LEAVES FROM THE LOG.
We repaired to our sledge alongside, and dragging it a little way
from the deserted barque, took a ration of grog (of which we stood
much in need), and then I proceeded to examine the volume we had
brought away. It proved to be the mouldered fragments of a log-book
or diary kept by the mate--doubtless the dead man, who was seated on
the stern locker, and whose body was reclining on the snow-covered
cabin table.
From this book we could glean that she was the _Royal Bounty_, a
Peterhead whaler, which had been beset in the ice off Cape Desolation
in 1801, and that one by one all her crew had perished of cold,
hunger, and despair!
The thick and crystalline coat of ice which covered every portion of
the ship, from her tops to her chain-plates--a coat that had never
melted or been disturbed--had protected her rigging, spars, and hull
from the natural progress of decay; so let none suppose it marvellous
that in a region or atmosphere of eternal snow, bodies are also thus
preserved; for frequently the remains of elephants and mammoths which
lived before the flood, and of pre-Adamite monsters, are found buried
in the Arctic ice, unchanged, undecayed, and entire.
At the mouth of the Lena, in Siberia--a river which traverses the
vast and uninhabited plains of Asiatic Russia--there was discovered,
in 1805, a mammoth entire, with the hair on its skin four inches
long, and all of a reddish-black; and so frequently are similar
discoveries made along the shores of the Frozen Sea, that the poor
Russians believe that race of animals to be still extant in their
country, but existing like moles which dwell underground, and cannot
endure the light of day; and their exhumation from the ice is ever
deemed a forerunner of calamity, as it is said that all who see them
die soon after. But to resume.
The book was much mouldered and decayed; only a few entries here and
there could be traced, as its leaves, now soft and pulpy, perished in
our fingers when we attempted to turn them over. A few passages ran
thus:--
"March 3rd, 1801; a brisk breeze from the S.W. The Faroe Isles
bearing about twenty miles off on our starboard quarter.
"At 7 P.M., took in the topgallant sails, and all fore and aft canvas
........ set the ........
"April 4, 8 P.M. Set more canvas--out reefs--set foretopmast and
maintopgallant studdingsails. Ice-floes a head. Compasses not
working well. The captain ordered ........, and Cairns ........
"9 P.M. Land ahead--supposed to be Cape Farewell. Weather squally.
Beset by an ice-field in a strong current running N. and by E. Took
in everything fore and aft--sent down the topgallantyards, and
brought the masts on deck ........"
After a successful whale fishing in latitude 76°-77°, they had been
again, or were still, beset.
"1st May, 1801; hoisted a garland of false flowers, made by our wives
and sweethearts at home in Scotland, between the fore and
mainmast........"
Then followed days and weeks, to the effect that they were _still
beset_. These memoranda were in the handwriting of various persons,
and were frequently mingled with earnest prayers for release. Then
scurvy appears to have broken out among them, and disease was quickly
followed by death.
"1802. Birnie from Buchan-ness, off duty, unwell--Birnie's teeth
fell out of his head. Willie Cairns from Southhouse Head, off duty,
unwell. Poor Birnie died, and was buried in the ice, where the
_others_ lie, half a mile off, on the starboard bow. God rest them!
"May 6th. Jobson ill with scurvy and blindness--Cairns died, and was
buried beside Birnie ........."
Many leaves totally illegible followed, till we deciphered a passage
like this--
"1802, 4th Dec. The captain died in his berth this day at 8 A.M.,
and we are too weak to move him. Smith, Arthur, and the cook are
dead, or dying of hunger on the cabin floor! We have now been beset
two years and twenty-one days. In that time twenty-four men have
died out of a crew of nine-and-twenty--no hope! no mercy! My God!
where is all this to end? We sailed upon a Friday, and this ........"
I shut the book abruptly, for I could perceive in the twilight a
blank horror stealing over the pale features of my companions as we
stood beside that old vessel--a frozen tomb; and favoured by the
light of the rising moon, we proceeded to regain the _Leda_, with all
the speed we could exert; for to some it appeared as if our future
fate was fearfully foreshadowed in the story of this old doomed
whale-ship. Half a mile distant, on her starboard bow, an ice-coated
pole was visible. It seemed to indicate where her dead were buried.
Hans Peterkin and three others strapped the collar-ropes over their
shoulders for the first "spell," and proceeded briskly in front with
our sledge of blankets, &c. The rest followed in silence, and only
turned from time to time to cast a backward glance at the old whaler,
whose decaying spars, coated with ice, glimmered darkly against the
starry sky. The moon arose in her full northern splendour--clear,
glorious, and wondrous! The sharp summits of the bergs (the
ice-mountains that rose from the plains of ice) gleamed and glittered
like mighty prisms, or spires, pyramids, and obelisks of crystal and
spar.
After all we had seen, the dead, the awful stillness of the frozen
sea--that snow-clad plain, "the silence of which seemed to come from
afar and to go afar," impressed us with deep and solemn emotions.
Thus, for several miles we trod gloomily on, equally desirous of
reaching the _Leda_ and of leaving far behind the scene of gloom I
have described.
The spirits of our party were sorely depressed; but Paul Reeves and I
did everything in our power, by cheerfulness and anecdotes, to divert
the gloomy current of their ideas; though poor Paul was not without
fears that a day might come when he would be inserting in the log of
the _Leda_, entries similar to those I have quoted from the
mouldering volume we had brought away.
"We have found a ship of the dead," said he, "but that is nothing!
What think you, shipmates, of a whole city full?"
"A city full!" reiterated our men.
"Not exactly a city like London--but a city, nevertheless."
"And where was this?" asked Hans, doubtfully.
"I read of it in a book--a real printed book--when I was in South
Carolina. There was one Lionel Wafer, an English surgeon, who,
having nobody to physic at home, took a voyage with the old
buccaneers to the South Seas. Well, on one occasion, his craft was
cruising off Vermijo, at the mouth of the Red River, in Peru. It was
a wild and solitary place; but he went ashore with a boat's crew, and
travelled four miles up the stream in quest of adventures; and there,
from the margin of a fine sandy bay, a plain spread inland as wide as
this ice-field, all covered with the ruins of streets, built of
mighty blocks of stone carved with wonderful sculptures, like those
of the Egyptians--only more terrible and quaint; and among these
crumbling streets and mansions were thousands of graves half open,
with the dead bodies of men, women, and little children in them, all
mummified and light as cork, for they had been dead two hundred years
or more.
"His men were terrified, and fled back to their boat; but on the way
they met an old Indian, who related that, in the days of his
forefathers, this arid plain had once been fruitful and green as the
greenest savannah, and the country so populous, that a fish of the
Red River could have been passed through the land from hand to hand,
till it was laid at the foot of the throne of the Inca (that was
their king, shipmates); but the cruel, murdering Spaniards came, with
their guns and bloodhounds, and laid siege to the capital city. Its
defence was long and desperate; and rather than yield, the
inhabitants slew themselves, and buried each other in the sand, till
there was only one man left, and _he_ drowned himself in the Red
River.
"In after years the stormy winds had blown the dry sand aside, and
there the grim Mexicans lay in thousands--the women with the pearls
of Vermijo at their ears and round their necks, their little
children, their distaffs and hand-mills by their sides, and their
long black hair filled with coins and precious stones. There, too,
lay the warriors, with their flint axes and broken spears, and the
war-paint yet traceable on their mummies. Lionel Wafer brought away
the body of a child, but the buccaneers would not admit it on board
lest it might bring a plague or a curse upon them; so he threw it
into the Rio Grande."
This yarn produced others equally lively, of course; but while
conversing we got over the dreary waste of hummocks more rapidly, and
some time after midnight were welcomed on board the _Leda_, where
those whom we had left were burning with curiosity to learn the
result of our expedition.
The impression of all we had seen was so vivid, that a horror lest
the same fate should befal us, made our men suggest and revolve every
rash plan for release.
The flight of the two ravens eastward indicated that land could not
be far off. Hans Peterkin, a hardy Orcadian, who was suffering from
scurvy, proposed that if matters grew more desperate, we should
travel over the field, taking with us the longboat upon
sledge-runners. Some urged that we should bore through the ice with
canvas set, while gangs went ahead blasting it up with gunpowder.
"Bore and blast through ice twenty feet thick, for a hundred miles,
perhaps!" said Hartly, with sorrowful irony.
But scurvy continued to increase among us; and on the eighth day
after our visit to the ship one of our crew died, and was buried in
the ice; while the brig was thrown in mourning, her colours
half-mast, her running-gear cast in loose bights, and her yards
topped up variously.
After his funeral, which had a most depressing effect upon us all, I
remarked to Hartly, that either by a strange coincidence or by an
irresistible fatality, we had interred him _half a mile distant on
the starboard bow_, exactly as the crew of the old whaler had
interred _their dead_!