THE ICE
On the morning of January 29, 1861, Captain Cliffe at dinner told me
that our position by dead reckoning--he had not been able to obtain an
observation for two days--was latitude 58° 30´ S., longitude 45° W. I
pulled out my note-book on hearing this and started violently.
'Good God, Cliffe!' cried I, 'do you know that we are within a mile or
two of the place where the "Lady Emma" was abandoned by her crew?'
'Is that so?' said the little man after a pause, closing his knife and
fork. 'But it's true all the same: I'll back my runs for the last two
days, log-reckoned as they are, right, longitude and latitude, within
ten mile.'
It was bitterly cold, and when I had come below so dense a fog overhung
the sea that the main-yard was out of sight from the wheel. The brig
was lying hove to under small canvas, a large smooth Cape Horn swell
was running out of the sallow thickness, and the little vessel was
rolling horribly, falling into the hollows and swinging to the summits,
now on her beam ends, now on a level keel, now with a dip forward that
seemed to make her all stern, now with a drop aft that shook the cabin
with a hollow roar, every motion being so abrupt, and exaggerated, that
it was almost impossible to walk, to stand, even to eat, the plate
flying from your hand, whilst the boy waited with a broken head through
a fall down the companion ladder.
We had passed several icebergs on the previous day, during a very thick
morning and afternoon, when the sky had been dark with driving cloud,
and the strong wind white with snow, and throughout the night a sharp
look-out had been kept for ice; but since daybreak it had been as dense
as it was now with an awful silence all round: nothing had once broken
the amazing, oppressive stillness upon that sea, sallow as the fog,
labouring in volumes of brine soundlessly, saving a strange, fierce
noise of blowing heard close upon the bow, though nothing was to be
seen there. Cliffe said it was a whale, and I might have guessed that
by the sight of the boatswain Bodkin springing with an amazing jump
into the fore-shrouds, and leaning away from the ratline he grasped
with pricked ears, staring as out of love for his old sport into the
choking wool the breathless air was filled with.
I was as anxious and restless on account of the ice as any man aboard,
though I was no sailor: Cliffe had said it didn't follow, though a
hurricane blew, that the smother would clear. I knew that ice must be
about: for still we had headed south after passing many bergs, and if
wind came and gave us a drift without clearing the ocean for us, we
might be foul of an ice mountain ere the mass of it was fairly shaped
to the sight within toss of a man's cap.
But I forgot our situation for awhile when Cliffe told me where we were
and I looked into my note-book. Deep love, deep grief, consecrated to
my heart this scene and place of silent hills of water. Here the 'Lady
Emma' had been abandoned; here, if the horizon had been visible, then,
within the compass of it Marie had been left with her two companions in
a dismasted hull amid such floating ice as during the past few days I
had gazed at with fear and amazement: from this point the three in that
mere raft of ship had drifted--the vessel on to the ice of Coronation
Island; that, undoubtedly, she had been seen, described, reported,
but her inmates--had they been taken out of her? Or were they frozen
corpses in her? Or were they living, within reach of a day or two's
sail from the place of ocean Cliffe had found us in that day?
A fire glowed in the little brass grate. The cabin was snug and warm
enough with the companion doors closed; but I speedily grew restless
after Cliffe had gone on deck. I asked the mate when he came down to
dinner how the weather looked.
'Thick as muck, sir.'
'Any signs of wind, Bland?'
'None. But there's no trusting the next minute.'
'Any ice near us, think you?'
'The boatswain's been a snuffling and says he can hear the noise of the
beating of water. Nary man else do, though. Them whalemen are so clever
they can thread needles with their toes. They can smell grease in a
field of grass.'
Here he began to munch, and I let him eat.
I put on a thick coat and went on deck. The brig's arrest on the
smoke-thickened water, when one thought that if it would but clear and
the sun flood the south with the sparkling splendour of the South Afric
parallels from the mastheads of the brig the loom of the huge dim hill
past the cliff where the hull was lying might be seen--this, I say, was
maddening. I never could have imagined so dense a fog out of London. It
was thick as soup, of a sort of dirty yellow, as though charged with
the soot of a city of factories. The dripping wet of it froze as it
gathered, and our shrouds were swollen with the glazing, as much of the
brig as could be seen was beautiful and novel with fantasies of ice.
The topsail clapped in the blankness overhead like shells exploding
there: but you could not see it. That was the only noise saving an
occasional long sobbing wash of water when the brig heeled straining
from the yearning send of the swell.
I held by a backstay, Cliffe standing beside me, and rolled my eyes
around the sallow blindness, till all of a moment I heard a very faint
moan like the noise of a sea running into a cave: it sounded afar, and
yet not far either, as though something stood between the cause of it
and us.
Cliffe heard nothing, though he grimaced in the direction I indicated,
and dropped his head on his shoulder to hearken.
About this time the mate came up from his dinner. I asked him to
listen, suspecting that the noise I had heard was the sound of sea upon
ice. After a pretty good spell of silence the three of us listening
with all our might, Bland said:
'Sometimes if ice is near and can't be smelt or seen, it may be heard.
If you fire off this gun,' said he, putting his hand upon the brass
piece, 'and ice is by, it'll answer.'
'Try it,' said I.
He promptly went below and returned with the necessary ammunition;
where our powder was kept I never inquired. He and Cliffe loaded the
gun, the skipper snapping grimace after grimace with nervous excitement.
'Are you all ready?' said I.
Bland said 'Yes,' and then shouted to the men forward to stand by to
listen for an echo and note its bearings. The forms of the seamen
loomed in mere smudges in the fog as they lurched to the rolling
bulwarks to hearken.
'Fire!' cried I.
The piece blazed and thundered, lighting up the fog like a volcanic
upheaval with a wild crimson glare as though it was the night itself
the powder flashed against. But stunning as the roar was, it was not so
deafening but that I, for one, caught an echo stinging back through the
thickness on the starboard hand like a slap of tall becalmed topsail
against a mast.
'Hear it?' shouted a voice forward.
'We were answered yonder,' I cried, pointing.
'Ship ahoy!' at that instant came in a hoarse but clear, thin, far
voice out of the blankness on the port bow.
'Good God, we are hailed!' cried Cliffe. 'Bland, answer. Your lungs
have got more carrying power than mine.'
'Hallo!' shouted Bland, going to the side in a spring, and sending his
voice in the direction of the hail in a deep, roaring, melancholy note.
'What ship's that?' came back distinct but remote, so wonderful was the
hush, so burnished the swell. We made answer, and then roared Bland:
'What ship's that?'
'The "Helen MacGregor" of Hull, twenty months out. What's wrong with
you, that you're firing guns?'
'All's right with us,' bawled Bland. 'Any ice about, d'ye know?'
'Not used my eyes since daybreak,' echoed the far, thin, hoarse voice.
It was strange to hear it, to look into the thickness and see nothing,
to know that a ship was there, and listen to a man talking on her! But
conversation all that way off was not to be kept up long.
After remaining twenty minutes on deck I felt the cold so severely that
I returned to the cabin. After I had been below about half an hour the
brig heeled sharply on a slant of swell without recovery as before,
whence I guessed it had come on to blow suddenly. In fact, I might have
known it by the noise of feet overhead and the gushing and hissing of
water in motion, shouldered off in foam. I wrapped myself up and went
on deck and found the brig lying down close hauled under the canvas she
had been brought-to with early in the morning--a reefed maintopsail
and foresail; she was looking up for a tall, black, full-rigged ship
that was lying with her topsail to the mast on the weather bow as
though waiting for us.
The scene of ocean was wonderfully grand at this hour: it was not
blowing hard, yet the wind out of the heads off the ridges it made,
and the swell was rolling now in furrows of foam. The fog was broken
up and sailing off in compact masses with the wide white-lived heave
of sea gleaming and glancing through the foundations of vapour, till
you looked to see the stuff rock as though afloat. Lanes and openings
stretched in all directions, and I did not know where to direct my eyes
first, so noble, wild, and startling was the picture of that tall black
ship showing in a wide, clear space, her canvas waving in squares of
light in the framing of the sallow smother, whilst on the starboard
quarter hung a stately incomparable spectacle of iceberg, a giant mass,
the height vaster to the imagination because the fog showed you bits
of it only--in one place marble white cliffs staring through a passage
of vapour, a little further on, a gray pinnacle piercing the stuff
which streamed off it like torn rag. And now I could hear, but faintly,
the noise of the sea breaking along its base.
We had passed a good deal of ice during the week; but this was the
place where the 'Lady Emma' was abandoned; that white vapour-clothed
mountain took a significance none other had. I thought of it as ice
that had been seen by Marie's own eyes. It was as a revelation, too,
of the savage, forbidding, tremendous scene of desolation the brig was
bound to, with myself in her, dreaming, hoping, praying to Almighty God
I should find my sweetheart in the hull alive.
Many large white and grey birds flew out of the vapour into the
openings; they glanced against the marble-like abrupt and vanished. In
the midst of a wide flaw right abeam to port, another tall berg was
floating. It, too, was a sight of terror and awful beauty, with a look
as of frozen foam about the brows of it where the fog was flying, the
vapour whitening out to the shadow of the ice as though moon-smitten,
whilst low down on the right arched a piece of marvellous architecture,
like a Titanic Gothic doorway, through which every swell of the sea
flashed, bursting into a terrible fury and dazzling brightness of foam.
I looked on in silence, keeping the shelter of the companion, whilst
the brig under her little show of cloths broke her way to windward,
helped by the tall black ship whose drift was towards us. After some
waiting we were within hailing distance. She was just such another
whaler as the 'Sea Queen,' but bigger by a couple of hundred tons, worn
and weedy, rolling dark decks at us with a glimpse of a black-roofed
galley and smoking chimney. She was rich with ice device: fathoms of
thick crystal hung from her tops, catheads, bowsprit and quarters; a
dull light sank down her glass-like rigging as she swayed. A crowd
of men viewed us over her rail, and a man stood awaiting us beside
the mizzen rigging, an arm wrapping a backstay, and his figure like a
bear's with fur to his heels.
'What southing are you from?' shouted Cliffe, who, dwarf as he was to
the sight, had something bugle-like in the clear, small penetrating
note of his throat's delivery.
'Sixty-one, sighting Elephant Island. Nothing to the south'ard of it,'
shouted back the man in the bear-like coat.
'Been off the South Orkneys?' cried Cliffe.
'Just caught a sight of the north-west point of Coronation Island?
'Twas blowing hard, and the weather coming on thick,' answered the
other.
The two vessels rolled at a distance apart not wider than a wide
street: each man's voice rang through the wind in distinct syllables
spite of the splashing and groaning sounds and the howling and
whistling aloft when the brig's spars sheared to windward on the slope
of the sea. When I heard the whaleman speak of Coronation Island, I
thought my heart had stopped. I wanted to speak, but could not.
'How was the ice?' bawled Cliffe.
'Plentiful to the south'ard and west'ard.'
'How was the ice about the New Orkneys?'
'More'n ye'll want if you're bound there,' was the answer.
'D'ye know that land?'
'Ay' was the answer that was accompanied by a significant ironical
flourish of the arm.
'Where's a man's chance of getting ashore?'
The whaleman seemed to address another, probably the mate, who stood a
little distance from him.
'There's some landing-places on the south side,' he presently called.
'There's shelter there from the westerly winds. But you must see to
your ship, for the ice is plentiful and dangerous.'
'The wreck lies on the north side of the island,' I called to Cliffe.
'Is there no landing on the north of the island?' shouted the little
fellow.
The other answered, but the words were lost in a sudden blast or squall
of wind which blew betwixt our masts in a shriek like a locomotive's.
A moment later I saw the skipper of the whaler, as I presumed the
bear-coated man to be, motioning to his crew and heard him, but
faintly, shouting; thereupon the ship's topsail-yard was swung: the man
brandished his fist in a farewell to us, and whilst we still lay as
though hove, with the weather leech-rope of our band of topsail shaking
at every smoking plunge of the brig's head, the ship heeled over, and
gathering way, broke the seas off her lee bow with glaring heaps, and
melted into a swollen smudge in the heart of a body of vapour when our
crew were trimming sail for the course to the New Orkneys.
The rolling ocean, sallow still, was thick in many places with fog. We
saw now that ice lay all about us. There was scarce an opening in the
vaporous folds that was not filled with a berg near or distant, a dull,
pale, motionless mass; the vast island that had been off our starboard
quarter when the wind broke up the thickness, we had now brought on to
our port bow, and were slowly passing; its loom was more like a blue
shadow of land in the dull yellow light of that Antarctic afternoon,
summer as it was, than ice: yet it was a vast berg stretching west
and east: its westermost point was nearest and hung like a mass of
foreland, wild with the vapour that flew smoking off its face and
points, and with the leap of the surf at its base in lofty columns of
foam, whose heads the wind swept off in clouds.
I stood beside Cliffe under the shelter of a large square of canvas
in the main rigging: oilskinned figures watched on the forecastle; we
drove very slowly; the running rigging had been seen to and carefully
coiled down ready for instant handling should a sudden cry from the
forecastle compel a shift of helm. I saw many birds flying in the
hollow seas, and turning to mark the bearings of a small berg which had
come and gone and come again on the starboard bow, I observed slowly
swinging past about a half-acre of the giant kelp of this part of the
world, a huge seaweed, glancing black in the whiteness of the froth,
and hissing like shingle as the salt shot through it.
'Now that we are under way again,' I exclaimed, 'I am realising that
the end of this cruise is at hand.'
'Were it all clear water and fine weather,' answered the little man,
'we should be off the island by noon to-morrow.'
'What distance do you reckon it?'
'Eighty miles.'
'That ship we have just spoken makes me believe the hull has been
sighted again and again.'
'Why, perhaps so,' he answered, 'but not of necessity.'
'She was off the island, close enough to see the rocks.'
'And who's to say that she's not the first that's been off that land
this six months--close in with the coast, I mean? Depend upon it,
Mr. Moore,' he went on with his face full of earnestness betwixt his
grimaces, 'you're doing the right thing for your own peace of mind, and
in the cause of humanity....'
'Oh, it goes higher than humanity, man, higher than humanity,' I
interrupted.
'In finding out for yourself,' he continued, 'whether the hull's the
wreck of the "Lady Emma," and whether the captain, and his wife, and
your young lady are still aboard----'
'By heaven, yes, then!' I exclaimed; 'Only to think of her as _being_
on board, and perishing there for the want of my coming to her help!
Whether she's there or not, Cliffe, it was the right thing to do, as
you say, and even in that thought I find a sort of comfort. Shall you
heave-to when it comes on dark?'
'I'm for shoving on, sir, but we'll take no risks.'
'None, though the job of heaving the land into view should fill another
month.'
And still expectation and excitement so worked in me, I felt ill with
the conflict. I was up and down ceaselessly till the dusk blackened
the scene out. The cold drove me below, restlessness forced me above
again. It was always the same picture, the rolling and plunging figure
of the brig, gleaming with barbs, and spears, and motionless pennons
of ice: the glare of her band of topsail dingy against the ice beyond
as she swung it through the howling sweep of wind: the quick dazzle
of froth recoiling in thunder from the thrust of the bows: the large
grey swell coursed by the breaking surge, and to right and left, and
ahead and astern, the shadows and clear shapes of ice, some with brows
in the flying scud, some table-like and flashing like sunlight as the
seas charged them and burst, one showing a hatchet-like edge till our
rolling brig, opened it into a coast of marble that vanished in a haze
of mist and spray.
Happily, after it had been dark about an hour, the brig still blowing
forward under reefed topsail and foresail, whilst I sat in the cabin
warming myself, drinking some hot brandy and water, but always with
ears straining to catch a cry on deck, Cliffe came below, and gave me
the good news of a shift of wind into the north-west, with a scanting
of it, and a plenty of starlight, and the Southern Cross looking almost
upright.
'What does that signify?' said I.
'Nothing,' he answered with a cheerful grimace. 'Except, that as the
Southern Cross is upright at midnight on one day only in the year, the
sight of it almost on end now is interesting.'
'When is it actually upright?'
'On March 26.'
'D'ye know, Cliffe,' said I, getting up, meaning to take a look round,
'that it's comforted me sometimes to think of that symbol of God
overhanging these waters. It should be a sight to freshen a man's faith
in a time of distress.'
'Strange to find it hung up down here where they're all heathens,' said
Cliffe.
'Much ice?'
'No more than there was, sir.'
I went on deck. The dusk of the night was hard and clear, and I
observed a keen blue in the trembling gleam of many of the stars. But
though there was no wet in the air, I had never felt the cold so
bitter as on this night. The sight of the nearer of the ice mountains
in the gloom under the light of the stars was marvellously fine and
awful; some shone with a light of their own; it was the snow upon them,
I suppose, that made that sheen. I noticed, however, that though the
sea was covered with these faint and pallid masses, there was plenty of
sea-room in the lanes and highways they made. A startling and alarming
part was the crackling and crashing noises which came from them, and
shortly before I was driven below by the cold, an island on the port
quarter, wan as a cloud touched by a corner of moon, vanished; it may
have shown in another shape by daylight; it had overset and perhaps
rose flat and invisible in that light. But the spectacle was wonderful:
it made a deep impression on me. Cliffe who saw it bid me listen, and
sure enough after a little there came slanting through the wind such a
prodigious noise of hissing and seething that, but for knowing what
made it, you would have looked in its direction for the foaming waters
of a sudden gale.
There was to be little rest for the crew that night. Cliffe informed me
the men had been told that all hands would have to stand by throughout
the dark hours, ready to jump to the first call if the brig was to
remain a brig. A seaman was stationed on each bow: a third aloft on the
foreyard: the mate and the boatswain were to relieve each other every
two hours in keeping a look-out on the forecastle. A man was stationed
aft ready in a breath to help at the helm. The galley fire was kept
burning all night, and hot coffee, and at longer intervals small drams
of rum, were served out to the crew.
The chief peril lay in the smaller blocks of ice floating on the water;
they were hard to see before they were dangerously close to; and yet,
comparatively small as they were, any one of them was big enough to
knock a hole in the brig's bottom, and founder her out of hand.
Right through the night we held on. At first the cries of 'Ice ahead,'
'Ice on the port bow,' 'Starboard your helm,' and the like, alarmed me;
but I presently got used to them, nor indeed were they so frequent as
to be terrifying; once only, that is, in my hearing, was a cry raised
as for life or death in a sudden passion or panic; then it was an
immense flat ragged-edged piece of ice under the bow; a swift turn of
the helm sent the brig clear, giving us a sight of the stuff alongside,
and the brave little ship ploughed her way onwards.
Happily, it was midsummer, and the night comparatively short. The dawn
was fair and rosy, and the sun rose upon a dark blue sea, frothing far
as the eye could pierce, and magnificent with ice. I cannot express
the gorgeous scene of colour that sunrise called into being. In all
directions the ice lay in a hundred shapes, some of the islands
sparkling like prisms; I beheld floating cities of porcelain, enormous
shapes in alabaster, figures of marble, monstrous and grotesque as
those huge forms of rock which stand in a congregation of Titans at the
base of some of the precipitous heights of Table Bay.
But though there was plenty of ice in the south, there was an abundance
of room too for our passage; the mate came down from the fore royal
yard with a telescope slung on his back and said he saw no barrier; he
thought, but would not then swear, he could make out a faint shadow
of land. If he was right, then the mountain that centres Coronation
Island was in sight! The breeze was fresh out of the north-west, with
a high following sea, and soon after the sun was risen and Cliffe had
taken a long look round, he ordered sail to be made. The foretopsail
was loosed, reefs shaken out, and cloths piled upon the little vessel
to the topgallant yards; _then_, like something alive and released, the
little ship fled southwards.