I LOSE MY COMPANIONS.
I lay for a long while insensible; and that I should have recovered my
mind instead of dying in that swoon I must ever account as the greatest
wonder of a life that has not been wanting in the marvellous. I had no
sooner sat up than all that had happened and my present situation
instantly came to me. My hair was stiff with ice; there was no more
feeling in my hands than had they been of stone; my clothes weighed upon
me like a suit of armour, so inflexibly hard were they frozen. Yet I got
upon my legs, and found that I could stand and walk, and that life
flowed warm in my veins, for all that I had been lying motionless for an
hour or more, laved by water that would have become ice had it been
still.
It was intensely dark; the binnacle lamp was extinguished, and the light
in the cabin burned too dimly to throw the faintest colour upon the
hatchway. One thing I quickly noticed, that the gale had broken and blew
no more than a fresh breeze. The sea still ran very high, but though
every surge continued to hurl its head of snow, and the heavens to
resemble ink from contrast with the passage, as it seemed, close under
them of these pallid bodies, there was less spite in its wash, less
fury in its blow. The multitudinous roaring of the heaving blackness had
sobered into a hard and sullen growling, a sound as of thunder among
mountains heard in a valley.
The brig pitched and rolled heavily. Much of the buoyancy of her earlier
dance was gone out of her. Nevertheless, I could not persuade myself
that this sluggishness was altogether due to the water she had taken in.
It was wonderful, however, that she should still be afloat. No man could
have heard the rending and grating of her side against the ice without
supposing that every plank in it was being torn out.
Finding that I had the use of my voice, I holloaed as loudly as I could,
but no human note responded. Three or four times I shouted, giving some
of the people their names, but in vain. Father of mercy! I thought, what
has come to pass? Is it possible that all my companions have been washed
overboard? Certainly, five men at least were living before we fouled the
ice. And again I cried out, "Is there any one alive?" looking wildly
along the black decks, and putting so much force into my voice with the
consternation that the thought of my being alone raised in me, that I
had like to have burst a blood-vessel.
My loneliness was more terrible to me than any other condition of my
situation. It was dreadful to be standing, nearly dead with cold, in
utter darkness, upon the flooded decks of a hull wallowing miserably
amid the black hollows and eager foaming peaks of the labouring sea,
convinced that she was slowly filling, and that at any moment she might
go down with me; it was dreadful, I say, to be thus placed, and to feel
that I was in the heart of the rudest, most desolate space of sea in the
world, into which the commerce of the earth dispatched but few ships all
the year round. But no feature of my lamentable situation so affrighted
me, so worked upon the passions of my mind, as my loneliness. Oh, for
one companion, even one only, to make me an echo for mine own speech!
Nay, God Himself, the merciful Father of all, even He seemed not! The
blackness lay like a pall upon the deep, and upon my soul. Misery and
horror were within that shadow, and beyond it nothing that my spirit
could look up to!
I stood for some moments as one stunned, and then my manhood--trained to
some purpose by the usage of the sea--reasserted itself; and maybe I
also got some slender comfort from observing that, dull and heavy as was
the motion of the brig, there was yet the buoyancy of vitality in her
manner of mounting the seas, and that, after all, her case might not be
so desperate as was threatened by the way in which she had been torn and
precipitated past the iceberg. At moments when she plunged the whiteness
of the water creaming upon the surges on either hand threw out a phantom
light of sufficient power to enable me to see that the forward part of
the brig was littered with wreckage, which served to a certain extent as
a breakwater by preventing the seas, which washed on to the forecastle,
from cascading with their former violence aft; also that the whole
length of the main and top masts lay upon the larboard rail and over the
side, held in that position by the gear, attached to them. This was all
that I could distinguish, and of this only the most elusive glimpse was
to be had.
Feeling as though the very marrow in my bones were frozen, I crawled to
the companion and, pulling open the door, descended. The lamp in the
companion burnt faintly. There was a clock fixed to a beam over the
table; my eyes directly sought it, and found the time twenty minutes
after ten. This signified that I had ten or eleven hours of darkness
before me!
I took down the lamp, trimmed it, and went to the lazarette hatch at the
after end of the cabin. Here were kept the stores for the crew. I lifted
the hatch and listened, and could hear the water in the hold gurgling
and rushing with every lift of the brig's bows; and I could not question
from the volume of water which the sound indicated that the vessel was
steadily taking it in, but not rapidly. I swallowed half a pannikin of
the hollands for the sake of the warmth and life of the draught, and
entering my cabin, put on thick dry stockings, first, chafing my feet
till I felt the blood in them; and I then, with a seaman's dispatch,
shifted the rest of my apparel, and cannot express how greatly I was
comforted by the change, though the jacket and trousers I put on were
still damp with the soaking of previous days. To render myself as
waterproof as possible--for it was the wet clothes against the skin that
made the cold so cruel--I took from the captain's cabin a stout cloak
and threw it over me, enveloping my head, which I had cased in a warm
fur cap, with the hood of it; and thus equipped I lighted a small
hand-lantern that was used on dark nights for heaving the log, that is,
for showing how the sand runs in the glass, and carried it on deck.
The lantern made the scene a dead, grave-like black outside its little
circle of illumination; nevertheless its rays suffered me to guess at
the picture of ruin the decks offered. The main mast was snapped three
or four feet above the deck, and the stump of it showed as jagged and
barbed as a wild beast's teeth. But I now noticed that the weight of the
hamper being on the larboard side, balanced the list the vessel took
from her shifted ballast, and that she floated on a level keel with her
bows fair at the sea, whence I concluded that a sort of sea-anchor had
been formed ahead of her by the wreckage, and that it held her in that
posture, otherwise she must certainly have fallen into the trough.
I moved with extreme caution, casting the lantern light before me,
sometimes starting at a sound that resembled a groan, then stopping to
steady myself during some particular wild leap of the hull; until,
coming abreast of the main hatch, the rays of the lantern struck upon a
man's body, which, on my bringing the flame to his face, proved to be
Captain Rosy. There was a wound over his right brow; and as if that had
not sufficed to slay him, the fall of the masts had in some wonderful
manner whipped a rope several times round his body, binding his arms and
encircling his throat so tightly, that no executioner could have gone
more artistically to work to pinion and choke a man.
Under a mass of rigging in the larboard scuppers lay two bodies, as I
could just faintly discern; it was impossible to put the lantern close
enough to either one of them to distinguish his face, nor had I the
strength even if I had possessed the weapons to extricate them, for they
lay under a whole body of shrouds, complicated by a mass of other gear,
against which leaned a portion of the caboose. I viewed them long enough
to satisfy my mind that they were dead, and then with a heart of lead
turned away.
I crossed to the starboard side, where the deck was comparatively clear,
and found the body of a seaman named Abraham Wise near the fore-hatch.
This man had probably been stunned and drowned by the sea that filled
the deck after I loosed the staysail. These were all of our people that
I could find; the others I supposed had been washed by the water or
knocked by the falling spars overboard.
I returned to the quarter-deck, and sat down in the companion way for
the shelter of it and to think. No language that I have command of could
put before you the horror that possessed me as I sat meditating upon my
situation and recalling the faces of the dead. The wind was rapidly
falling, and with it the sea, but the motion of the brig continued very
heavy, a large swell having been set running by the long, fierce gale
that was gone; and there being no uproar of tempest in the sky to
confound the senses, I could hear a hundred harsh and melancholy
groaning and straining sounds rising from the hull, with now and again a
mighty blow as from some spar or lump of ice alongside, weighty enough,
you would have supposed, to stave the ship. But though the _Laughing
Mary_ was not a new vessel, she was one of the stoutest of her kind ever
launched, built mainly of oak and put together by an honest artificer.
Nevertheless her continuing to float in her miserably torn and mangled
condition was so great a miracle, that, spite of my poor shipmates
having perished and my own state being as hopeless as the sky was
starless, I could not but consider that God's hand was very visible in
this business.
I will not pretend to remember how I passed the hours till the dawn
came. I recollect of frequently stepping below to lift the hatch of the
lazarette, to judge by the sound of the quantity of water in the vessel.
That she was filling I knew well, yet not leaking so rapidly but that,
had our crew been preserved, we might easily have kept her free, and
made shift to rig up jury masts and haul us as best we could out of
these desolate parallels. There was, however, nothing to be done till
the day broke. I had noticed the jolly-boat bottom up near the starboard
gangway, and so far as I could make out by throwing the dull lantern
light upon her she was sound; but I could not have launched her without
seeing what I was doing, and even had I managed this, she stood to be
swamped and I to be drowned. And, in sober truth, so horrible was the
prospect of going adrift in her without preparing for the adventure with
oars, sail, mast, provisions, and water--most of which, by the lamplight
only, were not to be come at amid the hideous muddle of wreckage--that
sooner than face it I was perfectly satisfied to take my chance of the
hulk sinking with me in her before the sun rose.