IMPRISONED
I might have guessed there would be no more to see now than when I had
first looked. I stood in the companion with my head just out, holding
the door as close shut as it would lie with my body in the way; and
hardly had I put my head through when a whole green sheet of water
tumbled over the port bulwarks and roared in a cataractal deluge down
the steep, boiling white, through the wreckage of smashed bulwarks. I
ducked, but not in time to stop a rush into the cabin.
I guessed, by the uncommon blackness, that we were in a hollow betwixt
high cliffs; I beheld an illusive paleness, the vague, spectral
faintness of rocks of ice or snow-covered acclivities on either hand,
but no features of them were in the least degree discernible. I durst
not let go of the companion to look over the side, but I judged by the
deep, hollow noise overhead that a strong gale still blew, and from a
distance came the strong, coarse seething of a high sea.
Still, the beat of the swell against the hull was not often now, which
made me suspect it was no iceberg we had stranded on but land, one of
the New Orkneys or South Shetlands group, because the bating of the
swell told that a tide ran, and I had read in that book about the South
Atlantic in the cabin that the rise and fall of the tide down here was
very considerable, that gales of wind often swelled the water high
above its natural level, as was shown by the many skeletons of whales
found lying twenty or thirty feet above high-water mark.
But until the dawn broke nothing could be imagined; I closed the
companion door and crawled back to where Miss Otway sat.
She was so postured by the angle of the deck that she could not get out
of her chair; she begged me to help her; I drew her out and held her
until she had sunk upon the floor, and then I sat down beside her on
the hard plank, the carpet having been rolled up and stowed away when
the cabin was flooded in the outfly that had dismasted the 'Lady Emma.'
Not so much water as I supposed had tumbled down; it lay the length of
the cabin wall and was fast draining off.
'Have you been able to see where we are?' she exclaimed.
'No. But though there's no doubt we've beached on ice, I believe the
land's close aboard.'
'What land?'
'Coronation Island, if any. That was the island in the way of our
drift; we've been making a straight course for it.'
We paused to hearken to a heavy flooding of water overhead, but the
blow that had sheeted the brine over the hull was as weak as a summer
ripple is to an angry surge compared with the thumps which had driven
us to where we now lay.
'The sea will have made a clean sweep of the decks,' said she.
'There was little to go. What but the galley? The companion has
weathered it out, happily for us.'
'Oh, Mr. Selby, what can we now do? What is to become of us?' she cried
with sudden hysteric passion of grief and terror.
'We must find out where we are. Better here, anyway, than knocking
about among the ice outside, with the prospect every next minute of
being squashed into pulp. Oh, _that_ was too terrible to have gone
on bearing! The perpetual apprehension was like to have driven us
overboard, mad. Why, this is peace, this is rest.'
'What a time it has been! What a time it is!' she cried. 'When will the
day break? If we are upon an iceberg----'
She was arrested by a second thunder-shock of water overhead, yet weak
as a blow of the sea, though the hull trembled fore and aft.
The lamp glowed and shed a good light, the body of it lying hard
against the upper deck, so sharp was the angle; it was strange to see
it stirless there, strange to feel the stillness of the hull, save when
a blow of swell made her quiver. The fire was out; but even had not all
the fuel fetched away into the wash of the wet, I had not dared kindle
a fresh one, lest in the trembling fit then upon me, and on such a
roof-like slope as that, I should stumble, or by some helpless flourish
set the ship in flames.
I crawled on my knees to the couch, and pulled the clothes from it and
covered Miss Otway with them, swathing her head and so wrapping her
that nothing showed but a little piece of the face. The poor girl's
teeth chattered, and she shivered ceaselessly. By carefully crawling I
got upon the table and managed to get hold of a glass and a decanter
of wine. She drank a little and I took a good pull of the wine myself.
Indeed it was an extraordinary situation--the hull on her beam ends,
the cabin alight, we two crouched on the deck, the stillness after the
fury we had come through, the stillness, I say, saving a low roar of
distant sea, with an occasional beat of the swell upon the hulk, and
the scaling and rushing of water overhead. An amazing situation indeed;
there is nothing like it, nothing stranger in the maritime records,
that I can recollect.
At last the starboard cabin windows, high in the broadside, showed of a
pale steel grey; I went on my hands and feet to the steps and reached
the deck. I stood a little while in the companion-way thunderstruck; I
was confounded and could not credit my sight. The hull lay stranded
in a very well of ice. Ahead and astern rose masses of cliffs to an
altitude of four or five hundred feet. The vessel lay on a frozen
beach; 'twas a sloping sweep of the stuff, apparently linking the
iceberg astern to the ice over the bows. The bight or bay we had
drifted into was ramparted by the iceberg which sank from a vast
terrace to a point in an arm of natural breakwater like marble; but the
ice ahead was fixed to the face of the land. After looking a little I
spied the iron frown of dusky rocks perpendicular and smooth as though
planed, showing amidst the snow.
Past the hinder ice and beyond the giant limb of marble-like breakwater
was the rolling ocean. It still blew hard, the seas raced angrily.
Whatever of ice they smote they flashed upon; over the lower parts
of the ice terrace the surge was bursting in lofty clouds, bright as
light. The heave came round the point in a wide swell, which did not
break in foam upon the beach where we lay, but swept silent, in a
glass-green volume, along the slope, just as the foamless lift of the
sea washes past the side of a ship; it broke only where it met with
anything rugged, and quickly lost its weight in the curve, soundlessly
recoiling from the base of the iceberg astern, though mightily
troubling the surface of the water by conflict with the succeeding
heave.
The sky between the cliffs was wild with flying scud and rusty brown
masses of vapour rushing southwards. The vessel lay close in to the
land; she rested on her side at an angle of hard upon fifty degrees.
On either hand was open sky, the picture of it to port showing as
at the extremity of an immense ravine. Save but for sudden, quick
shootings of little short-lived draughts and blasts, the calm and even
the repose down here was as though we were in a well. The swell never
swept nearer to us than twenty feet. I crept to the side and lay over,
watching anxiously, and thus made sure of this after following the
quiet sweep of at least twenty successive heaves of brine.
The desolation was awful! The picture savage, forbidding, terrifying
beyond imagination to one immured with its clouded crystal heights over
the bows, and the rugged slopes of ice over the stern forking into
fifty shapes of pinnacle, turret, spire, column, tower, as though on
the flat of the summit were the ruins of a city of marble.
The decks were swept of everything save the companion. Wheel, binnacle,
capstans, galley, all were gone. I watched the ocean rolling past the
arm of ice astern, it was but a bit of it. The great berg that formed
the bay blocked the view of the deep; there was nothing to see but the
abrupt white walls ahead and astern, and the flying soot overhead and
away down to port, and, on the right, tall cliffs of ice and snow
glazing the land, with here and there a space of staring, black rock.
Our isolation was shocking. My heart seemed to stop whilst I looked
around, realising the terrors and hopelessness of this new imprisonment
by the granite-hued light that was gaining a little in power. Though a
whaler stood within half a mile of the coast, how should she see us? It
would be hard enough to discern the speck of wreck we made had the bay
of ice in which we rested gaped naked to the sea, but we were as much
hidden here as if we had gone to the bottom. We were worse off, indeed,
than had we stranded upon a floating berg, because in _that_ case we
might have fallen in with the ice which might have split and freed us;
but now we were aground upon ice hardening into the face of an island
and stationary; months might pass before the body we were upon broke
away and became a water-borne bulk, and then, in the throes of the
liberation of the frozen cliffs, what of splintering, of volcanic-like
upheaval and disruption might happen to crush the little toy of hull
lying after many months as she lay now?
I don't doubt I stared about me with something of a madman's wildness,
glancing up at the inaccessible heights, then at the sea rolling in
white lines beyond the limb of ice, then into the desolation of the
whirling sky on the left, till, recollecting that I had a companion
who looked to me for heart and encouragement, whom, by God's mercy,
wonderful as it would afterwards appear, I might yet be the means of
delivering from this hideous situation, I pulled my wits together and
returned to the cabin.
The poor young lady was on the deck before the black stove as I had
left her. She could not have stood upon that angle of plank without
danger and distress. She began to question me in a voice that shuddered
with the cold. I answered I would talk with her when I had lighted a
fire, for I had now some spirit and saw things a little clearly, and
was no longer afraid of setting the hull in flames.
I split up a bunk board, and picked a bucket full of capsized coal out
of the wash to leeward, as I may call it, and made a fire; but I moved
with pain and difficulty; the decks were wet, and as slippery as though
coated with ice, and the slope was that of a ship bulwarks under.
When the fire was blazing I helped the young lady to sit close beside
it, and went on deck for some life-lines for this cabin. I moved with
less trouble above, for the life-lines I had before set up were still
stretched along. Every rope that I handled was like bar iron, but with
infinite trouble I succeeded in getting a length below and stretching
it here and there, which done I was able to use my legs with some
freedom.
The stove was violently aslant, but it was possible to boil a kettle,
and whilst I waited for a hot drink I crouched beside the girl,
grateful for the comforting heat of the flames. I told her plainly that
we were stranded and ice-locked; that we must resolve to exert our
patience and make the best of our deplorable situation. She cleared
her head of the cover I had wrapped about her, and stared at me dumbly
for a minute or two with a face as white as though moonlit, and her
fair hair full of sparkles with the light of the lamp that still glowed
hard-slanted against the upper deck.
'Do I understand,' she exclaimed in a low voice, painful to hear with
the tremulous gasps that shook it, 'that we are to remain in this
condition until--until----' She stopped, then added, 'but until _when_?
We are stranded and hidden and must perish.'
'Listen to me,' said I, 'for this is our chance as I see it is as a
sailor: suppose us beached for months as we now are--though who's to
predict _that_?--for within twenty-four hours may come a gale out of
another quarter that shall free us and drive us amongst the ice to our
destruction--take it we are to be stranded here: I have read the ship's
papers, know the contents of the hold, and promise you, though no
chance of rescue should happen for a twelvemonth, nay, for a couple of
years, help, when it comes, shall find us alive so far as life may be
kept in us by food and drink and warmth.'
She buried her face: I think it nearly killed her to hear me talk of
a twelvemonth or two years. Then, flashing upon me as it were with a
sudden dropping of her hands and the stare of her desperate grief and
horror, she cried:
'Is there no hope beyond the waiting for the deliverance which may
never happen?' and without stopping for an answer she went on: 'How are
we to live even for a week in a hull we cannot move about on?'
'That's the very least of our troubles,' said I. 'Come, you have
spirit--the heart of an Englishwoman beats in you. You must put some
face of courage and faith upon this business. We are alive. Keep on
thinking of _that_. Consider what we have come through. We might have
been thrown upon the ice without this shelter.'
'We have stranded on an island, you say?'
'I think so.'
'What island?'
I answered her.
'Is there no harbour in it, no place where ships touch, no place where
men are? If they came fishing down here for whales and seals there
should be a port.'
I put my hand upon a life-line and walked to the captain's cabin. It
was as dark as night there, for the heel of the hulk depressed the
cabin windows to within arms' reach of the beach, as it looked. I
lighted a bull's-eye, and, finding the chart I required, returned with
it.
It was a chart of the discoveries made in these waters between 1819 and
1843. It outlined Graham Land down to sixty-eight degrees south, and
a little more than sixty-eight degrees west, and submitted a shaded
tracing of the South Shetlands; but I was very certain that our island
was none of _them_. I put the chart on Miss Otway's knee and threw the
lamplight upon it, and said, pointing to Coronation Island and then to
Laurie Island:
'Which of them this is I can't tell you, but I should guess by our
drift that it's the bigger of the two, and that our lodgment's here,'
and I put my finger upon a bight named Palmer's Bay. 'Here's a mountain
at back of it, you see,' said I, 'towering to a height of nigh four
thousand five hundred feet; it was the blue shadow we saw in the air,
and our drift was nigh hard straight for that.'
She put her face close to the chart, listening, meanwhile, greedily to
me.
'But here are many English names,' said she--'Cape Dundas--Despair
Rock--Saddle Island.' She read thus a little; then went on: 'Surely an
island that has been named in this fashion is inhabited?'
'Well, it may be. I hope it is,' said I.
'Here are big islands,' she cried, pointing to the South Shetlands.
'Aren't there people upon _them_? And if so, couldn't we manage to get
to the place where they're settled? It's not far,' she added, looking
up at me.
'It's a long way,' said I, 'for all it looks but the span of a hand on
this paper, and we have no boat.'
'People must have been in some such another dreadful situation as this
before now,' she exclaimed. 'How did they manage?'
'We'll manage, depend on't', said I, with all the hearty cheerfulness
I could summon. 'We'll write letters to the sea, telling our distress,
and send them adrift in bottles. I'll fashion rafts out of some of the
theatre stuff in the hold and send them afloat with the story of our
condition mastheaded on them in cans. It's not for us to be hopeless.
Wouldn't you rather be here than knocking about amongst the ice?'
'Oh yes,' she cried; 'but if we are locked up--hidden away?'
She started as if she would rise, and asked me to take her on deck that
she might see where we were, but I thought proper to keep her below in
the warmth and encourage her, and rouse her spirits by representations
of our prospects of deliverance, before letting her view the situation
of the hull; in truth I could not look at her and observe how delicate
and fragile she was, and reflect on the depressing, heart-subduing
influence of the terrors and experiences she had passed through,
without fearing the effect of a sudden shock, such as might prove the
sight of the savage wildness of the frowning, frozen cradle in which
the hull lay as in a tomb.
I went about to get some breakfast. When I got on deck with a chopper
to fill the kettle, I found that the mould of fresh-water ice I had
split out of the scuttlebutt was gone. I had no mind to enter the
hold; indeed, I had not strength enough then to break open the frozen
hatch-covers; and water being wanted for a cup of hot coffee, I chipped
at a spear of ice on the bulwark and found it sweet, and perhaps
sweeter than the water we had been drinking. Why? Because nearly all
those frozen heads and devices of barbs and spikes were frozen snow and
mist. But never could we lack fresh water in this part of the world;
the cliffs ahead and astern were fresh; we were beached in fresh-water
ice. Even in that early time of my distress, whilst I sucked a little
piece of ice off the bulwarks to learn its quality, I found myself
lifting up my eyes with amazement at those giant heights, formed, as I
knew, of the vapour of the air and the sleet of the cloud and the gale.
It was like thinking of some vast, soft fog clinging to the face of
the land and freezing there into precipitous iron-hard rocks.
Whilst making my way to the hatch with the ice, I heard a sudden great
roar astern; a sharp tremble ran through the hull as though a mine had
been sprung close alongside; the noise was exactly that of a broadside
from a liner, every great gun discharged at once. Yet I saw no movement
in the ice, nor heard any sound as of a fall. This put it into my head
to fancy it might not be long before the great berg that was linked
astern of us was sundered and on its way to join the rest of the mighty
fleet, every one of which had had a like berth and such a despatch as
awaited this.
I clawed my way to the side and looked over. The beach that held the
berg to the main was perhaps a quarter of a mile long; I could not
be sure; it went out of sight in a slope on the port hand. But, in
comparison with the mighty bulk it yoked to the island, it was a
slender tie indeed, to be snapped in any moment of storm as you'd break
a clay pipe-stem. I peered down, wondering if the severance happened
whether we should go with the berg or be left a-dry under the cliff as
we now lay; but it was a hopeless and therefore a silly speculation;
though all the same I prayed heartily whilst I stood staring about me
that the berg would go, and speedily, whether it took us or left us,
since, whilst we lay hidden by it, there was not the remotest chance,
that I could imagine, of our being rescued.
I remember thinking, as I turned from the rail and made with the ice
in my hand towards the companion, that one of the hardest parts of
this terrible experience for the poor girl below, though she would
have to be dumb on the subject, was the prospect of being locked up
with me--alone with a young man, a sailor, who was a stranger without
existence to her a few days ago; to be locked up, I say, it might
be for months, with a threat even of years in the run of time, with
a person whose character and history she knew nothing about, whose
calling sunk him far below her socially. This ran in my head with the
swiftness of thought whilst I was going below, and after I was in the
cabin going about the business of boiling coffee for a meal.
How could I make her mind easy, on the score, I mean, of our
association, so that something at least of the weight of our
distressful tragic situation should be lifted off her poor young heart?
But the answer my good sense gave me was the answer it had before
returned, namely, she could only find me out by time, though to be sure
I might shorten the period of her fear of me by a behaviour that could
leave her in no doubt of my resolution to act as a man.
I can't express how deeply I pitied her, how my very soul was moved
to its depths by the sight of her as she sat in her loneliness and
helplessness, a trueborn lady, gentle and fair, watching me, with her
white face turning after me, as I moved; sitting upon that desperate
slope of deck with the red glow of the fire upon her, herself a
shapeless bulk of furs and coverings in the lamplight that was growing
dim.
When I drew to the stove she questioned me afresh upon our situation,
and begged me to conduct her on deck. I answered presently, when she
had broken her fast. She said:
'Only think how it would be with me if I were alone.'
I stopped in what I was about, and looking at her a little steadily,
but with a smile, I said:
'I'm glad my presence is welcome to you. It will be owing to no fault
of mine if it's not always so whilst we're together.'
A grateful look freshened her face with an expression of life that was
like colour and a smile.
'Think of me alone here!' she said in a low voice. 'I should have gone
mad days ago. It never could have come to my knowing that this hull
had stranded amongst the ice. I should have destroyed myself in my
craziness.'
'You have gone through too much,' said I, 'to miss of being rescued.
You'll be saved and so shall I, and for no other reason, I dare say,
than because I'm with you. I have some hope that this hulk will take a
more comfortable posture. Did you hear a roar like an explosion just
now astern?'
'Yes. Was it the ice?'
'Ay. But should it trim us, I hope it will not send us afloat.'
She listened whilst I told her of the huge berg that lay linked to the
island by the beach of ice on which the hull rested. Then I talked
as cheerfully as I could of making this interior a tight, dry, warm
room for her whilst we lay waiting for that help which was bound in
some shape of whaler or sealer to come along. She shuddered and looked
around her with a face of sudden imploring grief; but I went on,
speaking as heartily as I could.
'We'll make this cabin dry and warm,' said I. 'I'll get that water to
leeward there baled out. I'll rout the carpet up on deck and see what
the breeze will do for the brine in it. They've managed very well over
and over again up in the Arctic latitudes for months and months with
meaner accommodation and a poorer hold. I'll stock this cabin that
things may be handy. There's plenty of oil aboard I hope. There'll be
coal to last us in the forepeak; we shall be helped out of this before
it's all used up.'
'How long,' she asked, 'are we likely to remain here?'
'It was a saying of Nelson that at sea everything is possible and
nothing improbable. It's certain these islands are visited. My
intention is, Miss Otway, since we're here, so to provide for ourselves
that we may be alive when help comes. Do you see that?'
'Oh yes.'
'Don't be scared, then, because I talk of provisioning and securing
ourselves as though we were to be locked up for years.'
Whilst I talked I was at work getting breakfast. The angle of the
deck was an abomination and a terrible hindrance, but I made no
further trouble of it than my laboured motions expressed. Yet beyond
the boiling of the kettle there was nothing to be done in the way of
cooking owing to the slant of the stove. The discomfort was incredible.
It was like being in a ship poised on her beam ends on the edge of a
sea, magically arrested in her downward rush, and hanging fixed, as
though capsizing.
All was as hushed in the interior as though we were in harbour. The
seethe coming from the flashes of silent swell, whenever the dark green
folds, blindly sweeping, tore themselves against some edge of ice,
was too faint to invade us: the noise of the sea was shut out by the
heights of ice astern, and no echo of the booming of the gale sweeping
over the frozen summits penetrated. But for the insufferable posture
of the hull my heart might have beaten with some sort of restfulness
and even gratitude; for, dreadful as our situation was, it lacked the
terrors of the past days and nights; we were at least safe for the
time being, whilst in any hour gone by we might have been crushed to
pieces; we had a right to look forward with some hope, because we were
plentifully supplied with food; the hull was a stout shelter, and I
could not conceive, unless there happened some convulsion of ice, that
the swell of the bay, however enraged by storm, could hurt us; it might
thump and thrust us high, further out of its reach--that was all--and
trim the vessel by so doing into a habitable structure.
These were my thoughts as I put some breakfast on the deck for my
companion. It was impossible for her to help herself. I had to place
the fiddles on the deck to save the food from slipping from her hand.
I talked with so much confidence that, when she had made a light meal,
I heard something like a note of her spirit in her voice, and saw a
little light of kindling hope in her eyes. Presently she begged me to
take her on deck, on which I helped her to stand, and, catching hold of
her arm, conducted her to the companion steps.
She ascended painfully. I stepped out on deck and brought her to my
side; and then, emerging, she looked around. Never can I forget that
poor young lady's face as she gazed at the savage, desolate, frozen
scene, realising the significance of it slowly. She shrank, she
cowered in the companion way; she shuddered violently, whilst her hand,
with a wandering gesture, came to my arm. I see her now in memory
turning her white face towards the towering mass astern, then looking
at the dumb blankness of the ice cliffs ahead, with the bows of the
beam-ended hulk rising to them as though upon a lift of sea.
'Is this it? Is this it?' she whispered.
She stared straight up at the flying gloom, blacking off the ghastly
white edge of the iceberg in shadows of a ragged, smoke-like stuff;
she strained her eyes at the little space of sea showing in angry,
dark, flashing ridges past the huge ice projection that made the bay,
shutting out from our sight all the rest of the ocean too. Then,
turning to me, she tried to speak, swayed, with an effort to cover her
face, and fainted.