgivings flashed upon me. It was not so much the schooner as my appearance. The truth was, my clothes having been wetted, I had ever since been wearing such thick garments as I met with in the cabin, keeping my legs warm with jackboots, and I had become so used to the garb that I forgot I had it on. You will judge, then, that I must have presented a figure very nicely calculated to excite the wonder and apprehension of a body of men whose superstitious instincts were already sufficiently fluttered by the appearance of the schooner, when I tell you that, in addition to the jackboots and a great fur cap, my costume was formed of a red plush waistcoat laced with silver, purple breeches, a coat of frieze with yellow braiding and huge cuffs, and the cloak that I had taken from the body of Mendoza.
"Captain," cried I, "if so be you are the captain, in the name of God and humanity come aboard, sir." Here I had to wait till he reappeared. "My story is an extraordinary one. You have nothing to fear. I am a plain English sailor; my ship was theLaughing Mary, bound in ballast from Callao to the Cape." Here I had to wait again. "Pray, sir, come aboard. There is nothing to fear. I am alone—in grievous distress, and in want of help. Pray come, sir!"
There was so little of the goblin in this appeal that it resolved him. The crew hung in the wind, but he addressed them peremptorily. I heard him damn them for a set of curs, and tell them that if they put him aboard they might lie off till he was ready to return, where they would be safe, as the devil could not swim; and presently they buckled to their oars again and the boat came alongside. The long man, watching his chance, sprang with great agility into the chains, and stepped on deck. I ran up to him and seized his hand with both mine.
"Sir," cried I, speaking with difficulty, so great was the tumult of my spirits and the joy and gratitude that swelled my heart, "I thank you a thousand times over for this visit. I am in the most helpless condition that can be imagined. I am not astonished that you should have been startled by the appearance of this vessel and by the figure I make in these clothes, but, sir, you will be much more amazed when you have heard my story."
He eyed me steadfastly, examining me very earnestly from my boots to my cap, and then cast a glance around him before he made any reply to my address. He had the gauntness, sallowness of complexion, and deliberateness of manner peculiar to the people of New England. And though he was a very ugly, lank, uncouth man, I protest he was as fair in my sight as if he had been the ambrosial angel described by Milton.
"Well, cook my gizzard," he exclaimed presently, through his nose, and after another good look at me and along the decks and up aloft, "if this ain't mi-raculous, tew. Durned if we didn't take this hooker for some ghost ship riz from the sea, in charge of a merman rigged out to fit her age. Y' are all alone, air you?"
"All alone," said I.
"Broach me every barrel aboard if ever I see sich a vessel," he cried, his astonishment rising with the searching glances he directed aloft and alow. "How old be she?"
"She was cast away in seventeen hundred and fifty-three," said I.
"Well, I'm durned. She's froze hard, sirree; I reckon she'll want a hot sun to thaw her. Split me, mister, if she ain't worth sailing home as a show-box."
I interrupted his ejaculations by asking him to step below, where we could sit warm whilst I related my story, and I asked him to invite his boat's crew into the cabin that I might regale them with a bowl of such liquor as I ventured to say had never passed their lips in this life. On this he went to the side, and, hailing the men, ordered all but one to step aboard and drink to the health of the lonesome sailor they had come across. The word "drink" acted like a charm; they instantly hauled upon the painter and brought the boat to the chains and tumbled over the side, one of the negroes remaining in her. They fell together in a body, and surveyed me and the ship with a hundred marks of astonishment.
"My lads," said I, "my rig is a strange one, but I'll explain all shortly. The clothes I was cast away in are below, and I'll show you them. I'm no spectre, but as real as you; though I have gone through so much that, if I am not a ghost, it is no fault of old ocean, but owing to the mercy of God. My name is Paul Rodney, and I'm a native of London. You, sir," says I, addressing the long man, "are, I presume, the master of theSusan Tucker?"
"At your sarvice—Josiah Tucker is my name, and that ship is my wife Susan."
"Captain Tucker, and you, men, will you please step below," says I. "The weather promises fair; I have much to tell, and there is that in the cabin which will give you patience to hear me."
I descended the companion-stairs, and they all followed, making the interior that had been so long silent ring with their heavy tread, whilst from time to time a gruff, hoarse whisper broke from one of them. But superstition lay strong upon their imagination, and they were awed and quiet. The daylight came down the hatch, but for all that the cabin was darksome.
I waited till the last man had entered, and then said, "Before we settle down to a bowl and a yarn, captain, I should like to show you this ship. It'll save me a deal of description and explanation if you will be pleased to take a view."
"Lead on, mister," said he; "but we shall have to snap our eyelids and raise fire in that way, for durned if I, for one, can see in the dark."
I fetched three or four lanthorns, and, lighting the candles, distributed them among the men, and then, in a procession, headed by the captain and me, we made the rounds. I had half-cleared the arms-room, but there were weapons enough left, and they stared at them like yokels in a booth. I showed them the cook-house and the forecastle, where the deck was still littered with clothes, and chests, and hammocks; and, after carrying them aft to the cabins, gave them a sight of the hold. I never saw men more amazed. They filled the vessel with their exclamations. They never offered to touch anything, being too much awed, but stepped about with their heads uncovered, as quietly as they could, as though they had been in a crypt, and the influence of strange and terrifying memorials was upon them. I also showed them the clothes I had come away from theLaughing Maryin; and, that I might submit such an aspect to them as should touch their sympathies, I whipped off the cloak and put on my own pilot-cloth coat.
There being nothing more to see, I led them to the cook-room, and there brewed a great hearty bowl of brandy-punch, which I seasoned with lemon, sugar, and spices into as relishable a draught as my knowledge in that way could compass, and, giving every man a pannikin, bade him dip and welcome, myself first drinking to them with a brief speech, yet not so brief but that I broke down towards the close of it, and ended with a dry sob or two.
They would have been unworthy their country and their calling not to have been touched by my natural manifestation of emotion; besides, the brandy was an incomparably fine spirit, and the very perfume of the steaming bowl was sufficient to stimulate the kindly qualities of sailors who had been locked up for months in a greasy old ship, with no diviner smells about than the stink of the try-works. The captain, standing up, called upon his men to drink to me, promising me that he was very glad to have fallen in with my schooner, and then, looking at the others, made a sign, whereupon they all fixed their eyes upon me and drank as one man, every one emptying his pot and inverting it as a proof, and fetching a rousing sigh of satisfaction.
This ceremony ended, I began my story, beginning with the loss of theLaughing Mary, and proceeding step by step. I told them of the dead body of Mendoza, but said nothing about the Frenchman and the mate, and the Portugal boatswain, lest I should make them afraid of the vessel, and so get no help to work her. As to acquainting them with my recovery of Tassard, after his stupor of eight-and-forty years, I should have been mute on that head in any case, for so extraordinary a relation could, from such people, have earned me but one of two opinions: either that I was mad and believed in an impossibility, or that I was a rogue and dealt in magic, and to be vehemently shunned. Yet there were wonders enough in my story without this, and I recited it to a running commentary of all sorts of queer Yankee exclamations.
There were seven seamen and the captain and I made nine, and we pretty nearly filled the cook-room. 'Twas a scene to be handled by a Dutch brush. We were a shaggy company, in several kinds of rude attire, and the crimson light of the furnace, whose playing flames darted shadows through the steady light of the lanthorns, caused us to appear very wild. The mariners' eyes gleamed redly as their glances rove round the place, and, had you come suddenly among us, I believe you would have thought this band of pale, fire-touched, hairy men, with the one ebon visage among them, rendered the vessel a vast deal more ghostly than ever she could have shown when sailing along with me alone on board.
They were a good deal puzzled when I told them of the mines I had made and sprung in the ice. They reckoned the notion fine, but could not conceive how I had, single-handed, broken out the powder-barrels, got them over the side, and fixed them.
"Why," said I, "'twas slow, heavy work, of course; but a man who labours for his life will do marvellous things. It is like the jump of a hunted stag."
"True for you," says the captain. "A swim of two miles spends me in pleasurin'; but I've swum eight mile to save my life, and stranded fresh as a new-hooked cod. What's your intentions, sir?"
"To sail the schooner home," said I, "if I can get help. She's too good to abandon. She'll fetch money in England."
"Ay, as a show."
"Yes, and as a coalman. Rig her modernly, and carry your forecastle deck into the head, captain, and she's a brave ship, fit for a Baltimore eye."
He stroked down the hair upon his chin.
"Dip, captain, dip, my lads; there's enough of this to drown ye in the hold," said I, pointing to the bowl. "Come, this is a happy meeting for me; let it be a merry one. Captain, I drink to theSusan Tucker."
"Sir, your servant. Here's to your sweetheart, be she wife or maid. Bill, jump on deck and take a look round. See to the boat."
One of the men went out.
"Captain," said I, "you are a full ship?"
"That's so."
"Bound home?"
"Right away."
"You have men enough and to spare. Lend me three of your hands to help me to the Thames, and I'll repay you thus; there should be near a hundred tons of wine and brandy, of exquisite vintage, and choice with age beyond language in the hold. Take what you will of that freight; there'll be ten times the value of your lay in your pickings, modest as you may prove. Help yourself to the clothes in the cabin and forecastle; they will turn to account. For the men you will spare, and who will volunteer to help me, this will be my undertaking: the ship and all that is in her to be sold on her arrival, and the proceeds equally divided. Shall we call it a thousand pounds apiece? Captain, she's well found: her inventory would make a list as long as you; I'd name a bigger sum, but here she is, you shall overhaul her hold and judge for yourself."
I watched him anxiously. No man spoke, but every eye was upon him. He sat pulling down the hair on his chin, then, jumping up on a sudden and extending his hand, he cried, "Shake! it's a bargain, if the men 'll jine."
"I'll jine!" exclaimed a man.
There was a pause.
"And me," said the negro.
I was glad of this, and looked earnestly at the others.
"Is she tight?" said a man.
"As a bottle," said I.
They fell silent again.
"Joe Wilkinson and Washington Cromwell—them two jines," said the captain. "Bullies, he wants a third. Don't speak all together."
The man named "Bill" at this moment returned to the cook-room, and reported all well above. My offer was repeated to him, but he shook his head.
"This is the Horn, mates," said he. "There's a deal o' water 'tween this and the Thames. How do she sail?—no man knows."
"I want none but willing men," said I. "Americans make as good sailors as the English. What an English seaman can face any of you can. There is another negro in the boat. Will you let him step aboard, captain? He may join."
A man was sent to take his place. Presently he arrived, and I gave him a cup of punch.
"'Splain the business to him, sir," said the captain, filling his pannikin; "his name's Billy Pitt."
I did so; and when I told him that Washington Cromwell had offered, he instantly said, "All right, massa, I'll be ob yah."
This was exactly what I wanted, and had there been a third negro I'd have preferred him to the white man.
"But how are you going to navigate this craft home with three men?" said the man "Bill" to me.
"There'll be four; we shall do. The fewer the more dollars, hey, Wilkinson?"
He grinned, and Cromwell broke into a ventral laugh.
They seemed very well satisfied, and so was I.