THE FROZEN SCHOONER.
I found myself on the summit of a kind of table-land; vast bodies of
ice, every block weighing hundreds and perhaps thousands of tons lay
scattered over it; yet for the space of a mile or so the character was
that of flatness. Southwards the range went upwards to a coastal front
of some hundred feet, with a huddle of peaks and strange configurations
behind soaring to an elevation from the sea-line of two or three hundred
feet. Northwards the range sloped gradually, with such a shelving of its
hinder part that I could catch a glimpse of a little space of the blue
sea that way. From this I perceived that whatever thickness and surface
of ice lay southwards, in the north it was attenuated to the shape of a
wedge, so that its extreme breadth where it projected its cape or
extremity would not exceed a musket shot.
A companion might have qualified in my mind something of the sense of
prodigious loneliness and desolation inspired by that huge picture of
dazzling uneven whiteness, blotting out the whole of the south-east
ocean, rolling in hills of blinding brilliance into the blue heavens,
and curving and dying out into an airy film of silvery-azure radiance
leagues away down in the south-west. But to my solitary eye the
spectacle was an amazing and confounding one.
If I had not seen the tract of dark blue water in the north-east, I
might have imagined that this island stretched as far into the east and
north as it did in the south and west. And one thing I quickly enough
understood: that if I wanted to behold the ocean on the east side of the
ice I should have to journey the breadth of the range, which here, where
I was, might mean one or five miles, for the blocks and lumps hid the
view, and how far off the edge of the cliffs on the other side might be
I could not therefore gather. This was not to be dreamt of, and
therefore to this extent my climb had been useless.
Being on the top of the range now, I could plainly hear the noises of
the splitting and internal convulsions of this vast formation. The
sounds are not describable. Sometimes they seemed like the explosions of
guns, sometimes like the growlings and mutterings of huge fierce beasts,
sometimes like smart single echoless blasts of thunder; and sometimes
you heard a singular sort of hissing or snarling, such as iron makes
when speeding over ice, only when this noise happened the volume of it
was so great that the atmosphere trembled upon the ear with it. It was
impossible to fix the direction of these sounds, the island was full of
them; and always sullenly booming upon the breeze was the voice of the
ocean swell bursting in foam against the ice-coast that confronted it.
You may talk of the solitude of a Selkirk, but surely the spirit of
loneliness in him could not rival the unutterable emotion of
solitariness that filled my mind as I sent my gaze over those miles of
frozen stirless whiteness. He had the sight of fair pastures, of trees
making a twinkling twilight on the sward, of grassy savannahs and
pleasant slopes of hills; the air was illuminated by the glorious
plumage of flying birds; the bleat of goats broke the stillness in the
valleys; there was a golden regale for his eye, and his other senses
were gratified with the perfumes of rich flowers and engaging concerts
among the trembling leaves. Above all, there was the soothing warmth of
a delicious climate. But out upon those heaped and spreading plains of
snow nothing stirred, if it were not once that I was startled by a loud
report, and spied a rock about half a mile away slide down the edge of
the flat cliff and tumble into the sea. Nothing stirred, I say; there
was an affrighting solemnity of motionlessness everywhere. The
countenance of this plain glared like a great dead face at the sky;
neither sympathy, nor fancy, no, not the utmost forces of the
imagination, could witness expression in it. Its unmeaningness was
ghastly, and the ghastlier for the greatness of its bald and lifeless
stare.
I turned my eyes seawards; haply it was the whiteness that gave the
ocean the extraordinarily rich dye I found in it. The expanse went in
flowing folds of violet into the nethermost heavens, and though God
knows what extent of horizon I surveyed, the line of it, as clear as
glass, ran without the faintest flaw to amuse my heart with even an
instant's hope.
There was more weight, however, in the wind than I had supposed. It blew
from the west of north, and was an exquisitely frosty wind, despite the
quarter whence it came. It swept in moans among the rocks, and there
were tones in it that recalled the stormy mutterings we had heard in the
blasts which came upon the brig before the storm boiled down upon her.
But my imagination was now so tight-strung as to be unwholesomely and
unnaturally responsive to impulses and influences which at another time
I had not noticed. There were a few heavy clouds in the north-east, so
steam-like that methought they borrowed their complexion from the snow
on the island's cape there. I was pretty sure, however, that there was
wind behind them, for if the roll of the ocean did not signify heavy
weather near to, then what else it betokened I could not imagine.
I cannot express to you how the very soul within me shrank from putting
to sea in the little boat. There was no longer the support of the
excitement and terror of escaping from a sinking vessel. I stood upon an
island as solid as land, and the very sense of security it imparted
rendered the boat an object of terror, and the obligation upon me to
launch into yonder mighty space as frightful as a sentence of death. Yet
I could not but consider that it would be equally shocking to me to be
locked up in this slowly crumbling body of ice--nay, tenfold more
shocking, and that, if I had to choose between the boat and this hideous
solitude and sure starvation, I would cheerfully accept fifty times over
again the perils of a navigation in my tiny ark.
This reflection comforted me somewhat, and whilst I thus mused I
remained standing with my eyes upon the little group of fanciful fanes
and spires of ice on the edge of the abrupt hollow. I had been too
preoccupied to take close notice; on a sudden I started, amazed by an
appearance too exquisitely perfect to be credible. The sun shone with a
fine white frosty brilliance in the north-east; some of these spikes and
figures of ice reflected the radiance in several colours. In places
where they were wind-swept of their snow and showed the naked ice, the
hues were wondrously splendid, and, mingling upon the sight, formed a
kind of airy, rainbow-like veil that complicated the whole congregation
of white shaft and many-tinctured spire, the marble column, the
alabaster steeple into a confused but most surprisingly dainty and
shining scene.
It was whilst looking at this that my eye traced, a little distance
beyond, the form of a ship's spars and rigging. Through the labyrinth of
the ice outlines I clearly made out two masts, with two square yards on
the foremast, the rigging perfect so far as it went, for the figuration
showed no more than half the height of the masts, the lower parts being
apparently hidden behind the edge of the hollow. I have said that this
coast to the north abounded in many groups of beautiful fantastic
shapes, suggesting a great variety of objects, as the forms of clouds
do, but nothing perfect; but here now was something in ice that could
not have been completer, more symmetrical, more faultlessly proportioned
had it been the work of an artist. I walked close to it and a little way
around so as to obtain a clearer view, and then getting a fair sight of
the appearance I halted again, transfixed with amazement.
The fabric appeared as if formed of frosted glass. The masts had a good
rake, and with a seaman's eye I took notice of the furniture, observing
the shrouds, stays, backstays, braces to be perfect. Nay, as though the
spirit artist of this fragile glittering pageant had resolved to omit no
detail to complete the illusion, there stood a vane at the masthead,
shining like a tongue of ice against the soft blue of the sky. Come,
thought I, recovering from my wonder, there is more in this than it is
possible for me to guess by staring from a distance; so, striking my
pole into the snow, I made carefully towards the edge of the hollow.
The gradual unfolding of the picture prepared my mind for what I could
not see till the brink was reached; then, looking down, I beheld a
schooner-rigged vessel lying in a sort of cradle of ice, stern-on to the
sea. A man bulked out with frozen snow, so as to make his shape as great
as a bear, leaned upon the rail with a slight upwards inclination of his
head, as though he were in the act of looking fully up to hail me. His
posture was even more lifelike than that of the man under the rock, but
his garment of snow robbed him of that reality of vitality which had
startled me in the other, and the instant I saw him I knew him to be
dead. He was the only figure visible. The whole body of the vessel was
frosted by the snow into the glassy aspect of the spars and rigging, and
the sunshine striking down made a beautiful prismatic picture of the
silent ship.
She was a very old craft. The snow had moulded itself upon her and
enlarged without spoiling her form. I found her age in the structure of
her bows, the headboards of which curved very low round to the top of
the stem, forming a kind of well there, the after-part of which was
framed by the forecastle bulkhead, after the fashion of ship-building in
vogue in the reign of Anne and the first two Georges. Her topmasts were
standing, but her jibboom was rigged in. I could find no other evidence
of her people having snugged her for these winter quarters, in which she
had been manifestly lying for years and years. I traced the outlines of
six small cannons covered with snow, but resting with clean-sculptured
forms in their white coats; a considerable piece of ordnance aft, and
several petararoes or swivel-pieces upon the after-bulwark rails. Gaffs
and booms were in their places, and the sails furled upon them. The
figuration of the main hatch showed a small square, and there was a
companion or hatch-cover abaft the mainmast. There was no trace of a
boat. She had a flush or level deck from the well in the bows to a
fathom or so past the main-shrouds; it was then broken by a short
poop-deck, which went in a great spring or rise to the stern, that was
after the pink style, very narrow and tall.
Though I write this description coldly, let it not be supposed that I
was not violently agitated and astonished almost into the belief that
what I beheld was a mere vision, a phenomenon. The sight of the body I
examined did not nearly so greatly astound me as the spectacle of this
ice-locked schooner. It was easy to account for the presence of a dead
man. My own situation, indeed, sufficiently solved the riddle of that
corpse. But the ship, perfect in all respects, was like a stroke of
magic. She lay with a slight list or inclination to larboard, but on the
whole tolerably upright, owing to the corpulence of her bilge. The
hollow or ravine that formed her bed went with a sharp incline under
her stern to the sea, which was visible from the top of the cliffs here
through the split in the rocks. The shelving of the ice put the wash of
the ocean at a distance of a few hundred feet from the schooner; but I
calculated that the vessel's actual elevation above the water-line,
supposing you to measure it with a plummet up and down, did not exceed
twenty feet, if so much, the hollow in which she rested being above
twenty feet deep.
It was very evident that the schooner had in years gone by got embayed
in this ice when it was far to the southward, and had in course of time
been built up in it by floating masses. For how old the ice about the
poles may be who can tell? In those sunless worlds the frozen continents
may well possess the antiquity of the land. And who shall name the
monarch who filled the throne of Britain when this vast field broke away
from the main and started on its stealthy navigation sunwards?