_HE SEES AN ICEBERG._
When I had finished my work in the boat, I walked forward to toast my
hands for a little at the galley-fire. The cook and I were good friends.
Our esteem for each other had grown up through my giving him a portion of
my allowance of rum, which acts of attention he repaid by presenting me,
from time to time, with a hot roll or jam tart. For, though the owner of
the _Lady Violet_ had told my father that his ships were sober vessels,
yet with us it was the practice for the steward to serve out every day at
noon, on the drum of the capstan on the quarter-deck, a gill, or tot, of
rum to the whole ship’s company. We midshipmen, as being on the articles,
were included, and, regularly with the rest, I presented myself for my
“tot”; but the stuff was much too fiery for me; the flavour, moreover,
I thought extremely disagreeable; so, instead of swallowing the dose, I
preserved it in a bottle and gave it to the boatswain’s mate, and the
cook, and to the man who washed my linen, and to one or two others.
Well, having yarned a bit with the cook about the fight between the
whale and the thrasher, whilst I warmed my fingers at his genial stove,
I quitted the galley to go aft again. As I left the structure, the chief
mate, standing at the break of the poop, sang out for some hands to clew
up the main-royal and furl it. The mizzen-royal, I saw, was in process
of being stowed by Poole, and there was a fellow dancing up the lower
fore-shrouds on his way to furl the fore-royal. Some hands came tumbling
past me; they let go the halliards and tailed on to the clew-lines, and a
couple of sailors jumped on to the bulwarks to get into the rigging. One
continued on his way aloft; the other halted with his feet still upon the
bulwark-rail, and his left hand upon his heart.
He was a short man, with a yellowish, coarse face, dingy and stained,
the skin like an old blanket. He had a tuft of ginger-coloured beard
under his chin, a rounded back that seemed hunched, and stunted bow
legs. I looked at him as I came abreast on my way to the poop, struck by
his lingering when he should have been running aloft—struck, also, by a
quite indescribable expression in his face. His eyes were upturned like
those of a sleeper when you part the lids. I was exactly opposite him
when he fell. He tumbled inboards like a wooden figure; and his head
struck my shoulder with such force that I was spun round and felled,
half-senseless, to the deck.
I recovered in a few moments, and sat upright; nobody took any notice
of me. A crowd had gathered round the prostrate man, and presently two
or three of the sailors lifted him up and carried him forwards. _He was
stone dead!_ The doctor examined the body, and said it was disease of the
heart that had killed him.
I cannot express the effect this shock produced upon me. The mere seeing
the poor fellow fall a corpse would have been painful and terrible to my
young nerves; but to be struck by him—to carry about with me a shoulder
aching from the blow of his head!—it was an incident that filled my
boyish sleep with nightmares that lasted me for a long fortnight. Again
and again I would start from my slumbers—from some horrible vision of the
dead man clasping me—drawing me from my bed—struggling to carry me on
deck to jump overboard with me! Had I found courage to speak out, my mind
might have been soothed; but I did not dare whisper my thoughts for fear
of being laughed at, and though the impression faded before long, yet,
whilst it lasted I was the most nervous miserable creature, I do believe,
that was ever afloat.
The burial of this poor fellow gave me an opportunity of witnessing what
I cannot but think the most impressive ceremony that is anywhere to be
viewed. How solemn a thing is a funeral on shore we all know; but at
sea those points and features which render the interment of the dead on
land affecting and awful are immeasurably heightened by the vastness of
the ocean, the mystery of its depths, the contrast between it and the
littleness of the form committed to its great dark heart, and, above
all, by the utter extinction of the body. Ashore there is a grave: you
can point to the mound or to the stone; but at sea nothing but a bubble
follows the plunge of the corpse: it is swallowed up in the immensity of
the deep as the mounting lark dies out in the blue into which it soars.
The dead sailor was stitched up in his hammock and a weight attached to
his feet. The shrouded figure was placed upon a hatch grating, and the
large ensign thrown over it, after which it was brought by four seamen
to the gangway. The captain stood bare-headed close by, prayer-book in
hand; the whole ship’s company gathered round, most of them having made
some little difference in their attire for the occasion; the passengers
collected at the break of the poop, the gentlemen with their caps in
their hands, and the ladies looking down upon the quarter-deck with
grave and earnest faces. A stillness fell upon the ship, and you heard
nothing but the voice of the captain reading the Service, mingled with
the hissing noise of the foam washing past, and the humming of the wind
in the concavities of the canvas. At a signal one end of the grating was
lifted, and the hammock flashed overboard. A shudder ran through me as I
saw it go. Then, when the last words of the Service had been recited, the
captain put on his hat and entered the cabin, the boatswain’s pipe rung
out shrilly in dismissal of the men, and within a quarter of an hour the
ship had regained her familiar appearance—the ladies walking on the poop,
the captain briskly chatting with some passengers near the wheel, and the
sailors of the watch at work on their several jobs about the deck and in
the rigging.
It was customary in my time to hold an auction of the effects of a dead
sailor shortly after his burial. There was an odd mixture of humour
and pathos in the scene. The poor fellow’s chest was brought on to the
quarter-deck, and the mate at the capstan played the part of auctioneer.
I stood under the break of the poop, looking on; and, young as I was,
I seemed to have mind enough to appreciate the queer appearance the
Jacks presented as they stood shouldering one another in bunches, with
something of shyness in their manner, and with askant, half-sheepish, yet
grinning glances directed at the ladies who stood on the poop, viewing
the scene.
There was not much of an auction, for the poor fellow had left very few
clothes behind him. He had been one of those improvident sailors who will
spend in a single night ashore the earnings for which they have laboured
during a twelvemonth, and who are driven by poverty to ship again in a
hurry, often rolling into the forecastle with nothing but a jumper and a
pair of tarry breeches in their bags. The articles were held up for the
crew to see; Mr. Johnson did not apparently relish the idea of handling
them. The steward pulled a pair of trousers out of the chest, and
expanded them between his raised hands.
“What bid for these?” said the mate; “you all behold them. Observe
that patch; the neatness of the stitching heightens the value of those
trousers by at least five shillings more than they are intrinsically
worth, if only as an object of art just to look at. How much shall I say?”
One bid two shillings, another five, and the breeches were ultimately
knocked down to the cook for ten—not a little to my astonishment, for it
seemed to me that an offer of even threepence for them would have been
excessive. The steward then flourished a worn shirt, for which a sailor
with a hoarse voice offered three-and-sixpence. It was knocked down to
him, and, had it been an extraordinary bargain, he could not have looked
more pleased. Then a very rusty monkey-jacket was exposed, together with
a belt and sheath-knife, a pair of shoes which certainly did not match,
a greasy Scotch cap, and one or two other articles of a like nature.
They all fetched high prices. The sailors seemed to regard the biddings
as a joke; yet it was impossible that there should be much humour in the
thing to those to whom these specimens of squalid raiment were knocked
down, since the money was deducted from their pay. Nor could I gather of
what use the clothes were likely to prove to the fellows who purchased
them, there being superstitious fancies in every forecastle concerning
dead men’s attire, so that very few sailors will ever be got to clothe
themselves in a drowned ship-mate’s dress.
But there is a deal of good nature in the recklessness of Jack’s
character, and the bids made at these auctions are owing, not to the
desire of the men to possess the articles, but to the feeling that the
money they spend will be of help to the dead man’s relatives.
The captain, in making the Horn this voyage, was running his ship on
the Great Circle track; at all events, he was steering a very much more
southerly course than was customary with vessels whose masters deemed
a wide spread of longitude preferable to the risks of ice amongst the
narrower meridians. It was not the harshest time of the year down off
the South American headland; but even with Cape Horn in sight, the
weather would have been bitterly and abominably cold. Judge, then, how
it was with us when I tell you that the navigation of the _Lady Violet_
carried her to within a league or two of sixty degrees south latitude.
I had often heard of Cape Horn seas and skies, and here they were now
with a vengeance—an horizon shrouded by a wall of grey mist to within a
musket-shot of the ship; the shadows of black clouds whirling overhead
and darkening the air yet with heavy snowfalls, which blew along in
horizontal masses, thick as the contents of a feather-bed, or with
volleys of hail big as plums, which rang upon the decks as though tons of
bullets were being emptied out of the tops; seas of mountainous height
of a dark olive-green, whose white and roaring heads seemed to brush
the flying soot of the heavens as they came storming at us; the rigging
glazed with ice; the running gear so frozen that the ropes crackled in
our hands as wood spits in a fire; the decks full of water, with such a
rolling and plunging of them besides that it was sometimes at the risk of
your life that you let go the rope you swung by to obey an order—this was
my experience of the Horn!
And only a little bit of it, too. Spite of our oilskins, we were so
repeatedly wet through that it came to our having no dry clothes to put
on. I have known what it is to come down from aloft after reefing the
mizzen topsail, and to shed tears, child as I was, with the agony of the
cold in my hands. The cook could do nothing with the galley-fire, and
there was no warm food to be had. Again and again would we of the watch
on deck go below, and appease our hunger by a meal of mouldy biscuit,
which I would endeavour to sweeten with a coating of salt butter and
moist sugar, and with a pannikin of cold water, tasting already like the
end of a voyage. The passengers remained in the cuddy. The every-day
ship’s routine could not be carried on, and the sailors kept under cover,
but always ready to rush out at the first summons. The decks therefore
seemed deserted, and, but for the two hands at the wheel, and but for
the mate of the watch, who crouched hugging himself under the lee of a
square of canvas in the mizzen rigging, the ship might have been deemed
abandoned—a craft speeding aimlessly before the gale with a company of
souls dead below!
Never shall I forget the impression produced upon me one night by the
sight of the sea. I came on deck at twelve o’clock, and found the ship
hove-to under a close-reefed main topsail and fore-topmast staysail.
There was a curl of reddish moon in the northern sky, and over that
shapeless blotch of light, as it looked to be, the loose scud was flying
like rolls of brown smoke at hurricane speed. The roaring of the surges
was almost deafening, and there is nothing in language to convey the
astounding noise of the wind in the ice-glaced rigging—the shrieking, the
shrilling, the whistling of it, as it split in fiendish howlings upon the
ropes, and swept away under the foot of the bursting band of topsail,
with a note of thunder like the noise of a train of empty waggons
speeding along the metals in tow of a locomotive.
I crept up the lee poop-ladder, but on gaining the deck was pinned to the
rail for some minutes by the force of the wind. Then, finding I could
do nothing with my legs, I fell upon my knees and crawled like a rat to
windward; and, still crawling, I passed along under the shelter of the
line of hencoops until I arrived at the mizzen rigging, where the mate
stood protected by the piece of sailcoth fastened to the shrouds. He
handed me the end of a rope, which I passed round my waist and belayed to
a pin, and then I could stand up without fear of falling, otherwise the
prodigious slope of the deck rendered the feet entirely helpless.
I could now look about me. The first thing I saw, broad on the
weather-bow, was a huge mass of faintness—a great blurr as it seemed of
dim light—that seemed to blend with the flying gloom as you gazed, though
if you withdrew your eye from it for a moment and then looked afresh, it
showed, I may even say, it _shone_ out clearly. I shouted to Mr. Johnson
to tell me what it was.
“An iceberg,” he roared; for I can tell you it needed all the wind our
lungs could hold to render ourselves audible to each other amid the
fierce clamour of that Cape Horn night.
It was the first ice that I had seen. Several bergs of magnitude had been
passed during the week, but always when I was below, and, as the weather
was continuously thick, they were out of sight promptly, long before
eight bells called me to keep my watch.
I stared, fascinated by the huge visionary spectral mass that lay, of the
colour of faint starlight, out upon the bow. It came and went, for our
ship was rolling furiously. Never could I have dreamt that the waves of
the ocean raged to such a height as they were now running to. One moment
the ship was on a level keel in the trough, in a valley deep down, with
moving walls of water on either hand of her; for a breathless moment
there was a lull, the gale seemed to have been spent, you heard nothing
but the howl of it on high, and the savage hissing of boiling foam.
But in a moment the vessel was sweeping up the huge liquid incline—up and
yet up, with sickening rapidity, with spars sloping till the angle of
the deck was like that of the roof of a house, with all her top hamper
shrieking anew, as it soared into the full weight of the gale. Then would
follow another instant’s pause, whilst she hung poised on the flickering
peak of the sea that had hoisted her, when once more down she would slip,
reeling to windward as she went, until the heart of the valley was again
reached, with its terrifying interval of calm and its deafening uproar of
storm above.
I forgot the iceberg presently in watching the tremendous billows; and
for a considerable time I swung in the bight of the rope that was round
me, full of consternation. As I looked at the approaching seas it seemed
impossible that the ship could ride to them; but she was a noble vessel,
buoyant as an ocean bird, and she took every surge with a magnificent
ease, falling away, as it were, from the first Titanic blow of it upon
her bow, then rising, like a thing on wings and full of life, never
shipping a drain of water save right forwards, where now and again
you would see the spray blowing in a smoke of crystals right over the
forecastle head.
Her glorious behaviour after a while restored confidence to me, and then
I looked at the iceberg again. I longed to ask Mr. Johnson questions
about it, but talking, beyond now and again a brief shout, was out of the
question. Such a night as this was the right sort of frame in which to
view the picture of that dim, wild, gigantic berg. The distorted smudge
of red moon, the sweeping shadows of vapour, the enormous seas, frothing,
as it seemed, to the very sky, the darkness, the savage, warring noises
of the tempest, all concurred to impart an inexpressible quality of awe
and mystery and terror to that silent mass of paleness which loomed up
out of the obscurity of the horizon each time our ship rose to the height
of the sea.
The gale abated before my watch was out, but we were still hove-to when
I went below. At eight o’clock, when the midshipmen in the starboard
watch came down to rout us out, they told us that the wind had shifted,
that the captain had come up on deck at seven and ordered the yards to be
squared and the reefed fore-topsail and foresail set, and that the ship
was now running dead before it on a course well to the north of east,
which looked as if the “old man” feared that he had made more southing
than was good for him, and was now heading for a warmer part of the ocean
whilst there was a wind to serve him.
One did not need to be told that the vessel had the sea right astern of
her. She was going along on a level keel, though pitching heavily, and
the comparative evenness of her decks after the late fearful slope of
them came with something of novelty to my strained and tired little legs.
On passing through the booby-hatch, I found the ship almost hidden in a
snowstorm. The fall had the density of a fog, and I do not exaggerate
when I say that nothing was to be seen of the spars above the maintop,
whilst the forecastle was an indistinguishable outline in the white
smother blowing like steam along the decks. One of us midshipmen had to
be on the poop within eyeshot of the mate. We took turn and turn about
at this, Poole going first, and the others of us hanging together in the
cuddy embrasure under the break of the deck, where there was some shelter
to be obtained from the marrow-freezing, man-killing wind.
When my turn came round, the weather, that had been tolerably clear
for half-an-hour, grew as thick as “mud in a wine-glass” again with
snow. From the poop-rail the two men who were keeping a look-out on the
forecastle head were hardly to be seen. It was blowing half a gale of
wind, but, being dead aft, much of its weight was taken out of it.
Under reefed topsails and yawning foresail dark with saturation and
iron-hard with frost, the ship drove before the blast, chased by huge
seas which scared me to watch, as the summits rose in grey, freckled, and
foaming hills high above the heads of the steersmen, who were clinging to
the wheel with nervous, sinewy grip. The mate stood at the head of the
weather-poop ladder; the captain, clothed in water-proof garments from
head to foot, paced a bit of deck from the grating abaft the wheel to the
mizzen-shrouds. Through the weeping skylight you caught a dim glimpse
of the outlines of passengers cuddling themselves in the cabin. Heavens,
how did I envy them! What would I have given for the liberty to exchange
this freezing, snow-swept deck for the warmth of the glowing cuddy-stove
and the luxury of the wine-scented atmosphere, the comfortable sofas, the
piano, and the little library of books which the steward had charge of!
“Well, Master Rockafellar,” said the chief mate, “pray, sir, what do you
think of Cape Horn?”
“I don’t like it, sir,” said I.
“Isn’t it cold enough?” he asked.
“I prefer the equator, sir,” I exclaimed.
I could see by a laugh in his eye that he was about to deliver something
mirthful; but all on a sudden he fell as grave as a mute, and began to
sniff, as though scenting something in the air whilst he cast a look at
the captain, who continued to patrol the after part of the deck with a
careless step. He sniffed again.
“I smell ice!” he exclaimed.
I thought he might wish me to sniff too, which I did, somewhat
ostentatiously, perhaps, that he might notice me; but as to smelling
ice—why, ’twas all snow to me, with a coldness in it that went beyond
ice, to my mind. The flakes were still rolling over us, dense as smoke,
from the lead-coloured sky, and the ship’s bowsprit was nearly out of
sight.
Once more the mate sniffed up the air with wide nostrils, went to the
rail and thrust his head over, with a long, probing look ahead, and then
came back to where I was standing. He was about to speak, when, out from
the whirling, wool-white thickness forward, came the loud and fearful cry:
“_Ice right ahead, sir!_”
“Ice right ahead, sir!” re-echoed the mate in a shriek, whipping round
his face towards the captain.
“I see it, sir! I see it!” cried the skipper. “Hard a starboard! hard a
starboard! over with it for your lives, lads!”
The spokes revolved like the driving-wheel of a locomotive in the hands
of the two seamen, and the ship paid off with a slow, stately sweep
of her head, as she swung upon the underrun of a huge Pacific sea,
brimming to her counter, and roaring in thunder along the line of her
water-ways—and just in time!
For, out upon the starboard bow there leapt out of the snowstorm, in
proportions as huge as those of the cathedral of St. Paul’s, a monster
iceberg. It all happened in a minute, and what a minute was that! It was
a prodigious crystalline mass, some of the sharp curves of it of a keen
blue, the summits deep in snow, and the sides frightfully scored and
gashed into ravines and gorges and caverns, whilst all about the sky-line
of it, showing faintly in the whirling flakes, were forms of pinnacles
and spires, of towers and minarets, columns like those of ruins, and
wild and startling shapes like couchant beasts of colossal size, giant
helmets, forts, turreted heads of castles, and I know not what besides.
In the fair and streaming sunshine, that would have filled it with
flaming jewels of light, and kindled all kinds of rich and shining
colours, it would have glowed out upon the sea as a most glorious, most
magnificent object; but now, with the shadow upon it of the storm-laden
sky, and rendered wild beyond imagination by the gyrations of the clouds
of snow all about it, it offered a most dreadful and terrifying picture
as it swept past, with the noise of the great seas bursting at its base,
smiting the ear like shocks of earthquake.
We had escaped it by a miracle. Our ship’s head had been pointed for
it as neatly as the muzzle of a musket at the object to be shot at. In
another three minutes our bows would have been into it, and the ship have
ground herself away from the bows aft, as you shut up the tubes of a
telescope!
Our captain seemed to take fright at this experience, and whilst the
loom of the mighty mass was still visible on the lee quarter, orders
were given for all hands to turn out and heave the ship to. Nor was way
got upon her again till the weather cleared, and even then for several
days our progress was exceedingly stealthy, the order of the time being
that whenever it came on thick the ship was to be hove-to. It was weary,
desperate work, and every hand on board the ship soon grew to yearn, with
almost shipwrecked longings, for the blue skies and the trade-winds of
the South Atlantic.