of in cold blood, as the ship was rushing forward at full speed, and
there was no knowing what might happen; but the sympathies of the party
were now so fully aroused by the awful peril of the barque--which, in
the midst of all her danger, was still gaily dressed in flags--that they
never paused to think of the possible consequences, but sent the ship at
the barrier as a huntsman sends his horse to a desperate leap. For an
infinitesimal fraction of time the four adventurous travellers were
thrilled with a feeling of wild exultation as they held their breath and
braced themselves for the expected shock. Then the smooth polished hull
of the _Flying Fish_ met the ice, and, rising like a hunter to the leap,
slid smoothly, and without the slightest jar, up on to the surface of
the floe, across the narrow barrier, and into the water beyond.
"Stop her!" shouted Mildmay, checking the exultant cheer which rose to
the lips of his companions. "Sheer as close alongside the barque as you
can go, Sir Reginald, and give me a chance to get our heaving line on
board. Then, as soon as I wave my hand, go ahead gently until you have
brought a strain upon the hawser, when you may increase the speed to
about twelve knots--not more, or you will tear the windlass out of the
barque. Steer straight out between those two bergs, and remember that
_moments_ are now precious."
With these words the lieutenant hurried out on deck and made his way
aft, where he at once began to clear away the heaving line and make
ready for a cast.
The engines meanwhile had been stopped in obedience to Mildmay's
command, his companions intuitively recognising that he was the man to
cope with the present emergency, and the _Flying Fish_ answering the
helm, which the baronet, an experienced yachtsman, was deftly
manipulating, shot cleverly up along the weather side of the barque.
"Look out for our line, lads!" hailed Mildmay to the crew of the vessel,
who were gaping in open-mouthed astonishment at the extraordinary
apparition which had thus abruptly put in an appearance alongside them.
"Ay, ay, sir; heave!" answered one smart fellow, who, notwithstanding
his surprise, still seemed to have his wits about him. Mildmay hove the
line with all a seaman's skill, and a couple of bights settled down
round the neck and shoulders of the expectant tar.
"Haul in, and throw the eye of the hawser over your windlass bitts,"
ordered Mildmay; "we will soon have you clear of your present pickle."
"Thank you, sir," hailed the skipper; "haul in smart there, for'ard, and
take a turn _anywhere_; those bergs are driving down upon us mighty
fast."
With a joyous "hurrah" at the timely arrival of such unexpected
assistance, the men roused the hawser on board, threw the eye over the
bitts, passed two or three turns of the slack round the barrel of the
windlass, and adjusted the rope in a "fair-lead" with lightning
rapidity. Mildmay, who was intently watching their movements, waved his
hand as a signal to the baronet the instant he saw that the hawser was
properly fast on board the barque, and the _Flying Fish_ immediately
began to glide ahead. The baronet was evidently bent on retrieving his
character and making up for his past carelessness, for he handled his
strangely-shaped vessel with most consummate skill, bringing the strain
upon the hawser very gradually, and, when he had done so, coaxing the
barque's head round until her nose and that of the _Flying Fish_ pointed
straight toward the rapidly narrowing passage between the bergs. Then,
indeed, the thin but tough hawser straightened out taut as a bow-string
between the two vessels as the baronet sent his engines powerfully
ahead; the barque's windlass bitts creaked and groaned with the
tremendous strain to which they were suddenly subjected; a foaming surge
gathered and hissed under her bows, and as her harassed crew, active as
wild-cats, skipped about the decks busily letting go and clewing up,
away went the two craft toward the closing gap.
It was like steering into the jaws of death. The two bergs were by this
time within a bare cable's-length of the _Flying Fish's_ conical stem;
and as they swept irresistibly onward, their pinnacled summits towering
five hundred feet into the air, their rugged sides rasping horribly
along the edges of the floe with an awful crushing, grinding sound, and
their contiguous sides approaching each other more and more nearly every
moment, there was not a man on either of those two vessels who did not
hold his breath and stand fascinated in awestricken suspense, gazing
upon those menacing walls of ice and waiting for the shock which should
be the herald of their destruction.
Rapidly--yet slower than a snail's pace, as it seemed to those anxious
men--the space narrowed between the bergs and the ships; the grinding
crash and crackle of the ice grew momentarily more loud and distracting;
the freezing wind from the bergs cut their faces like an invisible razor
as it swept down upon them in sudden powerful gusts, apparently intent
upon retarding their progress until the last hope of escape should be
cut off; the gigantic icy cliffs lowered more and more threateningly
down upon them; and at last, when the feeling of doubt and suspense was
at its highest, the _Flying Fish_ entered the gap. The channel had by
this time become so narrow that for the _Flying Fish_ to pass through it
seemed utterly impossible; indeed, it looked as though there remained
scarcely room for the barque with her much narrower beam; and as the
towering crystal walls closed in upon them every man present felt that
the final moment had now come. Everything depended upon Sir Reginald;
if at this critical instant his nerve failed him there was nothing but
quick destruction and a horrible death for every man there. But the
baronet's nerve did _not_ fail him. With a face pale and teeth clenched
with excitement, but with a steady pulse and an unquailing eye, he stood
with one hand on the tiller and the other on the engine lever, guiding
his ship exactly midway through the narrow gorge; and precisely at the
right moment, when the _Flying Fish's_ sides were actually grazing the
ice on either side, he increased the pressure of his hand upon the
lever, the engines revolved a shade more rapidly, and the flying ship
slid through the narrowest part of the pass uninjured, but escaping by
the merest hair's breadth.
But would the barque also get through? She was fully two hundred feet
astern of the _Flying Fish_, and the bergs were revolving on their own
centres in such a manner that ere many seconds were past they must
inevitably come together with a force which would literally annihilate
whatever might happen to be between them. And as for the barque--the
way in which her bows were burying themselves in the hissing wave that
foamed and surged about her cutwater, and the terrified looks of her
crew as they glanced, now aloft at the formidable bergs, and now at the
straining hawser--from which they stood warily aloof lest it should
part, and in so doing inflict upon some of them a deadly injury--told
the baronet that he must not increase by a single ounce the strain upon
the rope, lest something should give way on board the whaler and leave
her there helpless in the very grip of those awful floating mountains of
ice.
It was a race between the bergs and the barque; and Mildmay, standing
there by the after rail, told himself, as he breathlessly watched the
progress of events, that the bergs would win. The contiguous sides of
these monsters were slightly concave in shape; and whilst the whaler,
still some dozen yards or so within the passage had a foot or two of
clear water on either side of her, the projecting extremities of the
bergs had neared each other to within a distance of twenty feet, or some
five feet less than the breadth of the imprisoned ship.
Suddenly a tremendous crash was heard, and the party on board the
_Flying Fish_ looked to see the unfortunate barque collapse and crumple
into a shapeless mass of splintered wood before their eyes. But, to
their inexpressible astonishment, nothing of the sort occurred. There
was a reverberating sound as of muffled thunder, which echoed and re-
echoed in the confined space between the two bergs; a series of
tremendous splashes just astern of the whaler; the bergs recoiled
violently from each other; the baronet, more by instinct than anything
else, threw the engine lever still further forward, and before anyone
had time even to draw a breath of relief, the apparently doomed vessel
was dragged, with a foaming surge heaped up round her bows as high as
the figurehead, out from the reopened portal and clear of all danger a
single instant before the two gigantic masses of ice again closed in
upon each other with a horrible grinding _crunch_ which must have been
audible for miles.
It was not until the barque had been dragged, almost bows under, some
fifty or sixty fathoms away from the still grinding and rasping bergs,
that her crew were able to realise the astounding fact of their safety,
but when they did so they sent up a wild cheer which was as distinct an
expression of gratitude to God for their deliverance as ever issued from
human lips. Their escape, though it could easily be accounted for,
might indeed well be called miraculous, for at the moment when their
last hope was extinguished--apparently their last chance gone--two huge
overhanging projections on the summits of the bergs had come into
contact with such violence that both the projecting masses of ice had
become detached and had gone thundering down into the water, fortunately
at some few yards' distance astern of the whaler, and the shock of
collision had been so great as to compel the momentary recoil of the
bergs, with the fortunate result already described.
Directly it was seen that the barque had indeed escaped, the _Flying
Fish's_ engines were slowed down to their lowest speed, and the whaler,
relieved of the enormous tugging strain upon her, once more floated on
her normal water-lines. The two craft were now in comparatively open
water, the channel being between two and three miles wide, and still
widening ahead of them, with a few small bergs in their vicinity, it is
true, but with no ice at hand likely to cause them immediate peril. The
barque was towed to windward of all these, and then the baronet stopped
the _Flying Fish_ altogether, and hailed the skipper of the whaler to
know whither he was bound. Upon this the worthy man lowered one of his
boats and pulled alongside his strange consort to return thanks in
person for his recent rescue.
He was a very fine specimen of a seaman, not very tall, but bluff and
hearty-looking in his manifold wraps surmounted by a dreadnought pilot
jacket, sealskin cap, and water boots reaching to his thighs; and it was
amusing to see his look of surprise as he came up the _Flying Fish's_
side-ladder and stepped in upon her roomy deck unencumbered by anything
but the pilot-house. The four companions of course stepped out on deck
in a body to meet him, and after they had all heartily shaken hands with
him and deprecatingly received his thanks for the important service
rendered in the rescue of his ship from the ice, he was invited to
accompany them below to cement the newly-made acquaintance over a glass
of grog. And if the worthy seaman was surprised at the exterior of the
strange craft he was now visiting, how much greater was his astonishment
when he entered her magnificent saloons, revelled in their grateful
warmth, and looked round bewildered upon the rich carpets, the handsome
furniture, the superb pictures and statuary, and the choice _bric a
brac_, all glowing under the brilliant but cunningly modified electric
light. And if he was surprised at all these unwonted sights, his
astonishment may be imagined when he was informed that the four refined
and cultured men who welcomed him so hospitably, constituted, with the
exception of the cook and the steward, the entire crew of the immense
craft, and that the owner of all the magnificence he beheld had dared
the terrors of the polar regions solely by way of pastime.
"Well, gentlemen," he remarked, "it's an old saying that tastes differ,
and what you've just told me proves it. I've been a whaler for nigh on
to twenty-five years, but it has been a case of necessity, not choice,
with me; and after the first two or three years of the life--when the
novelty had worn off a bit, as you may say--I've looked forward to only
one thing, and that is the scraping together of enough money to retire
and get quit of it all for ever. I took to it first as a hand before
the mast, and have regularly passed through all the grades--boat-
steerer, third, second, and chief mate, master, and at last owner of my
own ship, always with the same object ahead. And when, little more than
a year ago, I put the savings of a lifetime into the purchase of the old
_Walrus_ there, I thought that the dream of my life was soon to be
realised, and that one trip more to the nor'ard would bring me in a
sufficiency to last me the remainder of my days, and enable me to enjoy
'em in the company of my wife and my little daughter. God bless the
child! if she's still alive she's five years old to-day."
"Ah!" interrupted Mildmay, "then that, I suppose, accounts for the flags
flying on board you, and the meaning of which we were so utterly unable
to guess?"
"That's it, sir," was the reply. "I `dressed ship' at eight o'clock
this morning in honour of my little Florrie's birthday, and I hadn't the
heart to haul down the flags even when we found ourselves in such a
precious pickle amongst the ice yonder. I thought that if so be it was
God's will that we was to go, we might as well go with the buntin' still
flying in Florrie's honour as not."
"And what success have you met with, captain?" asked Sir Reginald.
"Precious little, sir. We've been out now more'n a twelvemonth, and
we've only killed three fish in all that time. Got jammed up here in
the ice all last winter. I stayed in hopes of doin' something in the
sealing line, and only got some three hundred skins after all. It's
been a bad speculation for me. An old friend of mine came this way the
year before last, and, the season being an open one and not much ice
about, he reached as far north as Baffin's Bay and through Jones' Sound,
fillin' his ship with oil and bone in a single season. He was lucky
enough to hit upon a spot where the sea was fairly alive with whales,
and he filled the ship right up in that very spot. The fish seemed
tame, as though they hadn't been interfered with for years; and bein' an
old friend, as I said before, he gave me the latitude and longitude of
the place as a great secret, and I've been trying to reach the spot ever
since we came north, but have been kept back by the ice and the contrary
winds. If I could get there, even now, it would make the trip
profitable enough to serve my purpose; but I see no chance of it, and
the men are getting disheartened."
"Never mind, captain, cheer up; all may yet be well," exclaimed the
baronet. "We can't drag your ship _over_ the ice, but if there is only
a passage for her we can drag her _through_ it, and for little Florrie's
sake we will. If it is in our power to get you to the spot you wish to
reach, you shall go there. Now, as the present open water affords an
opportunity too good to be lost, return to your ship, secure our hawser
in such a way that we may put a big strain upon it without damaging the
vessel, and send a trustworthy hand aloft into the crow's-nest to look
out for the best channels. We will tow you to the northward as long as
a channel can be found through the ice, and at seven o'clock I hope you
will give us the pleasure of your company on board here to dinner, when
we will drink `many happy returns of the day' to Florrie in the best
champagne the _Flying Fish's_ cellar affords."
The captain of the whaler returned to his own ship in a state of such
mingled astonishment and elation that his people were at first inclined
to think he had suddenly gone demented. However, the order which he
gave them to secure the towing hawser in such a manner as would enable
the ship to withstand a heavy strain was intelligible enough; it told
them that, with the assistance of their strange rescuers, a supreme
effort was now to be made to reach those prolific fishing-grounds which
had from the first been the goal of their voyage; and that, best of all,
that effort was to be unaccompanied by any of the usual harassing labour
of working the ship to windward through the ice, and they set to with a
will. A sufficient length of the hawser was hauled on board to enable
them to take a couple of turns round the barrel of the windlass and two
more round the heel of the foremast, the eye of the hawser being further
secured by tackles to every ring-bolt in the ship capable of bearing a
good substantial strain; and then, the skipper himself going aloft to
the crow's-nest, the signal was given for the _Flying Fish_ to go ahead.
CHAPTER TEN.
THE "HUMBOLDT" GLACIER.
The two ships were at this time floating in a tolerably broad expanse of
open water; but at a distance of some seven miles ahead the pack-ice
stretched, apparently unbroken, across their track for miles. The
skipper of the whaler, however, shouted down to them from his elevated
perch the intelligence that a somewhat intricate but continuous channel
extended through this ice in a northerly direction as far as the eye
could reach. Toward this channel, then, away they went at a speed of
something like sixteen knots per hour, the barque with her string of
colours still fluttering bravely in defiance of the adverse gale, and
the _Flying Fish_ with the white ensign of the Royal Yacht Squadron, of
which Sir Reginald was a member, streaming from her ensign staff in
honour of little Florrie. It was a strange sight, even in that region
of fantastic phantasmagoria, to see the two ships, one of which,
moreover, wore such an unaccustomed shape, dashing rapidly along through
the black foam-flecked water, with ice in every conceivable form heaped
and piled around them, and their bright-hued flags fluttering against
the dark and dismal background of a stormy sky; and the skipper of the
whaler possesses to this day a spirited water-colour sketch of the
scene, executed on the spot by the colonel, which he exhibits with
becoming pride whenever he relates the story of his wonderful escape
from the threatening icebergs.
Half an hour later they entered the channel through the ice. Narrow and
tortuous at first, it gradually widened out, and, after a journey of
some fourteen or fifteen miles, turned sharply off in a direction almost
due west. About the same time the gale broke, the sun made his
appearance through the rifted clouds, and by seven o'clock that evening,
at which hour Florrie's father duly put in an appearance on board the
_Flying Fish_, the engines having been temporarily stopped to receive
him, they found themselves in open water, or rather in a straight
channel some twelve miles in width and entirely free from ice, with a
clear sky overhead, a light easterly wind blowing, and the evening sun
lighting up the snow-clad peaks of the extensive island called North
Devon. An hour later, dinner having been postponed on account of their
near proximity to the land, the two vessels entered a commodious natural
harbour called Hyde Bay, and anchored there for the night, in order to
give the whaler's exhausted crew an opportunity to snatch a few hours of
much-needed rest.
The master of the _Walrus_, who answered, by the way, to the name of
Hudson, though only a bluff hearty seaman, and somewhat shy for the
first half-hour or so in such unaccustomed company as that of his four
well-bred easy-mannered entertainers, gradually thawed out under the
genial influence of the baronet's champagne, and proved himself a
tolerably well informed and by no means disagreeable companion. He
possessed a fund of interesting anecdote and information with respect to
the peculiarities of the region his hosts were now visiting for the
first time, and imparted to them many valuable hints as to the best
means of protecting themselves from the ice; but, as they did not see
fit to inform him of the aerial capabilities of the _Flying Fish_, he
laughed to scorn their project of reaching the North Pole, which he
assured them most solemnly was an utter impossibility. They duly drank
the unconscious Florrie's health, treated her father to some excellent
music, gave him a file of the latest newspapers they had brought with
them, and sent him back to his own ship at midnight a thoroughly happy
man.
On the following morning about half-past eight, whilst the party on
board the _Flying Fish_ were sitting down to breakfast, the sound of
oars was heard close alongside; and a minute later Captain Hudson,
ushered by George, made his appearance in the saloon. He was in a great
hurry and almost breathlessly explained that he had come on board to
repeat his thanks and those of his crew for their rescue of the previous
day, and to say "Good-bye," as he was about to weigh and proceed to sea
in chase of a large school of whales which had just been seen spouting
at a distance of some twelve miles in the offing. The baronet was good-
natured enough to offer to tow him to the scene of action; but this
service he gratefully declined, saying that there was a fine fair wind
blowing and that his anchor was already a-trip. The party therefore
shook hands heartily with him, wishing him "Good luck," and he departed,
leaving Sir Reginald and his friends to finish their meal at their
leisure.
An hour later the _Flying Fish_ also weighed and stood out to sea after
the _Walrus_, now nearly hull down, to witness the sport.
The engines had scarcely begun to move when the whaler was seen to heave
to; and when the _Flying Fish_ ranged up alongside her, some ten minutes
afterwards, three whale-boats were in the water and pulling lustily
toward a school of some forty whales which were lazily sporting,
apparently quite unconscious of danger, about two miles away.
"Those whales do not appear in the least alarmed at the presence of the
boats," remarked Mildmay; "evidently they have not been chased for a
considerable period. If we only had the means of killing a few, now,
what a splendid opportunity there would be to do that poor fellow Hudson
a good turn."
"Well thought of!" exclaimed the professor. "Follow me, gentlemen; we
can do our friend a good turn, and, at the same time, test the powers of
our large-bore rifles with explosive shells for big game."
The party hurried below to the armoury, and each selected one of the
weapons indicated by the professor, providing himself at the same time
with a supply of cartridges from a large chest near at hand.
The rifles were truly formidable, being repeating weapons each capable
of firing ten shots without reloading. The barrels were not very long,
measuring only three feet from breech to muzzle, but they were of one-
and-a-half-inch bore and fired a conical shell four and a half inches in
length. Notwithstanding their somewhat ponderous appearance they were
very light, being constructed of aethereum throughout.
When the party returned to the deck they had the satisfaction of seeing
that, though each of the whale-boats had succeeded in fastening to a
fish, the remainder of the school manifested very little alarm, the
stricken whales having started to "run" in different directions and
quite away from their companions.
The _Flying Fish_ was moved as gently as possible into the very centre
of the herd, the huge monsters taking no apparent notice of her, and
perhaps mistaking her for one of themselves. They were swimming lazily
about, rolling over on their sides until their pectoral fins appeared
above the surface, and occasionally throwing themselves entirely out of
the water.
The engines being stopped the four sportsmen took up their positions,
two on each side of the deck, and, having loaded their weapons, waited
for a favourable opportunity to use them.