"The mariner whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar."
Coleridge.
Scene: The good ship _Brilliant_ in the Doldrums. Crew at their
Christmas dinner. The doctor continues his story.
"`In the year 18--, I sailed from Hull in the good barque _Constance_,
bound for Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen, in pursuit of seals and walruses.
I was a very young man then, and, indeed, white though my hair be and
snowy my beard, I am not old yet. It is not age that has made me grey,
but grief, and one of the most terrible experiences it has probably ever
been the lot of man to undergo.
"`Our voyage to the Arctic seas was a pleasant enough one. We did not
encounter a single gale, and we made the country in less than a
fortnight. We met the seals a little north of Mount Beerenberg, coming
southward to the low pack ice in thousands; nay, but in millions; for
the sea was black with their beautiful heads for miles on each side of
our ship, and as far north as we could see from the masthead. Oh,
didn't our hearts beat high then! We saw fortune within our reach, and
had bright visions of a splendid voyage, a ship full to the hatches,
with bings of skins on deck, and an early return to sunny England, our
sweethearts and wives. We put about and followed the seals, and ere
many days were past had the satisfaction of seeing them take the ice.
There would soon be enough to fill all the ships in the Greenland fleet.
We had but to wait a week or two until the young were big enough to
capture. What a happy crew we were now! It was singing forward and
laughing aft, all day long. But alas! and alas! for the fickleness of
fortune, a wretched, greedy old Dutch ship came in, and no sooner saw
the seals on the ice than she lowered her boats, and in spite of our
remonstrances, proceeded to the ice. Twenty-four hours afterwards there
was not one single seal, of all the myriads that had taken the ice,
visible anywhere, above or below--the Dutch boats had scared them all
away. It was all our captain and myself--I had only that spring got my
certificate as mate--could do to prevent our men from boarding the
Dutchman, and taking summary vengeance on that idiot skipper and his
idiot crew.
"`We got up sail as soon as possible, and began forging through the
loose pack ice, in the hope of again falling in with fortune in the
shape of seals. We did sight them far in towards the west, and on
heavier ice than we generally cared to venture among; but we did not
think twice about the matter then. We worked our vessel in, and in, and
in, towards our game, when the wind failed us all at once, and every
seal disappeared as if by magic, or as if they had been but phantoms of
the brain. To add to our grief, hard frost set in, and lasted for many
weeks. We hoped against hope we would get clear before long, and still
be in time to follow the old seals northwards toward Spitzbergen. So we
dreamt. Well, clouds banked up on the southern horizon at last, and
snow fell, such snow as I had never seen before, and have seen but once
or twice since. Every flake was as big as a hand. In less than twelve
hours the whole of that vast ice-pack was one level surface, one
unbroken field of dazzling snow. But then came the wind--a fierce and
fearful gale--and the bergs rose and fell around us and tossed and
tumbled, as if we had been in the middle of a troubled sea, the waves of
which were walls of snow. Our barque was heaved up, now forward, now
aft, and ground and torn, till we could hear the very timbers cracking
and rending beneath us, and we knew then she was doomed--knew that when
the ice that nipped her receded, and the pressure abated, she would
sink. This happened sooner far than we could have believed possible.
While the wind still roared through the rigging, and all between decks
was as dark as a winter midnight with the clouds of drifting, driving
snow, suddenly the sides of the saloon, in which the captain, myself,
and the other mate were sitting, came crashing and splintering in upon
us, and we had barely time to spring to the companion ladder before the
freer ice was grinding amid a chaos of broken boards and timbers in the
very place where we had been sitting barely three seconds before.
Almost at the same moment the after-part of the ship took fire.
"`How this happened I cannot tell. Friction itself would fire the rum,
or the blazing coals from the broken stove might have been thrown among
the staved casks. Explosion after explosion occurred; then the water
rushed forward, and the vessel began at once to be sucked under. We had
barely a quarter of an hour to clear out, but even in that short time we
managed to land three boats with blankets and provisions on the ice, and
this, too, in spite of the storm, in spite of the numbing wind, and the
drifting, choking, powdery snow.
"`We huddled together beneath the boats for hours and hours, and when
the wind went down at last, we crawled out--those who could crawl--the
living from among the dead, the maimed and sick. Out of a crew of
thirty-nine only twenty-four answered to their names the morning after
the wreck of the good barque _Constance_. We sunk the dead between the
bergs, and waited for others to die--waited days and days; then the
remainder of us started southwards with two of the whalers to seek for
the open water. The frost had set in again harder than ever, and the
sun was very bright, but it was a terrible journey, nevertheless, and
five more of us, including our captain, succumbed to cold and hardship
before we stood at last on the edge of the solid pack with the open
water all before us.
"`Ay, there it was--the open water, the Southern Sea--black as ink in
the foreground, blue beyond, and dotted here and there with little
floating bergs, just as the sky above was flecked with little fleecy,
floating clouds. And we knew well that hundreds of miles beneath the
horizon lay Iceland, the country we must try to reach, even if we
perished in the attempt.
"`We launched our boats and grasped our oars, and so began our long and
dangerous voyage. Provisions we had, and compasses; water we had none,
but we took on board huge pieces of fresh-water ice that we were lucky
enough to find on top of the salt sea bergs.
"`All went well for days and days, and, much to our joy, a breeze sprang
up. The sail was set. We were so far south now that, summer though it
was, the sun set; then we steered by the stars, for as yet clouds had
not obscured the sky. I had command of our boat; the steward had charge
of the other.
"`One morning I was saddened to see a body launched overboard from our
companion boat, which was a little way ahead at the time. As we sailed
up I had just time to notice it was the steward himself ere a terrible
specimen of the hammer-headed shark sprang, monster-like, out of the
sea, and next moment the body had disappeared.
"`The rugged mountain peaks of Iceland at last! With what joy we hailed
them, only those who have been so situated can understand or appreciate.
Yes, the mountains were very rugged, very much peaked and jagged, but
we knew that in the freer glens betwixt them, and at the head waters of
many a lonely fiord, dwelt a rude but kindly-hearted people, who would
gladly welcome and shelter the shipwrecked mariners.
"`And in two days at the furthest our trials would be over; so we fondly
imagined. Alas! they were but beginning. In a few hours after we had
sighted the distant hills the wind completely failed us, while up from
the south came, rolling and tumbling along the surface of the ocean, a
bank of dark fog, and we were soon completely enveloped. We called to
the other boat to keep near us, and trusting now entirely to our
compasses, we took to our oars once more.
"`For half a day our boats kept together, but as soon as night and
darkness fell, the wind got up, and the sea became rough, dashing
continually on board of us, and necessitating constant work in baling.
Towards morning the wind had increased to a gale, and we were running
before it under our small, closely reefed mainsail and a trifle of jib.
Where we were running we knew not, and, I think, hardly cared. We were
completely exhausted with the wet and the cold. Our ice and the
provisions were gone, and even the compass lost.
"`The sun broke through the fog at last, and to some extent the wind
abated, but the sea still ran houses high. I looked up from the place
where I sat, mechanically grasping the tiller. Heavens! what a sight I
witnessed! When night had come on, we had been seven in our boat; now
we were but three, that is two more than myself. Of the others two had
leapt overboard mad, or been washed away; two sat alive but pale and
ghastly, grasping in white-blue hands, that I could see were sadly
frost-bitten, the icy sheets of the sails. One poor fellow was curled
up dead under the bows; the other had fallen backwards over a thwart as
if he had caught a crab, and there he lay with his long yellow hair
floating in the water with which the boat was half full, and his
sightless eyes turned sunwards.
"The life still there upon his hair,
The death within his eyes."
"Bale, men, bale the boat," I cried, "bale her, or we shall sink."
"`They turned their awful cadaverous faces towards me, they opened their
mouths as if to speak, but a sound 'twixt a moan and a gurgle was all
that came from their throats; then they lifted their hands and tapped
the backs of their fingers against the gunwale of the boat, and they
rattled as if they had been made of wood, so sorely were they frozen.
"`Many, many times during that long and dreadful day did those two poor
fellows turn towards me, and they kept signing, signing to me for the
help they were pleading for in vain, and ever from their throats came
that awful gurgling moan. Oh! men, I think I see and hear them now.
"`Night fell at last, night and pitchy darkness, and next morning I was
alone on the sea. Alone with the dead!
"`And all that day I sat there, as if in the power of some strange
nightmare. The use of every limb I retained as well as that of head and
body, but still I did not or could not move, but I kept praying, praying
not for the cold and icy wind to fall, not for the clouds and fog to
roll away, or the sea to go down, but praying for death, a share of the
death I saw around me.
"`Towards the afternoon I think I must have slept or fallen into a kind
of a trance. The wind had quite gone down when I again recovered a sort
of consciousness. There was no more broken water, but a heavy tumbling
swell on the eastward when I looked. These huge heaving smooth waves
seemed to take on the appearance of monsters of the deep, raising their
awful heads and backs, grim and grey and cold, above the sea; but
westward they were moving masses crimson and black. The sky was a
wonderful sight. From the sun's upper limit to the zenith it was hung
with curtains of blue-grey clouds, one behind the other, as it were, the
edges all zig-zagged and fringed with red. All round the sun itself was
a coppery haze. To the north the sky was clear and of a bright lemon
yellow; to the east it was clear also, and _green_.
"`I sat gazing at clouds, and sky till they faded into the gloom of
night; they got thinner and thinner then, and stars shone through them,
and soon they vanished entirely, and the stars had it all their own way.
"`I felt no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no pleasure; my condition was
one of pure apathy; my very soul appeared dead within me.
"`Soon a bright light shone out of the north with tints of carmine, pale
yellow, and green; it was the aurora, and long fringes of pale
phosphorescent light descended from the sky overhead. I could have
touched them with my hand had they been tangible. They were independent
of the far-off aurora. They assumed the forms of gigantic fern leaves
and danced dazzlingly before my eyes, and I could almost imagine they
emitted a hissing, crackling sound.
"`Then my brain began to reel, and I fell forward in the boat among my
dead companions.
"`A shock awoke me at last. Cold and shivering now, I sat up and rubbed
my eyes. Morning was breaking gloomy and grey over the sea, and some
gulls were wheeling and screaming about in the air.
"`Once again the shock, and the boat trembled from stem to stern, and
some birds rose up out of the bows and floated slowly away. They had
been gorging on the dead.
"`The shocks to the boat were easily accounted for: the sea was alive
with monster sharks.
"`O God! men, it was a fearful sight. There was something appalling and
horrible in the very way they _gambolled_ around the boat. Their eyes
told me one thing: they had come for the dead--and the living.
"`I cannot tell you whether I really did lift the bodies of my late
companions and throw them overboard. I would even now fain believe this
was but a dream. If so, it was terribly real, the fighting, wrangling
sharks in the sea, the birds wheeling and screaming above.
"`My boat was picked up that day by some Icelandic fisherman; there was
no one in it but myself, men, white in hair, white in beard, as you now
behold me.'"
So ended the spectioneer's story, and so ended that Christmas dinner in
the Doldrums, but both Kenneth and Archie long, long after this used to
speak about it amid other scenes and in other climes, and both agreed it
was one of the pleasantest afternoons ever they had spent in life.
The two friends made many a voyage together in the _Brilliant_, and
together came through no little adventure, and saw many a strange sight
in many a strange sea. They came to love the vessel at last, for real
sailors do love their ships. They loved her and called her the saucy
_Brilliant_, and the dear old ship, and quite a host of other pet names.
"But alas! and alas?" said Kenneth to Archie one day, while they stood
together on the quarter-deck, "we are not making our fortunes. We will
never get rich at sea. And by-and-bye, you know, we'll be getting
fearfully old."
"Yes," said Archie, "I'm feeling old already. We are both of us over
twenty."
"Sad thought! yes?" added Kenneth. "So I propose we leave the dear old
stupid craft at the end of this voyage, Archie."
And so they did, reader. And thus our tale runs on, but the scenes must
change.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Book Two.