CHAPTER I.

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

THE FROZEN PIRATE.

BY W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF "THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR," "THE LADY MAUD," "A SAILOR'S

SWEETHEART," ETC., ETC.

PH[OE]NIX PUBLISHING CO.,

NEW YORK.

CONTENTS.

I. The Storm

II. The Iceberg

III. I Lose My Companions

IV. I Quit the Wreck

V. I Sight a White Coast

VI. An Island of Ice

VII. I am Startled by a Discovery

VIII. The Frozen Schooner

IX. I Lose my Boat

X. Another Startling Discovery

XI. I Make Further Discoveries

XII. A Lonely Night

XIII. I Explore the Hold and Forecastle

XIV. An Extraordinary Occurrence

XV. The Pirate's Story

XVI. I Hear of a Great Treasure

XVII. The Treasure

XVIII. We Talk over our Situation

XIX. We Take a View of the Ice

XX. A Merry Evening

XXI. We Explore the Mines

XXII. A Change Comes Over the Frenchman

XXIII. The Ice Breaks Away

XXIV. The Frenchman Dies

XXV. The Schooner Frees Herself

XXVI. I am Troubled by Thoughts of the Treasure

XXVII. I Encounter a Whaler

XXVIII. I Strike a Bargain with the Yankee

XXIX. I Value the Lading

XXX. Our Progress to the Channel

XXXI. The End

Postscript

THE FROZEN PIRATE.

CHAPTER I.

THE STORM.

The _Laughing Mary_ was a light ship, as sailors term a vessel that

stands high upon the water, having discharged her cargo at Callao, from

which port we were proceeding in ballast to Cape Town, South Africa,

there to call for orders. Our run to within a few parallels of the

latitude of the Horn had been extremely pleasant; the proverbial

mildness of the Pacific Ocean was in the mellow sweetness of the wind

and in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced swell; but scarce had

we passed the height of forty-nine degrees when the weather grew sullen

and dark, a heavy bank of clouds of a livid hue rose in the north-east,

and the wind came and went in small guns, the gusts venting themselves

in dreary moans, insomuch that our oldest hands confessed they had never

heard blasts more portentous.

The gale came on with some lightning and several claps of thunder and

heavy rain. Though it was but two o'clock in the afternoon, the air was

so dusky that the men had to feel for the ropes; and when the first of

the tempest stormed down upon us the appearance of the sea was

uncommonly terrible, being swept and mangled into boiling froth in the

north-east quarter, whilst all about us and in the south-west it lay in

a sort of swollen huddle of shadows, glooming into the darkness of the

sky without offering the smallest glimpse of the horizon.

In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down to

the close-reefed main-topsail; yet, though we were dead before the

outfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed of

smoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the bows like a

scattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind. The

bursting of the topsail was like the explosion of a large cannon. In a

breath the brig was smothered with froth torn up in huge clouds, and

hurled over and ahead of her in vast quivering bodies that filled the

wind with a dismal twilight of their own, in which nothing was visible

but their terrific speeding. Through these slinging, soft, and singing

masses of spume drove the rain in horizontal steel-like lines, which

gleamed in the lightning stroke as though indeed they were barbed

weapons of bright metal, darted by armies of invisible spirits raving

out their war cries as they chased us.

The storm made a loud thunder in the sky, and this tremendous utterance

dominated without subduing the many screaming, hissing, shrieking, and

hooting noises raised in the rigging and about the decks, and the wild,

seething, weltering sound of the sea, maddened by the gale and

struggling in its enormous passion under the first choking and iron grip

of the hurricane's hand.

I had used the ocean for above ten years, but never had I encountered

anything suddener or fiercer in the form of weather than this. Though

the wind blew from the tropics it was as cruel in bitterness as frost.

Yet there was neither snow nor hail, only rain that seemed to pass like

a knife through the head if you showed your face to it for a second. It

was necessary to bring the brig to the wind before the sea rose. The

helm was put down, and without a rag of canvas on her she came round;

but when she brought the hurricane fair abeam, I thought it was all over

with us. She lay down to it until her bulwarks were under water, and the

sheer-poles in the rigging above the rail hidden.

In this posture she hung so long that Captain Rosy, the master, bawled

to me to tell the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmast rigging.

But the _Laughing Mary_, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship and

lightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through our

seizing a small tarpaulin in the weather main shrouds, she erected her

masts afresh, like some sentient creature pricking its ears for the

affray, and with that showed herself game and made indifferently good

weather of it.

But though the first rage of the storm was terrible enough, its

fierceness did not come to its height till about one o'clock in the

middle watch. Long before then the sea had grown mountainous, and the

dance of our eggshell of a brig upon it was sickening and affrighting.

The heads of the Andean peaks of black water looked tall enough to

brush the lowering soot of the heavens with the blue and yellow

phosphoric fires which sparkled ghastly amid the bursting froth. Bodies

of foam flew like the flashings of pale sheet-lightning through our

rigging and over us, and a dreadful roaring of mighty surges in mad

career, and battling as they ran, rose out of the sea to deepen yet the

thunderous bellowing of the hurricane on high.

No man could show himself on deck and preserve his life. Between the

rails it was waist high, and this water, converted by the motions of the

brig into a wild torrent, had its volume perpetually maintained by

ton-loads of sea falling in dull and pounding crashes over the bows on

to the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm and

await the issue below, for, if we were to be drowned, it would make a

more easy foundering to go down dry and warm in the cabin, than to

perish half-frozen and already nearly strangled by the bitter cold and

flooded tempest on deck.

There was Captain Rosy; there was myself, by name Paul Rodney, mate of

the brig; and there were the remaining seven of a crew, including the

carpenter. We sat in the cabin, one of us from time to time clawing his

way up the ladder to peer through the companion, and we looked at one

another with the melancholy of malefactors waiting to be called from

their cells for the last jaunt to Tyburn.

"May God have mercy upon us!" cries the carpenter. "There must be an

earthquake inside this storm. Something more than wind is going to the

making of these seas. Hear that, now! naught less than a forty-foot

chuck-up could ha' ended in that souse, mates."

"A man can die but once," says Captain Rosy, "and he'll not perish the

quicker for looking at his end with a stout heart;" and with that he put

his hand into the locker on which he had been sitting and pulled out a

jar of whisky, which, after putting his lips to it and keeping them

glued there whilst you could have counted twenty, he handed to me, and

so it went round, coming back to him empty.

I often have the sight of that cabin in my mind's eye; and it was not

long afterwards that it would visit me as such a vision of comfort, I

would with a grateful heart have accepted it with tenfold darker

conditions of danger, had it been possible to exchange my situation for

it. A lantern hung from a beam, and swung violently to the rolling and

pitching of the brig. The alternations of its light put twenty different

meanings, one after another, into the settled dismal and rueful

expressions in the faces of my companions. We were clad in warm clothes,

and the steam rose from the damp in our coats and trousers like vapour

from wet straw. The drink mottled some of our faces, but the spirituous

tincture only imparted a quality of irony to the melancholy of our

visages, as if our mournfulness were not wholly sincere, when, God

knows, our hearts were taken up with counting the minutes when we should

find ourselves bursting for want of breath under water.

Thus it continued till daybreak, all which time we strove to encourage

one another as best we could, sometimes with words, sometimes with

putting the bottle about. It was impossible for any of us at any moment

to show more than our noses above the companion; and even at that you

needed the utmost caution, for the decks being full of water, it was

necessary to await the lurch of the vessel before moving the slide or

cover to the companion, else you stood to drown the cabin.

Being exceedingly anxious, for the brig lay unwatched, I looked forth on

one occasion longer than the others chose to venture, and beheld the

most extravagant scene of raging commotion it could enter the brain of

man to imagine. The night was as black as the bottom of a well; but the

prodigious swelling and flinging of white waters hove a faintness upon

the air that was in its way a dim light, by which it was just possible

to distinguish the reeling masts to the height of the tops, and to

observe the figure of the brig springing black and trembling out of the

head of a surge that had broken over and smothered her as in a cauldron,

and to note the shapes of the nearer liquid acclivities as they bore

down upon our weather bow, catching the brig fair under the bluff, and

so sloping her that she seemed to stand end on, and so heeling her that

the sea would wash to the height of the main hatch. Indeed, had she been

loaded, and therefore deep, she could not have lived an hour in that

hollow and frightful ocean; but having nothing in her but ballast she

was like a bladder, and swung up the surges and blew away to leeward

like an empty cask.

When the dawn broke something of its midnight fury went out of the gale.

The carpenter made shift to sound the well, and to our great

satisfaction found but little water, only as much as we had a right to

suppose she would take in above. But it was impossible to stand at the

pumps, so we returned to the cabin and brewed some cold punch and did

what we could to keep our spirits hearty. By noon the wind had weakened

yet, but the sea still ran very heavily, and the sky was uncommonly

thick with piles of dusky, yellowish, hurrying clouds; and though we

could fairly reckon upon our position, the atmosphere was so nipping it

was difficult to persuade ourselves that Cape Horn was not close aboard.

We could now work the pumps, and a short spell freed the brig. We got up

a new main-topsail and bent it, and, setting the reefed foresail, put

the vessel before the wind, and away she ran, chased by the swollen

seas. Thus we continued till by dead reckoning we calculated that we

were about thirty leagues south of the parallel of the Horn, and in

longitude eighty-seven degrees west. We then boarded our larboard tacks

and brought the brig as close to the wind as it was proper to lay her

for a progress that should not be wholly leeway; but four hours after we

had handled the braces the gale, that had not veered two points since it

first came on to blow, stormed up again into its first fury; and the

morning of the 1st of July, _anno_ 1801, found the _Laughing Mary_

passionately labouring in the midst of an enraged Cape Horn sea, her

jibboom and fore top-gallant mast gone, her ballast shifted, so that her

posture even in a calm would have exhibited her with her starboard

channels under, and her decks swept by enormous surges, which, fetching

her larboard bilge dreadful blows, thundered in mighty green masses over

her.