THE AURORA AUSTRALIS
Whilst slowly sweeping the ice with the glass, I saw, or seemed to
see, when the lenses pointed a little to the eastward of south, a blue
shadow of land in the air. I took my eye away from the telescope and
then the shadow was gone: I looked again through the glass and there it
was, a dim, scarcely distinguishable liquid dye whitening as it climbed
till it melted in the azure.
I very well knew that shadow must be land, probably one of the
mountainous rocks of the South Orkneys; unless indeed it was that group
which lies north-east of the South Shetlands--forming one of them, in
short: but I could not persuade myself that our drift to the westwards
had been so considerable. I said to Miss Otway:
'Do you see a shadow in the air yonder?'
She looked, preserving the frown of an intense stare, and replied:
'No; I see no shadow.'
I directed the glass; she put her eye to it and cried quickly, 'Yes; I
see it.'
'It is land,' said I.
She looked eagerly at me and said, 'Inhabited land?'
'I'll not say so, but I believe they go sealing there. I've heard of
whalers heaving-to and sending ashore.'
'For what?'
'I don't know.'
I put away the glass and said:
'I've been afraid of that land; but when I think of it, best after all
for us, Miss Otway, it should be there. Only, how to come at it? What's
our drift and where are we? Shall we wash perhaps round yonder point of
film, clearing the whole blocking mass, to light, may be, upon some
spouter crawling northwards from ten degrees lower south? Or--or----'
But I broke off, for what was the good of conjecturing unless I could
say something to bring a little of the poor girl's heart into her eyes?
On the chance of something lying hidden round a point of crystal I
went forward, lowered the lantern, and ran the red flag aloft, jack
down. This done, I fetched a sextant from the captain's cabin and stood
with Miss Otway in the shelter of the companion-way waiting for the
sun to cross his meridian, meanwhile searching the line of the ice,
beholding the phantasy of a ship's white sails over and over again, and
conversing with the girl.
The sea came ridging steadily out of north-west, the vast westerly
swell of the mighty Southern Ocean pulsing through it in rounds so
majestically regular, you didn't notice the heave of it. I had never
beheld a more glorious breast of ocean. All was dark blue sparkling
billows, heads of froth tossing into silken veils upon the wind, a
roaring, flashing scene, deep blue above, looking in its silence down,
and the ice southward, like a coast cut in ivory white, motionless,
shining, coming and going as the hull sank and soared.
I got an observation and eagerly went below to work it out. Miss
Otway followed me into the captain's cabin and watched me whilst I
calculated. I made the latitude sixty degrees ten minutes south, and
the longitude exactly forty-five degrees west. Then, looking at the
chart, I judged that that shadow of land which was showing miles past
the barrier of ice was some central mountain of Coronation Island,
towering high four thousand five hundred feet. I marked the hull's
place on the chart, and said:
'This is where we are.'
She peered, and after a pause exclaimed: 'It is all desolation down
here! Look how far we are off from Cape Horn. There is no nearer
civilisation than the Falkland Islands--how many hundreds of miles
distant! Oh!' she cried, lifting her head and clapping her hand to
her face, 'if we could but hoist even a little sail to save us from
drifting to the ice and certain death.'
'No,' I exclaimed, 'death's not aboard yet, not even in sight. Sixty
degrees south! The whalers make nothing of that. The Great Circle
carries you lower;' but I would not add 'not here.'
Then, my eye going to a bookshelf, I spied a volume which I pulled down
quickly. It was a directory to these seas. I searched the pages, and,
putting my finger upon a paragraph, said:
'See here now, Miss Otway: men have visited this land, they have named
it, surveyed it, sounded round about it, described it. Where one has
been others may venture. Look at this,' and I read: '"At daylight on
the morning of the 12th January 1823, we saw some pigeons and at six
o'clock perceived the east end of the islands of South Orkneys bearing
W. by S. distant about eleven leagues. We carried all possible sail to
get under the land, but the wind soon became light and left us almost
at the mercy of a heavy swell in the midst of ice islands, which made
our navigation truly hazardous."'
'Their ship had masts and sails,' she exclaimed, 'and was under
command.'
I read on, eager to learn all the book could tell me.
'"Being now close under the land I sent a boat from each vessel to
explore them. We continued to tack the vessels about in a bay. The
icebergs which form in the bays in winter and break away in the summer
now produced so much drift ice that we had frequently to tack ship to
avoid striking it."'
'That's it!' she cried. 'Their ship was under command.'
I proceeded: '"This coast is, if possible, more terrific in appearance
than the South Shetland. The tops of the islands for the most part
terminate in craggy towering peaks, and look not unlike the mountain
tops of a sunken island. The loftiest of these summits, towering up to
a point, I denominated Noble's Peak. This peak in a clear day may be
seen at the distance of fifteen leagues."'
'Is that the shadow?' she asked.
'Possibly.'
'Oh! look at the book, Mr. Selby, and see if it says that the island's
inhabited.'
'It's not inhabited,' I answered.
Then I stood with my finger upon the page musing upon the brief
account. There was little to interest outside of what I had read aloud:
the rest told of bearings and distances, and what had been brought up
by the lead.
'But,' said I, looking at the girl, 'we are not stranded yet. That
we've drifted south is sure; but how much westing has there been in
this tumbling drive? Here's all about the currents shown here,' and I
turned the leaves of the book and read:
'"Ten miles south of Cape Horn the ocean stream flows east-north-east,
half to one mile in the hour." That should be good for us. Let this
wind shift south or west, and the swell and the run of the sea will
drive the hulk out of sight of the barrier.'
But I had something more to do just then than talk, basing chat on
small hope and weak conjecture. I saw to the fire in the stove, then
went on deck to sound the well; the pump was hard frozen as before. I
freed it and got a cast, and found that no water had drained in since
I last sounded. I'll not swear to an inch or two, but the depth was
quite unimportant, and after readjusting the pump I took the glass for
another long look at the ice.
It was land, sure enough, at the back of the barrier; the pearly blue
shadow stood a clear shape in the lens, and I seemed to see it now
with my bare sight when I looked a little away to right or left of it.
I carefully took its bearings, also the bearings of certain defined
features of what I call the barrier, though, as I have said, it was a
length of dislocated stuff full of yawns and wide winding openings,
with a menace of the revelation of many grotesque mighty shapes,
startling miracles of form beyond the reach of the dreams of fever,
should we be set close. There was a sort of salt sparkle upon the range
in some places; and now, whilst looking over the side, I saw, streaming
up the slant of a surge, a pistol-shot distant, a mass of the giant
kelp of these waters: but I observed no birds, nothing more than that
kelp to hint at the meaning of that distant shadow in the air.
It was miserable that I could not get the least idea of our drift save
by waiting and watching, which presently became a sort of anguish.
I sought, but could nowhere find, the deep-sea lead, or certainly I
should have dropped it over the side, taking my chance of its finding
bottom, and lying there to show by the angle of the line into what
quarter of the sea we were drifting--whether we were making straight
for the heart of the range, as it looked, or laterally rolling towards
the south-western extremity of the ice.
The weather continued of a clear cold splendour, the horizon
sharp-edged against the sky as the rim of a tumbler. The sea ran hard
in spiteful foaming slopes which kept on shouldering the hulk dead
to leeward, and within an hour the growth of the ice told me we were
closing it; in fact, by the bearings I had taken I saw that the drive
of the hull was as fair for the heart of the barrier as if she was
being steered for it!
What was to be done? I had been cast in my time in many situations of
peril, yet had never known myself despairful even in the blackest hour
of my troubles: but I own my heart fell now, my spirits sank, hope
died when I looked at those leagues of horizon of ice and reflected
upon my helplessness. Could I have summoned the help of but another
pair of hands I might have made some desperate effort with capstan and
leading-blocks to cap the stump of the foremast with another height of
spar, and get a jib stretched that her head might pay off and bring
her under some sort of control to enable me to thread the waterways
betwixt the bergs. But, single-handed, I could do nothing. There was no
height of foremast for the setting of any sort of rag that would round
her head away and keep her before it--I mean, in a fashion to hold her
responsive to the helm.
When I made the discovery that the hull was setting dead on to the
ice, Miss Otway was in the cabin boiling some cocoa for a scrambling
afternoon meal; she came up while I stood swaying on the heave of the
plank, my arms tightly folded, my eyes rooted to the ice; instantly it
was as clear to her as to me whither our drift was tending, and she
uttered a low cry as though she had been struck.
The mere sight of her, however, did me good--it quickened perception of
my obligations as a man. Her face was white as the foam over the side;
her pale lips moved, but the shrill wind sheared with icy-edge through
her words as they came to her lips. She sent a blind, staggering glance
round the western and northern sea line, and, knitting her face into a
look of resolution, she said:
'It is God's will. But, Mr. Selby, it is a dreadful death to die.'
'I am pleased when you look so,' said I, 'but not when you speak so.
It is God's will, as you say. But what is that will? What's to be our
fate? Look how those blue shadows in the ice open and widen. The bergs
appear close together; hundreds of fathoms separate them in reality,
and if we are to drift into the huddle why shouldn't we scrape through?'
'To where?'
'To where?... There may be open water beyond, and a ship.'
'No, no, land!' she cried, 'land! See the shadow of it. It was visible
in the telescope only a little while ago: now I see it like a forming
cloud. It will be all ice to the rocks, and some break will let us in
and we shall drift deep and be locked up and left--and left----'
And now she could scarcely articulate for some spasm in her throat, and
her poor white face was all awork with the horrors of her imagination.
It made me sullen to hear her, she reasoned so well, beyond any trick
that I had for cheering her.
'We must wait and hope,' said I; 'we are not in the ice yet; there may
come a ship.'
And setting my teeth I swung the glass out of its brackets fiery with
some passing mood of wrath born of hopelessness and helplessness; for
no sailor will stand at gaze and be deserted by his spirit as a man
whilst there is a chance for life, though it be dim as a corposant in a
burst of wet squall; but put him in my place--as I then was; aboard a
dismasted hull rolling to her waterways in a steady pouring sea, a doom
of ice filling the horizon to leeward: how should a sailor act as a man
_then_ save by a stony endurance that sounds gallantly if you call it
heroic fortitude?
But the girl had boiled some cocoa: it waited: so I begged leave to
hand her below out of the ceaseless howl of the ice-charged wind. Yet
neither of us stayed long. She could not eat, and for my part 'twas as
much as I could do to gulp down the steaming cocoa, good as it was.
I believe the sun set soon after two; the sky was everywhere of a
wild crimson, flashing gorgeously where the luminary was; the sea
came running in hard green lines, tall with passing heads, out of the
splendour; _then_ the ice was a wonderful scene indeed, delicately
tinctured as it was with the redness. The shadow of the land hung afar
in a dim, pink cloud, but though the barrier had been plain in view for
some while I could not swear that within the last hour we had sensibly
closed it. This gave me a little hope--though I didn't know any: I bade
Miss Otway note it and she agreed with me--she had a sailor's eye for
atmospheric distance--that the ice looked no nearer than it had within
the past hour.
'Can we be in the grip of a westerly current?' thought I. Then, before
the blaze faded in the west, I hauled down the flag and hoisted the
burning lantern, for the delicate figures of the ice in the remote
recesses where the film of it died out were so cheating in their
likeness to ships lifting canvas and heading for us, that I could
not persuade myself but one _must_ prove a vessel--if not now, then
presently.
I obliged Miss Otway to go below when the night fell. It was too cold
for her. She was like to freeze to death. The ice loomed as a range
of snow-covered cliff to leeward: it showed of a savage and deadly
paleness under the stars which sheeted down weakly to it, though here
and there one brighter than the rest glowed like a lighthouse lantern
on some faint point. It was a wonderfully brilliant night, however,
no moon that I remember, but overhead the larger stars had the rich
tremble you see in the tropics; I had never seen such a field of
brilliants--the stardust hovered like mist, and the height of the sky
that night was awful to my solitary gaze.
At about eight o'clock we were, as I reckoned, about five miles distant
from the nearest elbow of the ice. But though a tall sea still ran,
giving the hull the lofty motions of a stately dancer, the wind was
sensibly taking off. A frightful time was this! for if the hull struck
on the hurl of such a surge as still roared under us, she would go to
pieces in the twinkling of an eye. I was constantly looking over the
side, reckoning to find us setting on to some detached mass of drift
stuff, flat, but not the less deadly for being awash, but saw none.
Suddenly I perceived a light upon the horizon right over the bows. I
fancied my vision deceived me, that the trend of the ice was not as I
imagined it to be in that darkness, that the light was some burning
mountain far past the barrier, and that a shift of wind or change of
stream or tide had altered the bearings: this I conceived and rushed
headlong for a bull's-eye, which I flashed upon the compass; but no!
the indications were as before.
What, then, was that light ahead? Miss Otway had followed me when I
fled up the companion steps with a lighted bull's-eye.
'What is it?' she cried.
'What's that?' I exclaimed, pointing ahead in the starlight.
But now, looking, I beheld a luminous arched cloud: it soared, always
arched, increasing in brightness till the brow of it stood about
twenty degrees above the horizon: the brightest of the stars shone
wanly through it: then, whilst we watched, flashes of fire, darting
like lightning, leapt from it; they changed into spiral columns of the
brilliance of sunlight, scores of them, and they went twisting and
streaming out of the cloud with the look of the rush of the Milky Way
to the Zenith, whirling and winding their strands of fire into a very
rope of flame, whose end seemed to search the furthest stardust. This
wonderful, beautiful, sublime scene of joyous dancing, inwreathing
lights, faded, but was quickly followed in the same quarter where the
fiery curved cloud had shone by rich, straw-coloured arches of flame,
linking and sinking and soaring, changing on a sudden with a vast
spread of light, exactly fan shaped, and jewelled with colours manifold
as the rainbow, as though it reflected some giant prism.
'What is it?' said Miss Otway, standing close beside me and speaking in
a voice subdued by awe and astonishment.
'The Aurora Australis,' I answered, knowing it must be that by
descriptions I remembered.
We lost all sense of time in watching. In some of the sublimest
recesses of that show of fire it was as though the heaven of God were
opening: one held one's breath not knowing what the next revelation
would be, what spectacle of winged spirit shapes would glance upon
one's mortal vision out of those chasms of splendour which looked,
with the glory that burned in them, to have been cloven to the very
Throne.
'Mark this!' I cried, and as I spoke--the vast fan of light then fading
and no more lightning-like fire leaping--the wind that had been a fresh
breeze dropped as if by magic: the sky over the bows darkened into its
night of stars: the sea fell into a sloppy tumble, and within a quarter
of an hour the hull was rolling quietly upon the long, wide swell of
these seas with so oil-like a calm upon the steady run of the folds
that, close to our port quarter, I watched the image of a bright star
lengthen and shrink as it rode, till, but for the intense, dread cold
of the atmosphere, you would have thought yourself becalmed near the
line.
'We may drift north and go clear after all,' said I, taking the lighted
bull's-eve out of the companion and looking at the binnacle by it.
'Do you hear the thunder?' said Miss Otway, following me.
I listened: it was not thunder but the crackling of ice. There was
no roar of sea, no howl of gale now to kill that sound; it rolled
up through the night from the southward in bursts and shocks like
explosions of heavy artillery; it swept over the smooth swell which
looked liked smoking grease as the huge rounds noiselessly floated
eastward, and it sounded as though a thunderstorm were raging over the
ice.
And still that brief peace that was in the night, spite of the distant
thundering of the ice, was a wonderful refreshment to the spirits after
the ceaseless flush of the surge to the side and the steady roar of the
gale on high, shrieking as it split upon the barbs of ice the length of
bulwarks bristled with. More: a change of weather might now happen to
drive us northward, to drift us clear of the bergs, at all events, and
so extend our chance of being fallen in with and rescued.
I stayed on deck till after nine watching anxiously for any signs of
a change of weather. Miss Otway came and went: she was too restless
and fearful to linger below, but the frost in the night wind was too
stinging to allow her to remain long above. When I went into the cabin
I left the hull rolling slowly upon a swell of the sea polished as
ebony; nay, so glass-like was that swollen mirror that all about us the
water was sprinkled with the images of stars, with one ice-like wake
swinging like a pendulum as the silver of it seemed to sink.
I mixed a tumbler of hot rum and sat down before the stove to smoke a
pipe, with the young lady's consent; there was a good stock of tobacco,
cigars, and a little collection of pipes in the cabin that had been
occupied by Captain and Mrs. Burke. Our talk was, you will suppose, all
about our situation. I assured her there was little to fear saving the
ice; and talked--the thing then coming into my head--of a sailor who
had gone sealing for three years with one Captain Smyley; this same
skipper having spent nearly half a century betwixt the River Plate and
the South Shetlands.
'These waters are plentifully frequented,' said I. 'A century ago in
such a case as this we shouldn't have had much to hope for. What was
to come? In half a year a score of yellow, humpbacked, round bowed
waggons blowing away under bladder-like sails, with topmast struck
and nothing but the log to tell the longitude--that was about the
sum of the navigation. There was no Australia then; nothing but a
Western American coast yielding a month's saunter from Acapulco to the
Philippines--wonderful that they should have ever got a Spaniard to
face the ice down here.'
'Did they?'
'Why, yes; they sent treasure to Europe in galleons named after saints,
and when they saw a waterspout they held up their swords as crosses,
and bade the thing be off in Latin.'
'Ships were as safe then as they are now,' said she, pulling off a
thick glove and toasting her hand, on which sparkled a diamond or two.
'Why should this vessel have been dismasted? What progress is there to
boast of when you think of this hull? Can't they plant masts which will
keep erect?'
'Had that been, you and all others who were here when the squall struck
you would be deeper under water than the fangs of the biggest iceberg
afloat,' I answered, with a half smile at her eager gravity, as though
there were nothing to interest us now but shipbuilding!
'If my life is preserved I'll never go to sea again,' she said.
'You'll have had enough of it.'
'I came for my health and it seems I have come to die.'
'Has your health improved?'
'Yes--perhaps; I don't feel whilst I talk as if the voyage had done me
much good.'
'You'll write an account of these experiences when you return, and the
Queen will send for you that she may see and converse with as wonderful
a heroine as ever flourished in her reign.'
'What have I done to be a heroine?'
I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned to lift the tumbler
of grog that was yet half full; when my hand was arrested as though
paralysed by an extraordinary noise, smooth, fierce, seething. I
listened a moment, then sprang to the companion steps.