William Clark Russell

“ 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. ”

“ The ice flashed out of its slatish hue into a radiant white, the ocean changed into a rich blue that seemed as violet under the paler azure of the heavens; but I could now see that the swell was heavier than I had suspected from the echo of its remote roaring in the north. It ran steadily out of the north-east. This was miserable to see, for the line of its running was directly my course, and if I committed myself to it in that little boat, the impulse of the long and swinging folds could not but set me steadily southwards, unless a breeze sprang up in that quarter to blow me towards the sun. ”

“ When I awoke it was pitch dark. My hands, legs, and feet seemed formed of ice, my head of burning brass. I thought I was in my cot, and felt with my hands till I touched Tassard's cold bald head, which so terrified me that I uttered a loud cry and sprang erect. Then recollection returned, and I heartily cursed myself for my folly and wickedness. Good God! thought I, that I should be so mad as to drown my senses when never was any wretch in such need of all his reason as I!
The boatswain's tinder-box was in my pocket; I groped, found a candle, and lighted it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We lost all reckoning of our position; for days, for weeks, sea and sky were enveloped in clouds of snow, in the heart of which drove our frozen schooner. We were none of us of a nationality fit to encounter these regions; we carried most of us the curly hair of the sun, the chocolate cheek of the burning zone, and the ice chained the crew, crouching like Lascars, below. We swept past many vast icebergs, which would leap on a sudden out of the white whirl of thickness, often so close aboard that the recoil of the surge striking against the mass would flood our decks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had the figure of her before my fancy, viewed the form of the man on her deck, and the idea of penetrating her dark interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that time and frost and death had wrought into a black mystery was dreadful to me. Nor was this all. It seemed like the very last expression of despair to board that stirless frame; to make a dwelling-place, without prospect of deliverance, in that hollow of ice; to become in one sense as dead as her lonely mariner, yet preserve all the sensibility of the living to a condition he was as unconscious of as the ice that enclosed him. ”

“ It was impossible to fix the direction of these sounds, the island was full of them; and always sullenly booming upon the breeze was the voice of the ocean swell bursting in foam against the ice-coast that confronted it.
You may talk of the solitude of a Selkirk, but surely the spirit of loneliness in him could not rival the unutterable emotion of solitariness that filled my mind as I sent my gaze over those miles of frozen stirless whiteness. He had the sight of fair pastures, of trees making a twinkling twilight on the sward, of grassy savannahs and pleasant slopes of hills ”

“ I was nearly dead with cold and misery when the morning came, but the sparkling sun and the blue sky cheered me, and as wind and sea fell with the soaring of the orb, I was enabled to flatten aft the sheet and let the boat steer herself whilst I beat my arms about for warmth and broke my fast. When I look back I wonder that I should have taken any pains to live. That it is possible for the human mind at any period of its existence to be absolutely hopeless I do not believe ”

“ No man could show himself on deck and preserve his life. Between the rails it was waist high, and this water, converted by the motions of the brig into a wild torrent, had its volume perpetually maintained by ton-loads of sea falling in dull and pounding crashes over the bows on to the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm and await the issue below, for, if we were to be drowned, it would make a more easy foundering to go down dry and warm in the cabin, than to perish half-frozen and already nearly strangled by the bitter cold and flooded tempest on deck. ”

“ Inside the ship, with the hatches on, and protected moreover by the sides of the hollow in which she lay, it would have been impossible to guess at the weight of the gale, though all along I had supposed it to be storming pretty fiercely by the thunderous humming noise which resounded in the cabin. But I had no notion that so great a wind raged till I gained the deck and heard the prodigious bellowing of it above the rocks. The sky was one great cloud of slate, and there was no flying darkness or yellow scud to give the least movement of life to it. ”

“ On a sudden the ice split on the starboard hand with a noise louder than the explosion of a twenty-four pounder. The schooner swayed to a level keel with so sharp a rise that I lost my balance and staggered. I recovered myself, trembling and greatly agitated by the noise and the movement coming together, without the least hint having been given me, and grasping a backstay, waited, not knowing what was to happen next. Unless it be the heave of an earthquake, I can imagine no motion capable of giving one such a swooning, nauseating, terrifying sensation as the rending of ice under a fixed ship. ”

“ She had something of the look of the barca-longas of half a century ago—that is, half a century ago from the date of my adventure; but that which, in sober truth, a man would have taken her to be was a vessel formed of snow, sparred and rigged with glass-like frosted ice, the artistic caprice of the genius or spirit of this white and melancholy scene, who, to complete the mocking illusion, had fashioned the figure of a man to stand on deck with a human face toughened into an idle eternal contemplation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not long ago that Captain Rosy cried to me, "A man can die but once. He'll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with a stout heart." He that so spoke is dead. The worst is over for him. Were he a babe resting upon his mother's breast he could not sleep more soundly, be more tenderly lulled, nor be freer from such anguish as now afflicts me who cling to life, as if this—this," I cried, looking around me, "were a paradise of warmth and beauty. I must be a man, ask God for courage to meet whatever may betide, and stoutly endure what cannot be evaded." ”

“ No snow had fallen to frost the surfaces, and every pendant was as pure and polished as cut-glass and reflected a hundred brilliant colours. The water hurled over and on the schooner had frozen upon the masts, rigging, and decks, and as this ice, like the pendants, was very sparklingly bright, it gave back all the hues of the sunbeam, so that, stepping from the darkness of the cabin into this effulgent scene, you might easily have persuaded yourself that before you stood the fabric of a ship fashioned out of a rainbow. ”

“ Outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swell swept past in a gurgling, bubbling, drowning sound, dismal and ghastly, as though in truth some such ogre as the monster I had dreamt of lay suffocating there. I welcomed the cold colouring of the east as if it had been a ship, and watched the stars dying and the frozen shore darkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it, against which the outline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink. The rising of the sun gave me fresh life. ”

“ That which I best recollect is the appearance of the mass of ice lying solidly, like a little island, upon the seas which roared in creaming waters about it. Every blow of the black and arching surge was reverberated in a dull hollow tremble back to the ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body was not taller than our mastheads, yet it showed like a mountain hanging over us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep Pacific hollow, leaving us staring upwards out of the instant's stagnation of the trough with lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes. ”

“ I was of another temper whilst I sat smoking and listening to the snoring of Monsieur Jules Tassard. Now that I had a companion should I be able to escape from this horrid situation? He had spoken of chests of silver—where was the treasure? in the run? There might be booty enough in the hold to make a great man, a fine gentleman of me ashore. It would be a noble ending to an amazing adventure to come off with as much money as would render me independent for life, and enable me to turn my back for ever upon the hardest calling to which the destiny of man can wed him. ”

“ The masts had a good rake, and with a seaman's eye I took notice of the furniture, observing the shrouds, stays, backstays, braces to be perfect. Nay, as though the spirit artist of this fragile glittering pageant had resolved to omit no detail to complete the illusion, there stood a vane at the masthead, shining like a tongue of ice against the soft blue of the sky. Come, thought I, recovering from my wonder, there is more in this than it is possible for me to guess by staring from a distance; so, striking my pole into the snow, I made carefully towards the edge of the hollow. ”

“ The sea was swelling very furiously, and I could divine its tempestuous character by clouds of spray which sped like volumes of steam under the sullen dusky heavens high over the mastheads. The schooner lay with a list of about fifteen degrees and her bows high cocked. I looked over the stern and saw that the ice had sunk there, and that there were twenty great rents and yawning seams where I had before noticed but one. A vast block of ice had fallen on the starboard side, and lay so close on the quarter that I could have sprung on to it. ”

“ The multitudinous roaring of the heaving blackness had sobered into a hard and sullen growling, a sound as of thunder among mountains heard in a valley.
The brig pitched and rolled heavily. Much of the buoyancy of her earlier dance was gone out of her. Nevertheless, I could not persuade myself that this sluggishness was altogether due to the water she had taken in. It was wonderful, however, that she should still be afloat. No man could have heard the rending and grating of her side against the ice without supposing that every plank in it was being torn out. ”

“ His coat—if I may call that a coat which resembled a robe of snow—fell to within a few inches of the deck. Steadying the body with one hand, I heartily tweaked the coat with the other, hoping thus to rupture the ice upon it; in doing which I slipped and fell on my back, and in falling gave a convulsive kick which, striking the feet of the figure, dislodged them from their frozen hold of the deck, and down it fell with a mighty bang alongside of me, and with a loud crackling noise, like the rending of a sheet of silk. ”

“ The whole world stares at the strange antique craft sailing up the river; she would be boarded and rummaged by the customs people, who of course would light upon the treasure. What then? I knew nothing of the law; but I reckoned, since I should have to tell the truth, that the money, ore, and jewellery would be claimed as stolen property, and I dismissed with a small reward for bringing it home. There was folly in such contemplation at such a time, when perhaps at this hour to-morrow the chests might be at the bottom of the sea, and myself a drowned sailor floating three hundred fathoms deep. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing delights a black man more than coloured apparel. They had seen the clothes in the forecastle and guessed the kind of garments I meant to present them with.
Whilst supper was getting, I walked the deck with Wilkinson, both of us keeping a bright look-out, for it was blowing fresh; the darkness lay thick about us, there might be ice near us, and the schooner was storming under her reefed mainsail, topsail, and staysail through the hollow seas, thundering with a great roaring seething noise into the trough, and lifting to the foaming slope with her masts wildly aslant. ”

“ The main hatch was just forward of the gun-room bulkhead; we seized a handspike apiece and went to work to prize the cover open. It was desperate tough labour; as bad as trying to open an oyster with a soft blade. The Frenchman broke out into many strange old-fashioned oaths in his own tongue, imagining the hatch to be frozen; but though I don't doubt the frost had something to do with it, its obstinacy was mainly owing to time, that had soldered it, so to speak, with the stubbornness that eight-and-forty years will communicate to a fixture which ice has cherished and kept sound. ”