Max Pemberton

“ Heaven or hell is nothing to me while I walk these decks and know that I am the master. Day and night are of less account than the waters about me and the wild sea's face. Aye, lad, I have begun to live again since the Zero sailed from Brest. It's Guichard's doing—and I will make him the greatest man alive as surely as there is a sky above us. ”

“ There'll be no sleep for me to-night, Strong, not if the devil himself closed my eyelids."
"Then it is very serious news, Osbart?"
He clutched my arm and pressed me against the steel taffrail.
"It's life or death to all of us," he cried, his eyes almost starting from his head; "life or death, the open sea or the gibbet. That's what it is, Strong."
"And I am to know nothing of it?"
"You—you who stand as you do to him? There's not a dog in the ship I wouldn't tell before you. Fire burn the paper on which it's written down. ”

“ She is mightier than the mountains and deeper than the valleys. All the jewels dug from the bowels of the earth cannot match the gems she catches from the sun. There is no emerald as green as the heart of yon wave; no diamond to match the spindrift she shakes from her crown when the winds call to her and she answers. Aye, love the sea, my lad, and make her your divinity. ”

“ When he spoke, it was to give the credit of the thing to Guichard—that genius of all we did and all we might hope to do upon the high seas.
"Fire's life to us," he said quietly; "while you are on the Zero you will know that man shall live by fire alone. We burn our batteries every week if we can; but they could run three weeks if we were pressed. Black says he could get across the Atlantic with them; he's mad enough to try it, and God help us if he does. Some day a ship will catch us like this, and that will be the end of the Zero and her crew. ”

“ I observed to Osbart as I returned the screed to him. He admitted that it was so.
"He reads every line written about him—there's vanity behind what he does, though you might be slow to think it. He'll go to Paris and risk his neck just because he wants the world to know he's been there. What's more, if something the skipper of 'Number 2' hinted at is true, Black and every man aboard her will hang as high as Haman in less than a month's time. ”

“ How if he were isolated at the heart of the Atlantic? These were vital questions. But, as though they must be answered in irony, what should happen at that very moment but the engineer, Dingo, came up the ladder to say that relief "Number 2" lay upon our port quarter, and that we had better go about to meet her. ”