THE ICEBERG.
The loss of the spars I have named was no great matter, nor were we to
be intimidated by such weather as was to be expected off Cape Horn. For
what sailor entering this icy and tempestuous tract of waters but knows
that here he must expect to find Nature in her most violent moods,
crueller and more unreckonable than a mad woman, who one moment looks
with a silent sinister sullenness upon you, and the next is shrieking
with devilish laughter as she makes as if to spring upon you?
But there was an inveteracy in the gale which had driven us down to this
part that bore heavily upon our spirits. It was impossible to trim the
ballast. We dared not veer so as to bring the ship on the other tack.
And the slope of the decks, added to the fierce wild motions of the
fabric, made our situation as unendurable as that of one who should be
confined in a cask and sent rolling downhill. It was impossible to light
a fire, and we could not therefore dress our food or obtain a warm
drink. The cold was beyond language severe. The rigging was glazed with
ice, and great pendants of the silvery brilliance of crystal hung from
the yards, bowsprit, and catheads, whilst the sails were frozen to the
hardness of granite, and lay like sheets of iron rolled up in gaskets of
steel. We had no means of drying our clothes, nor were we able so to
move as by exercise we might keep ourselves warm. Never once did the sun
shine to give us the encouragement of his glorious beam. Hour after hour
found us amid the same distracting scene: the tall olive-coloured seas
hurling out their rage in foam as they roared towards us in ranges of
dissolving cliffs; the wind screaming and whistling through our grey and
frozen rigging; the water washing in floods about our decks, with the
ends of the running gear snaking about in the torrent, and the live
stock lying drowned and stiff in their coops and pen near the caboose.
With helm lashed and yards pointed to the wind thus we lay, thus we
drifted, steadily trending with the send of each giant surge further and
deeper into the icy regions of the south-west, helpless, foreboding,
disconsolate.
It was the night of the fourth day of the month. The crew were forward
in the forecastle, and I knew not if any man was on deck saving myself.
In truth, there was no place in which a watch could be kept, if it were
not in the companion hatch. Such was the violence with which the seas
broke over the brig that it was at the risk of his life a man crawled
the distance betwixt the forecastle and the quarter-deck. It had been as
thick as mud all day, and now upon this flying gloom of haze, sleet, and
spray had descended the blackness of the night.
I stood in the companion as in a sentry-box, with my eyes just above the
cover. Nothing was to be seen but sheets of ghostly white water sweeping
up the blackness on the vessel's lee, or breaking and boiling to
windward. It was sheer blind chaos to the sight, and you might have
supposed that the brig was in the midst of some enormous vaporous
turmoil, so illusive and indefinable were the shadows of the
storm-tormented night--one block of blackness melting into another, with
sometimes an extraordinary faintness of light speeding along the dark
sky like to the dim reflection of a lanthorn flinging its radiance from
afar, which no doubt must have been the reflection of some particular
bright and extensive bed of foam upon a sooty belly on high, hanging
lower than the other clouds. I say, you might have thought yourself in
the midst of some hellish conflict of vapour but for the substantial
thunder of the surges upon the vessel and the shriek of the slung masses
of water flying like cannon balls between the masts.
After a long and eager look round into the obscurity, semi-lucent with
froth, I went below for a mouthful of spirits and a bite of supper, the
hour being eight bells in the second dog watch as we say, that is, eight
o'clock in the evening. The captain and carpenter were in the cabin.
Upon the swing-tray over the table were a piece of corned beef, some
biscuit, and a bottle of hollands.
"Nothing to be seen, I suppose, Rodney?" says the captain.
"Nothing," I answered. "She looks well up, and that's all that can be
said."
"I've been hove to under bare poles more than once in my time," said the
carpenter, "but never through so long a stretch. I doubt if you'll find
many vessels to look up to it as this here _Laughing Mary_ does."
"The loss of hamper forward will make her the more weatherly," says
Captain Rosy. "But we're in an ugly part of the globe. When bad sailors
die they're sent here, I reckon. The worst nautical sinner can't be hove
to long off the Horn without coming out of it with a purged soul. He
must start afresh to deserve further punishment."
"Well, here's a breeze that can't go on blowing much longer," cries the
carpenter. "The place it comes from must give out soon, unless a new
trade wind's got fixed into a whole gale for this here ocean."
"What southing do you allow our drift will be giving us, captain?" I
asked, munching a piece of beef.
"All four mile an hour," he answered. "If this goes on I shall look to
make some discoveries. The Antarctic circle won't be far off presently,
and since you're a scholar, Rodney, I'll leave you to describe what's
inside of it, though boil me if I don't have the naming of the tallest
land; for, d'ye see, I've a mind to be known after I'm dead, and
there's nothing like your signature on a mountain to be remembered by."
He grinned and put his hand out for the bottle, and after a pull passed
it to the carpenter. I guessed by his jocosity that he had already been
making somewhat free; for although I love a bold face put upon a
difficulty, ours was a situation in which only a tipsy man could find
food for merriment.
At this instant we were startled by a wild and fearful shout on deck. It
sounded high above the sweeping and seething of the wind and the hissing
of the lashed waters, and it penetrated the planks with a note that gave
it an inexpressible character of anguish.
"A man washed overboard!" bawled the carpenter, springing to his feet.
"No!" cried I, for my younger and shrewder ear had caught a note in the
cry that persuaded me it was not as the carpenter said; and in an
instant the three of us jumped up the ladder and gained the deck.
The moment I was in the gale the same affrighted cry rang down along the
wind from some man forward: _"For God's sake tumble up before we are
upon it!"_
"What do you see?" I roared, sending my voice, trumpet-fashion, through
my hands; for as to my own and the sight of Captain Rosy and the
carpenter, why, it was like being struck blind to come on a sudden out
of the lighted cabin into the black night.
Any reply that might have been attempted was choked out by the dive of
the brig's head into a sea, which furiously flooded her forecastle and
came washing aft like milk in the darkness till it was up to our knees.
"See there!" suddenly roared the carpenter.
"Where, man, where?" bawled the captain.
But in this brief time my sight had grown used to the night, and I saw
the object before the carpenter could answer. It lay on our lee beam,
but how far off no man could have told in that black thickness. It stood
against the darkness and hung out a dim complexion of light, or rather
of pallidness, that was not light--not to be described by the pen. It
was like a small hill of snow, and looked as snow does or the foam of
the sea in darkness, and it came and went with our soaring and sinking.
"Ice!" I shouted to the captain.
"I see it!" he answered, in a voice that satisfied me the consternation
he was under had settled the fumes of the spirits out of his head. "We
must drive her clear at all risks."
There was no need to call the men. To the second cry that had been
raised by one among them who had come out of the forecastle and seen the
berg, they had tumbled up as sailors will when they jump for their
lives; and now they came staggering, splashing, crawling aft to us, for
the lamp in the cabin made a sheen in the companion hatch, and they
could see us as we stood there.
"Men," cried Captain Rosy, "yonder's a gravestone for our carcases if we
are not lively! Cast the helm adrift!" (we steered by a tiller). "Two
hands stand by it. Forward, some of ye, and loose the stay-foresail, and
show the head of it."
The fellows hung in the wind. I could not wonder. The bowsprit had been
sprung when the jibboom was wrenched from the cap by the fall of the
top-gallant-mast; it still had to bear the weight of the heavy spritsail
yard, and the drag of the staysail might carry the spar overboard with
the men upon it. Yet it was our best chance; the one sail most speedily
released and hoisted, the one that would pay the brig's head off
quickest, and the only fragment that promised to stand.
"Jump!" roared the captain, in a passion of hurry. "Great thunder! 'tis
close aboard! You'll leave me no sea room for veering if you delay an
instant."
"Follow me who will!" I cried out; "and others stand by ready to hoist
away."
Thus speaking--for there seemed to my mind a surer promise of death in
hesitation at this supreme moment than in twenty such risks as laying
out on the bowsprit signified--I made for the lee of the weather
bulwarks, and blindly hauled myself forward by such pins and gear as
came to my hands. A man might spend his life on the ocean and never have
to deal with such a passage as this. It was not the bitter cold only,
though perhaps of its full fierceness the wildness of my feelings did
not suffer me to be sensible; it was the pouring of volumes of water
upon me from over the rail, often tumbling upon my head with such weight
as nearly to beat the breath out of my body and sink me to the deck; it
was the frenzy excited in me by the tremendous obligation of despatch
and my retardment by the washing seas, the violent motions of the brig,
the encumbrance of gear and deck furniture adrift and sweeping here and
there, and the sense that the vessel might be grinding her bows against
the iceberg before I should be able to reach the bowsprit. All this it
was that filled me with a kind of madness, by the sheer force of which
alone I was enabled to reach the forecastle, for had I gone to my duty
coldly, without agitation of spirits, my heart must have failed me
before I had measured half the length of the brig.
I got on to the bowsprit nearly stifled by the showering of the seas,
holding an open knife between my teeth, half dazed by the prodigious
motion of the light brig, which, at this extreme end of her, was to be
felt to the full height of its extravagance. At every plunge I expected
to be buried, and every moment I was prepared to be torn from my hold.
It was a fearful time; the falling off of the brig into the trough--and
never was I in a hollower and more swelling sea--her falling off, I say,
in the act of veering might end us out of hand by the rolling of a surge
over us big enough to crush the vessel down fathoms out of sight; and
then there was that horrible heap of faint whiteness leaping out of the
dense blackness of the sky, gathering a more visible sharpness of
outline with every liquid heave that forked us high into the flying
night with shrieking rigging and boiling decks.
Commending myself to God, for I was now to let go with my hands, I
pulled the knife from my teeth, and feeling for the gaskets or lines
which bound the sail to the spar, I cut and hacked as fast as I could
ply my arms. In a flash the gale, whipping into a liberated fold of the
canvas, blew the whole sail out; the bowsprit reeled and quivered under
me; I danced off it with incredible despatch, shouting to the men to
hoist away. The head of the staysail mounted in thunder, and the
slatting of its folds and the thrashing of its sheet was like the
rattling of heavy field-pieces whisked at full gallop over a stony road.
"High enough!" I bawled, guessing enough was shown, for I could not see.
"Get a drag upon the sheet, lads, and then aft with you for your lives!"
Scarce had I let forth my breath in this cry when I heard the blast as
of a gun, and knew by that the sail was gone; an instant after wash came
a mountainous sea sheer over the weather bulwarks fair betwixt the fore
and main rigging; but happily, standing near the fore shrouds, I was
holding on with both hands to the topsail halliards whilst calling to
the men, so that being under the rail, which broke the blow of the sea,
and holding on too, no mischief befell me, only that for about twenty
seconds I stood in a horrible fury and smother of frothing water,
hearing nothing, seeing nothing, with every faculty in me so numbed and
dulled by the wet, cold, and horror of our situation, that I knew not
whether in that space of time I was in the least degree sensible of what
had happened or what might befall.
The water leaving the deck, I rallied, though half-drowned, and
staggered aft, and found the helm deserted, nor could I see any signs of
my companions. I rushed to the tiller, and putting my whole weight and
force to it, drove it up to windward and secured it by a turn of its own
rope; for ice or no ice--and for the moment I was so blinded by the wet
that I could not see the berg--my madness now was to get the brig before
the sea and out of the trough, advised by every instinct in me that such
another surge as that which had rolled over her must send her to the
bottom in less time than it would take a man to cry "O God!"
A figure came out of the blackness on the lee side of the deck.
"Who is that?" said he. It was Captain Rosy.
I answered.
"What, Rodney! alive?" cried he. "I think I have been struck
insensible."
Two more figures came crawling aft. Then two more. They were the
carpenter and three seamen.
I cried out, "Who was at the helm when that sea was shipped?"
A man answered, "Me, Thomas Jobling."
"Where's your mate?" I asked; and it seemed to me that I was the only
man who had his senses full just then.
"He was washed forward along with me," he replied.
Now a fifth man joined us, but before I could question him as to the
others, the captain, with a scream like an epileptic's cry, shrieked,
"It's all over with us! We are upon it!"
I looked and perceived the iceberg to be within a musket-shot, whence it
was clear that it had been closer to us when first sighted than the
blackness of the night would suffer us to distinguish. In a time like
this at sea events throng so fast they come in a heap, and even if the
intelligence were not confounded by the uproar and peril, if indeed it
were as placid as in any time of perfect security, it could not possibly
take note of one-tenth that happens.
I confess that, for my part, I was very nearly paralyzed by the nearness
of the iceberg, and by the cry of the captain, and by the perception
that there was nothing to be done. That which I best recollect is the
appearance of the mass of ice lying solidly, like a little island, upon
the seas which roared in creaming waters about it. Every blow of the
black and arching surge was reverberated in a dull hollow tremble back
to the ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body was
not taller than our mastheads, yet it showed like a mountain hanging
over us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep Pacific hollow,
leaving us staring upwards out of the instant's stagnation of the trough
with lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes. It put a kind of film
of faint light outside the lines of its own shape, and this served to
magnify it, and it showed spectrally in the darkness as though it
reflected some visionary light that came neither from the sea nor the
sky. These points I recollect; likewise the maddening and maddened
motion of our vessel, sliding towards it down one midnight declivity to
another.
All other features were swallowed up in the agony of the time. One
monstrous swing the brig gave, like to some doomed creature's last
delirious struggle; the bowsprit caught the ice and snapped with the
noise of a great tree crackling in fire. I could hear the masts breaking
overhead--the crash and blows of spars and yards torn down and striking
the hull; above all the grating of the vessel, that was now head on to
the sea and swept by the billows, broadside on, along the sharp and
murderous projections. Two monster seas tumbled over the bows, floated
me off my legs, and dashed me against the tiller, to which I clung. I
heard no cries. I regained my feet, clinging with a death-grip to the
tiller, and, seeing no one near me, tried to holloa, to know if any man
were living, but could not make my voice sound.
The fearful grating noise ceased on a sudden, and the faintness of the
berg loomed upon the starboard bow. We had been hurled clear of it and
were to leeward; but what was our condition? I tried to shout again, but
to no purpose; and was in the act of quitting the tiller to go forward
when I was struck over the brows by something from aloft--a block, as I
believe--and fell senseless upon the deck.