I LOSE MY BOAT.
I lingered, I daresay, above twenty minutes contemplating this singular
crystal fossil of a ship, and considering whether I should go down to
her and ransack her for whatever might answer my turn. But she looked so
darkly secret under her white garb, and there was something so terrible
in the aspect of the motionless snow-clad sentinel who leaned upon the
rail, that my heart failed me, and I very easily persuaded myself to
believe that, first, it would take me longer to penetrate and search her
than it was proper I should be away from the boat; that, second, it was
scarce to be supposed her crew had left any provisions in her, or that,
if stores there were, they would be fit to eat; and that, finally, my
boat was so small it would be rash to put into her any the most trifling
matter that was not essential to the preservation of my life.
So, concluding to have nothing to do with the ghostly sparkling fabric,
I started for the body under the rock, and with some pain and
staggering, the ice being very jagged, lumpish, and deceitful to the
tread, arrived at it.
Nothing but the desire to possess the fine warm cloak could have tempted
me to handle or even to cast my eye upon the dead man again. I found
myself more scared by him now than at first. His attitude was so
lifelike that, though I knew him to be a corpse, had he risen on a
sudden the surprise of it could hardly have shocked me more than the
astonishment his posture raised. As a skeleton he could not have so
chilled and awed me; but so well preserved was his flesh by the cold,
that it was hard to persuade myself he was not breathing, and that,
though he feigned to be gazing downwards, he was not secretly observing
me.
His beard was frozen as hard as a bush, and it crackled unpleasantly to
the movement of my hands, which I was obliged to force under it to
unhook the silver chain that confined the cloak about his neck. I felt
like a thief, and stole a glance over either shoulder as though,
forsooth, some strangely clad companion of his should be creeping upon
me unawares. Then, thought I, since I have the cloak I may as well take
the watch, flask, and tobacco-box, as I had before resolved; and so I
dipped my hand into his pockets, and without another glance at his
fierce still face made for the boat.
I now noticed for the first time, so overwhelmingly had my discoveries
occupied my attention, that the wind had freshened and was blowing
briskly and piercingly. When I had first started upon the ascent of the
slope, the wind had merely wrinkled the swell as the large bodies ran;
but those wrinkles had become little seas, which flashed into foam after
a short race, and the whole surface of the ocean was a brilliant blue
tremble. I came to a halt to view the north-east sky before the brow of
the rocks hid it, and saw that clouds were congregating there, and some
of them blowing up to where the sun hung, these resembling in shape and
colour the compact puff of the first discharge of a cannon before the
smoke spreads on the air. What should I do? I sank into a miserable
perplexity. If it was going to blow what good could attend my departure
from this island? It was an adverse wind, and when it freshened I could
not choose but run before it, and that would drive me clean away from
the direction I required to steer in. Yet if I was to wait upon the
weather, for how long should I be kept a prisoner in this horrid place?
True, a southerly wind might spring up to-morrow, but it might be
otherwise, or come in a hard gale; and if I faltered now I might go on
hesitating, and then my provisions would give out, and God alone knows
how it would end with me. Besides, the presence of the two bodies made
the island fearful to my imagination, and nature clamoured in me to be
gone, a summons my judgment could not resist, for reason often misleads,
but instincts never.
I fell again to my downward march and looked towards my boat--that is to
say, I looked towards the part of the ice where the little haven in
which she lay had been, and I found both boat and haven gone!
I rubbed my eyes and stared again. Tush, thought I, I am deceived by the
ice. I glanced at the slope behind to keep me to my bearings, and once
more sought the haven; but the rock that had formed it was gone, the
blue swell rolled brimming past the line of shore there, and my eye
following the swing of a fold, I saw the boat about three cables length
distant out upon the water, swinging steadily away into the south, and
showing and disappearing with the heave.
The dead man's cloak fell from my arm; I uttered a cry of anguish; I
clasped my hands and lifted them to God, and looked up to Him. I was for
kicking off my boots and plunging into the water, but, mad as I was, I
was not so mad as that; and mad I should have been to attempt it, for I
could not swim twenty strokes, and had I been the stoutest swimmer that
ever breasted the salt spray, the cold must speedily put an end to my
misery.
What was to be done? Nothing! I could only look idly at the receding
boat with reeling brain. The full blast of the wind was upon her, and
helping the driving action of the billows. I perceived that she was
irrecoverable, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my head
burning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myself
down and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to God
for help and mercy, bringing my hands to my throbbing temples, and in
that posture straining my eyes at the fast vanishing structure. She was
the only hope I had--my sole chance. My little stock of provisions was
in her--oh, what was I to do?
Though I was at some distance from the place where what I have called my
haven had been, there was no need for me to approach it to understand
how my misfortune had come about. It was likely enough that the very
crevice in which I had jammed the mast to secure the boat by was a deep
crack that the increased swell had wholly split, so that the mast had
tumbled when the rock floated away and liberated the boat.
The horror that this white and frightful scene of desolation had at the
beginning filled me with was renewed with such violence when I saw that
my boat was lost, and I was to be a prisoner on the death-haunted waste,
that I fell down in a sort of swoon, like one partly stunned, and had
any person come along and seen me he would have thought me as dead as
the body on the hill or the corpse that kept its dismal look-out from
the deck of the schooner.
My senses presently returning, I got up, and the rock upon which I stood
being level, I fell to pacing it with my hands locked behind me, my head
sunk, lost in thought. The wind was steadily freshening; it split with a
howling noise upon the ice-crags and unequal surfaces, and spun with a
hollow note past my ear; and the thunder of the breakers on the other
side of the island was deepening its tone. The sea was lifting and
whitening; something of mistiness had grown up over the horizon that
made a blue dulness of the junction of the elements there; but though a
few clouds out of the collection of vapour in the north-east had floated
to the zenith and were sailing down the south-west heaven, the azure
remained pure and the sun very frostily white and sparkling.
I am writing a strange story with the utmost candour, and trust that the
reader will not judge me severely for my confession of weakness, or
consider me as wanting in the stuff out of which the hardy seaman is
made for owning to having shed tears and been stunned by the loss of my
little boat and slender stock of food. You will say, "It is not in the
power of the dead to hurt a man; what more pitiful and harmless than a
poor unburied corpse?" I answer, "True," and declare that of the two
bodies, as dead men, I was not afraid; but this mass of frozen solitude
was about them, and they took a frightful character from it; they
communicated an element of death to the desolation of the snow-clad
island; their presence made a principality of it for the souls of dead
sailors, and into their lifelike stillness it put its own supernatural
spirit of loneliness; so that to my imagination, disordered by suffering
and exposure, this melancholy region appeared a scene without parallel
on the face of the globe, a place of doom and madness, as dreadful and
wild as the highest mood of the poet could reach up to.
By this time the boat was out of sight. I looked and looked, but she was
gone. Then came my good angel to my help and put some courage into me.
"After all," thought I, "what do I dread? Death! it can but come to
that. It is not long ago that Captain Rosy cried to me, "_A man can die
but once. He'll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with a
stout heart._" He that so spoke is dead. The worst is over for him. Were
he a babe resting upon his mother's breast he could not sleep more
soundly, be more tenderly lulled, nor be freer from such anguish as now
afflicts me who cling to life, as if this--this," I cried, looking
around me, "were a paradise of warmth and beauty. I must be a man, ask
God for courage to meet whatever may betide, and stoutly endure what
cannot be evaded."
Do not smile at the simple thoughts of a poor castaway sailor. I hold
them still to be good reasoning, and had my flesh been as strong as my
spirit they had availed, I don't doubt. But I was chilled to the marrow;
the mere knowing that there was nothing to eat sharpened my appetite,
and I felt as if I had not tasted food for a week; and here then were
physical conditions which broke ruinously into philosophy and staggered
religious trust.
My mind went to the schooner, yet I felt an extraordinary recoil within
me when I thought of seeking an asylum in her. I had the figure of her
before my fancy, viewed the form of the man on her deck, and the idea of
penetrating her dark interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that time
and frost and death had wrought into a black mystery was dreadful to me.
Nor was this all. It seemed like the very last expression of despair to
board that stirless frame; to make a dwelling-place, without prospect of
deliverance, in that hollow of ice; to become in one sense as dead as
her lonely mariner, yet preserve all the sensibility of the living to a
condition he was as unconscious of as the ice that enclosed him.
It must be done nevertheless, thought I; I shall certainly perish from
exposure if I linger here; besides, how do I know but that I may
discover in that ship some means of escaping from the island? Assuredly
there was plenty of material in her for the building of a boat, if I
could meet with tools. Or possibly I might find a boat under hatches,
for it was common for vessels of her class and in her time to stow their
pinnaces in the hold, and, when the necessity for using them arose, to
hoist them out and tow them astern.
These reflections somewhat heartened me, and also let me add that the
steady mounting of the wind into a small gale served to reconcile me,
not indeed to the loss of my boat, but to my detention; for though there
might be a miserable languishing end for me here, I could not but
believe that there was certain death, too, out there in that high swell
and in those sharpening peaks of water off whose foaming heads the wind
was blowing the spray. By which I mean the boat could not have plyed in
such a wind; she must have run, and by running have carried me into the
stormier regions of the south, where, even if she had lived, I must
speedily have starved for victuals and perished of cold.
Hope lives like a spark amid the very blackest embers of despondency.
Twenty minutes before I had awakened from a sort of swoon and was
overwhelmed with misery; and now here was I taking a collected view of
my situation, even to the extent of being willing to believe that on the
whole it was perhaps as well that I should have been hindered from
putting to sea in my little eggshell. So at every step we rebel at the
shadowy conducting of the hand of God; yet from every stage we arrive at
we look back and know the road we have travelled to be the right one
though we start afresh mutinously. Lord, what patience hast Thou!
I turned my back upon the clamorous ocean and started to ascend the
slope once more. When I reached the brow of the cliffs I observed that
the clouds had lost their fleeciness and taken a slatish tinge, were
moving fast and crowding up the sky, insomuch that the sun was leaping
from one edge to another and darting a keen and frosty light upon the
scene. The wind was bitterly cold, and screamed shrilly in my ears when
I met the full tide of it. The change was sudden, but it did not
surprise me. I knew these seas, and that our English April is not more
capricious than the weather in them, only that here the sunny smile,
though sparkling, is frostier than the kiss of death, and brief as the
flight of a musket-ball, whilst the frowns are black, savage, and
lasting.
I bore the dead man's cloak on my arm and helped myself along with the
oar, and presently arrived at the brink of the slope in whose hollow lay
the ship as in a cup. The wind made a noisy howling in her rigging, but
the tackling was frozen so iron hard that not a rope stirred, and the
vane at the masthead was as motionless as any of the adjacent steeples
or pillars of ice. My heart was dismayed again by the figure of the man.
He was more dreadful than the other because of the size to which the
frozen snow upon his head, trunk, and limbs had swelled him; and the
half-rise of his face was particularly startling, as if he were in the
very act of running his gaze softly upwards. That he should have died in
that easy leaning posture was strange; however, I supposed, and no doubt
rightly, that he had been seized with a sudden faintness, and had leaned
upon the rail and so expired. The cold would quickly make him rigid and
likewise preserve him, and thus he might have been leaning,
contemplating the ice of the cliffs, for years and years!
A wild and dreadful thing for one in my condition to light on and be
forced to think of.
My heart, as I have said, sank in me again at the sight of him, and
fear and awe and superstition so worked upon my spirits that I stood
irresolute, and would have gone back had there been any place to return
to. I plucked up after a little, and, rolling up the cloak into a
compact bundle, flung it with all my strength to the vessel, and it fell
cleverly just within the rail. Then gripping the oar I started on the
descent.
The depth was not great nor the declivity sharp; but the surface was
formed of blocks of ice, like the collections of big stones you
sometimes encounter on the sides of mountains near the base; and I had
again and again to fetch a compass so as to gain a smaller block down
which to drop, till I was close to the vessel, and here the snow had
piled and frozen into a smooth face.
The ship lay with a list or inclination to larboard. I had come down to
her on her starboard side. She had small channels with long plates, but
her list, on my side, hove them somewhat high, beyond my reach, and I
perceived that to get aboard I must seek an entrance on the larboard
hand. This was not hard to arrive at; indeed, I had but to walk round
her, under her bows. She was so coated with hard snow I could see
nothing of her timbers, and was therefore unable to guess at the
condition of the hull. She had a most absurd swelling bilge, and her
buttocks, viewed on a line with her rudder, doubtless presented the
exact appearance of an apple. She was sunk in snow to some planks above
the garboard-streak, but her lines forward were fine, making her almost
wedge-shaped, though the flair of her bows was great, so that she
swelled up like a balloon to the catheads. She had something of the look
of the barca-longas of half a century ago--that is, half a century ago
from the date of my adventure; but that which, in sober truth, a man
would have taken her to be was a vessel formed of snow, sparred and
rigged with glass-like frosted ice, the artistic caprice of the genius
or spirit of this white and melancholy scene, who, to complete the
mocking illusion, had fashioned the figure of a man to stand on deck
with a human face toughened into an idle eternal contemplation.
On the larboard hand the ice pressed close against the vessel's side,
some pieces rising to the height of her wash-streak. The face of the
hollow was precipitous here, full of cracks and flaws and sharp
projections. Indeed, had the breadth of the island been as it was at the
extremity I might have counted upon the first violent commotion of the
sea snapping this part of the ice, and converting the northern part of
the body into a separate berg.
I climbed without difficulty into the fore-chains, the snow being so
hard that my feet and hands made not the least impression on it, and
somewhat warily--feeling the government of a peculiar awe, mounting into
a sort of terror indeed--stood awhile peering over the rail of the
bulwarks; then entered the ship. I ran my eyes swiftly here and there,
for indeed I did not know what might steal or leap into view. Let it be
remembered that I was a sailor, with the superstitious feelings of my
calling in me, and though I do not know that I actually believed in
ghosts and apparitions and spectrums, yet I felt as if I did;
particularly upon the deck of this silent ship, rendered spirit-like by
the grave of ice in which she lay and by the long years (as I could not
doubt) during which she had thus rested. Hence, when I slipped off the
bulwark on to the deck and viewed the ghastly, white, lonely scene, I
felt for the moment as if this strange discovery of mine was not to be
exhausted of its wonders and terrors by the mere existence of the
ship--in other words, that I must expect something of the supernatural
to enter into this icy sepulchre, and be prepared for sights more
marvellous and terrifying than frozen corpses.
So I stood looking forward and aft, very swiftly, and in a way I dare
say that a spectator would have thought laughable enough; nor was my
imagination soothed by the clear, harping, ringing sounds of the wind
seething through the frozen rigging where the masts rose above the
shelter of the sides of the hollow.
Presently, getting the better of my perturbation, I walked aft, and,
stepping on to the poop-deck, fell to an examination of the companion or
covering of the after-hatch, which, as I have elsewhere said, was
covered with snow.