THE SCHOONER FREES HERSELF.
All day long the weather remained sullen and still, and the swell
powerful. I was on deck at noon, looking at an iceberg half a league
distant when it overset. It was a small berg, though large compared with
most of the others; yet such a mighty volume of foam boiled up as gave
me a startling idea of the prodigious weight of the mass. The sight made
me very anxious about my own state, and to satisfy my mind I got upon
the ice and walked round the vessel, and to get a true view of her
posture went to the extreme end of the rocks beyond her bows, and
finally came to the conclusion that, supposing the ice should crumble
away from her sides so as to cause the weight of the schooner to render
it top-heavy, her buoyancy on touching the water would certainly tear
her keel out of its frosty setting and leave her floating. Indeed, so
sure was I of this that I saw, next to the ice splitting and freeing her
in that way, the best thing that could happen would be its capsizal.
I regained the ship, and had paused an instant to look over the side,
when I perceived the very block of ice on which I had come to a halt
break from the bed with a smart clap of noise, and completely roll
over. Only a minute before had I been standing on it, and thus had sixty
seconds stood between me and death, for most certainly must I have been
drowned or killed by being beaten against the ice by the swell! I fell
upon my knees and lifted up my hands in gratitude to God, feeling
extraordinarily comforted by this further mark of His care of me, and
very strongly persuaded that He designed I should come off with my life
after all, since His providence would not work so many miracles for my
preservation if I was to perish by this adventure.
These thoughts did more for my spirits than I can well express; and the
intolerable sense of loneliness was mitigated by the knowledge that I
was watched, and therefore not alone.
The day passed I know not how. The shadow as of tempest hung in the air,
but never a cats-paw did I see to blurr the rolling mirror of the ocean.
The hidden sun sank out of the breathless sky, tingeing the atmosphere
with a faint hectic, which quickly yielded to the deepest shade of
blackness. The mysterious desperate silence, however, that on deck
weighed oppressively on every sense, as something false, menacing, and
malignant in these seas, was qualified below by the peculiar straining
noises in the schooner's hold caused by the swinging of the ice upon the
swell. I was very uneasy; I dreaded a gale. It was impossible but that
the vessel must quickly go to pieces in a heavy sea upon the ice if she
did not liberate herself. But though this excited a depression
melancholy enough, nothing else that I can recollect contributed to it.
When I reviewed the apprehension the Frenchman had raised, and reflected
how unsupportable a burden he must have become, I was very well
satisfied to be alone. Time had fortified me; I had passed through
experiences so surprising, encountered wonders so preternatural, that
superstition lay asleep in my soul, and I found nothing to occasion in
me the least uneasiness in thinking of the lifeless shrivelled figure of
what was just now a fierce, cowardly, untamed villain, lying in the
forecastle.
I made a good supper, built up a large fire, and mixed myself a hearty
bowl of punch, not with the view of drowning my anxieties--God forbid! I
was too grateful for the past, too expectant of the future, to be
capable of so brutish a folly--but that I might keep myself in a
cheerful posture of mind; and being sick of my own company took the
lanthorn to the cabin lately used by the Frenchman, and found in a chest
there, among sundry articles of attire, a little parcel of books, some
in Dutch and Portuguese, and one in English.
It was a little old volume, the author's name not given, and proved to
be a relation of the writer's being taken by pirates, and the many
dangers he underwent. There was nothing in it, to be sure, that answered
to my own case, yet it interested me mightily as an honest unvarnished
narrative of sea perils; and I see myself now in fancy reading it, the
lanthorn hanging by a laniard close beside my head, the book in one
hand, my pipe in the other, the furnace roaring pleasantly, my feet
close to it, and the atmosphere of the oven fragrant with the punch that
I put there to prevent it from freezing. I had come to a certain page
and was reading this passage: "_Soon after we were on board we all went
into the great cabin, where we found nothing but destruction. Two
scrutores I had there were broke to pieces, and all the fine goods and
necessaries in them were all gone. Moreover, two large chests that had
books in them were empty, and I was afterwards informed they had been
all thrown overboard; for one of the pirates on opening them swore there
was jaw-work enough (as he called it) to serve a nation, and proposed
that they might be cast into the sea, for he feared there might be some
books amongst them that might breed mischief enough, and prevent some of
their comrades from going on in their voyage to hell, whither they were
all bound_"--I say, I was reading this passage, not a little affected by
the impiety of the rascal, for whose portrait my dead Frenchman might
very well have sat, when I was terrified by an extraordinary loud
explosion, that burst so near and rang with such a prodigious clear note
of thunder through the schooner that I vow to God I believed the
gunpowder below had blown up. And in this suspicion I honestly supposed
myself right for a moment, for on running into the cabin I was dazzled
by a crimson flame that clothed the whole interior with a wondrous gush
of fire; but this being instantly followed by such another clap as the
former, I understood a thunderstorm had broken over the schooner.
It was exactly overhead, and that accounted for the violence of the
crashes, which were indeed so extreme that they sounded rather like the
splitting of enormous bodies of ice close to, than the flight of
electric bolts. The hatch lay open; I ran on deck, but scarce had passed
my head through the companion when down came a storm of hail, every
stone as big as a pigeon's egg, and in all my time I never heard a more
hellish clamour. There was not a breath of air. The hail fell in
straight lines, which the fierce near lightning flashed up into the
appearance of giant harp strings, on which the black hand of the night
was playing those heavy notes of thunder. I sat in the shelter of the
companion, very anxious and alarmed, for there was powder enough in the
hold to blow the ship into atoms; and the lightning played so
continuously and piercingly that it was like a hundred darts of fire,
violet, crimson, and sun-coloured, in the grasp of spirits who thrust at
the sea, all over its face, with swift movement of the arms, as though
searching for the schooner to spear her.
The hailstorm ceased as suddenly as it had burst. I stepped on to the
deck, and 'twas like treading on shingle. There was not the least motion
in the air, and the stagnation gave an almost supernatural character to
the thunder and lightning. The ocean was lighted up to its furthest
visible confines by the flames in the sky, and the repeated explosions
of thunder exceeded the roaring of the ordnance of a dozen squadrons in
hot fight. The ice-coast in the east, and the two score bergs in the
north and west leapt out of one hue into another; and were my days in
this world to exceed those of old Abraham, I should to my last breath
remember the solemn and terrible magnificence of that picture of
lightning-coloured ice, the sulphur-tinctured shapes of the swollen
bodies of clouds bringing their dark electric mines together in a
huddle, the answering flash of the face of the deep to the lancing of
each spiral dazzling bolt, with the air as still as the atmosphere of a
cathedral for the thunder to roll its echoes through.
There was a second furious shower of hail, and when that was over I
looked forth, and observed that the storm was settling into the
north-east, whence I concluded that what draught there might be up there
sat in the south-west. Nor was I mistaken; for half an hour after the
first of the outburst, by which time the lightning played weak and at
long intervals low down, and the thunder had ceased, I felt a crawling
of air coming out of the south-west, which presently briskened into a
small steady blowing. But not for long. It freshened yet and yet; the
wrinkles crisped into whiteness on the black heavings; they grew into
small surges with sharp cubbish snarlings preludious of the lion's
voice; and by ten o'clock it was blowing in strong squalls, the seas
rising, and the clouds sailing swiftly in smoke-coloured rags under the
stars.
The posture of the ice inclined the schooner's starboard bow to the
billows; and in a very short time she was trembling in every bone to the
blows of the surges which rolled boiling over the ice there and struck
her, flinging dim clouds of spume in the air, which soon set the
scuppers gushing. My case was that of a stranded ship, with this
difference only, that a vessel ashore lies solid to the beating of the
waves, whereas the ice was buoyant, it rose and fell, sluggishly it is
true, and so somewhat mitigated the severity of the shocks of water.
But, spite of this, I was perfectly sure that unless the bed broke under
her or she slipt off it, she would be in pieces before the morning. It
was not in any hull put together by human hands to resist the pounding
of those seas. The weight of the mighty ocean along whose breast they
raced was in them, and though the wind was no more than a brisk gale,
each billow by its stature showed itself the child of a giantess. The
ice-bed was like a whirlpool with the leap and flash and play of the
froth upon it. The black air of the night was whitened by the storms of
foam-flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the broken waters
increased the horrors of the scene. I firmly believed my time was come.
God had been merciful, but I was to die now. As to making any shift to
keep myself alive after the ship should be broken up, the thought never
entered my head. What could I do? There was no boat. I might have
contrived some arrangement of booms and casks to serve as a raft, but to
what purpose? How long would it take the wind and sea to freeze me?
I crouched in the companion-way hearkening to the uproar around, feeling
the convulsions of the schooner, fully prepared for death, dogged and
hopeless. No, I was not afraid. Suffering and expectation had brought me
to that pass that I did not care. "'Tis such an end as hundreds and
thousands of sailors have met," I remember thinking; "it is the fittest
exit for a mariner. I have sinned in my time, but the Almighty God knows
my heart." To this tune ran my thoughts. I held my arms tightly folded
upon my breast, and with set lips waited for the first of those crashing
and rending sounds which would betoken the ruin and destruction of the
schooner.
So passed half an hour; then, being half perished with the cold, I went
to the furnace, for when the vessel went to pieces it would matter
little in what part of her I was, and warmed myself and took a dram as a
felon swallows a draught on his way to the scaffold. Were I to attempt
to describe the character of the thunderous noises in the ship I should
not be believed. The seas raised a most deafening roaring as they boiled
over the ice and rolled their volumes against the vessel's sides. Every
curl swung a load of broken frozen pieces against the bows and bends,
and the shocks resounded through her like blows from cyclopean hammers.
It was as if I had been seated in the central stagnant heart of a small
revolving hurricane, feeling no faintest sigh of air upon my cheek,
whilst close around whirled the hellish tormenting conflict of white
waters and yelling blasts.
On a sudden--in a breath--I felt the vessel rise. She was swung up with
the giddy velocity of a hunter clearing a tall gate; she sank again,
and there was a mighty concussion forward, then a pause of steadiness
whilst you might have counted five, then a wild upward heave, a sort of
sharp floating fall, a harsh grating along her keel and sides, as though
she was being smartly warped over rocks, followed by an unmistakable
free pitching and rolling motion.
I had sprung to my feet and stood waiting. But the instant I gathered by
the movements of her that she was released I sprang like a madman up the
companion-steps. The sea, breaking on her bow, flew in heavy showers
along the deck and half blinded me. But I was semi-delirious, and having
sat so long with Death's hand in mine was in a passionately defiant
mood, with a perfect rage of scorn of peril in me, and I walked right on
to the forecastle, giving the flying sheets of water there no heed. In a
minute a block of sea tumbled upon me and left me breathless; the
iciness of it cooled my mind's heat, but not my resolution. I was
determined to judge as best I could by the light of the foam of what had
happened, and holding on tenaciously to whatever came to my hand and
progressing step by step I got to the forecastle and looked ahead.
Where the ice was the water tumbled in milk; 'twas four or five ship's
lengths distant, and I could distinguish no more than that. I peered
over the lee bow, but could see no ice. The vessel had gone clear; how,
I knew not and can never know, but my own fancy is that she split the
bed with her own weight when the sea rose and threw the ice up, for she
had floated on a sudden, and the noises which attended her release
indicated that she had been forced through a channel.
I returned aft, barely escaping a second deluge, and looked over the
quarter; no ice was there visible to me. The vessel rolled horribly, and
I perceived that she had a decided list to starboard, the result of the
shifting of what was in her when the ice came away from the main with
her, and it was this heel that brought the sea washing over the bow. I
took hold of the tiller to try it, but either the helm was frozen
immovable or the rudder was jammed in its gudgeons or in some other
fashion fixed.
Had she been damaged below? was she taking in water? I knew her to be so
thickly sheathed with ice that, unless it had been scaled off in places
by the breaking of her bed, I had little fear (until this covering
melted or dropped off by the working of the frame) of the hull not
proving tight. I should have been coated with ice myself had I stayed
but a little longer in my wet clothes in that piercing wind, so I ran
below, and bringing an armful of clothes from my cabin to the cook-room,
was very soon in dry attire, and making an extraordinary figure, I don't
question, in the buttons, lace, and fripperies of the old-fashioned
garments.
The incident of the schooner's release from the ice had come upon me so
suddenly, and at a time too when my mind was terribly disordered, that I
scarce realized the full meaning of it until I had shifted myself and
fortified my heart with a dram and got warm in the glow of the furnace.
By this time she had fallen into the trough and was labouring like a
cask; that she would prove a heavy roller in a sea-way a single glance
at her fat buttocks and swelling bilge might have persuaded me, but I
never could have dreamt she would wallow so monstrously. The oscillation
was rendered more formidable by her list, and there were moments when I
could not keep my feet. She was shipping water very freely over her
starboard rail, but this did not much concern me, for the break of the
poop-deck kept the after part of the vessel indifferently dry, and the
forecastle and main hatches were well secured. But there was one great
peril I knew not how to provide against--I mean the flotilla of icebergs
in the north and west. They lay in a long chain upon the sea, and though
to be sure there was no doubt a wide channel between each, through which
it might have been easy to carry a ship under control, yet there was
every probability of a vessel in the defenceless condition of the
schooner, without a stitch of sail on her and under no other government
of helm than a fixed rudder, being swept against one of those frozen
floating hills when indeed it would be good-night to her and to me too,
for after such a catastrophe the sun would never rise for me or her
again.
Meanwhile I was crazy to ascertain if the schooner was taking in water.
If there was a sounding-rod in the ship I did not know where to lay my
hands upon it. But he is a poor sailor who is slow at substitutes.
There were several spears in the arms-room (piratical plunder, no doubt)
with mere spikes for heads, like those weapons used by the Caffres and
other tribes in that country; they were formed of a hard heavy wood. I
took a length of ratline line and secured it to one of these spears, and
carried it on deck with the powder-room bull's-eye lamp; but when I
probed the sounding-pipe I found it full of ice, and as it was
impossible to draw the pumps, I flung my ingenious sounding-rod down in
a passion of grief and mortification.
Yet was I not to be beaten. Such was my temper, had the devil himself
confronted me, I should have defied him to do his worst, for I had made
up my mind to weather him out. I entered the forecastle, lanthorn in
hand, prized open the hatch and dropped into the hold. It needed an
experienced ear to detect the sobbing of internal waters amid the
yearning gushes, the long gurgling washings, the thunderous blows, and
shrewd rain-like hissings of the seas outside. I listened with strained
hearing for some minutes, but distinguished no sounds to alarm me with
assurance of water in the hold. I could not mistake. I hearkened with
all my might, but the noise was outside. I thanked God very heartily,
and got out of the hold and put the hatch on. There was no need to go
aft and listen. The schooner was by the head, and there could be no
water in the run that would not be forward too.
Being reassured in respect of the staunchness of the hull, I returned to
the fire and proceeded to equip myself for a prolonged watch on deck.
Whilst I was drawing on a great pair of boots I heard a knocking in the
after part of the vessel. I supposed she had drifted into a little field
of broken ice, and that she would go clear presently, and I finished
arming myself for the weather; but the knocking continuing, I went into
the cabin where I heard it very plain, and walked as far as the
lazarette hatch, where I stood listening. The noises were a kind of
irregular thumping accompanied by a peculiar grinding sound. In a moment
I guessed the truth, rushed on deck, and by the dim light in the air saw
the long tiller mowing to and fro! The beat of the beam seas had
unlocked the frozen bonds of the rudder, and there swung the tiller, as
though like a dog the ship was wagging her tail for joy!
The vessel lay along, rolling so as to bring her starboard rail to a
level with the sea; her main deck was full of water, and the froth of it
combined with the ice that glazed her made her look like a fabric of
marble as she swung on the black fold ere it broke into snow about her.
I seized the tiller and ran it over hard a-starboard, and I had not held
it in that posture half a minute when to my inexpressible delight I
observed that she was paying off. Her head fell slowly from the sea; she
lurched drunkenly, and some tons of black water rolled over the
bulwarks; she reeled consumedly to larboard, and rose squarely and
ponderously to the height of the surge that was now abaft the beam. In a
few moments she was dead before it, the helm amidships, the wind blowing
sheer over the stern with half its weight seemingly gone through the
vessel running, the tall seas chasing her high stern and floating it
upwards, till looking forward was like gazing down the slope of a hill.
My heart was never fuller than then. I was half crazy with the passion
of joy that possessed me. Consider the alternations of hope and bitter
despair which had been crowded into that night! We may wonder in times
of security that life should be sweet, and admit the justice of the
arguments which several sorts of writers, and the poets even more than
the parsons, use in defence of death. But when it comes to the pinch
human nature breaks through. When the old man in Æsop calls upon Death
to relieve him, and the skeleton suddenly rises, the old man changes his
mind, and thinks he will go on trying for himself a little longer. I
liked to live, and had no mind for a wet shroud, and this getting the
schooner before the wind, along with the old familiar feeling of the
decks reeling and soaring and sinking under my feet, was so cordial an
assurance of life that, I tell you, my heart was full to breaking with
transport.
However, I was still in a situation that made prodigious demands upon my
coolness and wits. The wind was south-west, the schooner was running
north-east; the bulk of the icebergs lay on the larboard bow, but there
were others right ahead, and to starboard, where also lay the extremity
of the island, though I did not fear _that_ if I could escape the rest.
It was a dark night; methinks there should have been a young moon
curled somewhere among the stars, but she was not to be seen. The clouds
flew dark and hurriedly, and the frosty orbs between were too few to
throw a light. The ocean ahead and around was the duskier for the
spectral illumination of the near foam and the glimmer of the ice-coated
ship. I tested the vessel with the tiller and found she responded but
dully; she would be nimbler under canvas no doubt, but it was enough
that she should answer her helm at all. Oh, I say, I was mighty
thankful, most humbly grateful. My heart was never more honest to its
Maker than then.
She crushed along, pitching pitifully, the dark seas on either hand
foaming to her quarters, and her rigging querulous with the wind. Had
the Frenchman been alive to steer the ship, I might have found strength
enough for my hands in the vigour of my spirit to get the spritsail yard
square and chop its canvas loose--nay, I might have achieved more than
that even; but I could not quit the tiller now. I reckoned our speed at
about four miles an hour, as fast as a hearty man could walk. The high
stern, narrow as it was, helped us; it was like a mizzen in its way; and
all aloft being stout to start with and greatly thickened yet by ice,
the surface up there gave plenty for the gale to catch hold on; and so
we drove along.
I could just make out the dim pallid loom of the coast of ice upon the
starboard beam, and a blob or two of faintness--most elusive and not to
be fixed by the eye staring straight at them--on the larboard bow. But
it was not long before these blobs, as I term them, grew plainer, and
half a score swam into the dusk over the bowsprit end, and resembled
dull small visionary openings in the dark sky there, or like stars
magnified and dimmed into the merest spectral light by mist. I passed
the first at a distance of a quarter of a mile; it slided by
phantasmally, and another stole out right ahead. This I could have gone
widely clear of by a little shift of the helm, but whilst I was in the
act of starboarding three or four bergs suddenly showed on the larboard
bow, and I saw that unless I had a mind to bring the ship into the
trough again I must keep straight on. So I steered to bring the berg
that was right ahead a little on the bow, with a prayer in my soul that
there might be no low-lying block in the road for the schooner to split
upon. It went by within a pistol-shot. I was very much accustomed to the
sight of ice by this time, yet I found myself glancing at this mass with
pretty near as much wonder and awe as if I had never seen such a thing
before. It was not above thirty feet high, but its shape was exactly
that of a horse's head, the lips sipping the sea, the ears cocked, the
neck arching to the water. You would have said it was some vast courser
rising out of the deep. The peculiar radiance of ice trembled off it
like a luminous mist into the dusk. The water boiled about its nose, and
suggested a frothing caused by the monster steed's expelled breath. Let
a fire have been kindled to glow red where you looked for the eye, and
the illusion would have been frightfully grand.
The poet speaks of the spirits of the vasty deep; if you want to know
what exquisite artists they are, enter the frozen silences of the south.
Thus threading my way I drove before the seas and wind, striking a piece
of ice but once only, and that a small lump which hit the vessel on the
bow and went scraping past, doing the fabric no hurt; but often forced
to slide perilously close by the bergs. I needed twenty instead of one
pair of eyes. With ice already on either bow, on a sudden it would
glimmer out right ahead, and I had to form my resolution on the instant.
If ever you have been amid a pack of icebergs on a dark night in a high
sea you will understand my case; if not, the pen of a Fielding or a
Defoe could not put it before you. For what magic has ink to express the
roaring of swollen waters bursting into tall pale clouds against the
motionless crystal heights, the mystery of the configuration of the
faintness under the swarming shadows of the flying night, the sudden
glares of breaking liquid peaks, the palpitating darkness beyond, the
plunging and rolling of the ship, making her rigging ring upon the air
with the reeling of her masts, the gradual absorption of the solid mass
of dim lustre by the gloom astern, the swift spectral dawn of such
another light over the bows, with many phantasmal outlines slipping by
on either hand, like a procession of giant ocean-spectres, travelling
white and secretly towards the silent dominions of the Pole?
Half this ice came from the island, the rest of it was formed of bergs
too tall to have ever belonged to the north end of that great stretch.
It took three hours to pass clear of them, and then I had to go on
clinging to the tiller and steering in a most melancholy famished
condition for another long half-hour before I could satisfy myself that
the sea was free.
But now I was nearly dead with the cold. I had stood for five hours at
the helm, during all which time my mind had been wound up to the
fiercest tension of anxiety, and my eyes felt as if they were strained
out of their sockets by their searching of the gloom ahead, and nature
having done her best gave out suddenly, and not to have saved my life
could I have stood at the tiller for another ten minutes.
The gear along the rail was so iron-hard that I could not secure the
helm with it, so I softened some lashings by holding them before the
fire, and finding the schooner on my return to be coming round to
starboard, I helped her by putting the tiller hard a port and securing
it. I then went below, built up the fire, lighted my pipe, and sat down
for warmth and rest.