THE FROZEN PIRATE. 

 BY W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF "THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR, " "THE LADY MAUD, " "A SAILOR'SSWEETHEART, " ETC. , ETC. 

PH[OE]NIX PUBLISHING CO. , NEW YORK. 

CONTENTS. 

 I. The Storm

 II. The Iceberg

 III. I Lose My Companions

 IV. I Quit the Wreck

 V. I Sight a White Coast

 VI. An Island of Ice

 VII. I am Startled by a Discovery

 VIII. The Frozen Schooner

 IX. I Lose my Boat

 X. Another Startling Discovery

 XI. I Make Further Discoveries

 XII. A Lonely Night

 XIII. I Explore the Hold and Forecastle

 XIV. An Extraordinary Occurrence

 XV. The Pirate's Story

 XVI. I Hear of a Great Treasure

 XVII. The Treasure

 XVIII. We Talk over our Situation

 XIX. We Take a View of the Ice

 XX. A Merry Evening

 XXI. We Explore the Mines

 XXII. A Change Comes Over the Frenchman

 XXIII. The Ice Breaks Away

 XXIV. The Frenchman Dies

 XXV. The Schooner Frees Herself

 XXVI. I am Troubled by Thoughts of the Treasure

 XXVII. I Encounter a Whaler

 XXVIII. I Strike a Bargain with the Yankee

 XXIX. I Value the Lading

 XXX. Our Progress to the Channel

 XXXI. The End

 Postscript

THE FROZEN PIRATE. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE STORM. 

The _Laughing Mary_ was a light ship, as sailors term a vessel thatstands high upon the water, having discharged her cargo at Callao, fromwhich port we were proceeding in ballast to Cape Town, South Africa, there to call for orders. Our run to within a few parallels of thelatitude of the Horn had been extremely pleasant; the proverbialmildness of the Pacific Ocean was in the mellow sweetness of the windand in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced swell; but scarce hadwe passed the height of forty-nine degrees when the weather grew sullenand dark, a heavy bank of clouds of a livid hue rose in the north-east, and the wind came and went in small guns, the gusts venting themselvesin dreary moans, insomuch that our oldest hands confessed they had neverheard blasts more portentous. 

The gale came on with some lightning and several claps of thunder andheavy rain. Though it was but two o'clock in the afternoon, the air wasso dusky that the men had to feel for the ropes; and when the first ofthe tempest stormed down upon us the appearance of the sea wasuncommonly terrible, being swept and mangled into boiling froth in thenorth-east quarter, whilst all about us and in the south-west it lay ina sort of swollen huddle of shadows, glooming into the darkness of thesky without offering the smallest glimpse of the horizon. 

In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down tothe close-reefed main-topsail; yet, though we were dead before theoutfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed ofsmoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the bows like ascattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind. Thebursting of the topsail was like the explosion of a large cannon. In abreath the brig was smothered with froth torn up in huge clouds, andhurled over and ahead of her in vast quivering bodies that filled thewind with a dismal twilight of their own, in which nothing was visiblebut their terrific speeding. Through these slinging, soft, and singingmasses of spume drove the rain in horizontal steel-like lines, whichgleamed in the lightning stroke as though indeed they were barbedweapons of bright metal, darted by armies of invisible spirits ravingout their war cries as they chased us. 

The storm made a loud thunder in the sky, and this tremendous utterancedominated without subduing the many screaming, hissing, shrieking, andhooting noises raised in the rigging and about the decks, and the wild, seething, weltering sound of the sea, maddened by the gale andstruggling in its enormous passion under the first choking and iron gripof the hurricane's hand. 

I had used the ocean for above ten years, but never had I encounteredanything suddener or fiercer in the form of weather than this. Thoughthe wind blew from the tropics it was as cruel in bitterness as frost. Yet there was neither snow nor hail, only rain that seemed to pass likea knife through the head if you showed your face to it for a second. Itwas necessary to bring the brig to the wind before the sea rose. Thehelm was put down, and without a rag of canvas on her she came round;but when she brought the hurricane fair abeam, I thought it was all overwith us. She lay down to it until her bulwarks were under water, and thesheer-poles in the rigging above the rail hidden. 

In this posture she hung so long that Captain Rosy, the master, bawledto me to tell the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmast rigging. But the _Laughing Mary_, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship andlightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through ourseizing a small tarpaulin in the weather main shrouds, she erected hermasts afresh, like some sentient creature pricking its ears for theaffray, and with that showed herself game and made indifferently goodweather of it. 

But though the first rage of the storm was terrible enough, itsfierceness did not come to its height till about one o'clock in themiddle watch. Long before then the sea had grown mountainous, and thedance of our eggshell of a brig upon it was sickening and affrighting. The heads of the Andean peaks of black water looked tall enough tobrush the lowering soot of the heavens with the blue and yellowphosphoric fires which sparkled ghastly amid the bursting froth. Bodiesof foam flew like the flashings of pale sheet-lightning through ourrigging and over us, and a dreadful roaring of mighty surges in madcareer, and battling as they ran, rose out of the sea to deepen yet thethunderous bellowing of the hurricane on high. 

No man could show himself on deck and preserve his life. Between therails it was waist high, and this water, converted by the motions of thebrig into a wild torrent, had its volume perpetually maintained byton-loads of sea falling in dull and pounding crashes over the bows onto the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm andawait the issue below, for, if we were to be drowned, it would make amore easy foundering to go down dry and warm in the cabin, than toperish half-frozen and already nearly strangled by the bitter cold andflooded tempest on deck. 

There was Captain Rosy; there was myself, by name Paul Rodney, mate ofthe brig; and there were the remaining seven of a crew, including thecarpenter. We sat in the cabin, one of us from time to time clawing hisway up the ladder to peer through the companion, and we looked at oneanother with the melancholy of malefactors waiting to be called fromtheir cells for the last jaunt to Tyburn. 

"May God have mercy upon us!" cries the carpenter. "There must be anearthquake inside this storm. Something more than wind is going to themaking of these seas. Hear that, now! naught less than a forty-footchuck-up could ha' ended in that souse, mates. "

"A man can die but once, " says Captain Rosy, "and he'll not perish thequicker for looking at his end with a stout heart;" and with that he puthis hand into the locker on which he had been sitting and pulled out ajar of whisky, which, after putting his lips to it and keeping themglued there whilst you could have counted twenty, he handed to me, andso it went round, coming back to him empty. 

I often have the sight of that cabin in my mind's eye; and it was notlong afterwards that it would visit me as such a vision of comfort, Iwould with a grateful heart have accepted it with tenfold darkerconditions of danger, had it been possible to exchange my situation forit. A lantern hung from a beam, and swung violently to the rolling andpitching of the brig. The alternations of its light put twenty differentmeanings, one after another, into the settled dismal and ruefulexpressions in the faces of my companions. We were clad in warm clothes, and the steam rose from the damp in our coats and trousers like vapourfrom wet straw. The drink mottled some of our faces, but the spirituoustincture only imparted a quality of irony to the melancholy of ourvisages, as if our mournfulness were not wholly sincere, when, Godknows, our hearts were taken up with counting the minutes when we shouldfind ourselves bursting for want of breath under water. 

Thus it continued till daybreak, all which time we strove to encourageone another as best we could, sometimes with words, sometimes withputting the bottle about. It was impossible for any of us at any momentto show more than our noses above the companion; and even at that youneeded the utmost caution, for the decks being full of water, it wasnecessary to await the lurch of the vessel before moving the slide orcover to the companion, else you stood to drown the cabin. 

Being exceedingly anxious, for the brig lay unwatched, I looked forth onone occasion longer than the others chose to venture, and beheld themost extravagant scene of raging commotion it could enter the brain ofman to imagine. The night was as black as the bottom of a well; but theprodigious swelling and flinging of white waters hove a faintness uponthe air that was in its way a dim light, by which it was just possibleto distinguish the reeling masts to the height of the tops, and toobserve the figure of the brig springing black and trembling out of thehead of a surge that had broken over and smothered her as in a cauldron, and to note the shapes of the nearer liquid acclivities as they boredown upon our weather bow, catching the brig fair under the bluff, andso sloping her that she seemed to stand end on, and so heeling her thatthe sea would wash to the height of the main hatch. Indeed, had she beenloaded, and therefore deep, she could not have lived an hour in thathollow and frightful ocean; but having nothing in her but ballast shewas like a bladder, and swung up the surges and blew away to leewardlike an empty cask. 

When the dawn broke something of its midnight fury went out of the gale. The carpenter made shift to sound the well, and to our greatsatisfaction found but little water, only as much as we had a right tosuppose she would take in above. But it was impossible to stand at thepumps, so we returned to the cabin and brewed some cold punch and didwhat we could to keep our spirits hearty. By noon the wind had weakenedyet, but the sea still ran very heavily, and the sky was uncommonlythick with piles of dusky, yellowish, hurrying clouds; and though wecould fairly reckon upon our position, the atmosphere was so nipping itwas difficult to persuade ourselves that Cape Horn was not close aboard. 

We could now work the pumps, and a short spell freed the brig. We got upa new main-topsail and bent it, and, setting the reefed foresail, putthe vessel before the wind, and away she ran, chased by the swollenseas. Thus we continued till by dead reckoning we calculated that wewere about thirty leagues south of the parallel of the Horn, and inlongitude eighty-seven degrees west. We then boarded our larboard tacksand brought the brig as close to the wind as it was proper to lay herfor a progress that should not be wholly leeway; but four hours after wehad handled the braces the gale, that had not veered two points since itfirst came on to blow, stormed up again into its first fury; and themorning of the 1st of July, _anno_ 1801, found the _Laughing Mary_passionately labouring in the midst of an enraged Cape Horn sea, herjibboom and fore top-gallant mast gone, her ballast shifted, so that herposture even in a calm would have exhibited her with her starboardchannels under, and her decks swept by enormous surges, which, fetchingher larboard bilge dreadful blows, thundered in mighty green masses overher. 

CHAPTER II. 

THE ICEBERG. 

The loss of the spars I have named was no great matter, nor were we tobe intimidated by such weather as was to be expected off Cape Horn. Forwhat sailor entering this icy and tempestuous tract of waters but knowsthat here he must expect to find Nature in her most violent moods, crueller and more unreckonable than a mad woman, who one moment lookswith a silent sinister sullenness upon you, and the next is shriekingwith devilish laughter as she makes as if to spring upon you?

But there was an inveteracy in the gale which had driven us down to thispart that bore heavily upon our spirits. It was impossible to trim theballast. We dared not veer so as to bring the ship on the other tack. And the slope of the decks, added to the fierce wild motions of thefabric, made our situation as unendurable as that of one who should beconfined in a cask and sent rolling downhill. It was impossible to lighta fire, and we could not therefore dress our food or obtain a warmdrink. The cold was beyond language severe. The rigging was glazed withice, and great pendants of the silvery brilliance of crystal hung fromthe yards, bowsprit, and catheads, whilst the sails were frozen to thehardness of granite, and lay like sheets of iron rolled up in gaskets ofsteel. We had no means of drying our clothes, nor were we able so tomove as by exercise we might keep ourselves warm. Never once did the sunshine to give us the encouragement of his glorious beam. Hour after hourfound us amid the same distracting scene: the tall olive-coloured seashurling out their rage in foam as they roared towards us in ranges ofdissolving cliffs; the wind screaming and whistling through our grey andfrozen rigging; the water washing in floods about our decks, with theends of the running gear snaking about in the torrent, and the livestock lying drowned and stiff in their coops and pen near the caboose. 

With helm lashed and yards pointed to the wind thus we lay, thus wedrifted, steadily trending with the send of each giant surge further anddeeper into the icy regions of the south-west, helpless, foreboding, disconsolate. 

It was the night of the fourth day of the month. The crew were forwardin the forecastle, and I knew not if any man was on deck saving myself. In truth, there was no place in which a watch could be kept, if it werenot in the companion hatch. Such was the violence with which the seasbroke over the brig that it was at the risk of his life a man crawledthe distance betwixt the forecastle and the quarter-deck. It had been asthick as mud all day, and now upon this flying gloom of haze, sleet, andspray had descended the blackness of the night. 

I stood in the companion as in a sentry-box, with my eyes just above thecover. Nothing was to be seen but sheets of ghostly white water sweepingup the blackness on the vessel's lee, or breaking and boiling towindward. It was sheer blind chaos to the sight, and you might havesupposed that the brig was in the midst of some enormous vaporousturmoil, so illusive and indefinable were the shadows of thestorm-tormented night--one block of blackness melting into another, withsometimes an extraordinary faintness of light speeding along the darksky like to the dim reflection of a lanthorn flinging its radiance fromafar, which no doubt must have been the reflection of some particularbright and extensive bed of foam upon a sooty belly on high, hanginglower than the other clouds. I say, you might have thought yourself inthe midst of some hellish conflict of vapour but for the substantialthunder of the surges upon the vessel and the shriek of the slung massesof water flying like cannon balls between the masts. 

After a long and eager look round into the obscurity, semi-lucent withfroth, I went below for a mouthful of spirits and a bite of supper, thehour being eight bells in the second dog watch as we say, that is, eighto'clock in the evening. The captain and carpenter were in the cabin. Upon the swing-tray over the table were a piece of corned beef, somebiscuit, and a bottle of hollands. 

"Nothing to be seen, I suppose, Rodney?" says the captain. 

"Nothing, " I answered. "She looks well up, and that's all that can besaid. "

"I've been hove to under bare poles more than once in my time, " said thecarpenter, "but never through so long a stretch. I doubt if you'll findmany vessels to look up to it as this here _Laughing Mary_ does. "

"The loss of hamper forward will make her the more weatherly, " saysCaptain Rosy. "But we're in an ugly part of the globe. When bad sailorsdie they're sent here, I reckon. The worst nautical sinner can't be hoveto long off the Horn without coming out of it with a purged soul. Hemust start afresh to deserve further punishment. "

"Well, here's a breeze that can't go on blowing much longer, " cries thecarpenter. "The place it comes from must give out soon, unless a newtrade wind's got fixed into a whole gale for this here ocean. "

"What southing do you allow our drift will be giving us, captain?" Iasked, munching a piece of beef. 

"All four mile an hour, " he answered. "If this goes on I shall look tomake some discoveries. The Antarctic circle won't be far off presently, and since you're a scholar, Rodney, I'll leave you to describe what'sinside of it, though boil me if I don't have the naming of the tallestland; for, d'ye see, I've a mind to be known after I'm dead, andthere's nothing like your signature on a mountain to be remembered by. "

He grinned and put his hand out for the bottle, and after a pull passedit to the carpenter. I guessed by his jocosity that he had already beenmaking somewhat free; for although I love a bold face put upon adifficulty, ours was a situation in which only a tipsy man could findfood for merriment. 

At this instant we were startled by a wild and fearful shout on deck. Itsounded high above the sweeping and seething of the wind and the hissingof the lashed waters, and it penetrated the planks with a note that gaveit an inexpressible character of anguish. 

"A man washed overboard!" bawled the carpenter, springing to his feet. 

"No!" cried I, for my younger and shrewder ear had caught a note in thecry that persuaded me it was not as the carpenter said; and in aninstant the three of us jumped up the ladder and gained the deck. 

The moment I was in the gale the same affrighted cry rang down along thewind from some man forward: _"For God's sake tumble up before we areupon it!"_

"What do you see?" I roared, sending my voice, trumpet-fashion, throughmy hands; for as to my own and the sight of Captain Rosy and thecarpenter, why, it was like being struck blind to come on a sudden outof the lighted cabin into the black night. 

Any reply that might have been attempted was choked out by the dive ofthe brig's head into a sea, which furiously flooded her forecastle andcame washing aft like milk in the darkness till it was up to our knees. 

"See there!" suddenly roared the carpenter. 

"Where, man, where?" bawled the captain. 

But in this brief time my sight had grown used to the night, and I sawthe object before the carpenter could answer. It lay on our lee beam, but how far off no man could have told in that black thickness. It stoodagainst the darkness and hung out a dim complexion of light, or ratherof pallidness, that was not light--not to be described by the pen. Itwas like a small hill of snow, and looked as snow does or the foam ofthe sea in darkness, and it came and went with our soaring and sinking. 

"Ice!" I shouted to the captain. 

"I see it!" he answered, in a voice that satisfied me the consternationhe was under had settled the fumes of the spirits out of his head. "Wemust drive her clear at all risks. "

There was no need to call the men. To the second cry that had beenraised by one among them who had come out of the forecastle and seen theberg, they had tumbled up as sailors will when they jump for theirlives; and now they came staggering, splashing, crawling aft to us, forthe lamp in the cabin made a sheen in the companion hatch, and theycould see us as we stood there. 

"Men, " cried Captain Rosy, "yonder's a gravestone for our carcases if weare not lively! Cast the helm adrift!" (we steered by a tiller). "Twohands stand by it. Forward, some of ye, and loose the stay-foresail, andshow the head of it. "

The fellows hung in the wind. I could not wonder. The bowsprit had beensprung when the jibboom was wrenched from the cap by the fall of thetop-gallant-mast; it still had to bear the weight of the heavy spritsailyard, and the drag of the staysail might carry the spar overboard withthe men upon it. Yet it was our best chance; the one sail most speedilyreleased and hoisted, the one that would pay the brig's head offquickest, and the only fragment that promised to stand. 

"Jump!" roared the captain, in a passion of hurry. "Great thunder! 'tisclose aboard! You'll leave me no sea room for veering if you delay aninstant. "

"Follow me who will!" I cried out; "and others stand by ready to hoistaway. "

Thus speaking--for there seemed to my mind a surer promise of death inhesitation at this supreme moment than in twenty such risks as layingout on the bowsprit signified--I made for the lee of the weatherbulwarks, and blindly hauled myself forward by such pins and gear ascame to my hands. A man might spend his life on the ocean and never haveto deal with such a passage as this. It was not the bitter cold only, though perhaps of its full fierceness the wildness of my feelings didnot suffer me to be sensible; it was the pouring of volumes of waterupon me from over the rail, often tumbling upon my head with such weightas nearly to beat the breath out of my body and sink me to the deck; itwas the frenzy excited in me by the tremendous obligation of despatchand my retardment by the washing seas, the violent motions of the brig, the encumbrance of gear and deck furniture adrift and sweeping here andthere, and the sense that the vessel might be grinding her bows againstthe iceberg before I should be able to reach the bowsprit. All this itwas that filled me with a kind of madness, by the sheer force of whichalone I was enabled to reach the forecastle, for had I gone to my dutycoldly, without agitation of spirits, my heart must have failed mebefore I had measured half the length of the brig. 

I got on to the bowsprit nearly stifled by the showering of the seas, holding an open knife between my teeth, half dazed by the prodigiousmotion of the light brig, which, at this extreme end of her, was to befelt to the full height of its extravagance. At every plunge I expectedto be buried, and every moment I was prepared to be torn from my hold. It was a fearful time; the falling off of the brig into the trough--andnever was I in a hollower and more swelling sea--her falling off, I say, in the act of veering might end us out of hand by the rolling of a surgeover us big enough to crush the vessel down fathoms out of sight; andthen there was that horrible heap of faint whiteness leaping out of thedense blackness of the sky, gathering a more visible sharpness ofoutline with every liquid heave that forked us high into the flyingnight with shrieking rigging and boiling decks. 

Commending myself to God, for I was now to let go with my hands, Ipulled the knife from my teeth, and feeling for the gaskets or lineswhich bound the sail to the spar, I cut and hacked as fast as I couldply my arms. In a flash the gale, whipping into a liberated fold of thecanvas, blew the whole sail out; the bowsprit reeled and quivered underme; I danced off it with incredible despatch, shouting to the men tohoist away. The head of the staysail mounted in thunder, and theslatting of its folds and the thrashing of its sheet was like therattling of heavy field-pieces whisked at full gallop over a stony road. 

"High enough!" I bawled, guessing enough was shown, for I could not see. "Get a drag upon the sheet, lads, and then aft with you for your lives!"

Scarce had I let forth my breath in this cry when I heard the blast asof a gun, and knew by that the sail was gone; an instant after wash camea mountainous sea sheer over the weather bulwarks fair betwixt the foreand main rigging; but happily, standing near the fore shrouds, I washolding on with both hands to the topsail halliards whilst calling tothe men, so that being under the rail, which broke the blow of the sea, and holding on too, no mischief befell me, only that for about twentyseconds I stood in a horrible fury and smother of frothing water, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, with every faculty in me so numbed anddulled by the wet, cold, and horror of our situation, that I knew notwhether in that space of time I was in the least degree sensible of whathad happened or what might befall. 

The water leaving the deck, I rallied, though half-drowned, andstaggered aft, and found the helm deserted, nor could I see any signs ofmy companions. I rushed to the tiller, and putting my whole weight andforce to it, drove it up to windward and secured it by a turn of its ownrope; for ice or no ice--and for the moment I was so blinded by the wetthat I could not see the berg--my madness now was to get the brig beforethe sea and out of the trough, advised by every instinct in me that suchanother surge as that which had rolled over her must send her to thebottom in less time than it would take a man to cry "O God!"

A figure came out of the blackness on the lee side of the deck. 

"Who is that?" said he. It was Captain Rosy. 

I answered. 

"What, Rodney! alive?" cried he. "I think I have been struckinsensible. "

Two more figures came crawling aft. Then two more. They were thecarpenter and three seamen. 

I cried out, "Who was at the helm when that sea was shipped?"

A man answered, "Me, Thomas Jobling. "

"Where's your mate?" I asked; and it seemed to me that I was the onlyman who had his senses full just then. 

"He was washed forward along with me, " he replied. 

Now a fifth man joined us, but before I could question him as to theothers, the captain, with a scream like an epileptic's cry, shrieked, "It's all over with us! We are upon it!"

I looked and perceived the iceberg to be within a musket-shot, whence itwas clear that it had been closer to us when first sighted than theblackness of the night would suffer us to distinguish. In a time likethis at sea events throng so fast they come in a heap, and even if theintelligence were not confounded by the uproar and peril, if indeed itwere as placid as in any time of perfect security, it could not possiblytake note of one-tenth that happens. 

I confess that, for my part, I was very nearly paralyzed by the nearnessof the iceberg, and by the cry of the captain, and by the perceptionthat there was nothing to be done. That which I best recollect is theappearance of the mass of ice lying solidly, like a little island, uponthe seas which roared in creaming waters about it. Every blow of theblack and arching surge was reverberated in a dull hollow tremble backto the ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body wasnot taller than our mastheads, yet it showed like a mountain hangingover us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep Pacific hollow, leaving us staring upwards out of the instant's stagnation of the troughwith lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes. It put a kind of filmof faint light outside the lines of its own shape, and this served tomagnify it, and it showed spectrally in the darkness as though itreflected some visionary light that came neither from the sea nor thesky. These points I recollect; likewise the maddening and maddenedmotion of our vessel, sliding towards it down one midnight declivity toanother. 

All other features were swallowed up in the agony of the time. Onemonstrous swing the brig gave, like to some doomed creature's lastdelirious struggle; the bowsprit caught the ice and snapped with thenoise of a great tree crackling in fire. I could hear the masts breakingoverhead--the crash and blows of spars and yards torn down and strikingthe hull; above all the grating of the vessel, that was now head on tothe sea and swept by the billows, broadside on, along the sharp andmurderous projections. Two monster seas tumbled over the bows, floatedme off my legs, and dashed me against the tiller, to which I clung. Iheard no cries. I regained my feet, clinging with a death-grip to thetiller, and, seeing no one near me, tried to holloa, to know if any manwere living, but could not make my voice sound. 

The fearful grating noise ceased on a sudden, and the faintness of theberg loomed upon the starboard bow. We had been hurled clear of it andwere to leeward; but what was our condition? I tried to shout again, butto no purpose; and was in the act of quitting the tiller to go forwardwhen I was struck over the brows by something from aloft--a block, as Ibelieve--and fell senseless upon the deck. 

CHAPTER III. 

I LOSE MY COMPANIONS. 

I lay for a long while insensible; and that I should have recovered mymind instead of dying in that swoon I must ever account as the greatestwonder of a life that has not been wanting in the marvellous. I had nosooner sat up than all that had happened and my present situationinstantly came to me. My hair was stiff with ice; there was no morefeeling in my hands than had they been of stone; my clothes weighed uponme like a suit of armour, so inflexibly hard were they frozen. Yet I gotupon my legs, and found that I could stand and walk, and that lifeflowed warm in my veins, for all that I had been lying motionless for anhour or more, laved by water that would have become ice had it beenstill. 

It was intensely dark; the binnacle lamp was extinguished, and the lightin the cabin burned too dimly to throw the faintest colour upon thehatchway. One thing I quickly noticed, that the gale had broken and blewno more than a fresh breeze. The sea still ran very high, but thoughevery surge continued to hurl its head of snow, and the heavens toresemble ink from contrast with the passage, as it seemed, close underthem of these pallid bodies, there was less spite in its wash, lessfury in its blow. The multitudinous roaring of the heaving blackness hadsobered into a hard and sullen growling, a sound as of thunder amongmountains heard in a valley. 

The brig pitched and rolled heavily. Much of the buoyancy of her earlierdance was gone out of her. Nevertheless, I could not persuade myselfthat this sluggishness was altogether due to the water she had taken in. It was wonderful, however, that she should still be afloat. No man couldhave heard the rending and grating of her side against the ice withoutsupposing that every plank in it was being torn out. 

Finding that I had the use of my voice, I holloaed as loudly as I could, but no human note responded. Three or four times I shouted, giving someof the people their names, but in vain. Father of mercy! I thought, whathas come to pass? Is it possible that all my companions have been washedoverboard? Certainly, five men at least were living before we fouled theice. And again I cried out, "Is there any one alive?" looking wildlyalong the black decks, and putting so much force into my voice with theconsternation that the thought of my being alone raised in me, that Ihad like to have burst a blood-vessel. 

My loneliness was more terrible to me than any other condition of mysituation. It was dreadful to be standing, nearly dead with cold, inutter darkness, upon the flooded decks of a hull wallowing miserablyamid the black hollows and eager foaming peaks of the labouring sea, convinced that she was slowly filling, and that at any moment she mightgo down with me; it was dreadful, I say, to be thus placed, and to feelthat I was in the heart of the rudest, most desolate space of sea in theworld, into which the commerce of the earth dispatched but few ships allthe year round. But no feature of my lamentable situation so affrightedme, so worked upon the passions of my mind, as my loneliness. Oh, forone companion, even one only, to make me an echo for mine own speech!Nay, God Himself, the merciful Father of all, even He seemed not! Theblackness lay like a pall upon the deep, and upon my soul. Misery andhorror were within that shadow, and beyond it nothing that my spiritcould look up to!

I stood for some moments as one stunned, and then my manhood--trained tosome purpose by the usage of the sea--reasserted itself; and maybe Ialso got some slender comfort from observing that, dull and heavy as wasthe motion of the brig, there was yet the buoyancy of vitality in hermanner of mounting the seas, and that, after all, her case might not beso desperate as was threatened by the way in which she had been torn andprecipitated past the iceberg. At moments when she plunged the whitenessof the water creaming upon the surges on either hand threw out a phantomlight of sufficient power to enable me to see that the forward part ofthe brig was littered with wreckage, which served to a certain extent asa breakwater by preventing the seas, which washed on to the forecastle, from cascading with their former violence aft; also that the wholelength of the main and top masts lay upon the larboard rail and over theside, held in that position by the gear, attached to them. This was allthat I could distinguish, and of this only the most elusive glimpse wasto be had. 

Feeling as though the very marrow in my bones were frozen, I crawled tothe companion and, pulling open the door, descended. The lamp in thecompanion burnt faintly. There was a clock fixed to a beam over thetable; my eyes directly sought it, and found the time twenty minutesafter ten. This signified that I had ten or eleven hours of darknessbefore me!

I took down the lamp, trimmed it, and went to the lazarette hatch at theafter end of the cabin. Here were kept the stores for the crew. I liftedthe hatch and listened, and could hear the water in the hold gurglingand rushing with every lift of the brig's bows; and I could not questionfrom the volume of water which the sound indicated that the vessel wassteadily taking it in, but not rapidly. I swallowed half a pannikin ofthe hollands for the sake of the warmth and life of the draught, andentering my cabin, put on thick dry stockings, first, chafing my feettill I felt the blood in them; and I then, with a seaman's dispatch, shifted the rest of my apparel, and cannot express how greatly I wascomforted by the change, though the jacket and trousers I put on werestill damp with the soaking of previous days. To render myself aswaterproof as possible--for it was the wet clothes against the skin thatmade the cold so cruel--I took from the captain's cabin a stout cloakand threw it over me, enveloping my head, which I had cased in a warmfur cap, with the hood of it; and thus equipped I lighted a smallhand-lantern that was used on dark nights for heaving the log, that is, for showing how the sand runs in the glass, and carried it on deck. 

The lantern made the scene a dead, grave-like black outside its littlecircle of illumination; nevertheless its rays suffered me to guess atthe picture of ruin the decks offered. The main mast was snapped threeor four feet above the deck, and the stump of it showed as jagged andbarbed as a wild beast's teeth. But I now noticed that the weight of thehamper being on the larboard side, balanced the list the vessel tookfrom her shifted ballast, and that she floated on a level keel with herbows fair at the sea, whence I concluded that a sort of sea-anchor hadbeen formed ahead of her by the wreckage, and that it held her in thatposture, otherwise she must certainly have fallen into the trough. 

I moved with extreme caution, casting the lantern light before me, sometimes starting at a sound that resembled a groan, then stopping tosteady myself during some particular wild leap of the hull; until, coming abreast of the main hatch, the rays of the lantern struck upon aman's body, which, on my bringing the flame to his face, proved to beCaptain Rosy. There was a wound over his right brow; and as if that hadnot sufficed to slay him, the fall of the masts had in some wonderfulmanner whipped a rope several times round his body, binding his arms andencircling his throat so tightly, that no executioner could have gonemore artistically to work to pinion and choke a man. 

Under a mass of rigging in the larboard scuppers lay two bodies, as Icould just faintly discern; it was impossible to put the lantern closeenough to either one of them to distinguish his face, nor had I thestrength even if I had possessed the weapons to extricate them, for theylay under a whole body of shrouds, complicated by a mass of other gear, against which leaned a portion of the caboose. I viewed them long enoughto satisfy my mind that they were dead, and then with a heart of leadturned away. 

I crossed to the starboard side, where the deck was comparatively clear, and found the body of a seaman named Abraham Wise near the fore-hatch. This man had probably been stunned and drowned by the sea that filledthe deck after I loosed the staysail. These were all of our people thatI could find; the others I supposed had been washed by the water orknocked by the falling spars overboard. 

I returned to the quarter-deck, and sat down in the companion way forthe shelter of it and to think. No language that I have command of couldput before you the horror that possessed me as I sat meditating upon mysituation and recalling the faces of the dead. The wind was rapidlyfalling, and with it the sea, but the motion of the brig continued veryheavy, a large swell having been set running by the long, fierce galethat was gone; and there being no uproar of tempest in the sky toconfound the senses, I could hear a hundred harsh and melancholygroaning and straining sounds rising from the hull, with now and again amighty blow as from some spar or lump of ice alongside, weighty enough, you would have supposed, to stave the ship. But though the _LaughingMary_ was not a new vessel, she was one of the stoutest of her kind everlaunched, built mainly of oak and put together by an honest artificer. Nevertheless her continuing to float in her miserably torn and mangledcondition was so great a miracle, that, spite of my poor shipmateshaving perished and my own state being as hopeless as the sky wasstarless, I could not but consider that God's hand was very visible inthis business. 

I will not pretend to remember how I passed the hours till the dawncame. I recollect of frequently stepping below to lift the hatch of thelazarette, to judge by the sound of the quantity of water in the vessel. That she was filling I knew well, yet not leaking so rapidly but that, had our crew been preserved, we might easily have kept her free, andmade shift to rig up jury masts and haul us as best we could out ofthese desolate parallels. There was, however, nothing to be done tillthe day broke. I had noticed the jolly-boat bottom up near the starboardgangway, and so far as I could make out by throwing the dull lanternlight upon her she was sound; but I could not have launched her withoutseeing what I was doing, and even had I managed this, she stood to beswamped and I to be drowned. And, in sober truth, so horrible was theprospect of going adrift in her without preparing for the adventure withoars, sail, mast, provisions, and water--most of which, by the lamplightonly, were not to be come at amid the hideous muddle of wreckage--thatsooner than face it I was perfectly satisfied to take my chance of thehulk sinking with me in her before the sun rose. 

CHAPTER IV. 

I QUIT THE WRECK. 

The east grew pale and grey at last. The sea rolled black as the nightfrom it, with a rounded smooth-backed swell; the wind was spent; only asmall air, still from the north-east, stirred. There were a few starsdying out in the dark west; the atmosphere was clear, and when the sunrose I knew he would turn the sable pall overhead into blueness. 

The hull lay very deep. I had at one time, during the black hours, struck into a mournful calculation, and reckoned that the brig wouldfloat some two or three hours after sunrise; but when the glorious beamflashed out at last, and transformed the ashen hue of dawn into acerulean brilliance and a deep of rolling sapphire, I started withsudden terror to observe how close the covering-board sat upon thewater, and how the head of every swell ran past as high as the bulwarkrail. 

Yet for a few moments I stood contemplating the scene of ruin. It wasvisible now to its most trifling detail. The foremast was gone smoothoff at the deck; it lay over the starboard bow; and the topmast floatedahead of the hull, held by the gear. Many feet of bulwarks were crushedlevel; the pumps had vanished; the caboose was gone! A completernautical ruin I had never viewed. 

One extraordinary stroke I quickly detected. The jolly-boat had lainstowed in the long-boat; it was thus we carried those boats, the littleone lying snugly enough in the other. The sea that had flooded our deckshad floated the jolly-boat out of the long-boat, and swept it bottom upto the gangway where it lay, as though God's mercy designed it should bepreserved for my use; for, not long after it had been floated out, thebrig struck the berg, the masts fell--and there lay the long-boatcrushed into staves!

This signal and surprising intervention filled my heart withthankfulness, though my spirits sank again at the sight of my poordrowned shipmates. But, unless I had a mind to join them, it wasnecessary I should speedily bestir myself. So after a minute'sreflection I whipped out my knife, and cutting a couple of blocks awayfrom the raffle on deck, I rove a line through them, and so made atackle, by the help of which I turned the jolly-boat over; I then with ahandspike prised her nose to the gangway, secured a bunch of rope oneither side her to act as fenders or buffers when she should be launchedand lying alongside, ran her midway out by the tackle, and, attaching aline to a ring-bolt in her bow, shoved her over the side, and she fellwith a splash, shipping scarce a hatful of water. 

I found her mast and sail--the sail furled to the mast, as it was usedto lie in her--close against the stump of the mainmast; but though Isought with all the diligence that hurry would permit for her rudder, Inowhere saw it, but I met with an oar that had belonged to the otherboat, and this with the mast and sail I dropped into her, the swelllifting her up to my hand when the blue fold swung past. 

My next business was to victual her. I ran to the cabin, but thelazarette was full of water, and none of the provisions in it to be comeat. I thereupon ransacked the cabin, and found a whole Dutch cheese, apiece of raw pork, half a ham, eight or ten biscuits, some candles, atinder-box, several lemons, a little bag of flower, and thirteen bottlesof beer. These things I rolled up in a cloth and placed them in theboat, then took from the captain's locker four jars of spirits, two ofwhich I emptied that I might fill them with fresh water. I also tookwith me from the captain's cabin a small boat compass. 

The heavy, sluggish, sodden movement of the hull advised me to makehaste. She was now barely lifting to the swell that came brimming inbroad liquid blue brows to her stem. It seemed as though another ton ofwater would sink her; and if the swell fell over her bows and filled thedecks, down she would go. I had a small parcel of guineas in my chest, and was about to fetch this money, when a sort of staggering sensationin the upward slide of the hull gave me a fright, and, watching mychance, I jumped into the boat and cast the line that held her adrift. 

The sun was an hour above the horizon. The sea was a deep blue, heavingvery slowly, though you felt the weight of the mighty ocean in everyfold; and eastwards, the shoulders of the swell, catching the gloriousreflection of the sun, hurled the splendour along, till all that quarterof the sea looked to be a mass of leaping dazzle. Upon the easternsea-line lay a range of white clouds, compact as the chalk cliffs ofDover; threads, crescents, feather-shapes of vapour of the daintiestsort, shot with pearly lustre, floated overhead very high. It was intruth a fair and pleasant morning--of an icy coldness indeed, but theair being dry, its shrewdness was endurable. Yet was it a brightness tofill me with anguish by obliging me to reflect how it would have beenwith us had it dawned yesterday instead of to-day. My companions wouldhave been alive, and yonder sinking ruined fabric a trim ship capable ofbearing us stoutly into warm seas and to our homes at last. 

I threw the oar over the stern of the boat to keep her near to the brig, not so much because I desired to see the last of her, as because of theshrinking of my soul within me from the thought of heading in myloneliness into those prodigious leagues of ocean which lay stretchedunder the sky. Whilst the hull floated she was something to hold on to, so to say, something for the eye amid the vastness of water to restupon, something to take out of the insufferable feeling of solitude thepoisonous sting of conviction. 

But her end was at hand. I had risen to step the boat's mast, and wasstanding and grasping it whilst I directed a slow look round the horizonin God knows what vain hope of beholding a sail, when my eye coming tothe brig, I observed that she was sinking. She went down very slowly;there was a horrible gurgling sound of water rushing into her, and hermain deck blew up with a loud clap or blast of noise. I could follow theline of her bulwarks fluctuating and waving in the clear dark blue whenshe was some feet under. A number of whirlpools spun round over her, butthe slowness of her foundering was solemnly marked by the gradualdescent of the ruins of masts and yards which were attached to the hullby their rigging, and which she dragged down with her. On a sudden, whenthe last fragment of mast had disappeared, and when the hollows of thewhirlpools were flattening to the level surface of the sea, up rose abody, with a sort of leap. It was the sailor that had lain drowned onthe starboard side of the forward deck. Being frozen stiff he rose inthe posture in which he had expired, that is, with his arms extended; sothat, when he jumped to the surface, he came with his hands lifted up toheaven, and thus he stayed a minute, sustained by the eddies which alsorevolved him. 

The shock occasioned by this melancholy object was so great, it camenear to causing me to swoon. He sank when the water ceased to twisthim, and I was unspeakingly thankful to see him vanish, for his posturehad all the horror of a spectral appeal, and such was the state of mymind that imagination might quickly have worked the apparition, had itlingered, into an instrument for the unsettling of my reason. 

I rose from the seat on to which I had sunk and loosed the sail, andhauling the sheet aft, put the oar over the stern, and brought thelittle craft's head to an easterly course. The draught of air wasextremely weak, and scarce furnished impulse enough to the sail to raisea bubble alongside. The boat was about fifteen feet long; she would bebut a small boat for summer pleasuring in English July lake-waters, yethere was I in her in the heart of a vast ocean, many leagues south andwest of the stormiest, most inhospitable point of land in the world, with distances before me almost infinite for such a boat as this tomeasure ere I could heave a civilized coast or a habitable island intoview!

At the start I had a mind to steer north-west and blow, as the windwould suffer, into the South Sea, where perchance I might meet a whaleror a Southseaman from New Holland; but my heart sank at the prospect ofthe leagues of water which rolled between me and the islands and thewestern American seaboard. Indeed I understood that my only hope ofdeliverance lay in being picked up; and that, though by heading east Ishould be clinging to the stormy parts, I was more likely to meet with aship hereabouts than by sailing into the great desolation of thenorth-west. The burden of my loneliness weighed down upon me socrushingly that I cannot but consider my senses must have been somewhatdulled by suffering, for had they been active to their old accustomedheight, I am persuaded my heart must have broken and that I should havedied of grief. 

Faintly as the wind blew, it speedily wafted me out of sight of thefloating relics of the wreck, and then all was bare, bald, swelling seaand empearled sky, darkening in lagoons of azure down to the softmountainous masses of white vapour lying like the coast of a continenton the larboard horizon. But one living thing there was besides myself:a grey-breasted albatross, of a princely width of pinion. I had notobserved it till the hull went down, and then, lifting my eyes withinvoluntary sympathy in the direction pointed to by the upraised arms ofthe sailor, I observed the great royal bird hanging like a shape ofmarble directly over the frothing eddies. It was as though the spirit ofthe deep had taken form in the substance of the noblest of all the fowlsof its dominions, and, poised on tremorless wings, was surveying withthe cold curiosity of an intelligence empty of human emotion thedestruction of one of those fabrics whose unequal contests and repeatedtriumphs had provoked its haughty surprise. The bird quitted the spot ofthe wreck after a while and followed me. Its eyes had the sparklingblood-red gleam of rubies. It was as silent as a phantom, and witharched neck and motionless plumes seemed to watch me with anearnestness that presently grew insufferable. So far from finding anycomfort of companionship in the creature, methought if it did notspeedily break from the motionless posture in which it rested on itsseat of air, and remove its piercing gaze, it would end in crazing me. Ifelt a sudden rage, and, jumping up, shouted and shook my fist at it. This frightened the thing. It uttered a strange salt cry--the very noteof a gust of wind splitting upon a rope--flapped its wings, and after aturn or two sailed away into the north. 

I watched it till its figure melted into the blue atmosphere, and thensank trembling into the sternsheets of the boat. 

CHAPTER V. 

I SIGHT A WHITE COAST. 

Four days did I pass in that little open boat. 

The first day was fine, till sunset; it then blew fresh from thenorth-west, and I was obliged to keep the boat before the wind. The nextday was dark and turbulent, with heavy falls of snow and a high swellfrom the north, and the wind a small gale. On the third day the sunshone, and it was a fair day, but horribly cold, and I saw two icebergslike clouds upon the far western sea-line. There followed a cruel nightof clouded skies, sleet, and snow, and a very troubled sea; and thenbroke the fourth day, as softly brilliant as an English May day, butcold--great God, how cold!

Thus might I epitomize this passage; and I do so to spare you theweariness of a relation of uneventful suffering. 

In those four days I mainly ran before the wind, and in this way drovemany leagues south, though whenever a chance offered I hauled my sheetfor the east. I know not, I am sure, how the boat lived. I might pretendit was due to my clever management--I do not say I had no share in myown preservation, but to God belongs all the praise. 

In the blackness of the first night the sea boiled all about me. Theboat leapt into hollows in which the sail slapped the mast. One lookbehind me at the high dark curl of the oncoming surge had so affrightedme that I never durst turn my head again lest the sight should depriveme of the nerve to hold the oar with which I steered. I sat as squarelyas the task of steering would suffer, trusting that if a sea shouldtumble over the stern my back would serve as a breakwater, and save theboat from being swamped. The whole sail was on her, and I could not helpmyself; for it would have been certain death to quit the steering oarfor an instant. It was this that saved me, perhaps; for the boat blewalong with such prodigious speed, running to the height of a sea asthough she meant to dart from that eminence into the air, that the slopeof each following surge swung like a pendulum under her, and though hersail was becalmed in the trough, her momentum was so great that she wasspeeding up the acclivity and catching the whole weight of the windafresh before there was time for her to lose way. 

I was nearly dead with cold and misery when the morning came, but thesparkling sun and the blue sky cheered me, and as wind and sea fell withthe soaring of the orb, I was enabled to flatten aft the sheet and letthe boat steer herself whilst I beat my arms about for warmth and brokemy fast. When I look back I wonder that I should have taken any pains tolive. That it is possible for the human mind at any period of itsexistence to be absolutely hopeless I do not believe; but I can veryhonestly say that when I gazed round upon the enormous sea I was in, andconsidered the size of my boat, the quantity of my provisions, and mydistance (even if I was heading that way) from the nearest point ofland, I was not sensible of the faintest stirring of hope, and viewedmyself as a dead man. 

No bird came near me. Once I spied the back of a great black fish abouta quarter of a mile off. The wetness of it caught the sunshine andreflected it like a mirror of polished steel, and the flash was sobrilliant it might have passed for a bed of white fire floating on theblue heavings. But nothing more that was living did I meet, and such wasthe vastness of the sea over which my little keel glided, in the midstof which I sat abandoned by the angels, that for utter loneliness Imight have been the very last of the human race. 

When the third night came down with sullen blasts sweeping into a steadystorming of wind, that swung a strong melancholy howl through thegloom, it found me so weak with cold, watching, and anxiety, and thewant of space wherein to rid my limbs of the painful cramp whichweighted them with an insupportable leaden sensation, that I had barelypower to control the boat with the oar. I pined for sleep; one hour ofslumber would, I felt, give me new life, but I durst not close my eyes. The boat was sweeping through the dark and seething seas, and her coursehad to be that of an arrow, or she would capsize and be smothered in abreath. 

Maybe I fell something delirious, for I had many strange and frightfulfancies. Indeed I doubt not it was the spirit of madness--that iscertainly tonical when small--which furnished strength enough to my armto steer with. It was like the action of a powerful cordial in my blood, and the very horrors it fed my brain with were an animation to myphysical qualities. The gale became a voice; it cried out my name, andevery shout of it past my ear had the sound of the word 'Despair!' Iwitnessed the forms of huge phantoms flying over the boat; I watched thebeating of their giant wings of shadow and heard the thunder of theirlaughter as they fled ahead, leaving scores of like monstrous shapes tofollow. There was a faint lightning of phosphor in the creaming heads ofthe ebon surges, and my sick imagination twisted that pallid complexioninto the dim reflection of the lamps of illuminated pavilions at thebottom of the sea; mystic palaces of green marble, radiant cities in themeasureless kingdoms of the ocean gods. I had a fancy of roofs of pearlbelow, turrets of milk-white coral, pavements of rainbow lustre like tothe shootings and dartings of the hues of shells inclined and trembledto the sun. I thought I could behold the movements of shapes asindeterminable as the forms which swarm in dreams, human brows crownedwith gold, the cold round emerald eyes of fish, the creamy breasts ofwomen, large outlines slowly floating upwards, making a deeper blacknessupon the blackness like the dye of the electric storm upon the velvetbosom of midnight. Often would I shrink from side to side, starting froma fancied apparition leaping into terrible being out of some hurlingblock of liquid obscurity. 

Once a light shone upon the masthead. At any other time I should haveknown this to be a St. Elmo's fire, a corposant, the ignis fatuus of thedeep, and hailed it with a seaman's faith in its promise of gentleweather. But to my distempered fancy it was a lanthorn hung up by aspirit hand; I traced the dusky curve of an arm and observed the busytwitching of visionary fingers by the rays of the ghostly light; theoutline of a large face of a bland and sorrowful expression, pallid asany foam-flake whirling past, came into the sphere of those graveyardrays. I shrieked and shut my eyes, and when I looked again the light wasgone. 

Long before daybreak I was exhausted. Mercifully, the wind was scant;the stars shone very gloriously; on high sparkled the Cross of thesouthern world. A benign influence seemed to steal into me out of itssilver shining; the craze fell from me, and I wept. 

Shortly afterwards, worn out by three days and nights of suffering, Ifell into a deep sleep, and when I awoke my eyes opened right upon theblinding sun. 

This was the morning of the fourth day. I was without a watch. By theheight of the sun I reckoned the hour to be ten. I threw a languidglance at the compass and found the boat's head pointing north-west; shefell off and came to, being without governance, and was scarcely sailingtherefore. The wind was west, a very light breeze, just enough to put abright twinkling into the long, smooth folds of the wide and weightyswell that was rolling up from the north-east. I tried to stand, but wasso benumbed that many minutes passed before I had the use of my legs. Brightly as the sun shone there was no more warmth in his light than youfind in a moon-beam on a frosty night, and the bite in the air was likethe pang of ice itself pressed against the cheek. My right hand sufferedmost; I had fallen asleep clasping the loom of the steering oar, andwhen I awoke my fingers still gripped it, so that, on withdrawing them, they remained curved like talons, and I believed I had lost their use, and even reckoned they would snap off and so set up a mortification, till by much diligent rubbing I grew sensible of a small glow which, increasing, ended in rendering the joints supple. 

I stood up to take a view of the horizon, and the first sight that metmy eye forced a cry from me. Extending the whole length of thesouth-west seaboard lay what I took to be a line of white coast meltingat either extremity into the blue airy distance. Even at the lowelevation of the boat my eye seemed to measure thirty miles of it. Itwas not white as chalk is; there was something of a crystallinecomplexion upon the face of its solidity. It was too far off to enableme to remark its outline; yet on straining my sight--the atmospherebeing very exquisitely clear--I thought I could distinguish theprojections of peaks, of rounded slopes, and aerial angularities inplaces which, in the refractive lens of the air, looked, with their hueof glassy azure, like the loom of high land behind the coastal line. 

The notion that it was ice came into my head after the first prospect ofit; and then I returned to my earlier belief that it was land. Methoughtif it were ice, it must be the borderland of the Antarctic circle, thelimits of the unfrozen ocean, for it was incredible that so mighty abody could signify less than the capes and terraces of a continent ofice glazing the circumference of the pole for leagues and leagues; butthen I also knew that, though first the brig and then my boat had beenfor days steadily blown south, I was still to the north of the SouthShetland parallels, and many degrees therefore removed from the polarbarrier. Hence I concluded that what I saw was land, and that thepeculiar crystal shining of it was caused by the snow that covered it. 

But what land? Some large island that had been missed by the explorersand left uncharted? I put a picture of the map of this part of the worldbefore my mind's eye, and fell to an earnest consideration of it, butcould recollect of no land hereabouts, unless indeed we had been wildlywrong in our reckoning aboard the brig, and I in the boat had beendriven four or five times the distance I had calculated--things not tobe entertained. 

Yet even as a mere break in the frightful and enduring continuity of thesea-line--even as something that was not sea nor sky nor the cold silentand mocking illusion of clouds--it took a character of blessedness in myeyes; my gaze hung upon it joyously, and my heart swelled with a newimpulse of life in my breast. It would be strange, I thought, if onapproaching it something to promise me deliverance from this dreadfulsituation did not offer itself--some whaler or trader at anchor, signsof habitation and of the presence of men, nay, even a single hut toserve as a refuge from the pitiless cold, the stormy waters, the black, lonely, delirious watches of the night, till help should heave into viewwith the white canvas of a ship. 

I put the boat's head before the wind, and steered with one hand whilstI got some breakfast with the other. I thanked God for the brightness ofthe day and for the sight of that strange white line of land, that wentin glimmering blobs of faintness to the trembling horizon where thesouthern end of it died out. The swell rose full and brimming ahead, rolling in sapphire hills out of the north-east, as I have said, whenceI inferred that that extremity of the land did not extend very muchfurther than I could see it, otherwise there could not have been so muchweight of water as I found in the heaving. 

The breeze blew lightly and was the weaker for my running before it; butthe little line of froth that slipped past either side the boat gave meto know that the speed would not be less than four miles in the hour;and as I reckoned the land to be but a few leagues distant, I calculatedupon being ashore some little while before sundown. 

In this way two hours passed. By this time the features of the coastwere tolerably distinct. Yet I was puzzled. There was a peculiar sheenall about the irregular sky-line; a kind of pearly whitening, as itwere, of the heavens beyond, like to the effect produced by the risingof a very delicate soft mist melting from a mountain's brow into theair. This dismayed me. Still I cried to myself, 'It must be land! Allthat whiteness is snow, and the luminous tinge above it is thereflection of the glaring sunshine thrown upwards from the dazzle. Itcannot be ice! 'tis too mighty a barrier. Surely no single iceberg everreached to the prodigious proportions of that coast. And it cannot be anassemblage of bergs, for there is no break--it is leagues of solidconformation. Oh yes, it is land, sure enough! some island whose topsand seaboard are covered with snow. But what of that? It may bepopulated all the same. Are the northern kingdoms of Europe bare of lifebecause of the winter rigours?' And then thought to myself, if thatisland have natives, I would rather encounter them as the savages of anice-bound country than as the inhabitants of a land of sunshine andspices and radiant vegetation; for it is the denizens of the mostgloriously fair ocean seats in the world who are man-eaters; not thePatagonian, giant though he be, nor the blubber-fed anatomies of theice-climes. 

Thus I sought to reassure and comfort myself. Meanwhile my boat sailedquietly along, running up and down the smooth and foamless hills ofwater very buoyantly, and the sun slided into the north-west sky anddarted a reddening beam upon the coast towards which I steered. 

CHAPTER VI. 

AN ISLAND OF ICE. 

I had to approach the coast within two miles before I could satisfy mymind of its nature, and then all doubt left me. 

It was _ice!_ a mighty crescent of it--as was now in a measuregatherable, floating upon the dark blue waters like the new moon uponthe field of the sky. 

For a great while I had struggled with my misgivings, so tyrannicallywill hope lord it even over conviction itself, until it was impossiblefor me to any longer mistake. And then, when I knew it to be ice, Iasked myself what other thing I expected it should prove, seeing thatthis ocean had been plentifully navigated since Cook's time and no landdiscovered where I was; and I called myself a fool and cursed the hopethat had cheated me, and, in short, gave way to a violent outburst ofpassion, and was indeed so wild with grief and rage that, had my ecstasybeen but a very little greater, I must have jumped overboard, so greatwas my loathing of life then, and the horror the sight of the ice filledme with. 

Indeed, you cannot conceive how shocking to me was the appearance ofthat great gleaming length of white desolation. On the deck of a stoutship sailing safely past it I should have found the scene magnificent, Idoubt not; for the sun, being low with westering, shone redly, and therange of ice stood in a kind of gold atmosphere which gave anextraordinary richness to the shadowings of its rocks and peaks, and aparticular fullness of mellow whiteness to its lustrous parts, softeningthe dazzle into an airy tenderness of brightness, so that the whole massshone out with the blandness visible in a glorious star. But its mainbeauty lay in those features by which I knew it to be ice--I mean in avast surprising variety of forms, such as steeples, towers, columns, pyramids, ruins as it might be of temples, grotesque shapes as of mightystatues, left unfinished by the hands of Titans, domes as of cathedrals, castellated heights, fragments of ramparts, and the like. These featureslay in groups, as if veritably the line of coast were dotted withgatherings of royal mansions and remains of imperial magnificence, allof white marble, yet with a glassy tincture as though the material ownedsomething of a Parian quality. 

I had to come within two miles, as I have said, before these eleganciesbroke upon me, so deceptively did their delicacy of outlines mingle withthe dark blue softness beyond. In places the coast ran up to a height oftwo or three hundred feet, in others it sloped down to twenty feet. Forsome miles it was like the face of a cliff, a sheer abrupt, with scarcea scar upon its front, staring with a wild bald look over the frostybeautiful blue of that afternoon sea. Here and there it projected aforefoot, some white and massive rock, upon which the swell of the oceanburst in thunder, and flew to almost the height of the cliff in a verygreat and glorious fury of foam. In other parts, where I suspected asort of beach, there was the silver tremble of surf; but in the main, the heave coming out of the north-east, the folds swept the base of theice without froth. 

I say again, beheld in the red sunshine, that line of ice, resembling acoast of marble defining the liquid junction of the swelling folds ofsapphire below and the moist violet of the eastern sky beyond and overit, crowned at points with delicate imitations of princely habitations, would have offered a noble and magnificent spectacle to a mind at ease;but to my eyes its enchantments were killed by the horror I felt. It wasa lonely, hideous waste, rendered the more shocking by the considerationthat the whole vast range was formed of blocks of frozen water whichwarmth would dissolve; that it was a country as solid as rock and asunsubstantial as a cloud, to be shunned by the mariner as though it wasDeath's own pavilion, the estate and mansion of the grisly spectre, andcreating round about it as supreme a desolation and loneliness of oceanas that which reigned in its own white stillness. 

Though I held the boat's head for it I was at a loss--in so muchconfusion of mind that I knew not what to do. I did not doubt by thecharacter of the swell that its limits in the north-east extended onlyto the sensible horizon; in other words, that its extremity there wouldnot be above five miles distant, though to what latitude its southernarm did curve was not to be conjectured. 

Should I steer north and seek to go clear of it? Somehow, the presenceof this similitude of land made the sea appear as enormous as spaceitself. Whilst it was all clear horizon the immensity of the deep was ina measure limited to the vision by its cincture. But this ice-line gavethe eye something to measure with, and when I looked at those leagues offrozen shore my spirits sank into deepest dejection at the thought ofthe vastness of the waters in whose heart I floated in my little boat. 

However, I resolved at last to land if landing was possible. I couldstretch my limbs, recruit myself by exercise, and might even make shiftto obtain a night's rest. I stood in desperate need of sleep, but therewas no repose to be had in the boat. I durst not lie down in her; ifnature overcame me and I fell asleep in a sitting posture, I might waketo find the boat capsized and myself drowning. This considerationresolved me, and by this time being within half a mile of the coast, Iran my eye carefully along it to observe a safe nook for my boat toenter and myself to land in. 

Though for a great distance, as I have said, the front of the cliff, andwhere it was highest too, was a sheer fall, coming like the side of ahouse to the water, that part of the island towards which my boat's headwas pointed sloped down and continued in a low shore, with hummocks ofice upon it at irregular intervals, to where it died out in thenorth-east. I now saw that this part had a broken appearance as if ithad been violently rent from a mainland of ice; also, to my approach, many ledges projecting into the sea stole into view. There were ravinesand gorges, and almost on a line with the boat's head was an assemblageof those delicate glass-like counterfeits of spires, towers, and thelike, of which I have spoken, standing just beyond a brow whosedeclivity fell very easily to the water. 

To make you see the picture as I have it in my mind would be beyond myart; it is not in the pen--not in the brush either, I should think--toconvey even a tolerable portraiture of the ruggedness, the fairygrouping, the shelves, hollows, crags, terraces, precipices, and beachof this kingdom of ice, where its frontal line broke away from thesmooth face of the tall reaches, and ran with a ploughed, scarred, andserrated countenance northwards. 

Very happily I had insensibly steered for perhaps the safest spot that Icould have lighted on; this was formed of a large projection of rock, standing aslant, so that the swell rolled past it without breaking. Therock made a sort of cove, towards which I sailed in full confidence thatthe water there would be smooth. Nor was I deceived, for I saw that therock acted as a breakwater, whose stilling influence was felt a good waybeyond it. I thereupon steered for the starboard of this rock, and whenI was within it found the heave of the sea dwindled to a scarceperceptible undulation, whereupon I lowered my sail, and, standing tothe oar, sculled the boat to a low lump of ice, on to which I stepped. 

My first business was to secure the boat; this I did by inserting themast into a deep, thin crevice in the ice and making the painter fast toit as to a pole. The sun was now very low, and would soon be gone. Thecold was extreme, yet I did not suffer from it as in the boat. There isa quality in snow which it would be ridiculous to speak of as _warmth_;yet, as you may observe after a heavy fall ashore on top of a blackfrost, it seems to have a power of blunting the sharp edge of the cold, and the snow on this shore of ice being very abundant, though frozen ashard as the ice itself, appeared to mitigate the intolerable rigour Ihad languished under upon the water, in the brig and afterwards. Thismight also be owing to the dryness of the cold. 

Having secured the boat I beat my hands heartily upon my breast, andfell to pacing a little level of ice whilst I considered what I shoulddo. The coast--I cannot but speak of this frozen territory as land--wentin a gentle slope behind me to the height of about thirty feet; theground was greatly broken with rocks and boulders and sharp points, whence I suspected many fissures in which the snow might not be so hardbut that I might sink deep enough to be smothered. I saw no cave norhollow that I could make a bedroom of, and the improved circulation ofmy blood giving me spirits enough to resolve quickly, I made up my mindto use my boat as a bed. 

So I went to work. I took the oar and jammed it into such anothercrevice as the mast stood in, and to it I secured the boat by anotherline. This moored her very safely. There was as good promise of a fairquiet night as I might count upon in these treacherous latitudes; thehaven in which the boat lay was sheltered and the water almost still, and this I reckoned would hold whilst the breeze hung northerly and theswell rolled from the north-east. I spread the sail over the seats, which served as beams for the support of this little ceiling of canvas, and enough of it remained to supply me with a pillow and to cover mylegs. I fell to this work whilst there was light, and when I hadprepared my habitation, I took a bottle of ale and a handful of victualsashore and made my supper, walking briskly whilst I ate and drank. 

I caught myself sometimes looking yearningly towards the brow of theslope, as though from that eminence I should gain an extensive prospectof the sea and perhaps behold a ship; but I wanted the courage to climb, chiefly because I was afraid of tumbling into a hole and miserablyperishing, and likewise because I shrank from the idea of beingovertaken up there by the darkness. There was a kind of companionship inthe boat, the support of which I should lose if I left her. 

The going of the sun was attended by so much glory that the whole weightof my situation and the pressure of my solitude did not come upon meuntil his light was gone. The swell ran athwart his mirroring in linesof molten gold; the sky was a sheet of scarlet fire where he was, palingzenithwards into an ardent orange. The splendour tipped the frozen coastwith points of ruby flame which sparkled and throbbed like sentinelbeacons along the white and silent range. The low thunder of far-offhills of water bursting against the projections rolled sulkily down uponthe weak wind. Just beyond the edge of the slope, about a third of amile to the north of my little haven, stood an assemblage of exquisitelyairy outlines--configurations such as I have described; theircrystalline nature stole out to the lustrous colouring of the glowingwest, and they had the appearance of tinted glass of several dyes ofred, the delicate fibres being deep of hue, the stouter ones pale; andnever did the highest moon of human invention reach to anything moreglorious and dainty, more sweetly simulative of the arts of a fairy-likeimagination than yonder cluster of icy fabrics, fashioned, as it enteredmy head to conceive, as pavilions by the hands of the spirits of thefrozen world, and gilt and painted by the beams of the setting sun. 

But all this wild and unreal beauty melted away to the oncoming of thedusk; and when the sun was gone and the twilight had put a new qualityof bleakness into the air, when the sea rolled in a welter of darkshadows, one sombre fold shouldering another--a very swarming ofrestless giant phantoms--when the shining of the stars low down in theunfathomable obscurity of the north and south quarters gave to the oceanin those directions a frightful immensity of surface, making you feel asthough you viewed the scene from the centre of the firmament, and weregazing down the spangled slopes of infinity--oh, _then_ it was that thefull spirit of the solitude of this pale and silent seat of ice tookpossession of me. I found a meaning I had not before caught in thecomplaining murmur of the night breeze blowing in small gusts along therocky shore, and in the deep organ-like tremulous _hum_ of the swellthundering miles distant on the northward-pointing cliffs. This was anote I had missed whilst the sun shone. Perhaps my senses were sharpenedby the darkness. It mingled with the booming of the bursts of water onthis side the range, and gave me to know that the northward extremity ofthe island did not extend so far as I had supposed from my view of it inthe boat. Yet I could also suppose that the beat of the swell formed amighty cannonading capable of making itself heard afar, and the ice, being resonant, with many smooth if not polished tracts upon it, readilytransmitted the sound, yes, though the cause of it lay as far off as thehorizon. 

I will not say that my loneliness frightened me, but it subdued myheart with a weight as if it were something sensible, and filled me witha sort of consternation that was full of awe. The moon was up, but therocks hid the side of the sea she rode over, and her face was not to beviewed from where I was until she had marched two-thirds of her path tothe meridian. The coast ran away on either hand in cold motionlessblocks of pallor, which further on fell (by deception of the sheen ofthe stars) into a kind of twisting and snaking glimmer, and you followedit into an extraordinarily elusive faintness that was neither light norcolour in the liquid gloom, long after the sight had outrun thevisibility of the range. At intervals I was startled by sounds, sometimes sullen, like a muffled subterranean explosion, sometimessharp, like a quick splintering of an iron-hard substance. These noises, I presently gathered, were made by the ice stretching and cracking infifty different directions. The mass was so vast and substantial youcould not but think of it as a country with its foot resting upon thebed of the sea. 'Twas a folly of my nerves no doubt, yet it added to myconsternation to reflect that this solid territory, reverberating therepelled blows of the ocean swell, was as much afloat as my boat, and somuch less actual than my boat that, could it be towed a few degreesfurther north, it would melt into pouring waters and vanish as utterlywith its little cities of columns, steeples, and minarets as a wreath ofsteam upon the air. 

This gave a spirit-like character to it in my dismayed inquiring eyeswhich was greatly increased by the vagueness it took from the dusk. Itwas such a scene, methought, as the souls of seamen drowned in theseseas might flock to and haunt. The white and icy spell upon it wroughtin familiar things. The stars looking down upon me over the edge of thecliffs were like the eyes of shapes (easy to fashion out of thedarkness) kneeling up there and peering at the human intruder who waspacing his narrow floor of ice for warmth. The deceit of the shadowsproportioned the blanched ruggedness of the cliff's face on the northside into heads and bodies of monsters. I beheld a giant, from his waistup, leaning his cheek upon his arm; a great cross with a burlesquefigure, as of a friar, kneeling near it; a mighty helmet with a whiteplume curled; the shadowy conformation of a huge couchant beast, with ahundred other such unsubstantial prodigies. Had the moon shone in thewest I dare say I should have witnessed a score more such things, forthe snow was like white paper, on which the clear black shadows of theice-rocks could not but have cast the likeness of many startlingphantasies. 

I sought to calm my mind by considering my position, and to divert mythoughts from the star-wrought apparitions of the broken slopes I askedmyself what should be my plans, what my chance for delivering myselffrom this unparalleled situation. At this distance of time I cannotprecisely tell how long the provisions I had brought from the founderedbrig were calculated to last me, but I am sure I had not a week'ssupply. This, then, made it plain that my business was not to lingerhere, but to push into the ocean afresh as speedily as possible, for tomy mind nothing in life was clearer than that my only chance lay in myfalling in with a ship. Yet how did my heart sink when I reflected uponthe mighty breast of sea in which I was forlornly to seek for succour!My eyes went to the squab black outline of the boat, and the littlenessof her sent a shudder through me. It is true she had nobly carried methrough some fierce weather, yet at the expense of many leagues ofsouthing, of a deeper penetration into the solitary wilds of the polarwaters. 

However, I was sensible that I was depressed, melancholy, and under acontinued consternation, something of which the morning sun mightdissipate, so that I should be able to take a heartier view of my wofulplight. So after a good look seawards and at the heavens to satisfymyself on the subject of the weather, and after a careful inspection ofthe moorings of the boat, I entered her, feeling very sure that, if asea set in from the west or south and tumbled her, the motion wouldquickly arouse me; and getting under the roof of sail, with my legsalong the bottom and my back against the stem, which I had bolsteredwith the slack of the canvas, I commended myself to God, folded my arms, and went to sleep. 

CHAPTER VII. 

I AM STARTLED BY A DISCOVERY. 

In this uneasy posture, despite the intense cold, I continued to sleepsoundly during the greater part of the night. I was awakened by a horriddream of some giant shape stalking down the slope of ice to seize anddevour me, and sat up trembling with horror that was not a littleincreased by my inability to recollect myself, and by my thereforeconceiving the canvas that covered me to be the groping of the ogre'shand over my face. 

I pushed the sail away and stood up, but had instantly to sit again, mylegs being terribly cramped. A drink of spirits helped me; my bloodpresently flowed with briskness. 

The moon was in the west; she hung large, red, and distorted, and shedno light save her reflection that waved in the sea under her likeseveral lengths of undulating red-hot wire. My haven was still verytranquil--the boat lay calm; but there was a deeper tone in the boomingsound of the distant surf, and a more menacing note in the echoing ofthe blows of the swell along this side of the coast, whence I concludedthat, despite the fairness of the weather, the heave of the deep had, whilst I slept, gathered a greater weight, which might signify stormywinds not very many leagues away. 

The pale stare of the heights of ice at that red and shapeless disc wasshocking. "Oh, " I cried aloud, as I had once cried before, "but for one, even but for one, companion to speak to!"

I had no mind to lie down again. The cold indeed was cruelly sharp, andthe smoke sped from my mouth with every breath as though I held atobacco pipe betwixt my teeth. I got upon the ice and stepped about itquickly, darting searching glances into the gloom to left and right ofthe setting moon; but all lay bare, bleak, and black. I pulled off mystout gloves with the hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handlingthe snow; but it was frozen so hard I could not scrape up with my nailsas much as a half-dozen of flakes would make. What I got I dissolved inmy mouth and found it brackish; however, I suspected it would be sweeterand perhaps not so stonily frozen higher up, where there was less chanceof the salt spray mingling with it, and I resolved when the light cameto fill my empty beer-bottles as with salt or pounded sugar for usehereafter--that is, if it should prove sweet; as to melting it, I hadindeed a tinder-box and the means of obtaining fire, but no fuel. 

It seemed as if the night had only just descended, so tardy was thedawn. Outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swellswept past in a gurgling, bubbling, drowning sound, dismal and ghastly, as though in truth some such ogre as the monster I had dreamt of laysuffocating there. I welcomed the cold colouring of the east as if ithad been a ship, and watched the stars dying and the frozen shoredarkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it, against which theoutline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink. The rising of thesun gave me fresh life. The ice flashed out of its slatish hue into aradiant white, the ocean changed into a rich blue that seemed as violetunder the paler azure of the heavens; but I could now see that theswell was heavier than I had suspected from the echo of its remoteroaring in the north. It ran steadily out of the north-east. This wasmiserable to see, for the line of its running was directly my course, and if I committed myself to it in that little boat, the impulse of thelong and swinging folds could not but set me steadily southwards, unlessa breeze sprang up in that quarter to blow me towards the sun. There wasa small current of air stirring, a mere trickle of wind from thenorth-west. 

I made up my mind to climb as high as I could, taking the oar with me toserve as a pole, that I might view the ice and the ocean round about andform a judgment of the weather by the aspect of the sky, of which onlythe western part was visible from my low strand. But first I must breakmy fast. I remember bitterly lamenting the lack of means to make a fire, that I might obtain a warm meal and a hot drink and dry my gloves, coat, and breeches, to which the damp of the salt clung tenaciously. Had thisice been land, though the most desolate, gloomy, repulsive spot in theworld, I had surely found something that would burn. 

I sat in the boat to eat, and whilst thus occupied pondered over thisgreat field of ice, and wondered how so mighty a berg should travel insuch compacted bulk so far north--that is, so far north from the seat ofits creation. Now leisurely and curiously observing it, it seemed to methat the north part of it, from much about the spot where my boat lay, was formed of a chain of icebergs knitted one to another in aconsolidated range of irregular low steeps. The beautiful appearances ofspires, towers, and the like seemed as if they had been formed by anupheaval, as of an earthquake, of splinters and bodies of the frozenstuff; for, so far as it was possible for me to see from the low shore, wherever these radiant and lovely figures were assembled I noticed greatrents, spacious chasms, narrow and tortuous ravines. Certainappearances, however, caused me to suspect that this island was steadilydecaying, and that, large as it still was, it had been many times vasterwhen it broke away from the continent about the Pole. Naturally, as itprogressed northwards it would dissolve, and the cracking and thunderousnoises I had heard in the night, sounds very audible now when I gavethem my attention--sometimes a hollow distant rumbling as of some greatbody dislodged and set rolling far off, sometimes an inwards roaringcrack or blast of noise like the report of a cannon fired deepdown--advised me that the work of dissolution was perpetuallyprogressing, and that this prodigious island which appeared to barricadethe horizon might in a few months be dwindled into half a score ofrapidly dissolving bergs. 

My slender repast ended, I pulled the oar out of the crevice, and foundit would make me a good pole to probe my way with and support myself byup the slope. The boat was now held by the mast, which I shook and foundvery firm. I put an empty beer-bottle in my pocket, meaning to see if Icould fill it, if the snow above was sweet enough to be well-tasted, andthen with a final look at the boat I started. 

The slope was extremely craggy. Blocks of ice lay about, some on top ofthe others, like the stones of which the pyramids are built; the whiteglare of the snow caused these stones at a little distance to appearflat--that is, by merging them into and blending them with the softbrilliance of the background; and I had sometimes to warily walk fiftyor sixty paces round these blocks to come at a part of the slope thatwas smooth. 

I speedily found, however, that there was no danger of my being buriedby stepping into a hollow full of snow; for the same hardness waseverywhere, the snow, whether one or twenty feet deep, offering as solida surface as the bare ice. This encouraged me to step out, and I beganto move with some spirit; the exercise was as good as a fire, and beforeI was half-way up I was as warm as ever I had been in my life. 

I had come to a stand to fetch a breath, and was moving on afresh, when, having taken not half a dozen steps, I spied the figure of a man. He wasin a sitting posture, his back against a rock that had concealed him. His head was bowed, and his knees drawn up to a level with his chin, andhis naked hands were clasped upon his legs. His attitude was that of aperson lost in thought, very easy and calm. 

I stopped as if I had been shot through the heart. Had it been a bear, or a sea-lion, or any creature which my mind could instantly haveassociated with this white and stirless desolation, I might have beenstartled indeed; but no such amazement could have possessed me as I nowfelt. It never entered into my head to doubt that he was alive, sonatural was his attitude, as of one lost in a mood of tender melancholy. 

I stood staring at him, myself motionless, for some minutes, too greatlyastonished and thunder-struck to note more than that he was a man. ThenI looked about me to see if he had companions or for some signs of ahabitation, but the ice was everywhere naked. I fixed my eyes on himagain. His hair was above a foot long, black as ink, and the blackermaybe for the contrast of the snow. His beard and mustachios, which werealso of this raven hue, fell to his girdle. He wore a great yellowflapping hat, such as was in fashion among the Spaniards and buccaneersof the South Sea; but over his ears, for the warmth of the protection, were squares of flannel, secured by a very fine red silk handkerchiefknotted under his beard, and this, with his hair and pale cheeks andblack shaggy eyebrows, gave him a terrible and ghastly appearance. Fromhis shoulders hung a rich thick cloak lined with red, and the legs tothe height of the knees were encased in large boots. 

I continued surveying him with my heart beating fast. Every instant Iexpected to see him turn his head and start to behold me. My emotionswere too tumultuous to analyze, yet I believe I was more frightened thangladdened by the sight of a fellow-creature, though not long before Ihad sighed bitterly for some one to speak to. I looked around again, prepared to find another one like him taking stock of me from behind arock, and then ventured to approach him by a few steps the better to seehim. He had certainly a frightful face. It was not only the length ofhis coal-black hair and beard; it was the hue of his skin, a greenishashen colour, an unspeakably hideous complexion, sharpened on the onehand by the red handkerchief over his ears and on the other by thedazzle of the snow. Then, again, there was the extreme strangeness ofhis costume. 

I coughed loudly, holding my pole in readiness for whatever mightbefall, but he did not stir; I then holloaed, and was answered by theechoes of my own voice among the rocks. His stillness persuaded me hewas in one of those deep slumbers which fall upon a man in frozenplaces, for I could not persuade myself he was dead, so living was hisposture. 

This will not do, thought I; so I went close to him and peered into hisface. 

His eyes were fixed; they resembled glass painted as eyes, the coloursfaded. He had a broad belt round his waist, and the hilt of a kind ofcutlass peeped from under his cloak. Otherwise he was unarmed. I thoughthe breathed, and seemed to see a movement in his breast, and I took himby the shoulder; but in the hurry of my feelings I exerted more strengththan I was sensible of. I pushed him with the violence of suddentrepidation; my hand slipped off his shoulder, and he fell on his side, exactly as a statue would, preserving his posture as though, like astatue, he had been chiselled out of marble or stone. 

I started back frightened by his fall, in which my fears found a sort oflife; but it was soon clear to me his rigidity was that of a man frozento death. His very hair and beard stood stiff, as before, as though theywere some exquisite counterfeit in ebony. Perfectly satisfied that hewas dead, I stepped round to the other side of him, and set him up as Ihad found him. He was as heavy as if he had been alive, and when I puthis back to the rock his posture was exactly as it had been, that of onedeeply meditating. 

Who had this man been in life? How had he fallen into this pass? Howlong had he been dead there, seated as I saw him?

These were speculations not to be resolved by conjecture. On looking atthe rock against which he leaned and observing its curvature, it seemedto me that it had formed part of a cave, or of some large, deep hole ofice; and this I was sure must have been the case, for it is certainthat, had this body remained long unsheltered, it must have been hiddenby the snow. 

I concluded then that the unhappy man had been cast away upon this icewhilst it was under bleaker heights than these parallels, and that hehad crawled into a hollow, and perished in that melancholic sittingposture. But in what year had his fate come upon him? I had madeseveral voyages into distant places in my time and seen a great varietyof people; but I had never met any man habited as that body. He had theappearance of a Spanish or French cut-throat of the middle of lastcentury, and of earlier times yet; for it may be known to you that thebuccaneers of the Spanish Main and the South Sea were great lovers offinery; they had a strange theatric taste in their choice of costumes, which, as you will suppose, they had abundant opportunities forgratifying out of the many rich and glittering wardrobes that fell intotheir hands; and this man, I say, with his large fine hat, handsomecloak and boots, coupled with the villainous cast of his countenance andthe frightful appearance his long hair gave him, rendered him to mynotions the completest figure that could be imagined of one of thoserogues who earned their living as pirates. 

Thinking I might find something on his person to acquaint me with hisstory or that would furnish me with some idea of the date of his beingcast away, I pulled his cloak aside and searched his pockets. His legswere thickly cased in two or three pairs of breeches, the outer pairbeing of a dark green cloth. He also wore a handsome red waistcoat, laced, and a stout coat of a kind of frieze. In his coat pocket I founda silver tobacco-box, a small glass flask fitted with a silver band andhalf full of an amber-coloured liquor, hard froze; and in his waistcoatpocket a gold watch, shaped like an apple, the back curiously chased andinlaid with jewels of several kinds, forming a small letter M. Thehands pointed to twenty minutes after three. A key of a strange shapeand a number of seals, trinkets, and the like, were attached to thewatch. 

These things, together with a knife, a key, a thick plain silver ring, and some Spanish pieces in gold and silver were what I found on thisman. There was nothing to tell me who he was nor how long he had been onthe island. 

The searching him was the most disagreeable job I ever undertook in mylife. His iron-like rigidity made him seem to resist me, and the swayingof his back against the rock to the motions of my hand was so full oflife that twice I quitted him, frightened by it. On touching his nakedhand by accident I discovered that the flesh of it moved upon the bonesas you pull a glove off and on. I had had enough of him, and walked awayfeeling sick. If he had companions, and they were like him, I did notwant to see them, unless it was that I might satisfy my curiosity as tothe time they had been here. I determined, however, on my way back totake his cloak, which would make me a comfortable rug in the boat, andalso the watch, flask, and tobacco-box; for if I was drowned they couldbut go to the bottom of the sea, which was their certain destination ifI left them in his pockets; and if I came off with them, then the moneythey would bring me must somewhat lighten the loss of my clothes andproperty in the brig. 

I pushed onwards, stepping warily and probing cautiously at every step, and earnestly peering about me, for after such a sight as that dead manI was never to know what new wonder I might stumble upon. About aquarter of a mile on my left--that is, on my left whilst I kept my faceto the slope--there was the appearance of a ravine not discernible fromwhere the boat lay. When I was within twenty feet of the summit of thecliff, the acclivity continuing gentle to the very brow, but muchbroken, as I have said, I noticed this hollow, and more particularly asmall collection of ice-forms, not nearly so large as the other groupsof this kind, but most dainty and lovely nevertheless. They showed asthe heads of trees might to my ascent, and when I had got a littlehigher I observed that they were formed upon the hither side of thehollow, as though the convulsion which had wrought that chasm had tossedup those exquisite caprices of ice. However, I was too eager to view theprospect from the top of the cliff to suffer my admiration to detain me;in a few minutes I had gained the brow, and, clambering on to a mass ofrock, I sent my gaze around. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE FROZEN SCHOONER. 

I found myself on the summit of a kind of table-land; vast bodies ofice, every block weighing hundreds and perhaps thousands of tons layscattered over it; yet for the space of a mile or so the character wasthat of flatness. Southwards the range went upwards to a coastal frontof some hundred feet, with a huddle of peaks and strange configurationsbehind soaring to an elevation from the sea-line of two or three hundredfeet. Northwards the range sloped gradually, with such a shelving of itshinder part that I could catch a glimpse of a little space of the bluesea that way. From this I perceived that whatever thickness and surfaceof ice lay southwards, in the north it was attenuated to the shape of awedge, so that its extreme breadth where it projected its cape orextremity would not exceed a musket shot. 

A companion might have qualified in my mind something of the sense ofprodigious loneliness and desolation inspired by that huge picture ofdazzling uneven whiteness, blotting out the whole of the south-eastocean, rolling in hills of blinding brilliance into the blue heavens, and curving and dying out into an airy film of silvery-azure radianceleagues away down in the south-west. But to my solitary eye thespectacle was an amazing and confounding one. 

If I had not seen the tract of dark blue water in the north-east, Imight have imagined that this island stretched as far into the east andnorth as it did in the south and west. And one thing I quickly enoughunderstood: that if I wanted to behold the ocean on the east side of theice I should have to journey the breadth of the range, which here, whereI was, might mean one or five miles, for the blocks and lumps hid theview, and how far off the edge of the cliffs on the other side might beI could not therefore gather. This was not to be dreamt of, andtherefore to this extent my climb had been useless. 

Being on the top of the range now, I could plainly hear the noises ofthe splitting and internal convulsions of this vast formation. Thesounds are not describable. Sometimes they seemed like the explosions ofguns, sometimes like the growlings and mutterings of huge fierce beasts, sometimes like smart single echoless blasts of thunder; and sometimesyou heard a singular sort of hissing or snarling, such as iron makeswhen speeding over ice, only when this noise happened the volume of itwas so great that the atmosphere trembled upon the ear with it. It wasimpossible to fix the direction of these sounds, the island was full ofthem; and always sullenly booming upon the breeze was the voice of theocean swell bursting in foam against the ice-coast that confronted it. 

You may talk of the solitude of a Selkirk, but surely the spirit ofloneliness in him could not rival the unutterable emotion ofsolitariness that filled my mind as I sent my gaze over those miles offrozen stirless whiteness. He had the sight of fair pastures, of treesmaking a twinkling twilight on the sward, of grassy savannahs andpleasant slopes of hills; the air was illuminated by the gloriousplumage of flying birds; the bleat of goats broke the stillness in thevalleys; there was a golden regale for his eye, and his other senseswere gratified with the perfumes of rich flowers and engaging concertsamong the trembling leaves. Above all, there was the soothing warmth ofa delicious climate. But out upon those heaped and spreading plains ofsnow nothing stirred, if it were not once that I was startled by a loudreport, and spied a rock about half a mile away slide down the edge ofthe flat cliff and tumble into the sea. Nothing stirred, I say; therewas an affrighting solemnity of motionlessness everywhere. Thecountenance of this plain glared like a great dead face at the sky;neither sympathy, nor fancy, no, not the utmost forces of theimagination, could witness expression in it. Its unmeaningness wasghastly, and the ghastlier for the greatness of its bald and lifelessstare. 

I turned my eyes seawards; haply it was the whiteness that gave theocean the extraordinarily rich dye I found in it. The expanse went inflowing folds of violet into the nethermost heavens, and though Godknows what extent of horizon I surveyed, the line of it, as clear asglass, ran without the faintest flaw to amuse my heart with even aninstant's hope. 

There was more weight, however, in the wind than I had supposed. It blewfrom the west of north, and was an exquisitely frosty wind, despite thequarter whence it came. It swept in moans among the rocks, and therewere tones in it that recalled the stormy mutterings we had heard in theblasts which came upon the brig before the storm boiled down upon her. But my imagination was now so tight-strung as to be unwholesomely andunnaturally responsive to impulses and influences which at another timeI had not noticed. There were a few heavy clouds in the north-east, sosteam-like that methought they borrowed their complexion from the snowon the island's cape there. I was pretty sure, however, that there waswind behind them, for if the roll of the ocean did not signify heavyweather near to, then what else it betokened I could not imagine. 

I cannot express to you how the very soul within me shrank from puttingto sea in the little boat. There was no longer the support of theexcitement and terror of escaping from a sinking vessel. I stood upon anisland as solid as land, and the very sense of security it impartedrendered the boat an object of terror, and the obligation upon me tolaunch into yonder mighty space as frightful as a sentence of death. YetI could not but consider that it would be equally shocking to me to belocked up in this slowly crumbling body of ice--nay, tenfold moreshocking, and that, if I had to choose between the boat and this hideoussolitude and sure starvation, I would cheerfully accept fifty times overagain the perils of a navigation in my tiny ark. 

This reflection comforted me somewhat, and whilst I thus mused Iremained standing with my eyes upon the little group of fanciful fanesand spires of ice on the edge of the abrupt hollow. I had been toopreoccupied to take close notice; on a sudden I started, amazed by anappearance too exquisitely perfect to be credible. The sun shone with afine white frosty brilliance in the north-east; some of these spikes andfigures of ice reflected the radiance in several colours. In placeswhere they were wind-swept of their snow and showed the naked ice, thehues were wondrously splendid, and, mingling upon the sight, formed akind of airy, rainbow-like veil that complicated the whole congregationof white shaft and many-tinctured spire, the marble column, thealabaster steeple into a confused but most surprisingly dainty andshining scene. 

It was whilst looking at this that my eye traced, a little distancebeyond, the form of a ship's spars and rigging. Through the labyrinth ofthe ice outlines I clearly made out two masts, with two square yards onthe foremast, the rigging perfect so far as it went, for the figurationshowed no more than half the height of the masts, the lower parts beingapparently hidden behind the edge of the hollow. I have said that thiscoast to the north abounded in many groups of beautiful fantasticshapes, suggesting a great variety of objects, as the forms of cloudsdo, but nothing perfect; but here now was something in ice that couldnot have been completer, more symmetrical, more faultlessly proportionedhad it been the work of an artist. I walked close to it and a little wayaround so as to obtain a clearer view, and then getting a fair sight ofthe appearance I halted again, transfixed with amazement. 

The fabric appeared as if formed of frosted glass. The masts had a goodrake, and with a seaman's eye I took notice of the furniture, observingthe shrouds, stays, backstays, braces to be perfect. Nay, as though thespirit artist of this fragile glittering pageant had resolved to omit nodetail to complete the illusion, there stood a vane at the masthead, shining like a tongue of ice against the soft blue of the sky. Come, thought I, recovering from my wonder, there is more in this than it ispossible for me to guess by staring from a distance; so, striking mypole into the snow, I made carefully towards the edge of the hollow. 

The gradual unfolding of the picture prepared my mind for what I couldnot see till the brink was reached; then, looking down, I beheld aschooner-rigged vessel lying in a sort of cradle of ice, stern-on to thesea. A man bulked out with frozen snow, so as to make his shape as greatas a bear, leaned upon the rail with a slight upwards inclination of hishead, as though he were in the act of looking fully up to hail me. Hisposture was even more lifelike than that of the man under the rock, buthis garment of snow robbed him of that reality of vitality which hadstartled me in the other, and the instant I saw him I knew him to bedead. He was the only figure visible. The whole body of the vessel wasfrosted by the snow into the glassy aspect of the spars and rigging, andthe sunshine striking down made a beautiful prismatic picture of thesilent ship. 

She was a very old craft. The snow had moulded itself upon her andenlarged without spoiling her form. I found her age in the structure ofher bows, the headboards of which curved very low round to the top ofthe stem, forming a kind of well there, the after-part of which wasframed by the forecastle bulkhead, after the fashion of ship-building invogue in the reign of Anne and the first two Georges. Her topmasts werestanding, but her jibboom was rigged in. I could find no other evidenceof her people having snugged her for these winter quarters, in which shehad been manifestly lying for years and years. I traced the outlines ofsix small cannons covered with snow, but resting with clean-sculpturedforms in their white coats; a considerable piece of ordnance aft, andseveral petararoes or swivel-pieces upon the after-bulwark rails. Gaffsand booms were in their places, and the sails furled upon them. Thefiguration of the main hatch showed a small square, and there was acompanion or hatch-cover abaft the mainmast. There was no trace of aboat. She had a flush or level deck from the well in the bows to afathom or so past the main-shrouds; it was then broken by a shortpoop-deck, which went in a great spring or rise to the stern, that wasafter the pink style, very narrow and tall. 

Though I write this description coldly, let it not be supposed that Iwas not violently agitated and astonished almost into the belief thatwhat I beheld was a mere vision, a phenomenon. The sight of the body Iexamined did not nearly so greatly astound me as the spectacle of thisice-locked schooner. It was easy to account for the presence of a deadman. My own situation, indeed, sufficiently solved the riddle of thatcorpse. But the ship, perfect in all respects, was like a stroke ofmagic. She lay with a slight list or inclination to larboard, but on thewhole tolerably upright, owing to the corpulence of her bilge. Thehollow or ravine that formed her bed went with a sharp incline underher stern to the sea, which was visible from the top of the cliffs herethrough the split in the rocks. The shelving of the ice put the wash ofthe ocean at a distance of a few hundred feet from the schooner; but Icalculated that the vessel's actual elevation above the water-line, supposing you to measure it with a plummet up and down, did not exceedtwenty feet, if so much, the hollow in which she rested being abovetwenty feet deep. 

It was very evident that the schooner had in years gone by got embayedin this ice when it was far to the southward, and had in course of timebeen built up in it by floating masses. For how old the ice about thepoles may be who can tell? In those sunless worlds the frozen continentsmay well possess the antiquity of the land. And who shall name themonarch who filled the throne of Britain when this vast field broke awayfrom the main and started on its stealthy navigation sunwards?

CHAPTER IX. 

I LOSE MY BOAT. 

I lingered, I daresay, above twenty minutes contemplating this singularcrystal fossil of a ship, and considering whether I should go down toher and ransack her for whatever might answer my turn. But she looked sodarkly secret under her white garb, and there was something so terriblein the aspect of the motionless snow-clad sentinel who leaned upon therail, that my heart failed me, and I very easily persuaded myself tobelieve that, first, it would take me longer to penetrate and search herthan it was proper I should be away from the boat; that, second, it wasscarce 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, myboat was so small it would be rash to put into her any the most triflingmatter 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 andstaggering, the ice being very jagged, lumpish, and deceitful to thetread, arrived at it. 

Nothing but the desire to possess the fine warm cloak could have temptedme to handle or even to cast my eye upon the dead man again. I foundmyself more scared by him now than at first. His attitude was solifelike that, though I knew him to be a corpse, had he risen on asudden the surprise of it could hardly have shocked me more than theastonishment his posture raised. As a skeleton he could not have sochilled 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 observingme. 

His beard was frozen as hard as a bush, and it crackled unpleasantly tothe movement of my hands, which I was obliged to force under it tounhook the silver chain that confined the cloak about his neck. I feltlike a thief, and stole a glance over either shoulder as though, forsooth, some strangely clad companion of his should be creeping uponme unawares. Then, thought I, since I have the cloak I may as well takethe watch, flask, and tobacco-box, as I had before resolved; and so Idipped my hand into his pockets, and without another glance at hisfierce still face made for the boat. 

I now noticed for the first time, so overwhelmingly had my discoveriesoccupied my attention, that the wind had freshened and was blowingbriskly and piercingly. When I had first started upon the ascent of theslope, the wind had merely wrinkled the swell as the large bodies ran;but those wrinkles had become little seas, which flashed into foam aftera short race, and the whole surface of the ocean was a brilliant bluetremble. I came to a halt to view the north-east sky before the brow ofthe rocks hid it, and saw that clouds were congregating there, and someof them blowing up to where the sun hung, these resembling in shape andcolour the compact puff of the first discharge of a cannon before thesmoke spreads on the air. What should I do? I sank into a miserableperplexity. If it was going to blow what good could attend my departurefrom this island? It was an adverse wind, and when it freshened I couldnot choose but run before it, and that would drive me clean away fromthe direction I required to steer in. Yet if I was to wait upon theweather, 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 beotherwise, or come in a hard gale; and if I faltered now I might go onhesitating, and then my provisions would give out, and God alone knowshow it would end with me. Besides, the presence of the two bodies madethe island fearful to my imagination, and nature clamoured in me to begone, 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 tosay, I looked towards the part of the ice where the little haven inwhich 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 theice. I glanced at the slope behind to keep me to my bearings, and oncemore sought the haven; but the rock that had formed it was gone, theblue swell rolled brimming past the line of shore there, and my eyefollowing the swing of a fold, I saw the boat about three cables lengthdistant out upon the water, swinging steadily away into the south, andshowing and disappearing with the heave. 

The dead man's cloak fell from my arm; I uttered a cry of anguish; Iclasped my hands and lifted them to God, and looked up to Him. I was forkicking off my boots and plunging into the water, but, mad as I was, Iwas not so mad as that; and mad I should have been to attempt it, for Icould not swim twenty strokes, and had I been the stoutest swimmer thatever breasted the salt spray, the cold must speedily put an end to mymisery. 

What was to be done? Nothing! I could only look idly at the recedingboat with reeling brain. The full blast of the wind was upon her, andhelping the driving action of the billows. I perceived that she wasirrecoverable, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my headburning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myselfdown and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to Godfor help and mercy, bringing my hands to my throbbing temples, and inthat posture straining my eyes at the fast vanishing structure. She wasthe only hope I had--my sole chance. My little stock of provisions wasin her--oh, what was I to do?

Though I was at some distance from the place where what I have called myhaven had been, there was no need for me to approach it to understandhow my misfortune had come about. It was likely enough that the verycrevice in which I had jammed the mast to secure the boat by was a deepcrack that the increased swell had wholly split, so that the mast hadtumbled when the rock floated away and liberated the boat. 

The horror that this white and frightful scene of desolation had at thebeginning filled me with was renewed with such violence when I saw thatmy 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 hadany person come along and seen me he would have thought me as dead asthe body on the hill or the corpse that kept its dismal look-out fromthe deck of the schooner. 

My senses presently returning, I got up, and the rock upon which I stoodbeing level, I fell to pacing it with my hands locked behind me, my headsunk, lost in thought. The wind was steadily freshening; it split with ahowling noise upon the ice-crags and unequal surfaces, and spun with ahollow note past my ear; and the thunder of the breakers on the otherside of the island was deepening its tone. The sea was lifting andwhitening; something of mistiness had grown up over the horizon thatmade a blue dulness of the junction of the elements there; but though afew clouds out of the collection of vapour in the north-east had floatedto the zenith and were sailing down the south-west heaven, the azureremained pure and the sun very frostily white and sparkling. 

I am writing a strange story with the utmost candour, and trust that thereader will not judge me severely for my confession of weakness, orconsider me as wanting in the stuff out of which the hardy seaman ismade for owning to having shed tears and been stunned by the loss of mylittle boat and slender stock of food. You will say, "It is not in thepower of the dead to hurt a man; what more pitiful and harmless than apoor unburied corpse?" I answer, "True, " and declare that of the twobodies, as dead men, I was not afraid; but this mass of frozen solitudewas about them, and they took a frightful character from it; theycommunicated an element of death to the desolation of the snow-cladisland; their presence made a principality of it for the souls of deadsailors, and into their lifelike stillness it put its own supernaturalspirit of loneliness; so that to my imagination, disordered by sufferingand exposure, this melancholy region appeared a scene without parallelon the face of the globe, a place of doom and madness, as dreadful andwild 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 wasgone. 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 tothat. It is not long ago that Captain Rosy cried to me, "_A man can diebut once. He'll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with astout heart. _" He that so spoke is dead. The worst is over for him. Werehe a babe resting upon his mother's breast he could not sleep moresoundly, be more tenderly lulled, nor be freer from such anguish as nowafflicts me who cling to life, as if this--this, " I cried, lookingaround me, "were a paradise of warmth and beauty. I must be a man, askGod for courage to meet whatever may betide, and stoutly endure whatcannot be evaded. "

Do not smile at the simple thoughts of a poor castaway sailor. I holdthem still to be good reasoning, and had my flesh been as strong as myspirit 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 werephysical conditions which broke ruinously into philosophy and staggeredreligious trust. 

My mind went to the schooner, yet I felt an extraordinary recoil withinme when I thought of seeking an asylum in her. I had the figure of herbefore my fancy, viewed the form of the man on her deck, and the idea ofpenetrating her dark interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that timeand 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 toboard that stirless frame; to make a dwelling-place, without prospect ofdeliverance, in that hollow of ice; to become in one sense as dead asher lonely mariner, yet preserve all the sensibility of the living to acondition he was as unconscious of as the ice that enclosed him. 

It must be done nevertheless, thought I; I shall certainly perish fromexposure if I linger here; besides, how do I know but that I maydiscover in that ship some means of escaping from the island? Assuredlythere was plenty of material in her for the building of a boat, if Icould 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 theirpinnaces in the hold, and, when the necessity for using them arose, tohoist them out and tow them astern. 

These reflections somewhat heartened me, and also let me add that thesteady 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 theremight be a miserable languishing end for me here, I could not butbelieve that there was certain death, too, out there in that high swelland in those sharpening peaks of water off whose foaming heads the windwas blowing the spray. By which I mean the boat could not have plyed insuch a wind; she must have run, and by running have carried me into thestormier regions of the south, where, even if she had lived, I mustspeedily 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 wasoverwhelmed with misery; and now here was I taking a collected view ofmy situation, even to the extent of being willing to believe that on thewhole it was perhaps as well that I should have been hindered fromputting to sea in my little eggshell. So at every step we rebel at theshadowy conducting of the hand of God; yet from every stage we arrive atwe look back and know the road we have travelled to be the right onethough we start afresh mutinously. Lord, what patience hast Thou!

I turned my back upon the clamorous ocean and started to ascend theslope once more. When I reached the brow of the cliffs I observed thatthe clouds had lost their fleeciness and taken a slatish tinge, weremoving fast and crowding up the sky, insomuch that the sun was leapingfrom one edge to another and darting a keen and frosty light upon thescene. The wind was bitterly cold, and screamed shrilly in my ears whenI met the full tide of it. The change was sudden, but it did notsurprise me. I knew these seas, and that our English April is not morecapricious than the weather in them, only that here the sunny smile, though sparkling, is frostier than the kiss of death, and brief as theflight of a musket-ball, whilst the frowns are black, savage, andlasting. 

I bore the dead man's cloak on my arm and helped myself along with theoar, and presently arrived at the brink of the slope in whose hollow laythe ship as in a cup. The wind made a noisy howling in her rigging, butthe tackling was frozen so iron hard that not a rope stirred, and thevane at the masthead was as motionless as any of the adjacent steeplesor 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 thefrozen snow upon his head, trunk, and limbs had swelled him; and thehalf-rise of his face was particularly startling, as if he were in thevery act of running his gaze softly upwards. That he should have died inthat easy leaning posture was strange; however, I supposed, and no doubtrightly, that he had been seized with a sudden faintness, and had leanedupon the rail and so expired. The cold would quickly make him rigid andlikewise 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 beforced to think of. 

My heart, as I have said, sank in me again at the sight of him, andfear and awe and superstition so worked upon my spirits that I stoodirresolute, and would have gone back had there been any place to returnto. I plucked up after a little, and, rolling up the cloak into acompact bundle, flung it with all my strength to the vessel, and it fellcleverly just within the rail. Then gripping the oar I started on thedescent. 

The depth was not great nor the declivity sharp; but the surface wasformed of blocks of ice, like the collections of big stones yousometimes encounter on the sides of mountains near the base; and I hadagain and again to fetch a compass so as to gain a smaller block downwhich to drop, till I was close to the vessel, and here the snow hadpiled and frozen into a smooth face. 

The ship lay with a list or inclination to larboard. I had come down toher on her starboard side. She had small channels with long plates, buther list, on my side, hove them somewhat high, beyond my reach, and Iperceived that to get aboard I must seek an entrance on the larboardhand. This was not hard to arrive at; indeed, I had but to walk roundher, under her bows. She was so coated with hard snow I could seenothing of her timbers, and was therefore unable to guess at thecondition of the hull. She had a most absurd swelling bilge, and herbuttocks, viewed on a line with her rudder, doubtless presented theexact appearance of an apple. She was sunk in snow to some planks abovethe garboard-streak, but her lines forward were fine, making her almostwedge-shaped, though the flair of her bows was great, so that sheswelled up like a balloon to the catheads. She had something of the lookof the barca-longas of half a century ago--that is, half a century agofrom the date of my adventure; but that which, in sober truth, a manwould have taken her to be was a vessel formed of snow, sparred andrigged with glass-like frosted ice, the artistic caprice of the geniusor spirit of this white and melancholy scene, who, to complete themocking illusion, had fashioned the figure of a man to stand on deckwith 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 thehollow was precipitous here, full of cracks and flaws and sharpprojections. Indeed, had the breadth of the island been as it was at theextremity I might have counted upon the first violent commotion of thesea snapping this part of the ice, and converting the northern part ofthe body into a separate berg. 

I climbed without difficulty into the fore-chains, the snow being sohard that my feet and hands made not the least impression on it, andsomewhat warily--feeling the government of a peculiar awe, mounting intoa sort of terror indeed--stood awhile peering over the rail of thebulwarks; 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 beremembered that I was a sailor, with the superstitious feelings of mycalling in me, and though I do not know that I actually believed inghosts and apparitions and spectrums, yet I felt as if I did;particularly upon the deck of this silent ship, rendered spirit-like bythe grave of ice in which she lay and by the long years (as I could notdoubt) during which she had thus rested. Hence, when I slipped off thebulwark on to the deck and viewed the ghastly, white, lonely scene, Ifelt for the moment as if this strange discovery of mine was not to beexhausted of its wonders and terrors by the mere existence of theship--in other words, that I must expect something of the supernaturalto enter into this icy sepulchre, and be prepared for sights moremarvellous and terrifying than frozen corpses. 

So I stood looking forward and aft, very swiftly, and in a way I daresay that a spectator would have thought laughable enough; nor was myimagination soothed by the clear, harping, ringing sounds of the windseething through the frozen rigging where the masts rose above theshelter 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 orcovering of the after-hatch, which, as I have elsewhere said, wascovered with snow. 

CHAPTER X. 

ANOTHER STARTLING DISCOVERY. 

This hatch formed the entrance to the cabin, and there was no other roadto it that I could see. If I wanted to use it I must first scrape awaythe snow; but unhappily I had left my knife in the boat, and was withoutany instrument that would serve me to scrape with. I thought of breakingthe beer-bottle that was in my pocket and scratching with a piece of theglass; but before doing this it occurred to me to search the body on thestarboard side. 

I approached him as if he were alive and murderously fierce, and I own Idid not like to touch him. He resembled the figure of a giant moulded insnow. In life he must have been six feet and a half tall. The snow hadbloated him, and though he leaned he stood as high as I, who was of atolerable stature. The snow was on his beard and mustaches and on hishair; but these features were merged and compacted into the snow on hiscoat, and as his cap came low and was covered with snow too, he, withthe little fragment of countenance that remained, the flesh whereof hadthe colour and toughness of the skin of a drum that has been wellbeaten, submitted as terrible an object as mortal sight ever rested on. I say I did not like to touch him, and one reason was I feared he wouldtumble; and though I know not why I should have dreaded this, yet theapprehension of it so worked in me that for some time it held me idlystaring at him. 

But I could not enter the cabin without first scraping the snow from thecompanion door; and the cold, after I had stood a few moments inactive, was so bitter as to set me craving for shelter. So I put my hand uponthe body, and discovered it, as I might have foreseen, frozen to thehardness of steel. His coat--if I may call that a coat which resembled arobe of snow--fell to within a few inches of the deck. Steadying thebody with one hand, I heartily tweaked the coat with the other, hopingthus to rupture the ice upon it; in doing which I slipped and fell on myback, and in falling gave a convulsive kick which, striking the feet ofthe figure, dislodged them from their frozen hold of the deck, and downit fell with a mighty bang alongside of me, and with a loud cracklingnoise, like the rending of a sheet of silk. 

I was not hurt, and sprang to my feet with the alacrity of fright, andlooking at the body saw that it had managed by its fall much better thanmy hands could have compassed; for the snow shroud was cracked andcrumpled, slabs of it had broken away leaving the cloth of the coatvisible, and what best pleased me was the sight of the end of a hangerforking out from the skirt of the coat. 

Yet to come at it so as to draw the blade from its scabbard required anintolerable exertion of strength. The clothes on this body were indeedlike a suit of mail. I never could have believed that frost served clothso. At last I managed to pull the coat clear of the hilt of the hanger;the blade was stuck, but after I had tugged a bit it slipped out, and Ifound it a good piece of steel. 

The corpse was habited in jackboots, a coat of coarse thick cloth linedwith flannel, under this a kind of blouse or doublet of red cloth, confined by a belt with leathern loops for pistols. His apparel gave meno clue to the age he belonged to; it was no better, indeed, than a sortof masquerading attire, as though the fashions of more than one country, and perhaps of more than one age, had gone to the habiting of him. Helooked a burly, immense creature, as he lay upon the deck in the samebent attitude in which he had stood at the rail, and so dreadful was hisface, with a singular diabolical expression of leering malice, caused bythe lids of his eyes being half closed, that having taken one peep I hadno mind to repeat it, though I was above ten minutes wrestling with hiscloak and hanger before I had the weapon fairly in my hand. 

I walked to the companion and fell to scraping the snow away from it. 'Twas like scratching at mortar between bricks. But I worked hard, andpresently, with the point of the hanger, felt the crevice 'twixt thedoor and its jamb, after which it was not long before I had carved thedoor out of its plate of ice and snow. 

The wind was now blowing a fresh gale, and the howling aloft wasextremely melancholy and dismal. I could not see the ocean, but I heardit thundering with a hollow roaring note; and the sharp reports anddistant sullen crashing noises, with nearer convulsions within the ice, were very frequent. 

My labour warmed me, but it also increased my hunger. While I hacked andscraped at the snow I was considering whether I should come acrossanything fit to eat in the ship, and if not what I was to do. Here wasa vessel assuredly not less than fifty or sixty years old, and evensupposing she was almost new when she fell in with the ice, the date ofher disaster would still carry her back half a century; so that--andcertainly there was much in the appearance of the body on the rocks towarrant the conjecture--she would have been thus sepulchred andfossilized for fifty years!

What, then, in the form of provisions proper for human food, such aseven a famine-driven stomach could deal with, was I likely to find inher? Would not her crew have eaten her bare, devoured the very heart outof her, before they perished?

These thoughts weighed heavily in me, but I toiled on nevertheless, andhaving cleared the door of the snow that bound it, I prized it apartwith the hanger and then dragged at it; but the snow on the deck wouldnot let it open far, and as there was room for me to squeeze through, Idid not stop to scrape the obstruction away. 

A flight of steps sank into the darkness of the interior, and a coldstrange smell floated up, with something of a dry earthiness of flavourand a mingling of leather and timber. I fell back a pace to letsomething of this smell exhale before I ventured into an atmosphere thathad been hermetically bottled by the ice in that cabin since the hourwhen this little door was last closed. Superstition was active in meagain, and when I peered into the blackness at the bottom of the hatch Ifelt as might a schoolboy on the threshold of a haunted room in whichhe is to be locked up as a punishment. 

I put my foot on the ladder and descended very slowly indeed, myinclination being strong the other way, and I kept on looking downwardsin a state of ridiculous fright as though at any moment I should beseized by the leg; being in too much confusion of mind to consider thatit was impossible anything living could be below, whilst a ghostlyshadow could not catch hold of me so as to cause me to feel its grasp. But then if fear could reason, it would cease to be fear. 

On reaching the bottom I remained standing close against the ladder, striving to see into what manner of place I was arrived. The glare ofthe whiteness of the decks and rocks hung upon my eyes like a kind ofblindness charged with fires of several colours, and I could not obtainthe faintest glimpse of any part of this interior outside the sphere ofthe little square of hazy light which lay upon the deck at the foot ofthe steps. The darkness, indeed, was so deep that I concluded this wasno more than a narrow well formed of bulkheads, and that the cabin wasbeyond, and led to by a door in the bulkhead. 

To test this conjecture I extended my arms in a groping posture andstepped a pace forward, feeling to right and left, till, having gonefive or six paces from the ladder, my fingers touched something cold, and feeling it, I passed my hand down what I instantly knew by theprojection of the nose and the roughness of hair on the upper lip to bea human face!

A little reflection might have prepared me for this, but I had notreflected, at least in this direction, and was therefore not prepared;and the horrible thrill of that black chill contact went in an agonythrough my nerves, and I burst into a violent perspiration. 

I backed away with all my hair astir, and then shot up the ladder as ifthe devil had been behind me; and when I reached the deck I wastrembling so violently that I had to lean against the companion lest myknees should give way. Never in all my time had I received such a frightas this; but then I had gone to it in a fright, and was exactly in thestate of mind to be terrified out of my senses. My soul had beenrendered sick and weak within me by mental and corporeal suffering; myloneliness, too, was dreadful, and the wilder and more scaring too forthis my unhappy association with the dead; the shrieking in the riggingwas like the tongue given by endless packs of hunting phantom wolves, and the growling and cracking noises of the ice in all directions wouldhave made one coming new to this desolate scene suppose that the islandof ice was full of fierce beasts. 

But needs must when Old Nick drives; I had either to find courage toenter the schooner and search her, and so stand to come across the meansto prolong my life, and perhaps procure my deliverance, or perish offamine and frost on deck. 

The companion door was small, and being scarce more than ajar I was notsurprised that only a very faint light entered by it. If the top wereremoved I doubted not I should be able to get a view of the cabin, enough to show me where the windows or port-holes were. So I went towork with the hanger again, insensibly obtaining a little stock ofcourage from the mere brandishing of it. In half an hour I had chippedand cut away the ice round the companion, and then found it to be one ofthose old-fashioned clumsy hatch-covers formerly used in certain kindsof Dutch ships--namely, a box with a shoulder-shaped lid. This lid, though heavy, and fitting with a tongue, I managed to unship, on whichthe full square of the hatch lay open to the sky. 

The light gave me heart. Once more I descended. After a few moments thebewildering dazzle of the snow faded off my sight, and I could see verydistinctly. 

The cabin was a small room. The forward part lay in shadow, but I coulddistinguish the outline of the mainmast amidships of the bulkhead there. In the centre of this cabin was a small square table supported by ironpins, that pierced through stanchions in such a manner that the tablecould at will be raised to the ceiling, and there left for theconveniency of space. 

At this table, seated upon short quaintly-wrought benches, andimmediately facing each other, were two men. They were incomparably morelifelike than the frozen figures. The one whose back was upon thehatchway ladder, being the man whose face I had stroked, sat upright, inthe posture of a person about to start up, both hands upon the rim ofthe table, and his countenance raised as if, in a sudden terror andagony of death, he had darted a look to God. So inimitably expressive oflife was his attitude, that though I knew him to be a frozen body asperished as if he had died with Adam or Noah, I was sensible of abreathless wonder in me that the affrighted start with which he seemedto be rising from the table was not continued--that, in short, he didnot spring to his feet with the cry that you seemed to _hear_ in hisposture. 

The other figure lay over the table with his face buried in his arms. Hewore no covering to his head, which was bald, yet his hair on eitherside was plentiful and lay upon his arms, and his beard fluffing upabout his buried face gave him an uncommon shaggy appearance. The otherhad on a round fur cap with lappets for the ears. His body was muffledin a thick ash-coloured coat; his hair was also abundant, curling longand black down his back; his cheeks were smooth manifestly throughnature rather than the razor, and the ends of a small black mustachewere twisted up to his eyes. These were the only occupants of the cabin, which their presence rendered terribly ghastly and strange. 

There was perhaps something in keeping with the icy spell of death uponthis vessel in the figure of the man who was bowed over the table, forhe looked as though he slept; but the other mocked the view with a_spectrum_ of the fever and passion of life. You would have sworn hehad beheld the skeleton hand of the Shadow reaching out of the dimnessfor him; that he had started back with a curse and cry of horror, andexpired in the very agony of his affrighted recoil. 

The interior was extremely plain: the bulkheads of a mahogany colour, the decks bare, and nothing in the form of an ornament saving a silvercrucifix hanging by a nail to the trunk of the mainmast, and a cage witha frozen bird of gorgeous plumage suspended to the bulkhead near thehatch. A small lanthorn of an old pattern dangled over the table, and Inoticed that it contained two or three inches of candle. Abaft thehatchway was a door on the starboard side which I opened, and found anarrow dark passage. I could not pierce it with my eye beyond a fewfeet; but perceiving within this range the outline of a little door, Iconcluded that here were the berths in which the master and his matesslept. There was nothing to be done in the dark, and I bitterly lamentedthat I had left my tinder-box and flint in the boat, for then I couldhave lighted the candle in the lanthorn. 

"Perhaps, " thought I, "one of those figures may have a tinder-box uponhim. "

Custom was now somewhat hardening me; moreover I was spurred on bymortal anxiety to discover if there was any kind of food to be met within the vessel. So I stepped up to the figure whose face I had touched, and felt in his pockets; but neither on him nor on the other did I findwhat I wanted, though I was not a little astonished to discover in thepockets of the occupants of so small and humble a ship as this schoonera fine gold watch as rich as the one I had brought away from the man onthe rocks, and more elegant in shape, a gold snuff-box set withdiamonds, several rings of beauty and value lying loose in the breechespocket of the man whose face was hidden, a handful of Spanish pieces ingold, handkerchiefs of fine silk, and other articles, as if indeed thesefellows had been overhauling a parcel of booty, and then carelesslyreturned the contents to their pockets. 

But what I needed was the means of obtaining a light, so, after castingabout, I thought I would search the body on deck, and went to it, and tomy great satisfaction discovered what I wanted in the first pocket Idipped my hand into, though I had to rip open the mouth of it away fromthe snow with the hanger. 

I returned to the cabin and lighted the candle, and carried the lanthorninto the black passage or corridor. There were four small doors, belonging to as many berths; I opened the first, and entered acompartment that smelt so intolerably stale and fusty that I had to comeinto the passage again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to theodour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of airwas not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetableor animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as thefoulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in thebottom of the hold. 

I held up the lanthorn and looked about me. A glance or two satisfied methat I was in a room that had been appropriated to the steward and hismates. A number of dark objects, which on inspection I found to be hams, were stowed snugly away in battens under the ceiling or upper-deck; acask half full of flour stood in a corner; near it lay a large coarsesack in which was a quantity of biscuit, a piece of which I bit andfound it as hard as flint and tasteless, but not in the least degreemouldy. There were four shelves running athwartships full of glass, knives and forks, dishes, and so forth, some of the glass very choiceand elegant, and many of the dishes and plates also very fine, fit forthe greatest nobleman's table. Under the lower shelf, on the deck, lay asack of what I believed to be black stones until, after turning one ortwo of them about, it came upon me that they were, or had been, I shouldsay, potatoes. 

Not to tease you with too many particulars under this head, let mebriefly say that in this larder or steward's room I found among otherthings several cheeses, a quantity of candles, a great earthenware potfull of pease, several pounds of tobacco, about thirty lemons, alongwith two small casks and three or four jars, manifestly of spirits, butof what kind I could not tell. I took a stout sharp knife from one ofthe shelves, and pulling down one of the hams tried to cut it, but Imight as well have striven to slice a piece of marble. I attempted nextto cut a cheese, but this was frozen as hard as the ham. The lemons, candles, and tobacco had the same astonishing quality of stoniness, andnothing yielded to the touch but the flour. I laid hold of one of thejars, and thought to pull the stopper out, but it was frozen hard in thehole it fitted, and I was five minutes hammering it loose. When it wasout I inserted a steel--used for the sharpening of knives--and found thecontents solid ice, nor was there the faintest smell to tell me what thespirit or wine was. 

Never before did plenty offer itself in so mocking a shape. It was thevery irony of abundance--substantial ghostliness and a Barmecide's feastto my aching stomach. 

But there was biscuit not unconquerable by teeth used to the fare of thesea life, and picking up a whole one, I sat me down on the edge of acask and fell a-munching. One reflection, however, comforted me, namely, that this petrifaction by freezing had kept the victuals sweet. I wassure there was little here that might not be thawed into relishable andnourishing food and drink by a good fire. The sight of these stores tooksuch a weight off my mind that no felon reprieved from death could feelmore elated than I. My forebodings had come to nought in this regard, and here for the moment my grateful spirits were content to stop. 

CHAPTER XI. 

I MAKE FURTHER DISCOVERIES. 

So long as I moved about and worked I did not feel the cold; but if Istood or sat for a couple of minutes I felt the nip of it in my verymarrow. Yet, fierce as the cold was here, it was impossible it could becomparable with the rigours of the parts in which this schooner hadoriginally got locked up in the ice. No doubt if I died on deck my bodywould be frozen as stiff as the figure on the rocks; but, though it wasvery conceivable that I might perish of cold in the cabin by sittingstill, I was sure the temperature below had not the severity to stonifyme to the granite of the men at the table. 

Still, though a greater degree of cold--cold as killing as if the worldhad fallen sunless--did unquestionably exist in those latitudes whencethis ice with the schooner in its hug had floated, it was so bitterlybleak in this interior that 'twas scarce imaginable it could be colderelsewhere; and as I rose from the cask shuddering to the heart with thefrosty motionless atmosphere, my mind naturally went to theconsideration of a fire by which I might sit and toast myself. 

I put a bunch of candles in my pocket--they were as hard as a parcel ofmarline-spikes--and took the lanthorn into the passage and inspected thenext room. Here was a cot hung up by hooks, and a large black cheststood in cleats upon the deck; some clothes dangled from pins in thebulkhead, and upon a kind of tray fixed upon short legs and serving as ashelf were a miscellaneous bundle of boots, laced waistcoats, three-corner hats, a couple of swords, three or four pistols, and otherobjects not very readily distinguishable by the candle-light. There wasa port which I tried to open, but found it so hard frozen I should needa handspike to start it. There were three cabins besides this; the lastcabin, that is the one in the stern, being the biggest of the lot. Eachhad its cot, and each also had its own special muddle and litter ofboxes, clothes, firearms, swords, and the like. 

Indeed, by this time I was beginning to see how it was. The suspicionthat the watches and jewellery I had discovered on the bodies of the menhad excited was now confirmed, and I was satisfied that this schoonerhad been a pirate or buccaneer, of what nationality I could not yetdivine--methought Spanish from the costume of the first figure I hadencountered; and I was also convinced by the brief glance I directed atthe things in the cabin, particularly the wearing apparel, and the makeand appearance of the firearms, that she must have been in this positionfor upwards of fifty years. 

The thought awed me greatly: _twenty years before I was born_ those twomen were sitting dead in the cabin!--he on deck was keeping his blindand silent look-out; he on the rocks with his hands locked upon hisknees sat sunk in blank and frozen contemplation!

Every cabin had its port, and there were ports in the vessel's sideopposite; but on reflection I considered that the cabin would be thewarmer for their remaining closed, and so I came away and entered thegreat cabin afresh, bent on exploring the forward part. 

I must tell you that the mainmast, piercing the upper deck, came downclose against the bulkhead that formed the forward wall of the cabin, and on approaching this partition, the daylight being broad enough nowthat the hatch lay open on top, I remarked a sliding door on thelarboard side of the mast. I put my shoulder to it and very easily ranit along its grooves, and then found myself in the way of a directcommunication with all the fore portion of the schooner. The arrangementindeed was so odd that I suspected a piratical device in this uncommonmethod of opening out at will the whole range of deck. The air here wasas vile as in the cabins, and I had to wait a bit. 

On entering I discovered a little compartment with racks on either handfilled with small-arms. I afterwards counted a hundred and thirteenmuskets, blunderbusses, and fusils, all of an antique kind, whilst thesides of the vessel were hung with pistols great and little, boarding-pikes, cutlasses, hangers, and other sorts of sword. Thisarmoury was a sight to set me walking very cautiously, for it was notlikely that powder should be wanting in a ship thus equipped; and wherewas it stowed?

There was another sliding door in the forward partition; it stood open, and I passed through it into what I immediately saw was the cook-house. I turned the lanthorn about, and discovered every convenience fordressing food. The furnaces were of brick and the oven was a greatone--great, I mean, for the size of the vessel. There were pots, pans, and kettles in plenty, a dresser with drawers, dishes of tin andearthenware, a Dutch clock--in short, such an equipment of kitchenfurniture as you would not expect to find in the galley of an Indiamanbuilt to carry two or three hundred passengers. About half a chaldron ofsmall coal lay heaped in a wooden angular fence fitted to the ship'sside, for the sight of which I thanked God. I held the lanthorn to thefurnace, and observed a crooked chimney rising to the deck and passingthrough it. The mouth or head of it was no doubt covered by the snow, for I had not noticed any such object in the survey I had taken of thevessel above. Strange, I thought, that these men should have frozen todeath with the material in the ship for keeping a fire going. But thenmy whole discovery I regarded as one of those secrets of the deep whichdefy the utmost imagination and experience of man to explain them. Enough that here was a schooner which had been interred in a sepulchreof ice, as I might rationally conclude, for near half a century, thatthere were dead men in her who looked to have been frozen to death, thatshe was apparently stored with miscellaneous booty, that she waspowerfully armed for a craft of her size, and had manifestly gonecrowded with men. All this was plain, and I say it was enough for me. Ifshe had papers they were to be met with presently; otherwise, conjecturewould be mere imbecility in the face of those white and frost-boundcountenances and iron silent lips. 

I thrust back another sliding door and entered the ship's forecastle. The ceiling, as I choose to call the upper deck, was lined withhammocks, and the floor was covered with chests, bedding, clothes, and Iknow not what else. The ringing of the wind on high did not disturb thestillness, and I cannot convey the impression produced on my mind bythis extraordinary scene of confusion beheld amid the silence of thattomblike interior. I stood in the doorway, not having the courage toventure further. For all I knew many of those hammocks might betenanted; for as this kind of bed expresses by its curvature the roundedshape of a seaman, whether it be empty or not, so it is impossible bymerely looking to know whether it is occupied or vacant. The dismalnessof the prospect was of course vastly exaggerated by the feeble light ofthe candle, which, swaying in my hand, flung a swarming of shadows uponthe scene, through which the hammocks glimmered wan and melancholy. 

I came away in a fright, sliding the door to in my hurry with a bangthat fetched a groaning echo out of the hold. If this ship were haunted, the forecastle would be the abode of the spirits!

Before I could make a fire the chimney must be cleared. Among thefurniture in the arms-room were a number of spade-headed spears; thespade as wide as the length of a man's thumb, and about a foot long, mounted on light thin wood. Armed with one of these weapons, the like ofwhich is to be met with among certain South American tribes, I passedinto the cabin to proceed on deck; but though I knew the two figureswere there, the coming upon them afresh struck me with as muchastonishment and alarm as if I had not before seen them. The manstarting from the table confronted me on this entrance, and I stoppeddead to that astounding living posture of terror, even recoiling, asthough he were alive indeed, and was jumping up from the table in hisamazement at my apparition. 

The brilliance of the snow was very striking after the dusk of theinteriors I had been penetrating. The glare seemed like a blaze of whitesunshine; yet it was the dazzle of the ice and nothing more for the sunwas hidden; the fairness of the morning was passed; the sky waslead-coloured down to the ocean line, with a quantity of smoke-brownscud flying along it. The change had been rapid, as it always ishereabouts. The wind screamed with a piercing whistling sound throughthe frozen rigging, splitting in wails and bounding in a roar upon theadamantine peaks and rocks; the cracking of the ice was loud, continuous, and mighty startling; and these sounds, combined with thethundering of the sea and the fierce hissing of its rushing yeast, gavethe weather the character of a storm, though as yet it was no more thana fresh gale. 

However, though it was frightful to be alone in this frozen vault, withno other society than that of the dead, not even a seafowl to put lifeinto the scene, I could not but feel that, be my prospects what theymight, for the moment I was safe--that is to say, I was immeasurablysecurer than ever I could have been in the boat, which, when I hademerged into this stormy sound and realized the sea that was runningoutside, I instantly thought of with a shudder. Had the rock, I mused, not fallen and liberated the boat, where should I be now? Perhapsfloating, a corpse, fathoms deep under water, or, if alive, then flyingbefore this gale into the south, ever widening the distance betwixt meand all chance of my deliverance, and every hour gauging more deeply thehorrible cold of the pole. Indeed I began to understand that I had beenmercifully diverted from courting a hideous fate, and my spirits rosewith the emotion of gratitude and hope that attends upon preservation. 

I speedily spied the chimney, which showed a head of two feet above thedeck, and made short work of the snow that was frozen in it, as nothingcould have been fitter to cut ice with than the spade-shaped weapon Icarried. This done, I returned to the cook-room, and with a butcher'saxe that hung against the bulkhead I knocked away one of the boards thatconfined the coal, split it into small pieces, and in a short time hadkindled a good fire. One does not need the experience of being cast awayupon an iceberg to understand the comfort of a fire. I had a mind to beprodigal, and threw a good deal of coals into the furnace, and presentlyhad a noble blaze. The heat was exquisite. I pulled a little bench, after the pattern of those on which the men sat in the cabin, to thefire, and, with outstretched legs and arms, thawed out of me the frostthat had lain taut in my flesh ever since the wreck of the _LaughingMary_. When I was thoroughly warm and comforted I took the lanthorn andwent aft to the steward's room, and brought thence a cheese, a ham, somebiscuit, and one of the jars of spirits, all which I carried to thecook-room, and placed the whole of them in the oven. I was extremelyhungry and thirsty, and the warmth and cheerfulness of the fire set meyearning for a hot meal. But how was I to make a bowl without freshwater? I went on deck and scratched up some snow, but the salt in itgave it a sickly taste, and I was not only certain it would spoil andmake disgusting whatever I mixed it with or cooked in it, but it stoodas a drink to disorder my stomach and bring on an illness. So, thought Ito myself, there must be fresh water about--casks enough in the hold, Idare say; but the hold was not to be entered and explored without labourand difficulty, and I was weary and famished, and in no temper for hardwork. 

In all ships it is the custom to carry one or more casks calledscuttlebutts on deck, into which fresh water is pumped for the use ofthe crew. I stepped along looking earnestly at the several shapes ofguns, coils of rigging, hatchways, and the like, upon which the snow laythick and solid, sometimes preserving the mould of the object itcovered, sometimes distorting and exaggerating it into an unrecognizableoutline, but perceived nothing that answered to the shape of a cask. Atlast I came to the well in the head, passed the forecastle deck, and onlooking down spied among other shapes three bulged and bulky forms. Iseemed by instinct to know that these were the scuttlebutts and wentfor the chopper, with which I returned and got into this hollow, thatwas four or five feet deep. The snow had the hardness of iron; it tookme a quarter of an hour of severe labour to make sure of the characterof the bulky thing I wrought at, and then it proved to be a cask. Whatever might be its contents it was not empty, but I was pretty nighspent by the time I had knocked off the iron bands and beaten out stavesenough to enable me to get at the frozen body within. There werethree-quarters of a cask full. It was sparkling clear ice, and chippingoff a piece and sucking it, I found it to be very sweet fresh water. Thus was my labour rewarded. 

I cut off as much as, when dissolved, would make a couple of gallons, but stayed a minute to regain my breath and take a view of this well orhollow before going aft. It was formed of the great open head-timbers ofthe schooner curving up to the stem, and by the forecastle deck endinglike a cuddy front. I scraped at this front and removed enough snow toexhibit a portion of a window. It was by this window I supposed that theforecastle was lighted. Out of this well forked the bowsprit, with thespritsail yard braced fore and aft. The whole fabric close to lookedmore like glass than at a distance, owing to the million crystallinesparkles of the ice-like snow that coated the structure from the vane atthe masthead to the keel. 

Well, I clambered on to the forecastle deck and returned to thecook-room with my piece of ice, struck as I went along by the suddencomfortable quality of life the gushing of the black smoke out of thechimney put into the ship, and how, indeed, it seemed to soften as if bymagic the savage wildness and haggard austerity and gale-sweptloneliness of the white rocks and peaks. It was extremely disagreeableand disconcerting to me to have to pass the ghastly occupants of thecabin every time I went in and out; and I made up my mind to get them ondeck when I felt equal to the work, and cover them up there. Theslanting posture of the one was a sort of fierce rebuke; the sleepingattitude of the other was a dark and sullen enjoinment of silence. Inever passed them without a quick beat of the heart and shortenedbreathing; and the more I looked at them the keener became thesuperstitious alarm they excited. 

The fire burned brightly, and its ruddy glow was sweet as humancompanionship. I put the ice into a saucepan and set it upon the fire, and then pulling the cheese and ham out of the oven found them warm andthawed. On smelling to the mouth of the jar I discovered its contents tobe brandy. [1] Only about an inch deep of it was melted. I poured thisinto a pannikin and took a sup, and a finer drop of spirits I neverswallowed in all my life; its elegant perfume proved it amazingly choiceand old. I fetched a lemon and some sugar and speedily prepared a smallsmoking bowl of punch. The ham cut readily; I fried a couple of stoutrashers, and fell to the heartiest and most delicious repast I ever satdown to. At any time there is something fragrant and appetizing in thesmell of fried ham; conceive then the relish that the appetite of astarved, half-frozen, shipwrecked man would find in it! The cheese wasextremely good, and was as sound as if it had been made a week ago. Indeed, the preservative virtues of the cold struck me withastonishment. Here was I making a fine meal off stores which in allprobability had lain in this ship fifty years, and they ate as choicelyas like food of a similar quality ashore. Possibly some of these daysscience may devise a means for keeping the stores of a ship frozen, which would be as great a blessing as could befall the mariner, and asure remedy for the scurvy, for then as much fresh meat might be carriedas salt, besides other articles of a perishable kind. 

[Footnote 1: I can give the reader no better idea of the cold of thelatitudes in which this schooner had lain, than by speaking of thebrandy as being frozen. This may have happened through its having losttwenty or thirty per cent. Of its Strength. --P. R. ]

CHAPTER XII. 

A LONELY NIGHT

I had a pipe of my own in my pocket; I fetched a small block of theblack tobacco that was in the pantry, and, with some trouble, for it wasas hard and dry as glass, chipped off a bowlful and fell a-puffing withall the satisfaction of a hardened lover of tobacco who has long beendenied his favourite relish. The punch diffused a pleasing glow throughmy frame, the tobacco was lulling, the heat of the fire very soothing, the hearty meal I had eaten had also marvellously invigorated me, sothat I found my mind in a posture to justly and rationally consider mycondition, and to reason out such probabilities as seemed to be attachedto it. 

First of all I reflected that by the usual operation of natural lawsthis vast seat of "thrilling and thick-ribbed ice" in which the schoonerlay bound was steadily travelling to the northward, where in due courseit would dissolve, though that would not happen yet. But as it advancedso would it carry me nearer to the pathways of ships using these seas, and any day might disclose a sail near enough to observe such signals ofsmoke or flag as I might best contrive. But supposing no opportunity ofthis kind to offer, then I ought to be able to find in the vesselmaterials fit for the construction of a boat, if, indeed, I met not witha pinnace of her own stowed under the main-hatch, for there wascertainly no boat on deck. Nay, my meditations even carried me further:this was the winter season of the southern hemisphere, but presently thesun would be coming my way, whilst the ice, on the other hand, floatedtowards him; if by the wreck and dissolution of the island the schoonerwas not crushed, she must be released, in which case, providing she wastight--and my brief inspection of her bottom showed nothing wrong withher that was visible through the shroud of snow--I should have a stoutship under me in which I would be able to lie hove to, or even makeshift to sail her if the breeze came from the south, and thus take mychance of being sighted and discovered. 

Much, I had almost said everything, depended on the quantity ofprovisions I should find in here and particularly on the stock of coal, for I feared I must perish if I had not a fire. But there was the holdto be explored yet; the navigation of these waters must have beenanticipated by the men of the schooner, who were sure to make handsomeprovision for the cold--and the surer if, as I fancied, they wereSpaniards. Certainly they might have exhausted their stock of coal, butI could not persuade myself of this, since the heap in the corner of thecook-room somehow or other was suggestive of a store behind. 

I knew not yet whether more of the crew lay in the forecastle, but sofar I had encountered four men only. If these were all, then I had aright to believe, grounding my fancy on the absence of boats, that mostof the company had quitted the ship, and this they would have doneearly--a supposition that promised me a fair discovery of stores. Hereinlay my hope; if I could prolong my life for three or four months, then, if the ice was not all gone, it would have advanced far north, servingme as a ship and putting me in the way of delivering myself, either bythe sight of a sail, or by the schooner floating free, or by myconstruction of a boat. 

Thus I sat musing, as I venture to think, in a clearheaded way. Yet allthe same I could not glance around without feeling as if I wasbewitched. The red shining of the furnace ruddily gilded thecook-house; through the after-sliding door went the passage to the cabinin blackness; the storming of the wind was subdued into a strangemoaning and complaining; often through the body of the ship came thethrill of a sudden explosion; and haunting all was the sense of the deadmen just without, the frozen desolation of the island, the mighty worldof waters in which it lay. No! you can think of no isolation comparableto this; and I tremble as I review it, for under the thought of theenormous loneliness of that time my spirit must ever sink and breakdown. 

It was melancholy to be without time, so I pulled out the gold watch Ihad taken from the man on the rocks and wound it up, and guessing at thehour, set the hands at half-past four. The watch ticked bravely. It wasindeed a noble piece of mechanism, very costly and glorious with itsjewels, and more than a hint as to the character of this schooner; andhad there been nothing else to judge by I should still have sworn to herby this watch. 

My pipe being emptied, I threw some more coals into the furnace, andputting a candle in the lanthorn went aft to take another view of thelittle cabins, in one of which I resolved to sleep, for though thecook-room would have served me best whilst the fire burned, I reckonedupon it making a colder habitation when the furnace was black than thosesmall compartments in the stern. The cold on deck gushed down sobitingly through the open companion-hatch that I was fain to close it. I mounted the steps, and with much ado shipped the cover and shut thedoor, by which of course the great cabin, as I call the room in whichthe two men were, was plunged in darkness; but the cold was nottolerable, and the parcels of candles in the larder rendered meindifferent to the gloom. 

On entering the passage in which were the doors of the berths, I noticedan object that had before escaped my observation--I mean a smalltrap-hatch, no bigger than a manhole, with a ring for lifting it, midwaydown the lane. I suspected this to be the entrance to the lazarette, andputting both hands to the ring pulled the hatch up. I sniffedcautiously, fearing foul air, and then sinking the lanthorn by thelength of my arm I peered down, and observed the outlines of casks, bales, cases of white wood, chests, and so forth. I dropped through thehole on to a cask, which left me my head and shoulders above the deck, and then with the utmost caution stooped and threw the lanthorn lightaround me. But the casks were not powder-barrels, which perhaps a littlereflection might have led me to suspect, since it was not to be supposedthat any man would stow his powder in the lazarette. 

As I was in the way of settling my misgivings touching the stock of foodin the schooner, I resolved to push through with this business at once, and fetching the chopper went to work upon these barrels and chests; andvery briefly I will tell you what I found. First, I dealt with a tiercethat proved full of salt beef. There was a whole row of these tierces, and one sufficed to express the nature of the rest; there were upwardsof thirty barrels of pork; one canvas bale I ripped open was full ofhams, and of these bales I counted half a score. The white cases heldbiscuit. There were several sacks of pease, a number of barrels offlour, cases of candles, cheeses, a quantity of tobacco, not to mentiona variety of jars of several shapes, some of which I afterwards found tocontain marmalade and succadoes of different kinds. On knocking the headoff one cask I found it held a frozen body, that by the light of thelanthorn looked as black as ink; I chipped off a bit, sucked it, andfound it wine. 

I was so transported by the sight of this wonderful plenty that I fellupon my knees in an outburst of gratitude and gave hearty thanks to Godfor His mercy. There was no further need for me to dismally wonderwhether I was to starve or no; supposing the provisions sweet, here wasfood enough to last me three or four years. I was so overjoyed andwithal curious that I forgot all about the time, and flourishing thechopper made the round of the lazarette, sampling its freight byindividual instances, so that by the time I was tired I had enlarged thelist I have given, by discoveries of brandy, beer, oatmeal, oil, lemons, tongues, vinegar, rum, and eight or ten other matters, all stowed verybunglingly, and in so many different kinds of casks, cases, jars, andother vessels as disposed me to believe that several piraticalrummagings must have gone to the creation of this handsome andplentiful stock of good things. 

Well, thought I, even if there be no more coal in the ship than whatlies in the cook-house, enough fuel is here in the shape of casks, boxes, and the like to thaw me provisions for six months, besides what Imay come across in the hold, along with the hammocks, bedding, boxes, and so forth in the forecastle, all which would be good to feed my firewith. This was a most comforting reflection, and I recollect springingout through the lazarette hatch with as spirited a caper as ever I hadcut at any time in my life. 

I replaced the hatch-cover, and having resolved upon the aftmost of thefour cabins as my bedroom, entered it to see what kind of accommodationit would yield me. I hung up the lanthorn and looked into the cot, thatwas slung athwartships, and spied a couple of rugs, or blankets, which Ipulled out, having no fancy to lie under them. The deck was like an oldclothes' shop, or the wardrobe of a travelling troop of actors. From theconfusion in this and the ajoining cabins, I concluded that there hadbeen a rush at the last, a wild overhauling and flinging about ofclothes for articles of more value hidden amongst them. But just aslikely as not the disorder merely indicated the slovenly indifference ofplunderers to the fruits of a pillage that had overstocked them. 

The first garment I picked up was a cloak of a sort of silk material, richly furred and lined; all the buttons but one had been cut off, andthat which remained was silver. I spread it in the cot, as it was asoft thing to lie upon. Then I picked up a coat of the fashion you willsee in Hogarth's engravings; the coat collar a broad fold, and the cuffsto the elbow. This was as good as a rug, and I put it into the cot withthe other. I inspected others of the articles on the deck, and amongthem recollect a gold-laced waistcoat of green velvet, two or threepairs of high-heeled shoes, a woman's yellow sacque, several frizzledwigs, silk stockings, pumps--in fine the contents of the trunks of somedandy passengers, long since gathered to their forefathers no doubt, even if the gentlemen of this schooner had not then and there walkedthem overboard or split their windpipes. But, to be honest, I cannotremember a third of what lay tumbled upon the deck or hung against thebulkhead. So far as my knowledge of costume went, every article pointedto the date which I had fixed upon for this vessel. 

I swept the huddle of things with my foot into a corner, and lifting thelids of the boxes saw more clothes, some books, a collection ofsmall-arms, a couple of quadrants, and sundry rolls of paper whichproved to be charts of the islands of the Antilles and the western SouthAmerican coast, very ill-digested. There were no papers of any kind todetermine the vessel's character, nor journal to acquaint me with herstory. 

I was tired in my limbs rather than sleepy, and went to the cook-room towarm myself at the fire and get me some supper, meaning to sit theretill the fire died out and then go to rest; but when I put my knife tothe ham I found it as hard frozen as when I had first met with it; sowith the cheese; and this though there had been a fire burning forhours! I put the things into the oven to thaw as before, and sittingdown fell very pensive over this severity of cold, which had power tofreeze within a yard or two of the furnace. To be sure the fire by myabsence had shrunk, and the sliding door being open admitted the cold ofthe cabin; but the consideration was, how was I to resist the killingenfoldment of this atmosphere? I had slept in the boat, it is true, andwas none the worse; and now I was under shelter, with the heat of aplentiful bellyful of meat and liquor to warm me; but if wine and hamand cheese froze in an air in which a fire had been burning, why not Iin my sleep, when there was no fire, and life beat weakly, as it does inslumber? Those figures in the cabin were dismal warnings and assurances;they had been men perhaps stouter and heartier in their day than ever Iwas, but they had been frozen into stony images nevertheless, undercover too, with the materials to make a fire, and as much strong watersin their lazarette as would serve their schooner to float in. 

Well, thought I, after a spell of melancholy thinking, if I _am_ toperish of cold, there's an end; it is preordained, and it is as easy asdrowning, anyhow, and better than hanging; and with that I pulled outthe ham and found it soft enough to cut, finding philosophy (which, asthe French cynic says, triumphs over past and future ills) not so hardbecause somehow I did not myself then particularly feel the cold--Imean, I was not certainly suffering here from that pain of frost which Ihad felt in the open boat. 

Having heartily supped, I brewed a pint of punch, and, charging my pipe, sat smoking with my feet against the furnace. It was after eight o'clockby the watch I was wearing. I knew by the humming noise that it wasblowing a gale of wind outside, and from time to time the decks rattledto a heavy discharge of hail. All sounds were naturally much subdued tomy ear by the ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with thehatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself aquality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. Itwas like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it washollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seascommingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splittingice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded the inward silence withunearthly tones, which my lonely and quickened imagination readilyfurnished with syllables. The lanthorn diffused but a small light, andthe flickering of the fire made a movement of shadows about me. I wasseparated from the great cabin where the figures were by the littlearms-room only, and the passage to it ran there in blackness. 

It strangely and importunately entered my head to conceive, that thoughthose men were frozen and stirless they were not dead as corpses are, but as a stream whose current, checked by ice, will flow when the iceis melted. Might not life in them be suspended by the cold, not ended?There is vitality in the seed though it lies a dead thing in the hand. Those men are corpses to my eye; but said I to myself, they may have theprinciples of life in them, which heat might call into being. Putrefaction is a natural law, but it is balked by frost, and just asdecay is hindered by cold, might not the property of life be leftunaffected in a body, though it should be numbed in a marble form forfifty years?

This was a terrible fancy to possess a man situated as I was, and it soworked in me that again and again I caught myself looking first forward, then aft, as though, Heaven help me! my secret instincts foreboded thatat any moment I should behold some form from the forecastle, or one ofthose figures in the cabin, stalking in, and coming to my side andsilently seating himself. I pshaw'd and pish'd, and querulously asked ofmyself what manner of English sailor was I to suffer such womanlyterrors to visit me; but it would not do; I could not smoke; a coldnessof the heart fell upon me, and set me trembling above any sort ofshivers which the frost of the air had chased through me; and presentlya hollow creak sounding out of the hold, caused by some movement of thebed of ice on which the vessel lay, I was seized with a panic terror andsprang to my feet, and, lanthorn in hand, made for the companion-ladder, with a prayer in me for the sight of a star!

I durst not look at the figures, but, setting the light down at thefoot of the ladder, squeezed through the companion-door on to the deck. My fear was a fever in its way, and I did not feel the cold. There wasno star to be seen, but the whiteness of the ice was flung out in a wildstrange glare by the blackness of the sky, and made a light of its own. It was the most savage and terrible picture of solitude the invention ofman could reach to, yet I blessed it for the relief it gave to myghost-enkindled imagination. No squall was then passing; the rocks roseup on either hand in a ghastly glimmer to the ebony of the heavens; thegale swept overhead in a wild, mad blending of whistlings, roarings, andcryings in many keys, falling on a sudden into a doleful wailing, thenrising in a breath to the full fury of its concert; the sea thunderedlike the cannonading of an electric storm, and you would have said thatthe rending and crackling noises of the ice were responses to thecrashing blows of the balls of shadow-hidden ordnance. But the scene, the uproar, the voices of the wind were real--a better cordial to myspirits than a gallon of the mellowest vintage below; and presently, when the cold was beginning to pierce me, my courage was so much thebetter for this excursion into the hoarse and black and gleamingrealities of the night, that my heart beat at its usual measure as Ipassed through the hatch and went again to the cook-room. 

I was, however, sure that if I sat here long, listening and thinking, fear would return. A small fire still burned; I put a saucepan on it, and popped in a piece of the fresh-water ice, but on handling thebrandy I found it hard set. The heat of the oven was not sufficientlygreat to thaw me a dram; so to save further trouble in this way I tookthe chopper and at one blow split open the jar, and then there laybefore me the solid body of the brandy, from which I chipped off as muchas I needed, and thus procured a hot and animating draught. 

Raking out the fire, I picked up the lanthorn and was about to go, thenhalted, considering whether I should not stow the frozen provisionsaway. It was a natural thought, seeing how precious food was to me. But, alas! it mattered not where they lay; they were as secure here as ifthey were snugly hidden in the bottom of the hold. It was the whiterealm of death; if ever a rat had crawled in this ship, it was, in itshiding-place, as stiff and idle as the frozen vessel. So I let the lumpof brandy, the ice, ham, and so forth, rest where they were, and went tothe cabin I had chosen, involuntarily peeping at the figures as Ipassed, and hurrying the faster because of the grim and terrifyingliveliness put into the man who sat starting from the table by the swingof the lanthorn in my hand. 

I shut the door and hung the lanthorn near the cot, having the flint andbox in my pocket. There was indeed an abundance of candles in thevessel; nevertheless, it was my business to husband them with the utmostniggardliness. How long I was to be imprisoned here, if indeed I wasever to be delivered, Providence alone knew; and to run short ofcandles would add to the terrors of my existence, by forcing me eitherto open the hatches and ports for light, and so filling the ship withthe deadly air outside, or living in darkness. There were a cloak and acoat in the cot, but they would not suffice. The fine cloak I had takenfrom the man on the rocks was on deck, and till now I had forgotten it;there was, however, plenty of apparel in the corner to serve as wraps, and having chosen enough to smother me I vaulted into the cot, and socovered myself that the clothes were above the level of the sides of thecot. 

I left the lanthorn burning whilst I made sure my bed was all right, andlay musing, feeling extremely melancholy; the hardest part was thethought of those two men watching in the cabin. The most fantasticalarms possessed me. Suppose their ghosts came to the ship at midnight, and, entering their bodies, quickened them into walking? Suppose theywere in the condition of cataleptics, sensible of what passed aroundthem, but paralyzed to the motionlessness and seeming insensibility ofdeath? Then the very garments under which I lay were of a proper kind tokeep a man in my situation quaking. My imagination went to work to tellme to whom they had belonged, the bloody ends their owners had met atthe hands of the miscreants who despoiled them. I caught myselflistening--and there was enough to hear, too, what with the subduedroaring of the wind, the splintering of ice, the occasionalcreaking--not unlike a heavy booted tread--of the fabric of theschooner--to the blasts of the gale against her masts, or to a movementin the bed on which she reposed. 

But plain sense came to my rescue at last. I resolved to have no more ofthese night fears, so, blowing out the candle, I put my head on the coatthat formed my pillow, resolutely kept my eyes shut, and after awhilefell asleep. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

I EXPLORE THE HOLD AND FORECASTLE. 

It was pitch dark when I awoke, and I conceived it must be the middle ofthe night, but to my astonishment, on lighting the lanthorn and lookingat the watch, which I had taken the precaution to wind up overnight, Isaw it wanted but twenty minutes of nine o'clock, so that I had passedthrough twelve hours of solid sleep. However, it was only needful torecollect where I was, and to cast a glance at the closed door and port, to understand why it was dark. I had slept fairly warm, and awoke withno sensation of cramp; but the keen air had caused the steam of mybreath to freeze upon my mouth in such a manner that, when feeling thesticky inconvenience I put my finger to it, it fell like a little mask;and I likewise felt the pain of cold in my face to such an extent thathad I been blistered there my cheeks, nose, and brow could not havesmarted more. This resolved me henceforward to wrap up my head and facebefore going to rest. 

I opened the door and passed out, and observed an amazing differencebetween the temperature of the air in which I had been sleeping and thatof the atmosphere in the passage--a happy discovery, for it served toassure me that, if I was careful to lie under plenty of coverings and tokeep the outer air excluded, the heat of my body would raise thetemperature of the little cabin; nor, providing the compartment wasventilated throughout the day, was there anything to be feared from thevitiation of the air by my own breathing. 

My first business was to light the fire and set my breakfast to thaw, and boil me a kettle of water; and some time after I went on deck toview the weather and to revolve in my mind the routine of the day. Onopening the door of the companion-hatch I was nearly blinded by theglorious brilliance of the sunshine on the snow; after the blackness ofthe cabin it was like looking at the sun himself, and I had to stand afull three minutes with my hand upon my eyes before I could accustom mysight to the dazzling glare. It was fine weather again; the sky over theglass-like masts of the schooner was a clear dark blue, with a few lightclouds blowing over it from the southward. The wind had shifted at last;but, pure as the heavens were, the breeze was piping briskly with theweight and song of a small gale, and its fangs of frost, even in thecomparative quiet of the sheltered deck, bit with a fierceness that hadnot been observable yesterday. 

The moment I had the body of the vessel in my sight I perceived thatshe had changed her position since my last view of her. Her bows weremore raised, and she lay over further by the depth of a plank. I staredearnestly at the rocky slopes on either hand, but could not have sworntheir figuration was changed. An eager hope shot into my mind, but itquickly faded into an emotion of apprehension. It was conceivable indeedthat on a sudden some early day I might find the schooner liberated andafloat, and this was the first inspiriting flush; but then came the fearthat the disruption and volcanic throes of the ice might crush her, afear rational enough when I saw the height she lay above the sea, andhow by pressure those slopes which formed her cradle might be jammed andwelded together. The change of her posture then fell upon me with a kindof shock, and determined me, when I had broken my fast, to search herhold for a boat or for materials for constructing some ark by which Imight float out to sea, should the ice grow menacing and force me fromthe schooner. 

I made a plentiful meal, feeling the need of abundance of food in such atemperature as this, and heartily grateful that there was no need why Ishould stint myself. The having to pass the two figures every time Iwent on deck and returned was extremely disagreeable and unnerving, andI considered that, after searching the hold, the next duty I owed myselfwas to remove them on deck, and even over the side, if possible, for oneplace below was as sure to keep them haunting me as another, and theywould be as much with me in the forecastle as if I stowed them away inthe cabin adjoining mine. 

Whilst I ate, my mind was so busy with considerations of the change inthe ship's posture during the night that it ended in determining me totake a survey of her from the outside, and then climb the cliffs andlook around before I fell to any other work. I fetched the cloak I hadstripped the body on the rocks of and thawed and warmed it, and put iton, and a noble covering it was, thick, soft, and clinging. Then, armingmyself with a boarding-pike to serve as a pole, I dropped into thefore-chains and thence stepped on to the ice, and very slowly andcarefully walked round the schooner, examining her closely, and boringinto the snow upon her side with my pike wherever I suspected a hole orindent. I could find nothing wrong with her in this way, though what athaw might reveal I could not know. Her rudder hung frozen upon itspintles, and looked as it should. Some little distance abaft her rudder, where the hollow or chasm sloped to the sea, was a great split three orfour feet wide; this had certainly happened in the night, and I musthave slept as sound as the dead not to hear the noise of it. Such a rentas this sufficed to account for the subsidence of the after-part of theschooner and her further inclination to larboard. Indeed, the hollow wasnow coming to resemble the "ways" on which ships are launched; and youwould have conceived by the appearance of it that if it should slope alittle more yet, off would slide the schooner for the sea, and in theright posture too--that is, stern on. But I prayed with all my mightand main for anything but this. It would have been very well had thehollow gone in a gentle declivity to the wash of the sea, to the wateritself, in short; but it terminated at the edge of a cliff, not veryhigh indeed, but high enough to warrant the prompt foundering of anyvessel that should launch herself off it. Happily the keel was toosolidly frozen into the ice to render a passage of this descriptionpossible; and the conclusion I arrived at after careful inspection wasthat the sole chance that could offer for the delivery of the vessel toher proper element was in the cracking up and disruption of the bed onwhich she lay. 

Having ended my survey of the schooner, I addressed myself to the ascentof the starboard slope, and scaled it much more easily than I hadyesterday managed to make my way over the rocks. I climbed to thehighest block that was nearest me on the summit, and here I had a verylarge view of the scene. Much to my astonishment, the first objectswhich encountered my eye were four icebergs, floating detached but closetogether at a distance of about three miles on my side of the north-easttrend of the island. I counted them and made them four. They swam low, and it was very easily seen they had formed part of the coast there, though, as the form of the ice that way was not familiar to me, and as, moreover, the glare rendered the prospect very deceptive, I could notdistinguish where the ruptures were. But one change in the face of thiswhite country I did note, and that was the entire disappearance of twoof the most beautiful of the little crystal cities that adorned thenorthward range. The gale of the night had wrought havoc, and theunsubstantiality of this dazzling kingdom of ice was made startlinglyapparent by the evanishment of the delicate glassy architecture, and bythose four white hills floating like ships under their courses andtopsails out upon the flashing hurry and leaping blue and yeast of thewater. 

It was blowing harder than I had imagined. The wind was extraordinarilysharp, and the full current of it not long to be endured on myunsheltered eminence. The sea, swelling up from the south, ran high, andwas full of seething and tumbling noises, and of the roaring of thebreakers, dashing themselves against the ice in prodigious bodies offoam, which so boiled along the foot of the cliffs that their fronts, rising out of it, might have passed for the spume itself freezing as itleapt into a solid mass of glorious brilliance. The eye never explored ascene more full of the splendour of light and of vivid colour. Here andthere the rocks shone prismatically as though some flying rainbow hadshivered itself upon them and lay broken. The blue of the sea and skywas deepened into an exquisite perfection of liquid tint by the blindingwhiteness of the ice, which in exchange was sharpened into a wonderfuleffulgence by the hues above and around it. Again and again, along thewhole range, far as the sight could explore, the spray rose in statelyclouds of silver, which were scattered by the wind in meteoricscintillations of surpassing beauty, flashing through the fires of thesun like millions of little blazing stars. There were twenty differentdyes of light in the collection of spires, fanes, and pillars near theschooner, whose masts, yards, and gear mingled their own particularradiance with that of these dainty figures; and wherever I bent my gazeI found so much of sun-tinctured loveliness, and the wild white gracesof ice-forms and the dazzle of snow-surfaces softening into an azuregleaming in the far blue distances, that but for the piercing wind Icould have spent the whole morning in taking into my mind the marvellousspirit of this ocean picture, forgetful of my melancholy condition inthe intoxication of this draught of free and spacious beauty. 

Satisfied as to the state of the ice and the posture of the schooner, viewed from without, I sent a slow and piercing gaze along the oceanline, and then returned to the ship. The strong wind, the dance of thesea, the grandeur of the great tract of whiteness, vitalized by theflying of violet cloud-shadows along it, had fortified my spirits, andbeing free (for a while) of all superstitious dread, I determined tobegin by exploring the forecastle and ascertaining if more bodies werein the schooner than those two in the cabin and the giant form on deck. I threw some coal on the fire, and placed an ox-tongue along with thecheese and a lump of the frozen wine in a pannikin in the oven (for Ihad a mind to taste the vessel's stores, and thought the tongue wouldmake an agreeable change), and then putting a candle into the lanthornwalked very bravely to the forecastle and entered it. 

I was prepared for the scene of confusion, but I must say it staggeredme afresh with something of the force of the first impression. Sailors'chests lay open in all directions, and their contents covered the decks. There was the clearest evidence here that the majority of the crew hadquitted the vessel in a violent hurry, turning out their boxes to cramtheir money and jewellery into their pockets, and heedlessly flingingdown their own and the clothes which had fallen to their share. This Ihad every right to suppose from the character of the muddle on thefloor; for, passing the light over a part of it, I witnessed a greatvariety of attire of a kind which certainly no sailor in any age everwent to sea with; not so fine perhaps as that which lay in the cabins, but very good nevertheless, particularly the linen. I saw several wigs, beavers of the kind that was formerly carried under the arm, women'ssilk shoes, petticoats, pieces of lace, silk, and so forth; all directlyassuring me that what I viewed was the contents of passengers' luggage, together with consignments and such freight as the pirates would seizeand divide, every man filling his chest. Perhaps there was less on thewhole than I supposed, the litter looking great by reason of everythinghaving been torn open and flung down loose. 

I trod upon these heaps with little concern; they appealed to me only asa provision for my fire should I be disappointed in my search for coal. The hammocks obliged me to move with a stooped head; it was onlynecessary to feel them with my hand--that is, to test their weight bypushing them in the middle--to know if they were tenanted. Some wereheavier than the others, but all of them much lighter than they wouldhave been had they contained human bodies; and by this rapid method Isatisfied my mind that there were no dead men here as fully as if I hadlooked into each separate hammock. 

This discovery was exceedingly comforting, for, though I do not knowthat I should have meddled with any frozen man had I found him in thisplace, his being in the forecastle would have rendered me constantlyuneasy, and it must have come to my either closing this part of the shipand shrinking from it as from a spectre-ridden gloom, or to my disposingof the bodies by dragging them on deck--a dismal and hateful job. Therewere no ports, but a hatch overhead. Wanting light--the candle makingthe darkness but little more than visible--I fetched from the arms-rooma handspike that lay in a corner, and, mounting a chest, struck at thehatch so heartily that the ice cracked all around it and the cover rose. I pushed it off, and down rolled the sunshine in splendour. 

Everything was plain now. In many places, glittering among the clothes, were gold and silver coins, a few silver ornaments such as buckles, andwatches--things not missed by the pirates in the transport of theirflight. In kicking a coat aside I discovered a couple of silvercrucifixes bound together, and close by were a silver goblet and thehilt of a sword broken short off for the sake of the metal it was of. Nothing ruder than this interior is imaginable. The men must have beenmighty put to it for room. There was a window in the head, but the snowveiled it. Maybe the rogues messed together aft, and only used thisforecastle to lie in. Right under the hatch, where the light wasstrongest, was a dead rat. I stooped to pick it up, meaning to fling iton to the deck, but its tail broke off at the rump, like a pipe-stem. 

Close against the after bulkhead that separated the forecastle from thecook-room was a little hatch. There was a quantity of wearing-apparelupon it, and I should have missed it but for catching sight of somethree inches of the dark line the cover made in the deck. On clearingaway the clothes I perceived a ring similar to that in the lazarettehatch, and it rose to my first drag and left me the hold yawning blackbelow. I peered down and observed a stout stanchion traversed by ironpins for the hands and feet. The atmosphere was nasty, and to give ittime to clear I went to the cook-house and warmed myself before thefire. 

The fresh air blowing down the forecastle hatch speedily sweetened thehold. I lowered the lanthorn and followed, and found myself on top ofsome rum or spirit casks, which on my hitting them returned to me asolid note. There was a forepeak forward in the bows, and the caskswent stowed to the bulkhead of it; the top of this bulkhead was openfour feet from the upper deck, and on holding the lanthorn over andputting my head through I saw a quantity of coals. If the forepeak wentas low as the vessel's floor, then I calculated there would not be lessthan fifteen tons of coal in it. This was a noble discovery to fallupon, and it made me feel so happy that I do not know that the assuranceof my being immediately rescued from this island could have given alighter pulse to my heart. 

The candle yielded a very small light, and it was difficult to see abovea yard or so ahead or around. I turned my face aft, and crawled over thecasks and came to under the main-hatch, where lay coils of hawser, buckets, blocks, and the like, but there was no pinnace, though here shehad been stowed, as a sailor would have promptly seen. A little waybeyond, under the great cabin, was the powder-magazine, a smallbulkheaded compartment with a little door, atop of which was a smallbull's-eye lamp. I peered warily enough, you will suppose, into thisplace, and made out twelve barrels of powder. I heartily wished themoverboard; and yet, after all, they were not very much more dangerousthan the wine and spirits in the lazarette and fore-hold. 

The run remained to be explored--the after part, I mean, under thelazarette deck to the rudder-post--but I had seen enough; crawling aboutthat black interior was cold, lonesome, melancholy work, and it wasrendered peculiarly arduous by the obligation of caution imposed by myhaving to bear a light amid a freight mainly formed of explosives andcombustible matter. I had found plenty of coal, and that sufficed. So Ireturned by the same road I had entered, and sliding to the bulkheaddoor to keep the cold of the forecastle out of the cook-room, I stirredthe fire into a blaze and sat down before it to rest and think. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

AN EXTRAORDINARY OCCURRENCE. 

After the many great mercies which had been vouchsafed me, such as mybeing the only one saved of all the crew of the _Laughing Mary_, mydeliverance from the dangers of an open boat, my meeting with thisschooner and discovering within her everything needful for the supportof life, I should have been guilty of the basest ingratitude had Irepined because there was no boat in the ship. Yet for all that I couldnot but see it was a matter that concerned me very closely. Should thevessel be crushed, what was to become of me? It was easy to propose tomyself the making of a raft or the like of such a fabric; but everythingwas so hard frozen that, being single-handed, it was next to impossibleI should be able to put together such a contrivance as would be fit tolive in the smallest sea-way. 

However, I was resolved not to make myself melancholy with theseconsiderations. The good fortune that had attended me so far mightaccompany me to the end, and maybe I was the fitter just then to take ahopeful view of my condition because of the cheerfulness awakened in meby the noble show of coal in the forepeak. At twelve o'clock by thewatch in my pocket I got my dinner. I had a mind for a lighter drinkthan brandy, and went to the lazarette and cut out a block of the winein the cask I had opened; I also knocked out the head of a tierce ofbeef, designing a hearty regale for supper. You smile, perhaps, that Ishould talk so much of my eating; but if on shore, amid the security ofexistence there, it is the one great business of life, that is to say, the one great business of life after love, what must it be to a poorshipwrecked wretch like me, who had nothing else to think of but hisfood?

Yet I could not help smiling when I considered how I was carrying mydrink about in my fingers. What the wine was I do not know; it lookedlike claret but was somewhat sweet, and was the most generous wine Iever tasted, spite of my having to drink it warm, for if I let the cupout of my hand to cool, lo! when I looked it was ice!

Whilst I sat smoking my pipe it entered my head to presently turn thosetwo silent gentlemen in the cabin out of it. It was a task from which Ishrank, but it must be done. To be candid, I dreaded the effects oftheir dismal companionship on my spirits. I had been in the schooner twodays only; I had been heartened by the plenty I had met with, a soundnight's rest, the fire, and my escape from the fate that had certainlyovertaken me had I gone away in the boat. But being of a superstitiousnature and never a lover of solitude, I easily guessed that in a fewdays the weight of my loneliness would come to press very heavily uponme, and that if I suffered those figures to keep the cabin I should findmyself lying under a kind of horror which might end in breaking down mymanhood and perhaps in unsettling my reason. 

But how was I to dispose of them? I meditated this matter whilst Ismoked. First I thought I would drag them to the fissure or rent in theice just beyond the stern of the schooner and tumble them into it. Buteven then they would still be with me, so to speak--I mean, they wouldbe neighbours though out of sight; and my eagerness was to get them awayfrom this island altogether, which was only to be done by casting theminto the sea. Why, though I did not mention the matter in its place, Iwas as much haunted last night by the man on deck and the meditatingfigure on the rocks as by the fellows in the cabin; and, laugh as youmay at my weakness, I do candidly own my feeling was, if I did notcontrive that the sea should carry those bodies away, I should comebefore long to think of them as alive, no matter in what part of theisland I might bear them to, and at night-time start at every sound, hear their voices in the wind, see their shapes in the darkness, andeven by day dread to step upon the cliffs. 

That such fancies should possess me already shows how necessary it was Ishould lose no time to provide against their growth; so I settled myscheme thus: first I was to haul the figures as best I could on to thedeck; then, there being three, to get them over the side, and afterwardsby degrees to transport the four of them to some steep whence they wouldslide of themselves into the ocean. Yet so much did I dread theundertaking, and abhor the thought of the tedious time I foresaw itwould occupy me, that I cannot imagine any other sort of painful anddistressing work that would not have seemed actually agreeable ascompared with this. 

My pipe being smoked out, I stepped into the cabin, and ascending theladder threw off the companion-cover and opened the doors, and then wentto the man that had his back to the steps, but my courage failed me; hewas so lifelike, there was so wild and fierce an earnestness in theexpression of his face, so inimitable a picture of horror in hisstarting posture, that my hands fell to my side and I could not lay holdof him. I will not stop to analyse my fear or ask why, since I knew thatthis man was dead, he should have terrified me as surely no living mancould; I can only repeat that the prospect of touching him, and layinghim upon the deck and then dragging him up the ladder, was indescribablyfearful to me, and I turned away, shaking as if I had the ague. 

But it had to be done, nevertheless; and after a great deal of reasoningand self-reproach I seized him on a sudden, and, kicking away the bench, let him fall to the deck. He was frozen as hard as stone and fell likestone, and I looked to see him break, as a statue might that fallslumpishly. His arms remaining raised put him into an attitude ofentreaty to me to leave him in peace; but I had somewhat masteredmyself, and the hurry and tumult of my spirits were a kind of hottemper; so catching him by the collar, I dragged him to the foot of thecompanion-steps, and then with infinite labour and a number of sickeningpauses hauled him up the ladder to the deck. 

I let him lie and returned, weary and out of breath. He had been a veryfine man in life, of beauty too, as was to be seen in the shape of hisfeatures and the particular elegance of his chin, despite the distortionof his last unspeakable dismay; and with his clothes I guessed hisweight came hard upon two hundred pounds, no mean burden to haul up aladder. 

I went to the cook-house for a dram and to rest myself, and then cameback to the cabin and looked at the other man. His posture has beenalready described. He made a very burly figure in his coat, and if hisweight did not exceed the other's it was not likely to be less. Nothingof his head was visible but the baldness on the top and the growth ofhair that ringed it, and the fluffing up of his beard about his arms inwhich his face was sunk. I touched his beard with a shuddering finger, and noted that the frost had made every hair of it as stiff as wire. Itwould not do to stand idly contemplating him, for already there wasslowly creeping into me a dread of seeing his face; so I took hold ofhim and swayed him from the table, and he fell upon the deck sideways, preserving his posture, so that his face remained hidden. I dragged hima little way, but he was so heavy and his attitude rendered him as aburthen so surprisingly cumbrous that I was sure I could never of my ownstrength haul him up the ladder. Yet neither was it tolerable that heshould be there. I thought of contriving a tackle called a whip, andmaking one end fast to him and taking the other end to the littlecapstan on the main deck; but on inspecting the capstan I found that thefrost had rendered it immovable, added to which there was nothingwhatever to be done with the iron-hard gear, and therefore I had to givethat plan up. 

Then, thought I, if I was to put him before the fire, he might presentlythaw into some sort of suppleness, and so prove not harder than theother to get on deck. I liked the idea, and without more ado dragged himlaboriously into the cook-room and laid him close to the furnace, throwing in a little pile of coal to make the fire roar. 

I then went on deck, and easily enough, the deck being slippery, got myfirst man to where the huge fellow was that had sentinelled the vesselwhen I first looked down upon her; but when I viewed the slopes, brokeninto rocks, which I, though unburdened, had found hard enough to ascend, I was perfectly certain I should never be able to transport the bodiesto the top of the cliffs, I must either let them fall into the greatsplit astern of the ship, or lower them over the side and leave thehollow in which the schooner lay to be their tomb. 

I paced about, not greatly noticing the cold in the little valley, andrelishing the brisk exercise, scheming to convey the bodies to the sea, for I was passionately in earnest in wishing the four of them away; butto no purpose. I had but my arms, and scheme as I would, I could notmake them stronger than they were. It was still blowing a fresh brightgale from the south; the sea, as might be known by the noise of it, beatvery heavily against the cliffs of ice; and the extremity of the hollow, where it opened to the ocean but without showing it, was again and againveiled by a vast cloud of spray, the rain of which I could hear ringinglike volleys of shot as the wind smote it and drove it with incredibleforce against the rocks past the brow of the north slope. I thought tomyself there should be power in this wind to quicken the sliding of evenso mighty a berg as this island northwards. Every day should steal it bysomething, however inconsiderable, nearer to warmer regions, and nogale, nay, no gentle swell even, but must help to crack and loosen itinto pieces. "Oh, " cried I, "for the power to rupture this bed, that theschooner might slip into the sea! Think of her running north before sucha gale as this, steadily bearing me towards a more temperate clime, andinto the road of ships!" I clenched my hands with a wild yearning in myheart. Should I ever behold my country again? should I ever meet aliving man? The white and frozen steeps glared a bald reply; and I heardnothing but menace in the shrill noises of the wind and the deep andthunderous roaring of the ocean. 

It was mighty comforting, however, on returning to the cabin to find itvacant, to be freed from the scare of the sight of the two silentfigures. I drew my breath more easily and stopped to glance around. Itwas the barest cabin I was ever in--uncarpeted, with no other seats thanthe little benches. I looked at the crucifix, and guessed from the sightof it that, whatever might be the vessel's nation, she had not beensailed by Englishmen. I peeped into poor Polly's cage--if a parrot itwas--and the sight of the rich plumage carried my imagination to skiesof brass, to the mysterious green solitude of tropic forests, to islandsfringed with silver surf, in whose sunny flashing sported nude girls offaultless forms, showing their teeth of pearl in merry laughter, windingamorously with the blue billow, and filling the aromatic breeze with themelody of their language of the sun. Ha! thought I, sailors see somechanges in their time; and with a hearty sigh I stepped into thecook-room. 

I started, stopped, and fell back a pace with a cry. When I had put thefigure before the fire he was in the same posture in which he had sat atthe table, that is, leaning forward with his face hid in his arms; I hadlaid him on his side, with his face to the furnace, and in that attitudeyou would have supposed him a man sound asleep with his arms over hisface to shield it from the heat. But now, to my unspeakableastonishment, he lay on his back, with his arms sunk to his side andresting on the deck, and his face upturned. 

I stared at him from the door as if he was the Fiend himself. I couldscarce credit my senses, and my consternation was so great that I cannotconceive of any man ever having laboured under a greater fright. Ifaintly ejaculated 'Good God!' several times, and could hardly preventmy legs from running away with me. You see, it was certain he must havemoved of his own accord to get upon his back. I was prepared for thefire to thaw him into limberness, and had I found him straightenedsomewhat I should not have been surprised. But there was no power infire to stretch him to his full length and turn him over on his back. What living or ghostly hand had done this thing? Did spirits walk thisschooner after all? Had I missed of something more terrible than anynumber of dead men in searching the vessel?

I had made a great fire and its light was strong, and there was also thelight of the lanthorn; but the furnace flames played very lively, completely overmastering the steady illumination of the candle, and theman's figure was all a-twitch with moving shadows, and a hundredfantastic shades seemed to steal out of the side and bulkheads anddisappear upon my terrified gaze. Then, thought I, suppose after allthat the man should be alive, the vitality in him set flowing by theheat? I minded myself of my own simile of the current checked by frost, yet retaining unimpaired the principle of motion; and getting myagitation under some small control, I approached the body on tiptoe andheld the lanthorn to its face. 

He looked a man of sixty years of age; his beard was grey and verylong, and lay upon his breast like a cloud of smoke. His eyes wereclosed; the brows shaggy, and the dark scar of a sword-wound ran acrosshis forehead from the corner of the left eye to the top of the rightbrow. His nose was long and hooked, but the repose in his countenance, backed by the vague character of the light in which I inspected him, left his face almost expressionless. I was too much alarmed to put myear to his mouth to mark if he breathed, if indeed the noise of theburning fire would have permitted me to distinguish his respiration. Idrew back from him, and put down the lanthorn and watched him. ThoughtI, it will not do to believe there is anything supernatural here. I canswear there is naught living in this ship, and am I to suppose, assumingshe is haunted, that a ghost, which I have always read and heard of asan essence, has in its shadowy being such quality of _muscle_ as wouldenable it to turn that heavy man over from his side on to his back? No, no, thought I! depend upon it, either he is alive and may presently cometo himself, or else in some wonderful way the fire in thawing him has sowrought in his frozen fibres as to cause him to turn. 

Presently his left leg, that was slightly bent towards the furnace, stretched itself out to its full length, and my ear caught a faintsound, as of a weak and melancholy sigh. Gracious heaven, thought I, he_is_ alive! and with less of terror than of profound awe, now that I sawthere was nothing of a ghostly or preternatural character in thisbusiness, I approached and bent over him. His eyes were still shut, andI could not hear that he breathed; there was not the faintest motion ofrespiration in his breast nor stir in the hair, that was now soft, abouthis mouth. Yet, so far as the light would suffer me to judge, there wasa complexion in his face such as could only come with flowing blood, however languid its circulation, and putting this and the sigh and themovement of the leg together, I felt convinced that the man was alive, and forthwith fell to work, very full of awe and amazement to be sure, to help nature that was struggling in him. 

My first step was to heat some brandy, and whilst this was doing Ipulled open his coat and freed his neck, fetching a coat from the cabinto serve as a pillow for his head. I next removed his boots and laidbare his feet (which were encased in no less than four pairs of thickwoollen stockings, so that I thought when I came to the third pair Ishould find his legs made of stockings), and after bathing his feet inhot water, of which there was a kettleful, I rubbed them with hot brandyas hard as I could chafe. I then dealt with his hands in the likemanner, having once been shipmate with a seaman who told me he had seena sailor brought to by severe rubbing of his extremities after he hadbeen carried below supposed to be frozen to death, and continued thisexercise till I could rub no longer. Next I opened his lips and, findinghe wanted some of his front teeth, I very easily poured a dram of brandyinto his mouth. Though I preserved my astonishment all this while, Isoon discovered myself working with enthusiasm, with a most passionatelonging indeed to recover the man, not only because it pleased me tothink of my being an instrument under God of calling a human being, soto speak, out of his grave, but because I yearned for a companion, someone to address, to lighten the hideous solitude of my condition and toassist me in planning our deliverance. 

I built up a great fire, and with much trouble, for he was very heavy, disposed him in such a manner before it that the heat was reflected allover the front of him from his head to his feet. I likewise continued tochafe his extremities, remitting this work only to rest, and findingthat the brandy had stolen down his throat, I poured another dram in andthen another, till I think he had swallowed a pint. This went on for anhour, during which time he never exhibited the least signs of life; buton a sudden he sighed deep, a tremor ran through him, he sighed againand partly raised his right hand, which fell to the deck with a blow;his lips twitched, and a small convulsion of his face compelled thefeatures into the similitude of a grin that instantly faded; then hefetched a succession of sighs and opened his eyes full upon me. 

I was warm enough with my work, but when I observed him looking at me Iturned of a death-like cold, and felt the dew of an intolerable emotionwet in the palms of my hands. There was no speculation in his stare atfirst; his eyes lay as coldly upon me as those of a fish; but as lifequickened in him so his understanding awoke; he slightly knitted hisbrows, and very slowly rolled his gaze off me to the furnace and so overas much of the cook-room as was before him. He then started as if to situp, but fell back with a slight groan and looked at me again. 

"What is this?" said he in French, in a very hollow feeble voice. 

I knew enough of his language to enable me to know he spoke in French, but that was all. I could not speak a syllable of that tongue. 

"You'll be feeling better presently; you must not expect your strengthto come in a minute, " said I, taking my chance of his understanding me, and speaking that he might not think me a ghost, for I doubt not I wasas white as one; since, to be plain, the mere talking to a figure that Ihad got to consider as sheerly dead as anybody in a graveyard wasalarming enough, and then again there was the sound of my own voice, which I had not exerted in speech for ages, as it seemed to me. 

He faintly nodded his head, by which I perceived he understood me, andsaid very faintly in English, but with a true French accent, "This is ahard bed, sir. "

"I'll speedily mend that, " said I, and at once fetched a mattress fromthe cabin next mine; this I placed beside him, and dragged him on to it, he very weakly assisting. I then brought clothes and rugs to cover himwith, and made him a high pillow, and as he lay close to the furnace hecould not have been snugger had he had a wife to tuck him up in his ownbed. 

I was very much excited; my former terrors had vanished, but my awecontinued great, for I felt as if I had wrought a miracle, and Itrembled as a man would who surveys some prodigy of his own creation. Itwas yet to be learnt how long he had been in this condition; but I wasperfectly sure he had formed one of the schooner's people, and as I hadguessed her to have been here for upwards of fifty years, the notion ofthat man having lain torpid for half a century held me under a perpetualspell of astonishment; but there was no more horror in me nor fright. Hefollowed me about with his eyes but did not offer to speak; perhaps hecould not. I put a lump of ice into the kettle, and when the waterboiled made him a pint of steaming brandy punch, which I held to hislips in a pannikin whilst I supported his back with my knee; he suppedit slowly and painfully but with unmistakable relish, and fetched a sighof contentment as he lay back. But he would need something moresustaining than brandy and water; and as I guessed his stomach, after soprodigious a fast, would be too weak to support such solids as beef orpork or bacon, I mused a little, turning over in my mind the contents ofthe larder (as I call it), all which time he eyed me with bewildermentgrowing in his face; and I then thought I could not do better thanmanufacture him a broth of oatmeal, wine, bruised biscuit, and a pieceof tongue minced very small. 

This did not take me long in doing, the tongue being near the furnaceand soft enough for the knife, and there was nothing to melt but thewine. When the broth was ready I kneeled as before and fed him. He ategreedily, and when the broth was gone looked as if he would have beenglad for more. 

"Now, sir, " says I, "sleep if you can;" with which he turned his headand in a few minutes was sound asleep, breathing regularly and deeply. 

CHAPTER XV. 

THE PIRATE'S STORY. 

It was now time to think of myself. The watch showed the hour to beafter six. Whilst my supper was preparing I went on deck to close thehatches to keep the cold out of the ship, and found the weather changed, the wind having shifted directly into the west, whence it was blowingwith a good deal of violence upon the ice, ringing over the peaks andamong the rocks with a singular clanking noise in its crying, as thoughit brought with it the echo of thousands of bells pealing in some greatcity behind the sea. It also swept up the gorge that went from ourhollow to the edge of the cliff in a noisy fierce hooting, and thisblast was very freely charged with the spray of the breakers whichboiled along the island. The sky was overcast with flying clouds of thetrue Cape Horn colour and appearance. 

I closed the fore-scuttle, but on stepping aft came to the two bodies, the sight of which brought me to a stand. Since there was life in one, thought I, life may be in these, and I felt as if it would be likemurdering them to leave them here for the night. But, said I to myself, after all, these men are certainly insensible if they be not dead; thecold that freezes on deck cannot be different from the cold that frozethem below; they'll not be better off in the cabin than here. It will beall the same to them, and to-morrow I shall perhaps have the Frenchman'shelp to carry them to the furnace and discover if the vital spark isstill in them. 

To be candid, I was the more easily persuaded to leave them to theirdeck lodging by the very grim, malignant, and savage appearance of thegreat figure that had leaned against the rail. Indeed, I did not at alllike the notion of such company in the cabin through the long night. Added to this, his bulk was such that, without assistance, I could onlyhave moved him as you move a cask, by rolling it; and though this mighthave answered to convey him to the hatch, I stood to break his arms andlegs off, and perhaps his head, so brittle was he with frost, by lettinghis own weight trundle him down the ladder. 

So I left them to lie and came away, flinging a last look round, andthen closing the companion-door upon me. The Frenchman, as I may callhim, was sleeping very heavily and snoring loudly. 

I got my supper, and whilst I ate surveyed the mound of clothes he madeon the deck--a motley heap indeed, with the colours and the finery ofthe lace and buttons of the coats I had piled upon him--and fell intosome startling considerations of him. Was it possible, I asked myself, that he could have lain in his frozen stupor for fifty years? But whynot? for suppose he had been on this ice but a year only, nay, sixmonths--an absurdity in the face of the manifest age of the ship and herfurniture--would not six months of lifelessness followed by aresurrection be as marvellous as fifty years? Had he the same aspectwhen the swoon of the ice seized him as he has now? I answered yes, forthe current of life having been frozen, his appearance would remain asit was. 

I lighted my pipe and sat smoking, thinking he would presently awake;but his slumber was as deep as the stillness I had thawed him out of hadbeen, and he lay so motionless that, but for his snoring and harshbreathing, I should have believed him lapsed into his former state. 

At eight o'clock the fire was very low. Nature was working out her ownway with this Frenchman, and I determined to let him sleep where he was, and take my chance of the night. At all events he could not alarm me bystirring, for if I heard a movement I should know what it was. So, loitering to see the last gleam of the fire extinguished, I took mylanthorn and went to bed, but not to sleep. 

The full meaning of the man awakening into life out of a condition intowhich he had been plunged, for all I knew, before I was born, came uponme very violently in the darkness. There being nothing to divert mythoughts, I gave my mind wholly to it, and I tell you I found it anamazing terrifying thing to happen. Indeed, I do not know that the likeof such an adventure was ever before heard of, and I well recollectthinking to myself, "I would give my left hand to know of other cases ofthe kind--to be assured that this recovery was strictly within thebounds of nature, " that I might feel I was not alone, so strongly didthe thoughts of a satanic influence operating in this business crowdupon me--that is to say, as if I was involuntarily working out some planof the devil. 

The gale made a great roaring. The ship's stern lay open to the gorge, and but for her steadiness I might have supposed myself at sea. Therewas indeed an incessant thunder about my ears often accompanied by theshock of a mass of spray flung thirty feet high, and falling likesacks of stones upon the deck. Once I felt the vessel rock; I cannottell the hour, but it was long past midnight, and by the noise ofthe wind I guessed it was blowing a whole gale. The movement wasextraordinary--whether sideways or downwards I could not distinguish;but, seasoned as my stomach was to the motion of ships, this movementset up a nausea that lasted some while, acting upon me as I have sincelearned the convulsion of an earthquake does upon people. It took off mymind from the Frenchman, and filled me with a different sort of alarmaltogether, for it was very evident the gale was making the ice break;and, thought I to myself, if we do not mind our eye we shall be crushedand buried. But what was to be done? To quit the ship for that piercingflying gale, charged with sleet and hail and foam, was merely tolanguish for a little and then miserably expire of frost. No, thought I, if the end is to come let it find me here; and with that I snugged medown amid the coats and cloaks in my cot, and, obstinately holding myeyes closed, ultimately fell asleep. 

It was late when I awoke. I lighted the lanthorn, but upon entering thepassage that led to the cabin I observed by my own posture that theschooner had not only heeled more to larboard, but was further "down bythe stern" to the extent of several feet. Indeed, the angle ofinclination was now considerable enough to bring my shoulder (in thepassage) close against the starboard side when I stood erect. The noiseof the gale was still in the air, and the booming and boiling of the seawas uncommonly loud. I walked straight to the cook-room, and, puttingthe lanthorn to the Frenchman, perceived that he was still in a heavysleep, and that he had lain through the night precisely in the attitudein which I had left him. His face was so muffled that little more thanhis long hawk's-bill nose was discernible. It was freezingly cold, and Imade haste to light the fire. There was still coal enough in the cornerto last for the day, and before long the furnace was blazing cheerfully. I went to work to make some broth and fry some ham, and melt a littleblock of the ruby-coloured wine; and whilst thus occupied, turning myhead a moment to look at the Frenchman, I found him half started up, staring intently at me. 

This sudden confrontment threw me into such confusion that I could notspeak. He moved his head from side to side, taking a view of the scene, with an expression of the most inimitable astonishment painted upon hiscountenance. He then brought the flat of his hand with a dramatic blowto his forehead, the scar on which showed black as ink to the fire-glow, and sat erect. 

"Where have I been?" he exclaimed in French. 

"Sir, " said I, speaking with the utmost difficulty, "I do not understandyour language. I am English. You speak my tongue. Will you address me init?"

"English!" he exclaimed in English, dropping his head on one side, andpeering at me with an incredible air of amazement. "How came you here?You are not of our company? Let me see... " Here he struggled withrecollection, continuing to stare at me from under his shaggy eyebrowsas if I was some frightful vision. 

"I am a shipwrecked British mariner, " said I, "and have been cast awayupon this ice, where I found your schooner. "

"Ha!" he interrupted with prodigious vehemence, "certainly; we arefrozen up--I remember. That sleep should serve my memory so!" He made asif to rise, but sat again. "The cold is numbing; it would weaken alion. Give me a hot drink, sir. "

I filled a pannikin with the melted wine, which he swallowed thirstily. 

"More!" cried he. "I seem to want life. "

Again I filled the pannikin. 

"Good!" said he, fetching a sigh as he returned the vessel; "you arevery obliging, sir. If you have food there, we will eat together. "

I give the substance of his speech, but not his delivery of it, nor isit necessary that I should interpolate my rendering with the Frenchwords he used. 

The broth being boiled, I gave him a good bowl of it along with a plateof bacon and tongue, some biscuit and a pannikin of hot brandy andwater, all which things I put upon his knees as he sat up on themattress, and to it he fell, making a rare meal. Yet all the while heate he acted like a man bewitched, as well he might, staring at me andlooking round and round him, and then dropping his knife to strike hisbrow, as if by that kind of blow he would quicken the activity of memorythere. 

"There is something wrong, " said he presently. "What is it, sir? This isthe cook-room. How does it happen that I am lying here?"

I told him exactly how it was, adding that if it had not been for hisposture, which obliged me to thaw in order to carry him, he would now beon deck with the others, awaiting the best funeral I could give him. 

"Who are the others?" asked he. 

"I know not, " said I. "There were four in all, counting yourself; onesits frozen to death on the rocks. I met him first, and took this watchfrom his pocket that I might tell the time. "

He took the watch in his hands, and asked me to bring the lanthornclose. 

"Ha!" cried he, "this was Mendoza's--the captain's. I remember; he tookit for the sake of this letter upon it. He lies dead on the rocks? Wemissed him, but did not know where he had gone. "

Then, raising his hand and impulsively starting upon the mattress, hecried, whilst he tapped his forehead, "It has come back! I have it!Guiseppe Trentanove and I were in the cabin; he had fallen blind withthe glare of the ice--if that was it. We confronted each other. On asudden he screamed out. I had put my face into my arms, and felt myselfdying. His cry aroused me. I looked up, and saw him leaning back fromthe table with his eyes fixed and horror in his countenance. I was toofeeble to speak--too languid to rise. I watched him awhile, and then thedrowsiness stole over me again, and my head sank, and I remember nomore. "

He shuddered, and extended the pannikin for more liquor. I filled itwith two-thirds of brandy and the rest water, and he supped it down asif it had been a thimbleful of wine. 

"By the holy cross, " cried he, "but this is very wonderful, though. Howlong have you been here, sir?"

"Three days. "

"Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time--never moving, never breathing?"

"You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect, " said I. 

"What is this month?" he cried. 

"July, " I replied. 

"July--July!" he muttered. "Impossible! Let me see"--he began to counton his fingers--"we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. Wehad six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; andsuppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stopswould be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say, _four months ofoblivion_; impossible!"

"What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?" said I. 

"The year?" he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this questionraised in him; "the year? Why, man, what year but _seventeen hundred andfifty-three_!"

"Good God!" cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I hadanticipated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation. 

"Do you know what year this is?"

He looked at me without answering. 

"It is eighteen hundred and one, " I cried, and as I said this I recoileda step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundreddemonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuadedwould have been my posture had any man roused me from a slumber and toldme I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years. 

He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression inhis eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising andbewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard, looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; thendrew out his feet and looked at _them_; then very slowly, but withoutvisible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, andproceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms andusing his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over hisnaked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, "What do you saythis year is, sir?"

"Eighteen hundred and one, " I replied. 

"Bah!" said he, and shook his head very knowingly. "No matter; you havebeen shipwrecked too! Sir, shipwreck shuffles dates as a player doescards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, andperil. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir, that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine. "

I saw how it was--he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction toplace upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a fewmoments' reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, forunless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and itwas inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozencondition for eight-and-forty years. 

I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. Hisappearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a verydark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost inthe dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed anindescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which Iattributed to the large quantity of liquor he had swallowed. Thiscontrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from hisbaldness--that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have beforesaid, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above theears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life hehad been scalped. 

I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man's company. For somecompanion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and againwith heart-breaking passion; and now a living man sat before me, yet Iwas sensible of no gladness. In truth, I was overawed by him; hefrightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that hadentered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man everreturns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard uponfifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly innature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that itcould not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as muchoppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, andwatching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he had risen and walked. 

I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him thatI had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over myfigure and then round the cook-room, and said, "I am impatient to learnyour story, sir. "

"Why, sir, " said I, "my story is summed up in what I have already toldyou. " But that he might not be at a loss--for to be sure he had onlyvery newly collected his intellects--I related my adventures at large. He drew nearer to the furnace whilst I talked, bringing his covering ofclothes along with him, and held out his great hands to toast at thefire, all the time observing me with scarce a wink of the eye. Arrivedat the end of my tale, I told him how only last night I had dragged hiscompanion on deck, and how he was to have followed but for his posture. 

"Ha!" cried he, "you might have caused my flesh to mortify by laying meclose to the fire. It would have been better to rub me with snow. "

He poked up one foot after the other to count his toes, fearing some hadcome away with his stockings, and then said, "Well, and how long shouldI have slept had you not come? Another week! By St. Paul, I might havedied. Have you my stockings, sir?"

I gave them to him, and he pulled them over his legs and then drew onhis boots and stood up, the coats and wraps tumbling off him as he rose. 

"I can stand, " says he. "That is good. "

But in attempting to take a step he reeled and would have fallen had Inot grasped his arm. 

"Patience, my friend, patience!" he muttered as if to himself. "I mustlie a little longer, " and with that he kneeled and then lay along themattress. He breathed heavily and pointed to the pannikin. I asked himwhether he would have wine or brandy; he answered, "Wine, " so I melted adraught, which dose, I thought, on top of what he had already taken, would send him to sleep; but instead it quickened his spirits, and withno lack of life in his voice he said, "What is the condition of thevessel?"

I told him that she was still high and dry, adding that during the nightsome sort of change had happened which I should presently go on deck toremark. 

"Think you, " says he, "that there is any chance of her ever beingliberated?"

I answered, "Yes, but not yet; that is, if the ice in breaking doesn'tdestroy her. The summer season has yet to come, and we are progressingnorth; but now that you are with me it will be a question for us tosettle, whether we are to wait for the ice to release the schooner orendeavour to effect our escape by other means. "

A curious gleam of cunning satisfaction shone in his eyes as he lookedat me; he then kept silence for some moments, lost in thought. 

"Pray, " said I, breaking in upon him, "what ship is this?"

He started, deliberated an instant, and answered, "The _Boca delDragon_. "[2]

[Footnote 2: So in Mr. Rodney's MS. ]

"A Spaniard?"

He nodded. 

"She was a pirate?" said I. 

"How do you know that?" he cried with a sudden fierceness. 

"Sir, " said I, "I am a British sailor who has used the sea for someyears, and know the difference between a handspike and a poop-lanthorn. But what matters? She is a pirate no longer. "

He let his eyes fall from my face and gazed round him with the air ofone who cannot yet persuade his understanding of the realities of thescene he moves in. 

"Tut!" cried he presently, addressing himself, "what matters the truth, as you say? Yes, the _Boca del Dragon_ is a pirate. You have of courserummaged her, and guessed her character by what you found?"

"I met with enough to excite my suspicion, " said I. "The ship's companyof such a craft as this do not usually go clothed in lace and richcloaks, and carry watches of this kind, " tapping my breast, "in theirfobs and handfuls of gold in their pockets. "

"Unless----" said he. 

"Unless, " I answered, "their flag is as black as our prospects. "

"You think them black?" cried he, the look of resentment that wasdarkening his face dying out of it. "The vessel is sound, is not she?"

I replied that she appeared so, but it would be impossible to be sureuntil she floated. 

"The stores?"

"They are plentiful. "

"They should be!" he cried; "we have the liquor and stores of a galleonand two carracks in our hold, apart from what we originally laid in forthe cruise. Everything will have been kept sweet by the cold. "

"All the stores seem sound, " said I; "we shall not starve--no, not if wewere to be imprisoned here for three years. But all the same ourprospects are black, for here is the ship high and fixed; the ice inparting may crush her, and we have no boat. "

"May, may!" he cried with a Frenchman's vehemence. "You have _may_ andyou also have _may not_ in your language. Let me feel my strengthimproving; we shall then find means of throwing a light upon these blackprospects of yours. "

He smiled, or rather grinned, his fangs making the latter term fitterfor the mirthless grimace he made. 

"May I ask your name?" said I. 

"Jules Tassard, at your service, " said he, "third in command of the_Boca del Dragon_, but good as Mate Trentanove, and good as CaptainMendoza, and good as the cabin boy Fernando Prado; for we pirates arerepublicans, sir, we know no social distinctions save those we order forthe convenience of working ship. Now let me tell you the story of ourdisaster. We had come out of the Spanish Main into the South Seas, partly to escape some British and French cruisers which were after usand others of our kind, and partly because ill-luck was against us, andwe could not find our account in those waters. We sailed in December twoyears ago----"

"Making the year----?" I interrupted. 

He started, and then grinned again. 

"Ah, to be sure!" cried he, "this is eighteen hundred and one; but tokeep my tale in countenance, " he went on in a satirical apologetic way, "let me call the year in which we sailed for the South Sea seventeenhundred and fifty-one. What matters forty or fifty years to theshipwrecked? Is not one day of an open boat, with no society but thedevils of memory and no hope but the silence at the bottom of the sea, an eternity? Fill me that pannikin, my friend. I thank you. To proceed:we cruised some months in the South Sea and took a number of ships. Onewas a privateer that had plundered a British Indiaman in the SouthernOcean, and had entered the South Sea by New Holland. This fellow wasfull of fine clothes and had some silver in her. We took what we wanted, and let her go with her people under hatches, her yards square, her helmamidships, and her cabin on fire. Our maxim is, 'No witnesses!' That isthe pirate's philosophy. Who gives us quarter unless it be to hang us?But to continue: we did handsomely, but were a long time about it, andafter careening and filling up with water 'twixt San Carlos and Chiloewe set sail for the Antilles. Like your brig, we were blown south. Theweather was ferocious. Gale after gale thundered down upon us, forcingus to fly before it. We lost all reckoning of our position; for days, for weeks, sea and sky were enveloped in clouds of snow, in the heart ofwhich drove our frozen schooner. We were none of us of a nationality fitto encounter these regions; we carried most of us the curly hair of thesun, the chocolate cheek of the burning zone, and the ice chained thecrew, crouching like Lascars, below. We swept past many vast icebergs, which would leap on a sudden out of the white whirl of thickness, oftenso close aboard that the recoil of the surge striking against the masswould flood our decks. At all moments of the day and night we wereprepared to feel the shock of the vessel crushing her bows against oneof these stupendous hills. The cabin resounded with Salves and Aves, with invocations to the saints, promises, curses, and litanies. The colddoes not make men of the Spaniards, who are but indifferent seamen intemperate climes, and we were chiefly Spanish with consciences as red asyour English flag. "

He grinned, emptied the pannikin, and stretched his hands to the fire towarm them. 

"One morning, the weather having cleared somewhat, we found ourselvessurrounded by ice. A great chain floated ahead of us, extending far intothe south. The gale blew dead on to this coast; we durst not haul theschooner to the wind, and our only chance lay in discovering some baywhere we might find shelter. Such a bay it was my good luck to spy, lying directly in a line with the ship's head. It was formed of a greatsteep of ice jutting a long way slantingly into the sea, the widthbetween the point and the main being about a third of a mile. I seizedthe helm, and shouted to the men to hoist the head of the mainsail thatshe might round to when I put the helm down. But the fellows were in apanic terror and stood gaping at what they regarded as their doom, calling upon the Virgin and all the saints for help and mercy. Into thisbay did we rush on top of a huge sea, Trentanove and the captain and Iswinging with set teeth at the tiller, that was hard a-lee; she cameround, but with such way upon her that she took a long shelving beach ofice and ran up it to the distance of half her own length, and there shelay, with her rudder within touch of the wash of the water. The men, regarding the schooner as lost, and and concluding that if she went topieces her boats would be destroyed, and with them their only chance toescape from the ice, fell frantic and lost their wits altogether. Theyroared, 'To the boats! to the boats!' The captain endeavoured to bringthem to their senses; he and I and the mate, and Joam Barros, theboatswain--a Portuguese--went among them pistols in hand, entreating, cursing, threatening. 'Think of the plunder in this hold! Will youabandon it without an effort to save it? What think you are your chancesfor life in open boats in this sea? The schooner lies protected here;the weather will moderate presently, and we may then be able to slideher off. ' But reason as we would the cowardly dogs refused to listen. They had broached a spirit-cask aft, and passed the liquor along thedecks whilst they hoisted the pinnace out of the hold and got the otherboats over. The drink maddened, yet left them wild with fear too. Theywould not wait to come at the treasure in the run--the fools believedthe ship would tumble to pieces as she stood--but entered the forecastleand the officers' cabins, and routed about for whatever money andtrinkets they might stuff into their pockets without loss of time; andthen provisioning the boats, they called to us to join them, but wesaid, No, on which they ran the boats down to the water, tumbled intothem, and pulled away round the point of ice. We lost sight of themthen, and I have little doubt that they all perished shortlyafterwards. "

He ceased. I was anxious to hear more. 

"You had been six months on the ice when the stupor fell upon you?"

"Ay, about six months. The ice gathered about us and built us in. Irecollect it was three days after we stranded that, going on deck, I sawthe bay (as I term it) filled with ice. We drew up several plans toescape, but none satisfied us. Besides, sir, we had a treasure on boardwhich we had risked our necks to get, and we were prepared to go onimperilling our lives to save it. 'Twas natural. We had a great store ofcoal forwards and amidships, for we had faced the Horn in coming andknew what we had to expect in returning. We were also richly stockedwith provisions and drink of all sorts. There were but four of us, andwe dealt with what we had as if we designed it should last us fiftyyears. But the cold was frightful; it was not in flesh and blood tostand it. One day--we had been locked up about five months--Mendoza saidhe would get upon the rocks and take a view of the sea. He did notreturn. The others were too weak to seek him, and they were half blindbesides; I went, but the ice was full of caves and hollows, and thelike, and I could not find him, nor could I look for him long, the coldbeing the hand of death itself up there. The time went by; Trentanovewent stone-blind, and I had to put food and drink into his hands that hemight live. A week before the stupor came upon me I went on deck and sawJoam Barros leaning at the rail. I called to him, but he made no reply. I approached and looked at him, and found him frozen. Then happened whatI have told you. We were in the cabin, the mate seated at the table, waiting for me to lead and support him to the cook-room, for he was soweak he could scarce carry his weight. A sudden faintness seized me, andI sank down upon the bench opposite him, letting my head fall upon myarms. His cry startled me--I looked up--saw him as I have said; but thecabin then turned black, my head sank again, and I remember no more. "

He paused and then cried in French, "That is all! They are dead--JulesTassard lives! The devil is loyal to his own!" and with that he lay backand burst into laughter. 

"And this, " said I, "was in seventeen hundred and fifty-three?"

"Yes, " he answered; "and this is eighteen hundred andone--eight-and-forty years afterwards, hey?" and he laughed out again. "I've talked so much, " said he, "that, d'ye know, I think another napwill do me good. What coals have you found in the ship?"

I told him. 

"Good, " he cried; "we can keep ourselves warm for some time to come, anyhow. "

And so saying, he pulled a rug up to his nose and shut his eyes. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

I HEAR OF A GREAT TREASURE. 

I lighted a pipe and sat pondering his story a little while. There wasno doubt he had given me the exact truth so far as his relation of itwent. As it was certain then that the _Boca del Dragon_ (as she wascalled) had been fixed in the ice for hard upon fifty years, theconclusion I formed was that she had been blown by some hundreds ofleagues further south than the point to which the _Laughing Mary_ hadbeen driven; that this ice in which she was entangled was not thendrifting northwards, but was in the grasp of some polar current thattrended it south-easterly; that in due course it was carried to theAntarctic main of ice, where it lay compacted; after which, throughstress of weather or by the agency of a particular temperature, a greatmass of it broke away and started on that northward course which bergsof all magnitude take when they are ruptured from the frozen continent. 

This theory may be disputed, but it matters not. My business is torelate what befell me; if I do my share honestly the candid reader willnot, I believe, quarrel with me for not being able to explain everythingas I go along. 

The Frenchman snored, and I sat considering him. The impression he hadmade upon me was not agreeable. To be sure he had suffered heavily, andthere was something not displeasing in the spirit he discovered intelling the story--a spirit I am unable to communicate, as it owedeverything to French vivacity largely spiced with devilment, and tosudden turns and ejaculations beyond the capacity of my pen to imitate. But a professional fierceness ran through it too; it was as if he hadlicked his chops when he talked of dismissing the captured ship with herpeople confined below and her cabin on fire. He had been as good as deadfor nearly fifty years, yet he brought with him into life exactly thesame qualities he had carried with him in his exit. Hence I never nowhear that expression taken from the Latin, "_Of the dead speak nothingunless good_, " without despising it as an unworthy concession tosentiment; for I have not the least doubt in my mind that, spite ofdeathbed repentances and all the horrors which crowd upon theimagination of a bad man in his last moments--I say I have not the leastdoubt that of every hundred persons who die, ninety-nine of them, couldthey be raised from the dead, no matter how many years or even centuriesthey might have lain in their graves, would exhibit their originalnatures, and pursue exactly the same courses which made them loved orscorned or feared or neglected before, which brought them to the gallowsor which qualified them to die in peace with faces brightening to theopening heavens. If Nero did not again fire Rome he would be equal tocrimes as great, and desire nothing better than the opportunity forthem. Cæsar would again be the tyrant, and the sword of Brutus wouldonce more fulfil its mission. Richard III. Would emerge in hiswinding-sheet with the same humpbacked character in which he hadexpired, the Queen of Scots return warm to her gallantries, and theStuarts repeat those blunders and crimes which terminated in theheadsman or in banishment. 

But these are my thoughts of to-day; I was of another temper whilst Isat smoking and listening to the snoring of Monsieur Jules Tassard. Nowthat I had a companion should I be able to escape from this horridsituation? He had spoken of chests of silver--where was the treasure? inthe run? There might be booty enough in the hold to make a great man, afine gentleman of me ashore. It would be a noble ending to an amazingadventure to come off with as much money as would render me independentfor life, and enable me to turn my back for ever upon the hardestcalling to which the destiny of man can wed him. 

Of such were the fancies which hurried through my mind, coupled withvisitations of awe and wonder when I cast my eyes upon the sleepingFrenchman. After all it was ridiculous that I should feel mortifiedbecause he supposed me crazy in the matter of dates. How was itconceivable he should believe he had lain lifeless for eight-and-fortyyears? I knew a man who after a terrible adventure had slept three daysand nights without stirring; the assurances of the people about himfailed to persuade him that he had slumbered so long, and it was notuntil he walked abroad and met a hundred evidences as to the passage ofthe time during which he had slept that he allowed himself to becomeconvinced. 

I wished to see how the schooner lay and what change had befallen theice in the night, and went on deck. It was blowing a whole gale of windfrom the north-west. Inside the ship, with the hatches on, and protectedmoreover by the sides of the hollow in which she lay, it would have beenimpossible to guess at the weight of the gale, though all along I hadsupposed it to be storming pretty fiercely by the thunderous hummingnoise which resounded in the cabin. But I had no notion that so great awind raged till I gained the deck and heard the prodigious bellowing ofit above the rocks. The sky was one great cloud of slate, and there wasno flying darkness or yellow scud to give the least movement of life toit. The sea was swelling very furiously, and I could divine itstempestuous character by clouds of spray which sped like volumes ofsteam under the sullen dusky heavens high over the mastheads. Theschooner lay with a list of about fifteen degrees and her bows highcocked. I looked over the stern and saw that the ice had sunk there, andthat there were twenty great rents and yawning seams where I had beforenoticed but one. A vast block of ice had fallen on the starboard side, and lay so close on the quarter that I could have sprung on to it. Noother marked changes were observable, but there were a hundred sounds toassure me that neither the sea nor the gale was wholly wasting itsstrength upon this crystal territory, and that if I thought proper toclimb the slope and expose myself to the wind, I should behold a face ofice somewhat different from what I had before gazed upon. 

But the bitter cold held me in dread, and there was no need besides forme to take a survey. All that concerned me lay in the hollow in whichthe schooner was frozen; but so far as the slopes were concerned I couldsee nothing to render me uneasy. The declivities were gradual, and therewas little fear of even a violent convulsion throwing the ice upon us. The danger lay below, under the keel; if the ice split, then down woulddrop the ship and stave herself, or if she escaped that peril she mustbe so wedged as to render the least further pressure of the ice againsther sides destructive. 

I was about to go below again, when my eye was taken by the two figureslying upon the deck. No dead bodies ever looked more dead, but afterthe wondrous restoration of the Frenchman I could not view their formswithout fancying that they were but as he had been, and that if theywere carried to the furnace and treated with brandy and rubbing and thelike they might be brought to. Full of thoughts concerning them Istepped into the cabin, and, going to the cook-room, found Tassard stillheavily sleeping. The coal in the corner was low, and as it wanted anhour of dinner-time I took the lanthorn and a bucket and went into theforepeak, and after several journeys stocked up a good provision of coalin the corner. I made noise enough, but Tassard slept on. When this wasended I boiled some water to cleanse myself, and then set about gettingthe dinner ready. 

The going into the forepeak had put my mind upon the treasure, which, asI had gathered from the Frenchman's narrative, was somewhere hidden inthe schooner--in the run, as I doubted not; I mean in the hold, underthe lazarette, for you will recollect that, being weary andhalf-perished with the cold, I had turned my back on that dark partafter having looked into the powder-room. All the time I was fetchingthe coal and dressing the dinner my imagination was on fire with fanciesof the treasure in this ship. The Frenchman had told me that they hadbeen well enough pleased with their hauls in the South Sea to resolvethem upon heading round the Horn for their haunt, wherever it might be, in the Spanish main; and I had too good an understanding of thecharacter of pirates to believe that they would have quitted a richhunting-field before they had handsomely lined their pockets. What, then, was the treasure in the run, if indeed it were there? I recalled adozen stories of the doings of the buccaneers, not to speak of thefamous Acapulco ship taken by Anson a little before the year in whichthe _Boca del Dragon_ was fishing in those waters; and I feasted myfancy with all sorts of sparkling dreams of gold and silver and preciousstones, of the costly ecclesiastical furniture of New Spain, of whichmethought I found a hint in that silver crucifix in the cabin, of rings, sword-hilts, watches, buckles, snuff-boxes, and the like. Lord! thoughtI, that this island were of good honest mother earth instead of ice, that we might bury the pirate's booty if we could not save the ship, andmake a princely mine of its grave, ready for the mattock should wesurvive to fetch it!

I was mechanically stirring the saucepan full of broth I had prepared, lost in these golden thoughts, when the Frenchman suddenly sat up on hismattress. 

"Ha!" cried he, sniffing vigorously, "I smell something good--somethingI am ready for. There is no physic like sleep, " and with that hestretched out his arms with a great yawn, then rose very agilely, kicking the clothes and mattress on one side and bringing a bench closeto the furnace. "What time is it, sir?"

"Something after twelve by the captain's watch, " said I, pulling it outand looking at it. "But 'tis guesswork time. "

"The _captain's watch_?" cried he, with a short loud laugh. "You aremodest, Mr. ----"

"Paul Rodney, " said I, seeing he stopped for my name. 

"Yes, modest, Mr. Paul Rodney. That watch is yours, sir; and you mean itshall be yours. "

"Well, Mr. Tassard, " said I, colouring in spite of myself, though hecould not witness the change in such a light as that, "I felt this, thatif I left the watch in the captain's pocket it was bound to go to thebottom ultimately, and----"

"Bah!" he interrupted, with a violent flourish of the hand. "Let us savethe schooner, if possible; there will be more than one watch for yourpocket, more than one doubloon for your purse. Meanwhile, to dinner! Mystupor has converted me into an empty hogshead, and it will take me afortnight of hard eating to feel that I have broken my fast. "

With a blow of the chopper he struck off a lump of the frozen wine, andthen fell to, eating perhaps as a man might be expected to eat who hadnot had a meal for eight-and-forty years. 

"There are two of your companions on deck, " said I. 

He started. 

"Frozen, " I continued; "they'll be the bodies of Trentanove and JoamBarros?"

He nodded. 

"There is no reason why they should be deader than you were. It is truethat Barros has been on deck whilst you have been below; but after youpass a certain degree of cold fiercer rigours cannot signify. "

"What do you propose?" said he, looking at me oddly. 

"Why, that we should carry them to the fire and rub them, and bring themto if we can. "

"Why?"

I was staggered by his indifference, for I had believed he would haveshown himself very eager to restore his old companions and shipmates tolife. I was searching for an answer to his strange inquiry, "Why?" whenhe proceeded, --

"First of all, my friend Trentanove was stone-blind, and Barros nearlyblind. Unless you could return them their sight with their life theywould curse you for disturbing them. Better the blackness of death thanthe blackness of life. "

"There is the body of the captain, " said I. 

He grinned. 

"Let them sleep, " said he. "Do you know that they are cutthroats, whowould reward your kindness with the poniard that you might not telltales against them or claim a share of the treasure in this vessel? Ofall desperate villains I never met the like of Barros. He loved bloodeven better than money. He'd quench his thirst before an engagement withgunpowder mixed in brandy. I once saw him choke a man--tut! he is verywell--leave him to his repose. "

In the glow of the fire he looked uncommonly sardonic and wild, with hislong beard, bald head, flowing hair, shaggy brows, and little cunningeyes, which seemed in their smallness to share in his grin, and yet didnot; and though to be sure he was some one to talk to and to make planswith for our escape, yet I felt that if he were to fall into a stuporagain it would not be my hands that should chafe him into being. 

"You knew those men in life, " said I. "If the others are of the samepattern as the Portuguese, by all means let them lie frozen. "

"But, my friend, " said he, calling me _mon ami_, which I translate, "that's not it, either. Do you know the value of the booty in thisschooner?"

I answered, No; how was I to know it? I had met with nothing but wearingapparel, and some pieces of money, and a few watches in the forecastle. He knit his brows with a fierce suspicious gleam in his eyes. 

"But you have searched the vessel?" he cried. 

"I have searched, as you call it--that is, I have crawled through thehold as far as the powder-room. "

"And further aft?"

"No, not further aft. "

His countenance cleared. 

"You scared me!" said he, fetching a deep breath. "I was afraid thatsome one had been beforehand with us. But it is not conceivable. No! weshall look for it presently, and we shall find it. "

"Find what, Mr. Tassard?" said I. 

He held up the fingers of his right hand: "One, two, three, four, five--five chests of plate and money; one, two, three--three cases ofvirgin silver in ingots; one chest of gold ingots; one case ofjewellery. In all----" he paused to enter into a calculation, moving hislips briskly as he whispered to himself--"between ninety and one hundredthousand pounds of your English money. "

I stifled the amazement his words excited, and said coldly, "You musthave met with some rich ships. "

"We did well, " he answered. "My memory is good"--he counted afresh onhis fingers--"ten cases in all. Fortune is a strange wench, Mr. Rodney. Who would think of finding her lodged on an iceberg? Now bring thoseothers up there to life, and you make us five. What would follow, thinkyou? what but this?"

He raised his beard and stroked his throat with the sharp of his hand. Then, swallowing a great draught of brandy, he rose and stopped tolisten. 

"It is blowing hard, " said he; "the harder the better. I want to seethis island knocked into bergs. Every sea is as good as a pickaxe. Hark!there are those crackling noises I used to hear before I fell into astupor. Where do you sleep?"

I told him. 

"My berth is the third, " said he. "I wish to smoke, and will fetch mypipe. "

He took the lanthorn and went aft, acting as if he had left that berthan hour ago, and I understood in the face of this ready recurrence ofhis memory how impossible it would be ever to make him believe he hadbeen practically lifeless since the year 1753. When he returned he hadon a hairy cap, with large covers for the ears, and a big flap behindthat fell to below his collar, and was almost as long as his hair. Hewanted but a couple of muskets and an umbrella to closely resembleRobinson Crusoe, as he is made to figure in most of the cuts I haveseen. He produced a pipe of the Dutch pattern, with a bowl carved into adeath's head, and great enough to hold a cake of tobacco. The skullmight have been a child's for size, and though it was dyed with tobaccojuice and the top blackened, with the live coals which had been held toit, it was so finely carved that it looked very ghastly and terriblyreal in his hand as he sat puffing at it. 

He eyed me steadfastly whilst he smoked, as if critically taking stockof me, and presently said, "The devil hath an odd way of orderingmatters. What particular merit have _I_ that I should have been the onehit upon by you to thaw? Had you brought any one of the others to, hewould have advised you against reviving us, and so I should have passedout of my frosty sleep into death as quietly, ay, and as painlessly, asthat puff of smoke melts into clear air. "

"Then perhaps you do not think you are obliged by my awakening you tolife?" said I. 

"Yes, my friend, I am much obliged, " said he with vivacity. "Any foolcan die. To live is the true business of life. Mark what you do: youmake me know tobacco again, you enable me to eat and drink, and thesethings are pleasures which were denied me in that cabin there. Yourecall me to the enjoyment of my gains, nay, of more--of my own and thegains of our company. You make me, as you make yourself, a rich man; theworld opens before me anew, and very brilliantly--to be sure, I amobliged. "

"The world is certainly before you, as it is before me, " said I, "butthat's all; we have got to get there. "

He flourished his pipe, and 'twas like the flight of Death through thegloomy fire-tinctured air. 

"That must come. We are two. Yesterday you were one, and I canunderstand your despair. But these arms--stupor has not wasted so muchas the dark line of a finger-nail of muscle. You too are no girl. Courage! between us we shall manage. How long is it since you sailedfrom England?"

"We sailed last month a year from the Thames for Callao. "

"And what is the news?" said he, taking a pannikin of wine from the ovenand sipping it. "Last year! 'Tis twelve years since I was in Paris andthree years since we had news from Europe. "

News! thought I; to tell this man the news, as he calls it, would obligeme to travel over fifty years of history. 

"Why, Mr. Tassard, " said I, "there's plenty of things happening, youknow, for Europe's full of kings and queens, and two or more of them arenearly always at loggerheads; but sailors--merchantmen like myself--hearlittle of what goes on. We know the name of our own sovereign and whatwages sailors are getting; that's about it, sir. In fact, at this momentI could tell you more about Chili and Peru than England and France. "

"Is there war between our nations?" he asked. 

"Yes, " said I. 

"Ha!" he cried, "I doubt if this time you will come off so easily. Youhave good men in Hawke and Anson; but Jonquière and St. George, hey? andMaçon, Cellie, Letenduer!"

He shook his head knowingly, and an air of complacency, that would beindescribable but for the word French, overspread his face. I knew thename of Jonquière as an admiral who had fought us in 1748 orthereabouts; of the others I had never heard. But I held my peace, whichI suppose he put down to good manners, for he changed the subject byasking if I was married. I answered, No, and inquired if _he_ had awife. 

"A wife!" cried he; "what should a man of my calling do with a wife? No, no! we gather such flowers as we want off the high seas, and wear themtill the perfume palls. They prove stubborn though; our graces are notalways relished. Trentanove reckoned himself the most killing among us, and by St. Barnabas he proved so, for three ladies--passengers of beautyand distinction--slew themselves for his sake. Do you understand me?They preferred the knife to his addresses. _I_, " said he, tapping hisbreast and grinning, "was always fortunate. "

He looked a complete satyr as he thus spoke, with his hairy cap, greybeard, long nose, little cunning shining eyes, and broken fangs; and achill of disgust came upon me. But I had already seen enough of him tounderstand that he was a man of a very formidable character, and that hehad awakened after eight-and-forty years of insensibility as real apirate at heart as ever he had been, and that it therefore behoved me todeal very warily with him, and above all not to let him suspect mythoughts. Yet he seemed a person superior to the calling he had adopted. His English was good, and his articulation indicated a quality ofbreeding. Whilst he smoked his pipe out he told me a story of an actionbetween this schooner and a French Indiaman. I will not repeat it; itwas mere butchery, with features of diabolic cruelty; but what affectedme more violently than the horrors of the narrative was his cool andeasy recital of his own and the deeds of his companions. You saw that hehad no more conscience in him than the death's head he puffed at, andthat his idea was there was no true greatness to be met with out ofenormity. Well, thought I, as I stepped to the corner for some coal, ifI was afraid of this creature when he was dead, to what condition ofmind shall I be reduced by his being alive?

CHAPTER XVII. 

THE TREASURE. 

When his pipe was out he rose and made several strides about thecook-room, then took the lanthorn, and entering the cabin stood awhilesurveying the place. 

"So this would have been my coffin but for you, Mr. Rodney?" said he. "Iwas in good company, though, " pointing over his shoulder at the crucifixwith his thumb. "Lord, how the rogues prayed and cursed in this samecabin! In fine weather, and when all was well, the sharks in our wakehad more religion than they; but the instant they were in danger, downthey tumbled upon their quivering knees, and if heaven was twice as bigas it is, it could not have held saints enough for those varlets topetition. "

"You were nearly all Spaniards?"

"Ay; the worst class of men a ship could enter these seas with. But forour calling they are the fittest of all the nations in the world; bettereven than the Portuguese, and with truer trade instincts than thetrained mulatto--nimbler artists in roguery than ever a one of them. Idespise their superstition, but they are the better pirates for it. Theycarry it as a man might a feather bed; it enables them to fall soft. D'ye take me?" He gave one of his short loud laughs, and said, "I hopethis slope won't increase. The angle's stiff enough as it is. 'Twill belike living on the roof of a house. I have a mind to see how she lies. What d'ye say, Mr. Rodney? shall I venture into the open?"

"Why not?" said I. "You can move briskly. You have as much life as everyou had. "

"Let's go, then, " he exclaimed, and climbing the ladder he pushed openthe companion-door and stepped on to the deck. I followed with butlittle solicitude, as you may suppose, as to what might attend hisexposure. The blast of the gale though it was broken into downwardseddying dartings by the rocks, made him bawl out with the sting of it, and for some moments he could think of nothing but the cold, stampingthe deck, and beating his hands. 

"Ha!" cried he, grinning to the smart of his cheeks, "this is not thecook-room, eh? Great thunder, you will not have it that this ice hasbeen drifting north? Why, man, 'tis icier by twenty degrees than when wewere first locked up. "

"I hope not, " said I; "and I think not. Your blood doesn't course strongyet, and you are fresh from the furnace. Besides, it is blowing a bittercold gale. Look at that sky and listen to the thunder of the sea!"

The commotion was indeed terribly uproarious. The spume as before wasblowing in clouds of snow over the ice, and fled in very startlingflashes of whiteness under the livid drapery of the sky. The wind itselfsounded like the prolonged echo of a discharge of monster ordnance, andit screeched and whistled hideously where it struck the peaks and edgesof the cliffs and swept through the schooner's masts. The rending noisesof the ice in all directions were distinct and fearful. The Frenchmanlooked about him with consternation, and to my surprise crossedhimself. 

"May the blessed Virgin preserve us!" he said. "Do you say we havedrifted north? If this is not the very heart of the south pole you shallpersuade me we are on the equator. "

"It cannot storm too terribly for us, as you just now said, " I replied. "I want this island to go to pieces. "

As I said this a solid pillar of ice just beyond the brow of the hill onthe starboard side was dislodged or blown down; it fell with a mightycrash, and filled the air with crystal splinters. Tassard started backwith a faint cry of "Bon Dieu!"

"Judge for yourself how the ship lies, " said I; "this is freezing work. "

He went aft and looked over the stern, then walked to the larboard railand peered over the side. 

"Is there ice beyond that opening?" he asked, pointing over thetaffrail. 

"No, " I answered; "that goes to the sea. There is a low cliff beyond. Mark that cloud of white; it is the spray hurled athwart the mouth ofthis hollow. "

"Good, " he mumbled with his teeth chattering. "The change is marvellous. There was ice for a quarter of a mile where that slope ends. 'Tis toocold to converse here. "

"_There_ are your companions, " said I, pointing to the two bodies lyinga little distance before the mainmast. 

He marched up to them, and exclaimed, "Yes, this is Trentanove and thatis Barros. Both were blind, but they are blinder now. Would they thankyou to arouse them out of their comfortable sleep and force them to feelas I do, this cold to which they are now as insensible as I was? Byheaven, for my part, I can stand it no longer;" and with that he ranbriskly to the hatch. 

I followed him to the cook-room and he crept so close to the furnacethat I thought he had a mind to roast himself. No doubt, newly come tolife as he was, the cold hurt him more than me, and maybe the tide ofthose animal spirits which had in his former existence furnished himwith a brute courage had not yet flowed full to his mind; still Iquestioned even in his heydey if there had ever been much more than theswashbuckler in him, which opinion, however, could only increase theanxiety his companionship was like to cause me by obliging me tounderstand that I must prepare myself for treachery, and on no accountwhatever to suppose for a moment that he was capable of the least degreeof gratitude or was to be swerved from any design he might form byconsiderations of my claim upon him as his preserver. 

It is among the wonders of human nature that antagonisms should be foundto flourish under such conditions of hopelessness, misery, and anguishas make those who languish under them the most pitiful wretches underGod's eye. But so it has been, so it is, so it will ever be. Two men inan open boat at sea, their lips frothing with thirst, their eyes burningwith famine, shall fall upon each other and fight to the death. Two menon an island, two miserable castaways whose dismal end can only be amatter of a week or two, eye each other morosely, give each otherinjurious words, break away and sullenly live, each man by himself, onopposite sides of their desert prison. Beasts do not act thus, norbirds, nor reptiles--only man. What was in the Frenchman Tassard's mindI do not know; in mine was fear, dislike, profound distrust, a greatuneasiness, albeit we were alone, we were brothers in affliction anddistress, as completely sundered from the world to which we belonged asif we lay stranded in the icy moon, speaking in the same tongue andbelieving in the same God!

The heat comforted him presently, and he put a lump of wine into theoven to melt, and this comforted him also. 

"I can converse now, " said he. "Perhaps after all the danger lies morein the imagination than in the fact. But it is a hideous naked scene, and needs no such colouring as the roaring of wind, the rushing of seas, and the crashing falls of masses of ice to render it frightful. "

"You tell me, " said I, "that when you fell asleep"--I would sometimesexpress his frozen state thus--"there was a quarter of a mile of icebeyond the schooner's stern. "

"At least a quarter of a mile, " he answered. "Day after day it would bebuilt up till it came to a face of that extent. "

I thought to myself if it has taken forty-eight years of the wear andtear of storm and surge to extinguish a quarter of a mile, how long atime must elapse before this island splits up? But then I reflected thatduring the greater part of those years this seat of ice had been stuckvery low south where the cold was so extreme as to make it defydissolution; that since then, it was come away from the main andstealing north, so that what might have taken thirty years to accomplishin seventy degrees of south latitude, might be performed in a day on theparallel of sixty degrees in the summer season in these seas. 

Tassard continued speaking with the pannikin in his hand, and his eyesshut as if to get the picture of the schooner's position fair before hismind's vision: "There was a quarter of a mile of ice beyond the ship: Ihave it very plain in my sight: it was a great muddle of hillocks, forthe ice pressed thick and hard, and raised us and vomited up peaks androcks to the squeeze. Suppose I have been asleep a week?" Here he openedhis eyes and gazed at me. 

"Well?" said I. 

"I say, " he continued in the tone of one easily excited into passion, "aweek. It will not have been more. It is impossible. Never mind aboutyour eighteen hundred and one, " showing his fangs in a sarcastic grin;"a week is long enough, friend. Then this is what I mean to say: thatthe breaking away of a quarter of a mile of ice in a week is fine work, full of grand promise: the next wrench--which might come now as I speak, or to-morrow, or in a week--the next wrench may bring away the rock onwhich we are lodged, and the rest is a matter of patience--which we canafford, hey? for we are but two--there is plenty of meat and liquor andthe reward afterwards is a princely independence, Mr. Paul Rodney. "

I was struck with the notion of the bed of ice on which the schooner laygoing afloat, and said, "Are sea and wind to be helped, think you? Ifthe block on which we lie could be detached, it might beat a bit againstits parent stock, but would not unite again. The schooner's canvas mightbe made to help it along--though suppose it capsized!"

"We must consider, " said he; "there is no need to hurry. When the windfalls we will survey the ice. "

He warmed himself afresh, and after remaining silent with the air of oneturning many thoughts over in his mind, he suddenly cried, "D'ye know Ihave a mind to view the plate and money below. What say you?"

His little eyes seemed to sparkle with suspicion as he directed them atme. I was confident he suspected I had lied in saying I knew nothing ofthis treasure and that he wanted to see if I had meddled with thosechests. One of the penalties attached to a man being forced to keep thecompany of liars is, he himself is never believed by them. I answeredinstantly, "Certainly; I should like to see this wonderful booty. It isright that we should find out at once if it is there; for supposing itvanished we should be no better than madmen to sit talking here of thefine lives we shall live if ever we get home. "

He picked up the lanthorn and said, "I must go to your cabin: it was thecaptain's. The keys of the chests should be in one of his boxes. "

He marched off, and was so long gone that I was almost of belief he hadtumbled down in a fit. However, I had made up my mind to act a very warypart; and particularly never to let him think I distrusted him, and so Iwould not go to see what he was about. But what I did was this: thearms-room was next door: I lighted a candle, entered it, and swiftlyarmed myself with a sort of dagger, a kind of boarding-knife, a verymurderous little two-edged sword, the blade about seven inches long, andthe haft of brass. There were some fifty of these weapons, and I tookthe first that came to my hand and dropped it into the deep side pocketof my coat and returned to the cook-room. It was not that I was afraidof going unarmed with this man into the hold: there was no more dangerto me there than here: should he ever design to despatch me, one placewas the same as another, for the dead above could not testify: therewere no witnesses in this white and desolate kingdom. What resolved meto go armed was the fear that should the treasure be missing--and whowas to swear that the schooner had never been visited once ineight-and-forty years?--the Frenchman, who was persuaded his stupor hadnot lasted above a week, and who was doubtless satisfied the chests werein the hold down to the period when he lost recollection, would suspectme of foul play, and in the barbarous rage of a pirate fall upon andendeavour to kill me. Thus you will see that I had no very high opinionof the morals and character of the man I had given life to; and indeed, after I had armed myself and was seated again before the furnace, I feltextremely melancholy, and underwent the severest dejection of spiritsthat had yet visited me, fearing that my humanity had achieved nothingmore than to bring me into the society of a devil, who would prove afixed source of anxiety and misery to me. Was it conceivable that theothers should be worse than, or even as bad as, this creature? His hairshowed him hoary in vice. The Italian was a handsome man, and let himhave been as profligate as he would, as cruel and fierce a pirate asTassard had painted him, he would at all events have proved a sightlycompanion, and harmless as being blind, though to be sure for thatreason of no use to me. Yet though his blindness would have made him aburden, I had rather have thawed him into life than the Frenchman. 

The mere thought of feeling under an obligation to arm myself filled mewith such vindictive passions that I protest as I sat alone waiting forhim. I felt as if it were a duty I owed myself to return him to thecondition in which I found him, which was to be easily contrived by mybinding him in his sleep and dragging him to the deck and leaving him tostupefy alongside the body of the giant Joam Barros. "Peace!" cried I tomyself with a shiver; "villain that thou art to harbour such thoughts!Thou art a hundred-fold worse than the wretch against whom Satan issetting thee plotting to think thus vilely. " I gulped down this bolusof conscience with the help of a draught of wine, and it did me good. Lord, how dangerous is loneliness to a man! Depend upon it, your seekerafter solitude is only hunting for the road that leads to Bedlam. 

It might be that he was long because of having to seek for the keys; butmy own conviction was that he found the keys easily and stayed torummage the boxes for such jewels and articles of value as he mightthere find. I think he was gone near half an hour; he then returned tothe cook-house, saying briefly, "I have the keys, " and jingling them, and after warming himself, said, "Let us go. "

I was moving towards the forecastle. 

"Not that way for the run, " cried he. 

"Is there a hatch aft?" I asked. 

"Certainly; in the lazarette. "

"I wish I had known that, " said I; "I should have been spared a stiflingscramble over the casks and raffle forwards. "

He led the way, and coming to the trap hatch that conducted to thelazarette, he pulled it open and we descended. He held the lanthorn andthrew the light around him and said, "Ay, there are plenty of storeshere. We reckoned upon provisions for twelve months, and we were seventyof a crew. "

A strange figure he looked, just touched by the yellow candle-light, andstanding out upon the blackness like some vision of a distempered fancy, in his hair-cap and flaps, and with his long nose and beard and littleeyes shining as he rolled them here and there. We made our way over thecasks, bales, and the like, till we were right aft, and here there was asmall clear space of deck in which lay a hatch. This he lifted by itsring, and down through the aperture did he drop, I following. Thelazarette deck came so low that we had to squat when still or move uponour knees. At the foremost end of this division of the ship, so far asit was possible for my eyes to pierce the darkness--for it seems thatthis run went clear to the fore-hold bulkhead, that is to say, under thepowder-room, to where the fore-hold began--were stowed the spare sails, ropes for gear, and a great variety of furniture for the equipment of aship's yards and masts. But immediately under the hatch stood severalsmall chests and cases, painted black, stowed side by side so that theycould not shift. 

Tassard ran his eye over them, counting. "Right!" cried he; "hold thelanthorn, Mr. Rodney. "

I took the light from him, and, pulling the keys from his pocket, hefell to trying them at the lock of the first chest. One fitted; the boltshot with a hard click, like cocking a trigger, and he raised the lid. The chest was full of silver money. I picked up a couple of the coins, and, bringing them to the candle, perceived them to be Spanish pieces ofeight. The money was tarnished, yet it reflected a sort of dull metalliclight. The Frenchman grasped a handful and dropped them, as though, likea child, he loved to hear the chink the pieces made as they fell. 

"There's a brave pocketful there, " said I. 

"Tut!" cried he, scornfully. "'Tis a mere show of money; resolve it intogold and it becomes a lean bit of plunder. This we got from the_Conquistador_; it was all she had in this way; destined for somemonastery, I recollect; but disappointment is good for holy fathers; itmakes them more earnest in their devotions and keeps their paunches fromswelling. "

He let fall the lid of the chest, which locked itself, and then, after ashort trial of the keys, opened the one beside it. This was stored tothe top with what I took to be pigs of lead, and when he pulled out oneand bade me feel the weight of it I still thought it was lead, until hetold me it was virgin silver. 

"This was good booty!" cried he, taking the lanthorn and swinging itover the blocks of metal. "It would have been missed but for me. Our menhad found it in the hold of the buccaneer in a chest half as deep againas this, and thought it to be a case of marmalade, for there were twolayers of boxes of marmalade stowed on top. I routed them out and foundthose pretty bricks of ore snug beneath. I believe Mendoza made thevalue of the two chests--silver though it be--to be equal to sixthousand pounds of your money. "

The next chest he opened was filled with jewellery of various kinds, thefruits, I daresay, of a dozen pillages, for not only had this piraterobbed honest traders but a picaroon as well that had also plundered inher turn another of her own kidney; so that, as I say, this chest ofjewellery might represent the property of the passengers of as many asa dozen vessels. It was as if the contents of the shop of a jeweller whowas at once a goldsmith and a silversmith had been emptied into thischest; you could scarce name an ornament that was not here--watches, snuff-boxes, buckles, bracelets, pounce-boxes, vinaigrettes, earrings, crucifixes, stars for the hair, necklaces--but the list grows tiresome;in silver and gold, but chiefly in gold; all shot together and lyingscramble fashion, as if they had been potatoes. 

"This is a fine sight, " said Tassard, poring upon the sparkling masswith falcon nose and ravenous eyes. "Here is a dainty little watch. Fifty guineas would not purchase it in London or Paris. Where is thewhite breast upon which that cross there once glittered? Ha! the perfumehas faded, " bringing a vinaigrette to his hawk's bill; "the soul isgone; the body is the immortal part in this case. Now, my friend, talkto me of the patient drudgery of honourable life after this, " collectingthe chests, so to say, to my view with a sweep of the hand; "men willbreak their hearts for a hundred livres ashore and be hanged for theprice of a pinchbeck dial. When I was in London I saw five men carted tothe gallows; one had forged, one was a highwayman--I forget the others'businesses; but I recollect on inquiring the value of theirbaggings--that for which they were hanged--it did not amount to fourguineas a man. Look at this!" He swept his great hand again over thechests. "Is not here something worth going to the scaffold for?"

His bosom swelled, his eyes sparkled, and he made as if to strike aheroic posture, but this he could not contrive on his hams. 

I was thunder-struck, as you will suppose, by the sight of all thistreasure, and looked and stared like a fool, as if I was in a dream. Ihad never seen so many fine things before, and indulged in the mostextravagant fancies of their worth. Here and there in the glitteringhuddle my eye lighted on an object that was a hundred, perhaps twohundred, years old: a cup very choicely wrought, that may have been in afamily for several generations; a watch of a curious figure, and thelike. There might have been the pickings of the cabins, trunks, andportmanteaux of a hundred opulent men and women in this chest, and, sofar as I could judge from what lay atop, the people plunderedrepresented several nationalities. 

But there were other chests and cases to explore--ten in all: two ofthese were filled with silver money, a third with plate, a fourth withEnglish, French, Spanish, and Portugal coins in gold; but the one overwhich Tassard hung longest in a transport that held him dumb, was thesmallest of all, and this was packed with gold in bars. The stuff hadthe appearance of mouldy yellow soap, and having no sparkle nor varietydid not affect me as the jewellery had, though in value this chest camenear to being worth as much as all the others put together. The fixedtransported posture of the pirate, his little shining eyes intent uponthe bars, his form in the candle-light looking like a sketch of astrange, wildly-apparelled man done in phosphorus, coupled with the loomof the black chests, the sense of our desolation, the folly of ourenjoyment of the sight of the treasure in the face of our pitiable anddismal plight, the melancholy storming of the wind, moaning like therumble of thunder heard in a vault, and above all the feeling ofunreality inspired by the thought of my companion having lain foreight-and-forty years as good as dead, combined to render the scene sostartlingly impressive that it remains at this hour painted as vividlyupon the eye of memory as if I had come from it five minutes ago. 

"So!" cried the Frenchman suddenly, slamming the lid of the chest. "Tisall here! Now then to the business of considering how to come off withit. "

He thrust the keys in his pocket, and we returned to the cook-room. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

WE TALK OVER OUR SITUATION. 

That night, as afterwards, Tassard occupied the berth that he was usedto sleep in before he was frozen. Although I had not then the least fearthat he would attempt any malignant tricks with me whilst we remained inthis posture, the feeling that he lay in the berth next but one to minemade me uneasy in spite of my reasoning; and I was so nervous as tosilently shoot a great iron bolt, so that it would have been impossibleto enter without beating the door in. 

In sober truth, the sight of the treasure had put a sort of fever intomy imagination, of the heat and effects of which I was not completelysensible until I was alone in my cabin and swinging in the darkness. That the value of what I had seen came to ninety or a hundred thousandpounds of our money I could not doubt; and I will not deny that my fancywas greatly excited by thinking of it. But there was something else. Suppose we should have the happiness to escape with this treasure, thenI was perfectly certain the Frenchman would come between me and my shareof it. This apprehension threading my heated thoughts of the gold andsilver kept me restless during the greater part of the night, and I alsoheld my brains on the stretch with devices for saving ourselves and thetreasure; yet I could not satisfy my mind that anything was to be doneunless Nature herself assisted us in freeing the schooner. 

However, as it happened, the gale roared for a whole week, and the coldwas so frightful and the air so charged with spray and hail that we wereforced to lie close below with the hatches on for our lives. It was trueCape Horn weather, with seas as high as cliffs, and a westering tendencyin the wind that flung sheets of water through the ravine, which musthave quickly filled the hollow and built us up in ice to the height ofthe rails but for the strong slope down which the water rushed as fastas it was hurled. 

I never needed to peep an inch beyond the companion-way to view thesky; nor for the matter of that was there ever any occasion to leave thecabin to guess at the weather, for the perpetual thunder of it echoedstrong in every part of the vessel below, and the whole fabric wasconstantly shivering to the blows of the falls of water on her decks. 

At first the Frenchman and I would sit in the greatest fear imaginable, constantly expecting some mighty disaster, such as the rending of theice under our keel and our being swallowed up, or the coming together ofthe slopes in such a manner as to crush the ship, or the fall upon herof ice weighty enough to beat her flat; though perhaps this we leastfeared, for unless the storm changed the whole face of the cliffs, therewas no ice in our neighbourhood to serve us in that way. But as the timeslipped by and nothing worse happened than one sharp movement only inthe vessel, following the heels of a great noise like a cannondischarged just outside; though this movement scared us nearly out ofour senses, and held us in a manner dumbfounded for the rest of the day;I say, the time passing and nothing more terrifying than what I haverelated happening, we took heart and waited with some courage andpatience for the gale to break, never doubting that we should find awonderful change when we surveyed the scene from the heights. 

We lived well, sparing ourselves in nothing that the vessel contained, the abundance rendering stint idle; the Frenchman cooked, for he was abetter hand than I at that work, and provided several relishablesea-pies, cakes, and broths. As for liquor, there was enough on board todrown the pair of us twenty times over: wines of France, Spain, Portugal, very choice fine brandy, rum in plenty, such variety indeed asenabled us to brew a different kind of punch every day in the seven. Butwe were much more careful with the coal, and spared it to the utmost byburning the hammocks, bedding, and chests that lay in the forecastle;that is to say, we burnt these things by degrees, the stock beingexcessive, and by judiciously mixing them with coal and wood, they madegood warming fires, and as tinder lasted long too. 

We occupied one morning in thoroughly overhauling the forecastle forsuch articles of value as the sailors had dropped or forgotten in theirflight; but found much less than I had expected from the sight of themoney and other things on the deck. There was little in this way to befound in the cabins: I mean in the captain's cabin which I used, and theone next it that had been the mate's, for of course I did not search Mr. Tassard's berth. But though it was quite likely that the seamen hadplundered these cabins before they left the ship, I was also sure thatthe Frenchman had made a clean sweep of what they had overlooked when hepretended to search for the keys of the treasure-chests; and thissuspicion I seemed to find confirmed by the appearance of the captain'sboxes. One of these boxes contained books, papers, a telescope, somenautical instruments, and the like. I looked at the books and thepapers, in the hope of finding something to read; but they were writtenand printed in the Spanish tongue, and might have been Hebrew for allthe good they were to me. 

Our life was extraordinarily dismal and melancholy, how much so I amunable to express. It was just the same as living in a dungeon. Therewas no crevice for the daylight to shine through, and had there been wemust have closed it to keep the cold out. Nothing could be imagined moregloomy to the spirits than the perpetual night of the schooner'sinterior. The furnace, it is true, would, when it flamed heartily, throwa brightness about it; but often it sank into redness that did butempurple the gloom. We burned but one candle at a time, and its lightwas very small, so that our time was spent chiefly in a sullen twilight. Added to all this was my dislike of my companion. He would half fuddlehimself with liquor, and in that condition hiccup out twenty kinds ofvillainous yarns of piracy, murder, and bloodshed, boasting of thenumber of persons he had despatched, of his system of torturingprisoners to make them confess what they had concealed and where. Hewould drivel about his amours, of the style in which he lived whenashore, and the like; but whether reticence had grown into a habit toostrong even for drink to break down, he never once gave me so much as ahint touching his youth and early life. He was completely a Frenchman inhis vanity, and you would have thought him entirely odious anddetestable for this excessive quality in him alone. Methinks I see himnow, sitting before me, with one half of him reflecting the light of thefurnace, his little eyes twinkling with a cruel merriment of wine, telling me a lying story of the adoration of a noble, queenly-lookingcaptive for his person--some lovely Spanish court lady whom, withothers, they had taken out of a small frigate bound to old Spain. Totest her sincerity he offered to procure her liberty at the firstopportunity that offered; but she wept, raved, tore her hair. No;without her Jules life would be unendurable; her husband, her country, her king, nay, even the allurements and sparkle of the court, had growndisgusting; and so on, and so on. And I think a monkey would have burstinto laughter to see the bald-headed old satyr beat his bosom, flourishhis arms, ogle, languish, and simper, all with a cut-throat expression, too, soften his voice, and act in short as if he was not telling me asbig a lie as was ever related on shipboard. 

It naturally rendered me very melancholy to reflect that I had restoredthis old villain to life, and I protest it was a continuous shock tosuch religious feelings as I had managed to preserve to reflect thatwhat had been as good as nearly half a century of death had done nothingfor this elderly rogue's morals. It entered my head once to believe thatif I could succeed in getting him to believe he had lain frozen foreight-and-forty years, he might be seized with a fright (for he was awhite-livered creature), and in some directions mend, and so come to asense of the service I had done him, of which he appeared whollyinsensible, and qualify me to rid my mind of the fears which Ientertained concerning our association, should we manage to escape withthe treasure. I said to him bluntly--not _apropos_ (to use his ownlingo) of anything we were talking about, --

"'Tis odd, Mr. Tassard, you should doubt my assurance that this is theyear eighteen hundred and one. "

He stared, grinned, and said, "Do you think so?"

"Well, " said I, "perhaps it is not so odd after all; but you shouldsuffer me to have as good an idea of the passage of time as yourself. You cannot tell me how long your stupor lasted. "

"Two days if you like!" he interrupted vehemently. "Why more? Why longerthan a day? How do you know that I had sunk into the condition in whichyou found me longer than an hour or two when you landed? How do youknow, hey? How do you know?" and he snapped his fingers. 

"I know by the date you name and by the year that this is, " said Idefiantly. 

He uttered a coarse French expression and added, "You want to prove thatI have been insensible for forty-eight years. "

"It is the fact, " said I. 

He looked so wild and fierce that I drew myself erect ready for him ifhe should fall upon me. Then, slowly wagging his head whilst the angerin his face softened out, he said, "Who reigns in France now?"

I said, "There is no king; he was beheaded. "

"What was his name?" said he. 

"Louis the Sixteenth, " I answered. 

"Ha!" cried he, with an arch sneer; "Louis the Sixteenth, hey? Are yousure it wasn't Louis the Seventeenth?"

"He is dead too. "

"This is news, Mr. Rodney, " said he scornfully. 

"Whilst you have been here, " said I, "many mighty changes have happened. France has produced as great a general and as dangerous a villain as theworld ever beheld; his name is Buonaparte. "

He shrugged his shoulders with an air of mocking pity. 

"Who is your king?" he asked. 

"George the Third, " said I; "God bless him!"

"So--George and Louis--Louis and George. I see how it is. Stick to yourdates, sir. But, my friend, never set up as a schoolmaster. "

This sally seemed to delight him, and he burst into a loud laugh. 

"Eighteen hundred and one!" he cried. "A man I knew once lost tenthousand livres at a _coup_. What do you think happened? They settled inhim here;" he patted his belly: "he went about bragging to everybodythat he was made of money, and was nicknamed the walking bourse. One dayhe asked a friend to dine with him; when the bill was presented he feltin his pockets, and exclaimed, 'I left my purse at home. No matter;there is plenty here;' with which he seized a table-knife and rippedhimself open. Eighteen hundred and one, d'ye call it? _Soit. _ But letit be _your_ secret, my friend. The world will not love you for makingit fifty years older than it is. "

It was ridiculous to attempt to combat such obstinacy as this, and asthe subject produced nothing but excitement and irritation, I dropped itand meddled with it no more, leaving him to his conviction that I wascracked in this one particular. In fact, it was a matter of noconsequence at all; what came very much closer home was the business ofour deliverance, and over this we talked long and very earnestly, for heforgot to be mean and fierce and boastful, and I to dislike and fearhim, when we spoke of getting away with our treasure, and returning toour native home. 

For hour after hour would we go on plotting and planning and scheming, stepping about the cook-house in our earnestness, and entirely engrossedwith the topic. His contention was that if we were to save the money andplate, we must save the schooner. 

"Unless we build a vessel, " said I. 

"Out of what?"

"Out of this schooner. "

"Are you a carpenter?" said he. 

"No, " I replied. 

"Neither am I, " said he. "It's possible we might contrive such astructure as would enable us to save our lives; but we have not theskill to produce a vessel big enough to contain those chests as well asourselves, and the stores we should require to take. Besides, do youknow there is no labour more fatiguing than knocking such a craft asthis to pieces?"

This I very well believed, and it was truer of such a vessel as the_Boca del Dragon_ that was a perfect bed of timber, and, like the_Laughing Mary_, built as if she was to keep the seas for three hundredyears. 

"And supposing, " said he, "after infinite toil we succeeded in breakingup as much of her as we wanted, what appliances have we for reshapingthe curved timbers? and where are we to lay the keel? Labour as wemight, the cold would prove too much for us. No, Mr. Rodney, to save thetreasure, ay, and to save ourselves, we must save the ship. Let us putour minds to that. "

In this way we would reason, and I confess he talked very sensibly, taking very practical views, and indicating difficulties which my moreardent and imaginative nature might have been blind to till theyimmovably confronted me, and rendered days of labour useless. But howwas the ship to be saved? Was it possible to force Nature's hand; inother words, to anticipate our release by the dissolution of the ice? Wewere both agreed that this was the winter season in these seas, thoughhe instantly grew sulky if I mentioned the month, for he was as certainI was as mad in this, as in the year, and he would eye me verymalignantly if I persisted in calling it July. But, as I have said, wewere both agreed that the summer was to come, and though we could notswear that the ice was floating northwards, we had a right to believeso, in spite of the fierceness of the cold, this being the trick of allthese frozen estates when they fetch to the heights under which we lay;and we would ask each other whether we should let our hands and mindsrest idle and wait to see what the summer would do for us, or essay tolaunch the schooner. 

"If, " said he, "we wait for the ice to break up it may break us up too. "

"Yes, " said I, "but how are we to cut the vessel out of the ice in whichshe is seated to above the garboard streak? Waiting is odious andintolerable work; but my own conviction is, nothing is to be done tillthe sun comes this way, and the ice crumbles into bergs. The island isleagues long, and vanishes in the south; but it is wasting fast in thenorth, and when this gale is done I shall expect to see twenty bergswhere it was before all compact. "

As you may guess, our long conversations left us without plans, bitteras was our need, and vigorous as were our efforts to strike upon somelikely scheme. However, if they achieved no more, they served to beguilethe time, and what was better yet, they took my companion's mind off hisnauseous and revolting recollections, so that it was only now and againwhen he had drained a full bowl, and his little eyes danced in theirthick-shagged caves, that he regaled me with his memories of murder, rapine, plank-walking, hanging, treacheries of all kinds, and crueltiestoo barbarous for belief. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

WE TAKE A VIEW OF THE ICE. 

For seven days the gale raged with uncommon violence: it then broke, andthis brought us into the first week of August. The wind fell in thenight, and I was awakened by the silence, which you will not thinkstrange if you consider how used were my ears to the fierce seething andstrong bellowing of the blast. I lay listening, believing that it hadonly veered, and that it would come on again in gusts and guns; but thestillness continued, and there was no sound whatever, saving the noisesof the ice, which broke upon the air like slow answers from batteriesnear and distant, half whose cannons have been silenced. 

I slept again, and when I awoke it was half-past nine o'clock in themorning. The Frenchman was snoring lustily. I went on deck beforeentering the cook-house, and had like to have been blinded by theastonishing brilliance of the sunshine upon the ice and snow. All thewind was gone. The air was exquisitely frosty and sharp. But there was aheavy sound coming from the sea which gave me to expect the sight of astrong swell. The sky was a clear blue, and there was no cloud on asmuch of its face as showed betwixt the brows of the slopes. 

The schooner was a most wonderful picture of drooping icicles. A morebeautiful and radiant sight you could not figure. From every rope, fromthe yards forward, from the rails, from whatever water could run in astream, hung glorious ice-pendants of prismatic splendour. No snow hadfallen to frost the surfaces, and every pendant was as pure and polishedas cut-glass and reflected a hundred brilliant colours. The water hurledover and on the schooner had frozen upon the masts, rigging, and decks, and as this ice, like the pendants, was very sparklingly bright, it gaveback all the hues of the sunbeam, so that, stepping from the darkness ofthe cabin into this effulgent scene, you might easily have persuadedyourself that before you stood the fabric of a ship fashioned out of arainbow. 

My attention, however, was quickly withdrawn from this shining spectacleby the appearance of the starboard cliff over against our quarter. Thewhole shoulder of it had broken away and I could just catch a view ofthe horizon of the sea from the deck by stretching my figure. The sightof the ocean showed me that the breakage had been prodigious, for tohave come to that prospect before, I should have had to climb to theheight of the main lower masthead. No other marked or noteworthy changedid I detect from the deck; but on stepping to the larboard side to peerover I spied a split in the ice that reached from the very margin of theravine, I mean to that end of it where it terminated in a cliff, to pastthe bows of the schooner by at least four times her own length. 

I returned to the cook-room and went about the old business of lightingthe fire and preparing the breakfast--this job by an understandingbetween the Frenchman and me, falling to him who was first out ofbed--and in about twenty minutes Tassard arrived. 

"The wind is gone, " said he. 

"Yes, " I replied, "it is a bright still morning. I have been on deck. There has been a great fall of ice close to. "

"Does it block us?"

"No, on the contrary, it clears the way to the sea; the ocean is nowvisible from the deck. Not that it mends our case, " I added. "But thereis a great rent in the ice that puts a fancy into my head; I'll speak ofit later after a closer look. "

The breakfast was ready, and we fell to in a hurry, the Frenchmangobbling like a hog in his eagerness to make an end. When we werefinished he wrapped himself up in three or four coats and cloaks, warming the under ones before folding them about him, and completing hispreparations for the excursion by swallowing half a pint of raw brandy. I bade him arm himself with a short-headed spear to save his neck; andthus equipped we went on deck. 

He stood stock-still with his eyes shut on emerging through the hatch, crying out with a number of French oaths that he had been struck blind. This I did not believe, though I readily supposed that the glare madehis eyeballs smart so as to cause him a good deal of agony. Indeed, allalong I had been surprised that he should have found his sight soeasily after having sat in blindness for forty-eight years, and it wasnot wonderful that the amazing brilliance on deck, smiting his sight ona sudden, should have caused him to cry out as if he had lost the use ofhis eyes for ever. 

I waited patiently, and in about ten minutes he was able to look abouthim, and then it was not long before he could see without pain. He stooda minute gazing at the glories upon the rigging, and in that piercinglight I noticed the unwholesome colour of his face. His cap hid thescar, and nothing of his countenance was to be seen but the cheeks, eyes, and nose; he was much more wrinkled than I had supposed, andmethought the spirit of cruelty lay visible in every line. I had neverseen eyes so full of cunning and treachery--so expressive, I should say, of these qualities; yet they were no bigger than mere punctures. I wassensible of a momentary fear of the man--not, let me say, an emotion ofcowardice--but a sort of mixture of alarm and awe, such as a ghost mightinspire. This I put down to the searching light in which I watched himfor a moment or two, an irradiation subtle enough to give the sharpestform to expression, to exquisitely define every meaning that wasdistinguishable in his graveyard physiognomy. I left him to stare andjudge for himself of the posture in which the long hard gale had put theschooner and stepped over to the two bodies. They were shrouded in icefrom head to foot, as though they had each man been packed in a glasscase cunningly wrought to their shapes. Their faces were hid by thecrystal masks. Tassard joined me. 

"Small chance for your friends now, " said I, "even if you were agreeableto my proposal to attempt to revive them. "

"So!" cried he, touching the body of the mate with his foot; "and thisis the end of the irresistible Trentanove! for what conquests has Deathrobed him so bravely? See, the colours shine in him like fifty differentkinds of ribbands. Poor fellow! he could not curl his moustachios now, though the loveliest eyes in Europe were fixed in passionate admirationon him. He'll never slit another throat, nor hiccup Petrarch over agoblet nor remonstrate with me on my humanity. Shall we toss the bodiesover the side?"

"They are your friends, " said I; "do as you please. "

"But we must empty their pockets first. Business before sentiment, Mr. Rodney. "

He stirred the figure again with his foot. 

"Well, presently, " said he, "this armour will want the hatchet. Now, myfriend, to view the work of the gale. "

The increased heel of the ship brought the larboard fore-channel low, and we stepped without difficulty from it on to the ice. The rent orfissure that I have before spoken of went very deep; it was nearly twofeet wide in places, but, though the light poured brilliantly upon it, Icould see no bottom. 

"If only such another split as this would happen t'other side, " said theFrenchman, "I believe this block would go adrift. "

"Well, " said I, after musing a little whilst I ran my eye over thehollows, "I'll tell you what was in my mind just now. There is a greatquantity of gunpowder in the hold; ten or a dozen barrels. By droppinglarge parcels of it into the crevices on the right there, and firing itwith slow-matches--"

He interrupted me with a cry: "By St. Paul, you have it! What creviceshave you?"

We walked briskly round the vessel, and all about her beam and starboardquarter I found, in addition to the seams I had before noticed, manygreat cracks and fissures, caused no doubt by the fall of the shoulderof the slope. I pushed on further yet, going down the ravine, as I havecalled it, until I came to the edge; and here I looked down from aheight of some twelve or fourteen feet--so greatly had the ice sunk orbeen changed by the weather--upon the ocean. I called to Tassard. Heapproached warily. I believe he feared I might be tempted to give him afriendly shove over the edge. 

"Observe this hollow, " said I; "the split there goes down to the water, and you may take it that the block is wholly disconnected on that side. Now look at the face of the ice, " said I, pointing to the starboard orright-hand side; "that crack goes as far as the vessel's quarter, andthe weakness is carried on to past the bows by the other rents. Mr. Tassard, if we could burst this body of ice by an explosion from itsmoorings ahead of the bowsprit, where it is all too compact, this cradlewith the schooner in it will go free of the parent body. "

He answered promptly, "Yes; it is the one and only plan. That crack tostarboard is like telling us what to do. It is well you came here. Weshould not have seen it from the top. This valley runs steep. You mustexpect no more than the surface to be liberated, for the foot of thecliff will go deep. "

"I desire no more. "

"Will the ship stand such a launch, supposing we bring it about?" saidhe. 

I responded with one of his own shrugs, and said, "Nothing is certain. We have one of two courses to choose: to venture this launch, or staytill the ice breaks up, and take our chance of floating or of beingsmashed. "

"You are right, " he exclaimed. "Here is an opportunity. If we wait, bergs may gather about this point and build us in. As to this islanddissolving, we are yet to know which way 'tis heading. Suppose it shouldbe travelling south, hey!"

He struck the ice with his spear, and we toiled up the slippery rockswith difficulty to the ship. We walked past the bows to the distance ofthe vessel's length. Here were many deep holes and cracks, and as if wewere to be taught how these came about, even whilst we were viewing theman ear-splitting crash of noise happened within twenty fathoms of us, arock many tons in weight rolled over, and left a black gulf behind it. 

The Frenchman started, muttered, and crossed himself. "Holy Virgin!" hecried, rolling his eyes. "Let us return to the schooner. We shall beswallowed up here. "

I own I was not a little terrified myself by the sudden loud blast andthe thunder of the uprooted rock, and the sight of the huge black rent;but I meant to view the scene from the top, and to consider how best todispose of the powder in the cracks, and said, "There is nothing to bedone on board; skulking below will not deliver us or preserve thetreasure. Here are several fissures big enough to receive barrels ofgunpowder. See, Mr. Tassard, as they stand they cover the whole width ofthe hollow. "

And I proceeded to give him my ideas as to lowering, fixing the barrels, and the like. He nodded his head, and said, "Yes, very good; yes, itwill do, " and so on; but was too scared in his heart, I believe, to seemy full meaning. He was perpetually moving, as if he feared the icewould split under his feet, and his eyes travelled over the face of therocks with every manifestation of alarm in their expression. I wonderedhow so poor a creature should ever have had stomach enough to serve as apirate; no doubt his spirit had been enfeebled by his long sleep; butthen it is also true that the greatest bullies and most bloodthirstyrogues prove themselves despicable curs under conditions which make nodemand upon their temper or their lust for plunder. 

He would have returned to the ship, had I encouraged him, but on seeingme start to climb to the brow he followed. The prospect disappointed me. I had expected to witness a variety of surprising changes; but southwardthe scene was scarce altered. It was a wonderfully fair morning, the skyclear from sea-line to sea-line, and of a very soft blue, the ocean of alike hue, with a high swell running, that was a majestic undulation evenfrom the height at which I surveyed it. The sun stood over the ice inthe north-east, and the dazzle kept me weeping, so intolerable was theeffulgence. Half of the delicate architecture that had enriched theslopes and surfaces that way was swept down, and ice lay piled in placesto an elevation of many feet, where before it had been flat or hollow. However, there was no question but that the gale had played havoc withthe north extremity of the island: I counted no less than twenty bergsfloating off the main, and it was quite likely the sea was crowdedbeyond, though my sight could not travel so far. 

However, when I came to look close, and to recollect the features of theshore as they showed when I first landed, I found some vital changesnear at hand. Where my haven had been the ice had given way and left agap half a mile broad and a hundred feet deep. The fall on theschooner's starboard quarter was very heavy, and the ice was split inall directions; and in parts was so loose that a point of cliff hardupon the sea rocked with the swell. When Tassard came to a stand helooked about him north and south, shading his eyes with his hand, andthen swearing very savagely in French, he cried out in English, freelyemploying oaths as he spoke, --

"Why, here's as much ice as there was before I fell asleep! See yonder!"pointing to the south. "It dies out in the distance. If it does notjoin the pole there, may the devil rise before me as I speak. Thunderand fury! I had hoped to see it shrivelled to an ordinary berg!"

"What! in a week?" cried I, as if I believed his stupor had not lastedlonger. 

He returned no answer and gaped about him full of consternation andpassion. 

"And are we to wait for our deliverance till this continent breaks up?"he bawled. "The day of judgment will be a thing of the past by thattime. Travelling north! 'sdeath!" he roared, his mouth full of theexpletives of his day, French and English. "Who but a madman couldsuppose that this ice is not as fixed as the antarctic circle to whichit is moored? Why, six months ago it was no bigger than it is now!" Andhe sent a furious terrified gate into the white solitudes vanishing inazure faintness in the south-west. 

It was not a thing to reason upon. I was as much disappointed as he bythe trifling changes the gale had made, and my heart felt very heavy atthe sight of the great field disappearing in the south. The bergs in thenorth signified little. It is true they indicated demolition, butdemolition so slow as to be worthless to us. It was not to be questionedthat the island was proceeding north, but at what rate? Here, perhaps, might be a frozen crescent of forty or fifty leagues: and at what speed, appreciable enough to be of the least consequence to our calculations, should such a body travel?

I looked at the Frenchman. 

"This must decide us!" said I. "We must fix on one of two courses:endeavour to launch the ship by blowing up the ice, or turn to and rigup the best arrangement we can contrive and put to sea. "

"Yes, " he answered, scowling as he darted his enraged eyes over the ice. "Better set a slow match in the magazine and drink ourselves senseless, and so blow ourselves to hell, than linger here in the hope that thiscontinent will dissolve and release us. Where's Mendoza's body?"

I stared about me, and then pointing to the huge gap the ice had made, answered, "It was there. Where it is now I know not. "

He shrugged his shoulders, took another view of the ice and the ocean, and then cried impatiently, "Let us return! the powder-barrels must havethe first chance. " And he made for the schooner, savagely striking theice with his spear and growling curses to himself as he ploughed andclimbed and jumped his way along. 

CHAPTER XX. 

A MERRY EVENING. 

By the time we had reached the bottom of the hollow Tassard was blowinglike a bellows with the uncommon exertion; and swearing that he felt thecold penetrating his bones, and that he should be stupefied again if hedid not mind, he climbed into the ship and disappeared. I loved him solittle that secretly I very heartily wished that nature would make awaywith him: I mean that something it would be impossible in me to lay tomy conscience should befall him, as becoming comatose again, and solying like one dead. Assuredly in such a case it was not this hand thatwould have wasted a drop of brandy in returning an evil, white-livered, hectoring old rascal to a life that smelled foully with him and the likeof him. 

It was so still a day that the cold did not try me sorely: there wasvitality if not warmth in the light of the sun, and I was heated withclambering. So I stayed a full half-hour after my companion had vanishedexamining the ice about the schooner; which careful inspection repaid meto the extent of giving me to see that if by blasts of gunpowder I couldsucceed in rupturing the ice ahead of the schooner's bows there was avery good chance of the mass on which she lay going adrift. Yet I willnot deny that though I recognized this business of dislocation as ouronly chance--for I could see little or nothing to be done in the way ofbuilding a boat proper to swim and ply--I foreboded a dismal issue toour adventure, even should we succeed in separating this block from themain. In fine, what I feared was that the weight of the schooner wouldoverset the ice and drown her and us. 

I entered the ship and found Tassard roasting himself in the cook-house. 

"How melancholy is this gloom, " said I, "after the glorious whitesunshine!"

"Yes, " said he, "but it is warm. That is enough for me. Curse the cold, say I. It robs a man of all spirit. To grapple with this rigour oneshould have fed all one's life on blubber. I defy a man to be brave whenhe is half-frozen. I feel a match for any three men now; but on theheights a flea would have made me run. "

He pulled a pot from the bricks and filled his pannikin. 

"I have been surveying the ice, " said I, drawing to the furnace, "andhave very little doubt that if we wisely bestow the powder in greatquantities we shall succeed in dislocating the bed on which we arelying. "

"Good!" he cried. 

"But after?" said I. 

"What?"

"As much of this bed as may be dislodged will not be deep: icebergs, asof course you know, capsize in consequence of their becoming top-heavyby the wasting of the bulk that is submerged. This block will make but asmall berg should we liberate it, and I very much fear that the weightof the schooner will overset it the instant we are launched. "

"Body of Moses!" he cried angrily, knitting his brows, whereby hestretched the scar to half its usual width, "what's to be done, then?"

"She is a full ship, " said I, "and weighty. If the liberated ice be thinshe may sit up on it and keep it under. We have a right to hope in thatdirection, perhaps. Yet there is another consideration. She may leaklike a sieve!"

"Why?" he exclaimed. "She took the ice smoothly; she has not beenstrained; she was as tight as a bottle before she stranded; the coatingof ice will have cherished her; and a stout ship like this does notsuffer from six months of lying up!"

Six months, thought I!

"Well, it may be as you say; but if she leaks it will not be in our fourarms to keep her free. "

He exclaimed hotly, "Mr. Rodney, if we are to escape, we must venturesomething. To stay here means death in the end. I am persuaded that thisice is joined with some vast main body far south and that it does notmove. What is there, then, to wait for? There is promise in yourgunpowder proposal. If she capsizes then the devil will get his own. "And with a savage flourish of the pannikin he put it to his lips anddrained it. 

His sullen determination that we should stand or fall by my scheme wasnot very useful to me. I had looked for some shrewdness in him, somecapacity of originating and weighing ideas; but I found he could dolittle more than curse and swagger and ply his can, in which he foundmost of his anecdotes and recollections and not a little of his courage. I pulled out my watch, as I must call it, and observed that it was hardupon one o'clock. 

"'Tis lucky, " said he, eying the watch greedily and coming to it awayfrom the great subject of our deliverance as though the sight of thefine gold thing with its jewelled letter extinguished every otherthought in him, "that you removed that watch from Mendoza. But he willhave carried other good things to the bottom with him, I fear. "

"His flask and tobacco-box I took away, " said I. "He had nothing ofconsequence besides. "

"They must go into the common-chest, " cried he; "'tis share and share, you know. "

"Ay, " said I, "but what I found on Mendoza is mine by the highest rightunder heaven. If I had not taken the things, they would now be at thebottom of the sea. "

"What of that?" cried he savagely. "If we had not plundered the galleon, she might have been wrecked and taken all she had down with her. Yetshould such a consideration hinder a fair division as betweenus--between you who had nothing to do with the pillage and me who riskedmy life in it?"

I said, "Very well; be it as you say, " appearing to consent, for therewas something truly absurd in an altercation about a few guineas' worthof booty in the face of our melancholy and most perilous situation;though it not only enabled me to send a deeper glance into the mind ofthis man than I had yet been able to manage, but made me understand areason for the bloody and furious quarrels which have again and againarisen among persons standing on the brink of eternity, to whom a cup ofdrink or the sight of a ship had been more precious than the contents ofthe Bank of England. 

I set about getting the dinner. 

"Whilst you are at that work, " cried he, starting up, "I'll overhaul thepockets of the bodies on deck;" and, picking up a chopper, away hewent, and I heard him cursing in his native tongue as he stumbled to thecompanion-ladder through the darkness in the cabin. 

His rapacity was beyond credence. There was an immense treasure in thehold, yet he could not leave the pockets of the two poor wretches ondeck alone. I did not envy him his task. The frozen figures would bear adeal of hammering; and besides he had to work in the cold. Ah, thought Iwith a groan, I should have left him to make one of them!

I had finished my dinner by the time he arrived. He produced the watch Ihad taken from and returned to the mate's pocket when I had searched himfor a tinder-box; also a gold snuff-box set with diamonds, and a fewSpanish pieces in gold. On seeing these things I remembered that I hadfound some rings and money in his pockets whilst overhauling him formeans to obtain fire; but I held my peace. 

"Should not we have been imbeciles to sacrifice these beauties?" hecried, viewing the watch and snuff-box with a rapturous grin. 

"They were hard to come at, I expect?"

"No, " he answered, pocketing them and turning to a piece of beef in theoven. "I knocked away the ice and after a little wrenching got at thepockets. But poor Trentanove! d'ye know, his nose came away with themask of ice! He is no longer lovely to the sight!" He broke into aguffaw, then stuffed his mouth full and talked in the intervals ofchewing. "There was nothing worth taking on Barros. They are bothoverboard. "

"Overboard!" I cried. 

"Why, yes, " said he. "They are no good on deck. I stood them against therail, then tipped them over. "

This was an illustration of his strength I did not much relish. 

"I doubt if I could have lifted Barros, " said I. 

"Not you!" he exclaimed, running his eye over me. "A dead Dutchman wouldhave the weight of a fairy alongside Barros. "

"Well, Mr. Tassard, " said I, "since you are so strong, you will be veryuseful to our scheme. There is much to be done. "

"Give me a sketch of your plans, that I may understand you, " heexclaimed, continuing to eat very heartily. 

"First of all, " said I, "we shall have to break the powder-barrels outof the magazine and hoist them on deck. There are tackles, I suppose?"

"You should be able to find what you want among the boatswain's storesin the run, " he replied. 

"There are some splits wide enough to receive a whole barrel of powder, "said I. "I counted four such yawns all happily lying in a line athwartthe ice past the bows. I propose to sink these barrels twenty feet deep, where they must hang from a piece of spar across the aperture. "

He nodded. 

"Have you any slow-matches aboard?"

"Plenty among the gunner's stores, " he replied. 

"There are but you and me, " said I; "these operations will take time. Wemust mind not to be blown up by one barrel whilst we are suspendinganother. We shall have to lower the barrels with their matches on fireand they must be timed to burn an hour. "

"Ay, certainly, at least an hour, " he exclaimed. "Two hours would bebetter. "

"Well, that must depend upon the number of parcels of matches we meetwith. There will be a good many mines to spring, and one must notexplode before another. 'Tis the united force of the several blastswhich we must reckon on. The contents of at least four more barrels ofpowder we must distribute amongst the other chinks and splits in suchparcels as they will be able to receive. "

"And then?"

"And then, " said I, "we must await the explosion and trust to the mercyof Heaven to help us. "

He made a hideous face, as if this was a sort of talk to nauseate him, and said, "Do you propose that we should remain on board or watch theeffects from a distance?"

"Why, remain on board of course, " I answered. "Suppose the minesliberated the ice on which the schooner lies and it floated away, whatshould we, watching at a distance, do?"

"True, " cried he, "but it is cursed perilous. The explosion might blowthe ship up. "

"No, it will not do that. We shall be bad engineers if we bring such athing about. The danger will be--providing the schooner is released--inher capsizing, as I have before pointed out. "

"Enough!" cried he, charging his pannikin for the third time. "We mustchance her capsizing. "

"If I had a crew at my back, " said I, "I would carry an anchor and cableto the shoulder of the cliff at the end of the slope to hold the ship ifshe swam. I would also put a quantity of provisions on the ice alongwith materials for making us shelter and the whole of the stock of coal, so that we could go on supporting life here if the schooner capsized. "

"Then, " said he, "you would remain ashore during the explosion?"

"Most certainly. But as all these preparations would mean a degree oflabour impracticable by us two men, I am for the bold venture--prepareand fire the mines, return to the ship, and leave the rest toProvidence. "

He made another ugly face and indulged himself in a piece of profanitythat was inexpressibly disgusting and mean in the mouth of a man who wasused to cross himself when alarmed and swear by the saints. But perhapshe knew, even better than I, how little he had to expect fromProvidence. He filled his pipe, exclaiming that when he had smoked itout we should fall to work. 

Now that I had settled a plan I was eager to put it into practice--hotand wild indeed with the impatience and hope of the castaway animatedwith the dream of recovering his liberty and preserving his life; and Iwas the more anxious to set about the business at once, on account ofthe weather being fair and still, for if it came on to blow a stormywind again we should be forced as before under hatches. But I had towait for the Frenchman to empty his pipe. He was so complete asensualist that I believe nothing short of terror could have forced himto shorten the period of a pleasure by a second of time. He went onpuffing so deliberately, with such leisurely enjoyment of the flavour ofthe smoke, that I expected to see him fall asleep; and my patiencebecoming exhausted I jumped up; but by this time his bowl held nothingbut black ashes. 

"Now, " cried he, "to work. "

And he rose with a prodigious yawn and seized the lanthorn. Our firstbusiness was to hunt among the boatswain's stores in the run for tacklesto hoist the powder-barrels up with. There was a good collection, asmight have been expected in a pirate whose commerce lay in slinginggoods from other ships' holds into her own; but the ropes were frozen ashard as iron, to remedy which we carried an armful to the cook-house, and left the tackles to lie and soften. We also conveyed to thecook-house a quantity of ratline stuff--a thin rope used for making ofthe steps in the shroud ladders; this being a line that would exactlyserve to suspend the smaller parcels of powder in the splits. Beforetouching the powder-barrels we put a lighted candle into the bull's eyelamp over the door and removed the lanthorn to a safe distance. Tassardwas perfectly well acquainted with the contents of this storeroom, andon my asking for the matches put his hand on one of several bags ofthem. They varied in length, some being six inches and some making a bigcoil. There was nothing for it but to sample and test them, and this Itold Tassard could be done that evening. The main hatch was just forwardof the gun-room bulkhead; we seized a handspike apiece and went to workto prize the cover open. It was desperate tough labour; as bad as tryingto open an oyster with a soft blade. The Frenchman broke out into manystrange old-fashioned oaths in his own tongue, imagining the hatch to befrozen; but though I don't doubt the frost had something to do with it, its obstinacy was mainly owing to time, that had soldered it, so tospeak, with the stubbornness that eight-and-forty years will communicateto a fixture which ice has cherished and kept sound. 

We got the hatch open at last--be pleased to know that I am speaking ofthe hatch in the lower deck, for there was another immediately over iton the upper or main deck--and returning to the powder-room rolled thebarrels forward ready for slinging and hoisting away when we should haverigged a tackle aloft. We had not done much, but what we had done hadeaten far into the afternoon. 

"I am tired and hungry and thirsty, " said the Frenchman. "Let us knockoff. We have made good progress. No use opening the main-deck hatchto-night: the vessel is cold enough even when hermetically corked. "

"Very well, " said I, bringing my watch to the lanthorn and observingthe time to be sundown: so, carefully extinguishing the candle in thebull's-eye lamp, we took each of us a bag of matches and went to thecook-room. 

There was neither tea nor coffee in the ship. I so pined for thesesoothing drinks that I would have given all the wine in the vessel for afew pounds of either one of them. A senseless, ungracious yearning, indeed, in the face of the plenty that was aboard! but it was theplenty, perhaps, that provoked it. There was chocolate, which theFrenchman frothed and drank with hearty enjoyment; he also devouredhandfuls of _succades_, which he would wash down with wine. These thingsmade me sick, and for drink I was forced upon the spirits and wine, thelatter of which was so generous that it promised to combine with theenforced laziness of my life under hatches to make me fat; so that I amof opinion had we waited for the ice to release us, I should have becomeso corpulent as to prove a burden to myself. 

I mention this here that you may find an excuse in it for the only actof folly in the way of drinking that I can lay to my account whilst Iwas in this pirate; for I must tell you that, on returning to thefurnace, we, to refresh us after our labour, made a bowl of punch, ofwhich I drank so plentifully that I began to feel myself very merry. Iforgot all about the matches and my resolution to test them that night. The Frenchman, enjoying my condition, continued to pledge me till hislittle eyes danced in his head. Luckily for me, being at bottom of avery jolly disposition, drink never served me worse than to developthat quality in me. No man could ever say that I was quarrelsome in mycups. My progress was marked by stupid smiles, terminating in unmeaninglaughter. The Frenchman sang a ballad about love and Picardy, and thelike, and I gave him "Hearts of Oak, " the sentiments of which song kepthim shrugging his shoulders and drunkenly looking contempt. 

We continued singing alternately for some time, until he fell to settingup his throat when I was at work, and this confused and stopped me. Hethen favoured me with what he called the Pirate's Dance, a very wild, grotesque movement, with no elegance whatever to be hurt by his being inliquor; and I think I see him now, whipping off his coat, and sprawlingand flapping about in high boots and a red waistcoat, flourishing hisarms, snapping his fingers, and now and again bursting into a stave tokeep step to. When he was done, I took the floor with the hornpipe, whistling the air, and double-shuffling, toe-and-heeling, and quiveringfrom one leg to another very briskly. He lay back against the bulkheadgrasping a can half full of punch, roaring loudly at my antics; and whenI sank down, breathless, would have had me go on, hiccuping that thoughhe had known scores of English sailors, he had never seen that dancebetter performed. 

By this time I was extremely excited and extraordinarily merry, andlosing hold of my judgment, began to indulge in sundry pleasantriesconcerning his nation and countrymen, asking with many explosions oflaughter, how it was that they continued at the trouble of buildingships for us to use against them, and if he did not think the "flower delouse" a neater symbol for people who put snuff into their soup andrestricted their ablutions to their faces than the tricolour, being toomuddled to consider that he was ignorant of that flag; and in short Iwas so offensive, in spite of my ridiculous merriment, that his savagenature broke out. He assailed the English with every injurious term hisdrunken condition suffered him to recollect; and starting up with hislittle eyes wildly rolling, he clapped his hand to his side, as iffeeling for a sword, and calling me by a very ugly French word, bade mecome on, and he would show me the difference between a Frenchman and abeast of an Englishman. 

I laughed at him with all my might, which so enraged him that, swayingto right and left, he advanced as if to fall upon me. I started to myfeet and tumbled over the bench I had jumped from, and lay sprawling;and the bench oversetting close to him, he kicked against it and felltoo, fetching the deck a very hard blow. He groaned heavily and mutteredthat he was killed. I tried to rise, but my legs gave way, and then thefumes of the punch overpowered me, for I recollect no more. 

When I awoke it was pitch dark. My hands, legs, and feet seemed formedof ice, my head of burning brass. I thought I was in my cot, and feltwith my hands till I touched Tassard's cold bald head, which soterrified me that I uttered a loud cry and sprang erect. Thenrecollection returned, and I heartily cursed myself for my folly andwickedness. Good God! thought I, that I should be so mad as to drown mysenses when never was any wretch in such need of all his reason as I!

The boatswain's tinder-box was in my pocket; I groped, found a candle, and lighted it. It was twenty minutes after three in the morning. Tassard lay on his back, snoring hideously, his legs overhanging thecapsized bench. I pulled and hauled at him, but he was too drunk toawake, and that he might not freeze to death I fetched a pile of clothesout of his cabin and covered him up, and put his head on a coat. 

My head ached horribly, but not worse than my heart. When I consideredhow our orgy might have ended in bloodshed and murder, how I hadinsulted God's providence by drinking and laughing and roaring out songsand dancing at a time when I most needed His protection, with Deathstanding close beside me, as I may say, I could have beaten my headagainst the deck in the anguish of my contrition and shame. My passionof sorrow was so extravagant, indeed, that I remember looking at theFrenchman as if he was the devil incarnate, who had put himself in myway to thaw and recover, that he might tempt me on to the loss of mysoul. Fortunately these fancies did not last. I was parched with thirst, but the water was ice, and there was no fire to melt it with; so Ibroke off some chips and sucked them, and held a lump to my forehead. Iwent to my cabin and got into my hammock, but my head was so hot, andached so furiously, and I was so vexed with myself besides, that I couldnot sleep. The schooner was deathly still; there was not apparently thefaintest murmur of air to awaken an echo in her; nothing spoke but thenear and distant cracking of the ice. It was miserable work lying in thecabin sleepless and reproaching myself, and as my burning head robbedthe cold of its formidableness, I resolved to go on deck and take abrisk turn or two. 

The night was wonderfully fine; the velvet dusk so crowded with starsthat in parts it resembled great spaces of cloth of silver hovering. Iturned my eyes northwards to the stars low down there and thought ofEngland and the home where I was brought up until the tears gathered, and with them went something of the dreadful burning aching out of myhead. Those distant, silent, shining bodies amazingly intensified thesense of my loneliness and remoteness, and yonder Southern Cross and theluminous dust of the Magellanic clouds seemed not farther off than mynative country. It is not in language to express the savage nakedbeauty, the wild mystery of the white still scene of ice, shining backto the stars with a light that owed nothing to their glory; nor conveyhow the whole was heightened to every sense by the element of fear, putinto the picture by the sounds of the splitting ice, and the softenedregular roaring of the breakers along the coast. 

I started with fresh shame and horror when I contrasted this ghastlycalmness of pale ice and the brightness of the holy stars looking downupon it, with our swinish revelry in the cabin, and I thought withloathing of the drunken ribaldry of the pirate and my own tipsy songspiercing the ear of the mighty spirit of this solitude. The exerciseimproved my spirits; I stepped the length of the little raised deckbriskly, my thoughts very busy. On a sudden the ice split on thestarboard hand with a noise louder than the explosion of a twenty-fourpounder. The schooner swayed to a level keel with so sharp a rise that Ilost my balance and staggered. I recovered myself, trembling and greatlyagitated by the noise and the movement coming together, without theleast hint having been given me, and grasping a backstay, waited, notknowing what was to happen next. Unless it be the heave of anearthquake, I can imagine no motion capable of giving one such aswooning, nauseating, terrifying sensation as the rending of ice under afixed ship. In a few moments there were several sharp cracks, all on thestarboard side, like a snapping of musketry, and I felt the schoonervery faintly heave, but this might have been a deception of the senses, for though I set a star against the masthead and watched it, there wasno movement. I looked over the side and observed that the split I hadnoticed on the face of the cliff had by this new rupture been extendedtransversely right across the schooner's starboard bow, the thitherside being several feet higher than on this. It was plain that the bedon which the vessel rested had dropped so as to bring her upright, and Iwas convinced by this circumstance alone, that if I used good judgmentin disposing of the powder the weight of the mass would complete its owndislocation. 

I stepped a little way forward to obtain a clearer sight of the splitsabout the schooner, and on putting my head over, I was inexpressiblydismayed and confounded by the apparition of a man with his armsstretched out before him, his face upturned, and his posture that ofstarting back as though terrified at beholding me. I had met withseveral frights whilst I had been on this island, but none worse thanthis, none that so completely paralyzed me as to very nearly deprive meof the power of breathing. I stared at him, and he seemed to stare atme, and I know not which of the two was the more motionless. Thewhiteness made a light of its own, and he was perfectly plain. I blinkedand puffed, conceiving it might be some illusion of the wine I haddrunk, and finding him still there, and acting as though he warded meoff in terror, as if my showing myself unawares had led him to think methe devil--I say finding him perfectly real, I was seized with an agonyof fear, and should have rushed to my cabin had my legs been equal tothe task of transporting me there. _Then_, thought I, idiot that youare, what think you, you fool, is it but the body of Trentanove? Sureenough it was, and putting my head a little farther over the rail, I sawthe figure of the Portuguese Barros lying close under the bends. Nodoubt it was the movement of the ice that had shot the Italian into thelifelike posture, it being incredible he should have fallen so on beingtumbled overboard by the Frenchman. But there he was, resting against alump of ice, looking as living in his frozen posture as ever he hadshowed in the cabin. 

The shock did my head good; I went below and got into my cot, and aftertossing for half an hour or so fell asleep. I awoke and went to thecook-house, where I found Tassard preparing the breakfast, and a greatfire burning. I hardly knew what reception he would give me, and wastherefore not a little agreeably surprised by his thanking me forcovering him up. 

"You have a stronger head than mine, " said he. "The punch used you well. You made me laugh, though. You was very diverting. "

"Ay, much too diverting to please myself, " said I; and I sounded himcautiously to remark what his memory carried of my insults, but foundthat he recollected nothing more than that I danced with vigour, andsang well. 

I said nothing about my contrition, my going on deck, and the like, contenting myself with asking if he had heard the explosion in thenight. 

"No, " cried he, staring and looking eagerly. 

"Well, then, " said I, "there has happened a mighty crack in the ice, andI do soberly believe that with the blessing of God we shall be able byblasts of powder to free the block on which the schooner rests. "

"Good!" cried he; "come, let us hurry with this meal. How is theweather?"

"Quiet, I believe. I have not been on deck since the explosion arousedme early this morning. "

Whilst we ate he said, "Suppose we get the schooner afloat, what do youpropose?"

"Why, " I answered, "if she prove tight and seaworthy, what but carry herhome?"

"What, you and I alone?"

"No, " said I, "certainly not; we must make shift to sail her to thenearest port, and ship a crew. "

He looked at me attentively, and said, "What do you mean by home?"

"England, " said I. 

He shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed in French, "'Tis natural. " Thenproceeding in English, "Pray, " said he, showing his fangs, "do not youknow that the _Boca del Dragon_ is a pirate? Do you want to be hangedthat you propose to carry her to a port to ship men?"

"I have no fear of that, " said I; "after all these years she'll be asclean forgotten as if she had never had existence. "

"Look ye here, Mr. Rodney, " cried he in a passion, "let's have no moreof this snivelling nonsense about _years_. You may be as mad as youplease on that point, but it shan't hang _me_. It needs more than a fewmonths to make men forget a craft that has carried on such traffic asour hold represents. You'll not find me venturing myself nor theschooner into any of your ports for men. No, no, my friend. I am in nostupor now, you know; and I've slept the punch off also, d'ye see. What, betray our treasure and be hanged for our generosity?"

He made me an ironical bow, grinning with wrath. 

"Let's get the schooner afloat first, " said I. 

"Ay, that's all very well, " he cried; "but better stop here than danglein chains. No, my friend; our plan must be a very different one fromyour proposal. I suppose you want your share of the booty?" said he, snapping his fingers. 

"I deserve it, " said I, smiling, that I might soften his passion. 

"And yet you would convey the most noted pirate of the age, with plunderin her to the value of thousands of doubloons, to a port in which weshould doubtless find ships of war, a garrison, magistrates, governors, prisons, and the whole of the machinery it is our business to give ourstern to! _Ma foi_, Mr. Rodney! sure you are out in something more thanyour reckoning of time?"

"What do you propose?" said I. 

"Ha!" he exclaimed, whilst his little eyes twinkled with cunning, "nowyou speak sensibly. What do I propose? This, my friend. We must navigatethe schooner to an island and bury the treasure; then head for theshipping highways, and obtain help from any friendly merchantmen we mayfall in with. _Home_ with us means the Tortugas. There we shall find thecompany we need to recover for us what we shall have hidden. We shallcome by our own then. But to sail with this treasure on board--without acrew to defend the vessel--by this hand! the first cruiser that sightedus would make a clean sweep, and then, ho, for the hangman, Mr. Rodney!"

How much I relished this scheme you will imagine; but to reason with himwould have been mere madness. I knitted my brows and seemed to reflect, and then said, "Well, there is a great deal of plain, good sense in whatyou say. I certainly see the wisdom of your advice in recommending thatwe should bury the treasure. Nor must we leave anything on board toconvict the ship of her true character. "

His greedy eyes sparkled with self-complacency. He tapped his foreheadand cried, "Trust to this. There is mind behind this surface. Your planfor releasing the schooner is great; mine for preserving the treasure isgreat too. You are the sailor, I the strategist; by combining ourgenius, we shall oppose an invulnerable front to adversity, and must endour days as Princes. Your hand, Paul!"

I laughed and gave him my hand, which he squeezed with many contortionsof face and figure; but though I laughed I don't know that I ever somuch disliked and distrusted and feared the old leering rogue as at thatmoment. 

"Come!" cried I, jumping up, "let's get about our work. " And with that Ipulled open a bag of matches, and fell to testing them. They burnt well. The fire ate into them as smoothly as if they had been prepared the daybefore. They were all of one thickness. I cut them to equal lengths, andfired them and waited watch in hand; one was burnt out two minutesbefore the other, and each length took about ten minutes to consume. This was good enough to base my calculations upon. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

WE EXPLODE THE MINES. 

I don't design to weary you with a close account of our proceedings. Howwe opened the main-deck hatch, rigged up tackles, clapping purchases onto the falls, as the capstan was hard frozen and immovable; how wehoisted the powder-barrels on deck and then, by tackles on the foreyard, lowered them over the side; how we filled a number of bags which wefound in the forecastle with powder; how we measured the cracks in theice and sawed a couple of spare studding-sail booms into lengths toserve as beams whereby to poise the barrels and bags; would make butsailor's talk, half of which would be unintelligible and the restwearisome. 

The Frenchman worked hard, and we snatched only half an hour for ourdinner. The split that had happened in the ice during the night showedby daylight as a gulf betwixt eight and ten feet wide at the seawardsend, thinning to a width of three feet, never less, to where it ended, ahead of the ship, in a hundred cracks in the ice that showed as if athunderbolt had fallen just there. I looked into this rent, but it wasas black as a well past a certain depth, and there was no gleam ofwater. When we went over the side to roll our first barrel of powder tothe spot where we meant to lower it, the Frenchman marched up to thefigure of Trentanove, and with no more reverence than a boy would showin throwing a stone at a jackass, tumbled him into the chasm. He thenstepped up to the body of the Portuguese boatswain, dragged him to thesame fissure, and rolled him into it. 

"There!" cried he; "now they are properly buried. "

And with this he went coolly on with his work. 

I said nothing, but was secretly heartily disgusted with this brutaldisposal of his miserable shipmates' remains. However, it was his doing, not mine; and I confess the removal of those silent witnesses was a verygreat relief to me, albeit when I considered how Tassard had beenawakened, and how both the mate and the boatswain might have beenbrought to by treatment, I felt as though, after a manner, the Frenchmanhad committed a murder by burying them so. 

It blew a small breeze all day from the south-west, the weather keepingfine. It was ten o'clock in the morning when we started on our labour, and the sun had been sunk a few minutes by the time we had rigged thelast whip for the lowering and poising of the powder. This left usnothing to do in the morning but light the matches, lower the powderinto position, and then withdraw to the schooner and await the issue. Our arrangements comprised, first, four barrels of powder in deep yawnsahead of the vessel, directly athwart the line of her head; second, twobarrels, a wide space between them, in the great chasm on the starboardside; third, about fifty very heavy charges in bags and the like for thefurther rupturing of many splits and crevices on the larboard bow of theship, where the ice was most compact. What should follow the mightyblast no mortal being could have foretold. I had no fear of the chargesinjuring the vessel--that is to say, I did not fear that the actualexplosion would damage her: but as the effect of the bursting of such amass of powder as we designed to explode upon so brittle a substance asice was not calculable, it was quite likely that the vast discharge, instead of loosening and freeing the bed of ice, might rend it intoblocks, and leave the schooner still stranded and lying in some wildposture amid the ruins. 

But the powder was our only trumps; we had but to play it and leave therest to fortune. 

We got our supper and sat smoking and discussing our situation andchances. Tassard was tired, and this and our contemplation of theprobabilities of the morrow sobered his mind, and he talked with acertain gravity. He drank sparely and forbore the hideous recollectionsor inventions he was used to bestow on me, and indeed could find nothingto talk about but the explosion and what it was to do for us. I was veryglad he did not again refer to his project to bury the treasure andcarry the schooner to the Tortugas. The subject fired his blood, and itwas such nonsense that the mere naming of it was nauseous to me. Eight-and-forty years had passed since his ship fell in with this ice, and not tenfold the treasure in the hold might have purchased for himthe sight of so much as a single bone of the youngest of thoseassociates whom he idly dreamt of seeking and shipping and sailing incommand of. Yet, imbecile as was his scheme, having regard to thehalf-century that had elapsed, I clearly witnessed the menace to me thatit implied. His views were to be read as plainly as if he had deliveredthem. First and foremost he meant that I should help him to sail theschooner to an island and bury the plate and money; which done he wouldtake the first opportunity to murder me. His chance of meeting with aship that would lend him assistance to navigate the schooner would be asgood if he were alone in her as if I were on board too. There would benothing, then, in this consideration to hinder him from cutting mythroat after we had buried the treasure and were got north. Two motiveswould imperatively urge him to make away with me; first, that I shouldnot be able to serve as a witness to his being a pirate, and next thathe alone should possess the secret of the treasure. 

He little knew what was passing in my mind as he surveyed me through thecurls of smoke spouting up from his death's-head pipe. I talked easilyand confidentially, but I saw in his gaze the eyes of my murderer, andwas so sure of his intentions that had I shot him in self-defence, as hesat there, I am certain my conscience would have acquitted me of hisblood. 

I passed two most uneasy hours in my cot before closing my eyes. I couldthink of nothing but how to secure myself against the Frenchman'streachery. You would suppose that my mind must have been engrossed withconsiderations of the several possibilities of the morrow; but that wasnot so. My reflections ran wholly to the bald-headed evil-eyed piratewhom in an evil hour I had thawed into being, and who was like todischarge the debt of his own life by taking mine. The truth is, I hadbeen too hard at work all day, too full of the business of planning, cutting, testing, and contriving, to find leisure to dwell upon what hehad said at breakfast, and now that I lay alone in darkness it was theonly subject I could settle my thoughts to. 

However, next morning I found myself less gloomy, thanks to severalhours of solid sleep. I thought, what is the good of anticipating?Suppose the schooner is crushed by the ice or jammed by the explosion?Until we are under way, nay, until the treasure is buried, I havenothing to fear, for the rogue cannot do without me. And, reassuringmyself in this fashion, I went to the cook-room and lighted the fire; mycompanion presently arrived, and we sat down to our morning meal. 

"I dreamt last night, " said he, "that the devil sat on my breast andtold me that we should break clear of the ice and come off safe withthe treasure--there is loyalty in the Fiend. He seldom betrays hisfriends. "

"You have a better opinion of him than I, " said I; "and I do not knowthat you have much claim upon his loyalty either, seeing that you willcross yourself and call upon the Madonna and saints when the occasionarises. "

"Pooh, mere habit, " cried he, sarcastically. "I have seen Barros prayingto a little wooden saint in a gale of wind and then knock its head offand throw it overboard because the storm increased. " And here he fell totalking very impiously, professing such an outrageous contempt for everyform of religion, and affirming so ardent a belief in the goodwill ofSatan and the like, that I quitted my bench at last in a passion, andtold him that he must be the devil himself to talk so, and that for mypart his sentiments awoke in me nothing but the utmost scorn, loathing, and horror of him. 

His face fell, and he looked at me with the eye of one who takes measureof another and does not feel sure. 

"Tut!" cried he, with a feigned peevishness; "what are my sentiments toyou, or yours to me? you may be a Quaker for all I care. Come, fill yourpannikin and let us drink a health to our own souls!"

But though he said this grinning, he shot a savage look of malice at me, and when he put his pannikin down his face was very clouded and sulky. 

We finished our meal in silence, and then I rose, saying, "Let us nowsee what the gunpowder is going to do for us. "

My rising and saying this worked a change in him. He exclaimed briskly, "Ay, now for the great experiment, " and made for the companion-stepswith an air of bustle. 

The wind as before was in the south-west, blowing without much weight;but the sky was overcast with great masses of white clouds with a tintof rainbows in their shoulders and skirts, amid which the sky showed ina clear liquid blue. Those clouds seemed to promise wind and perhapssnow anon; but there was nothing to hinder our operations. We got uponthe ice, and went to work to fix matches to the barrels and bags, and tosling them by the beams we had contrived ready for lowering when thematches were fired, and this occupied us the best part of two hours. When all was ready I fired the first match, and we lowered the barrelsmartly to the scope of line we had settled upon; so with the others. You may reckon we worked with all imaginable wariness, for the stuff wehandled was mighty deadly, and if a barrel should fall and burst withthe match alight, we might be blown in an instant into rags, it beingimpossible to tell how deep the rents went. 

The bags being lighter there was less to fear, and presently all thebarrels and bags with the matches burning were poised in the places andhanging at the depth we had fixed upon, and we then returned to theschooner, the Frenchman breaking into a run and tumbling over the railin his alarm with the dexterity of a monkey. 

Each match was supposed to burn an hour, so that when the severalexplosions happened they might all occur as nearly as possible at once, and we had therefore a long time to wait. The margin may lookunreasonable in the face of our despatch, but you will not think itunnecessary if you consider that our machinery might not have workedvery smooth, and that meanwhile all that was lowered was in the way ofexploding. So interminable a period as now followed I do believe neverbefore entered into the experiences of a man. The cold was intense, andwe had to move about; but also were we repeatedly coming to a halt tolook at our watches and cast our eyes over the ice. It was like standingunder a gallows with the noose around the neck waiting for the cart tomove off. My own suspense became torture; but I commanded my face. TheFrenchman, on the other hand, could not control the torments of hisexpectation and fear. 

"Holy Virgin!" he would cry, "suppose we are blown up too? suppose weare engulphed in the ice? suppose it should be vomited up in vast blockswhich in falling upon us must crush us to pulp and smash the decks in?"

At one moment he would call himself an idiot for not remaining on therocks at a distance and watching the explosion, and even make as if tojump off the vessel, then immediately recoil from the idea of settinghis foot upon a floor that before he could take ten strides might splitinto chasms, with hideous uproar under him. At another moment he wouldrun to the companion and descend out of my sight, but reappear after aminute or two wildly shaking his head and swearing that if waiting wasinsupportable in the daylight, it was ten thousand times worse in thegloom and solitude of the interior. 

I was too nervous and expectant myself to be affected by his behaviour;but his dread of the explosion upheaving lumps of ice was sensibleenough to determine me to post myself under the cover of the hatch andthere await the blast, for it was a stout cover and would certainlyscreen me from the lighter flying pieces. 

It was three or four minutes past the hour and I was lookingbreathlessly at my watch when the first of the explosions took place. Before the ear could well receive the shock of the blast the whole ofthe barrels exploded along with some twelve or fourteen parcels. Tassard, who stood beside me, fell on his face, and I believed he hadbeen killed. It was so hellish a thunder that I suppose the blowing upof a first-rate could not make a more frightful roar of noise. A kind oftwilight was caused by the rise of the volumes of white smoke out of theice. The schooner shook with such a convulsion that I was persuaded shehad been split. Vast showers of splinters of ice fell as if from thesky, and rained like arrows through the smoke, but if there were anygreat blocks uphove they did not touch the ship. Meanwhile, the otherparcels were exploding in their places sometimes two and three at atime, sending a sort of sickening spasms and throes through the fabricof the vessel, and you heard the most extraordinary grinding noisesrising out of the ice all about, as though the mighty rupture of thepowder crackled through leagues of the island. I durst not look forthtill all the powder had burst, lest I should be struck by some flyingpiece of ice, but unless the schooner was injured below she was as soundas before, and in the exact same posture, as if afloat in harbour, onlythat of course her stern lay low with the slope of her bed. 

I called to Tassard and he lifted his head. 

"Are you hurt?" said I. 

"No, no, " he answered. "'Tis a Spaniard's trick to fling down to abroadside. Body of St. Joseph, what a furious explosion!" and so sayinghe crawled into the companion and squatted beside me. "What has it donefor us?"

"I don't know yet, " said I; "but I believe the schooner is uninjured. _That_ was a powerful shock!" I cried, as a half-dozen of bags blew uptogether in the crevices deep down. 

The thunder and tumult of the rending ice accompanied by the heavyexplosions of the gunpowder so dulled the hearing that it was difficultto speak. That the mines had accomplished our end was not yet to beknown; but there could not be the least doubt that they had not onlyoccasioned tremendous ruptures low down in the ice, but that thevolcanic influence was extending far beyond its first effects by makingone split produce another, one weak part give way and create otherweaknesses, and so on, all round about us and under our keel, as wasclearly to be gathered by the shivering and spasms of the schooner, andby the growls, roars, blasts, and huddle of terrifying sounds whicharose from the frozen floor. 

It was twenty minutes after the hour at which the mines had been framedto explode when the last parcel burst; but we waited another quarter ofan hour to make sure that it _was_ the last, during all which time thegrowling and roaring noises deep down continued, as if there was abattle of a thousand lions raging in the vaults and hollows underneath. The smoke had been settled away by the wind, and the prospect was clear. We ran below to see to the fire and receive five minutes of heat intoour chilled bodies, and then returned to view the scene. 

I looked first over the starboard side and saw the great split that hadhappened in the night torn in places into immense yawns and gulfs by thefall of vast masses of rock out of its sides; but what most delighted mewas the hollow sound of washing water. I lifted my hand and listened. 

"'Tis the swell of the sea flowing into the opening!" I exclaimed. 

"That means, " said Tassard, "that this side of the block is dislocatedfrom the main. "

"Yes, " cried I. "And if the powder ahead of the bows has done its work, the heave of the ocean will do the rest. "

We made our way on to the forecastle over a deep bed of splinters ofice, lying like wood-shavings upon the deck, and I took notice as Iwalked that every glorious crystal pendant that had before adorned theyards, rigging, and spars had been shaken off. I had expected to see awonderful spectacle of havoc in the ice where the barrels of gunpowderhad been poised, but saving many scores of cracks where none was before, and vast ragged gashes in the mouths of the crevices down which thebarrels had been lowered, the scene was much as heretofore. 

The Frenchman stared and exclaimed, "What has the powder done? I seeonly a few cracks. "

"What it may have done, I don't know, " I answered; "but depend on't suchheavy charges of powder must have burst to some purpose. The dislocationwill be below; and so much the better, for 'tis _there_ the ice mustcome asunder if this block is to go free. "

He gazed about him, and then rapping out a string of oaths, English, Italian, and French, for he swore in all the languages he spoke, which, he once told me, were five, he declared that for his part he consideredthe powder wasted, that we'd have done as well to fling a hand-grenadeinto a fissure, that a thousand barrels of powder would be but as apopgun for rending the schooner's bed from the main, and in short, withseveral insulting looks and a face black with rage and disappointment, gave me very plainly to know that I had not only played the fool myself, but had made a fool of him, and that he was heartily sorry he had evergiven himself any trouble to contrive the cursed mines or to assist mein a ridiculous project that might have resulted in blowing the schoonerto pieces and ourselves with it. 

I glanced at him with a sneer, but took no further notice of hisinsolence. It was not only that he was so contemptible in all respects, a liar, a rogue, a thief, a poltroon, hoary in twenty walks of vice, there was something so unearthly about a creature that had been as goodas dead for eight-and-forty years, that it was impossible anything hesaid could affect me as the rancorous tongue of another man would. Ifeared and hated him because I knew that in intent he was already myassassin; but the mere insolences of so incredible a creature could notbut find me imperturbable. 

And perhaps in the present instance my own disappointment put me intosome small posture of sympathy with his passion. Had I been asked beforethe explosions happened what I expected, I don't know that I should havefound any answer to make; and yet, though I could not have expressed myexpectations, which after all were but hopes, I was bitterly vexed whenI looked over the bows and found in the scene nothing that appearedanswerable to the uncommon forces we had employed. Nevertheless, I feltsure that my remark to the Frenchman was sound. A great show of uphoverocks and fragments of ice might have satisfied the eye; but the realwork of the mines was wanted below; and since the force of the mightyexplosion must needs expend itself somewhere, it was absurd to wish tosee its effects in a part where its volcanic agency would be of littleor no use. 

"There is nothing to be seen by staring!" exclaimed the Frenchmanpresently, speaking very sullenly. "I am hungry and freezing, and shallgo below!" And with that he turned his back and made off, growling inhis throat as he went. 

I got upon the ice and stepped very carefully to the starboard side andlooked down the vast split there. The sea in consequence of the slopedid not come so far, but I could hear the wash of the water very plain. It was certain that the valley in which we lay was wholly disconnectedfrom the main ice on this side. I passed to the larboard quarter, andhere too were cracks wide and deep enough to satisfy me that its holdwas weak. It was forward of the bows where the barrels had been explodedthat the ice was thickest and had the firmest grasp; but its surface wasviolently and heavily cracked by the explosions, and I thought to myselfif the fissures below are as numerous, then certainly the swell of thesea ought to fetch the whole mass away. But I was now half frozen myselfand pining for warmth. It was after one o'clock. The wind was pipingfreshly, and the great heavy clouds in swarms drove stately across thesky. 

"It may blow to-night, " thought I; "and if the wind hangs as it is, justsuch a sea as may do our business will be set running. " And thus musingI entered the ship and went below. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

A CHANGE COMES OVER THE FRENCHMAN. 

Tassard was dogged and scowling. Such was his temper that had I been asmall or weak man, or a person likely to prove submissive, he would havegiven a loose to his foul tongue and maybe handled me very roughly. Butmy demeanour was cold and resolved, and not of a kind to improve hiscourage. I levelled a deliberate semi-contemptuous gaze at his own fierystare, and puzzled him, too, I believe, a good deal by my cool reserve. He muttered whilst we ate, drinking plentifully of wine, and garnishinghis draughts with oaths and to spare; and then, after falling silent andremaining so for the space of twenty minutes, during which I lighted mypipe and sat with my feet close to the furnace, listening with eagerears to the sounds of the ice and the dull crying of the wind, heexclaimed sulkily, "Your scheme is a failure. The schooner is fixed. What's to be done now?"

"I don't know that my scheme is a failure, " said I. "What did yousuppose? that the blast would blow the ice with the schooner on it intothe ocean clear of the island? If the ice is so shaken as to enable theswell to detach it, my scheme will have accomplished all I proposed. "

"_If!_" he cried scornfully and passionately. "_If_ will not deliver usnor save the treasure. I tell you the schooner is fixed--as fixed as thedamned in everlasting fire. Be it so!" he cried, clenching his fist. "But you must meddle no more! The _Boca del Dragon_ is mine--_mine_, d'ye see, now that they're all dead and gone but me"--smiting hisbosom--"and if ever she is to float, let nature or the devil launch her:no more explosions with the risks your failure has made her and me run!"

His voice sank; he looked at me in silence, and then with a wild grin ofanger he exclaimed, "What made you awake me? I was at peace--neithercold, hungry, nor hopeless! What demon forced you to bring me tothis--to bring me back to _this_?"

"Mr. Tassard, " said I coldly, "I don't ask your pardon for myexperiment; I meant well, and to my mind it is no failure yet. But fordisturbing your repose I do sincerely beg your forgiveness, and solemnlypromise you, if you will return to the state in which I found you, thatI will not repeat the offence. "

He eyed me from top to toe in silence, filled and lighted his hideouspipe, and smoked with his back turned upon me. 

Had there been another warm place in the schooner I should have retiredto it, and left this surly and scandalous savage to the enjoyment of hisown company. His temper rendered me extremely uneasy. The arms-room wasfull of weapons; he might draw a pistol upon me and shoot me dead beforeI should have time to clench my hand. Nor did I conceive him to have hisright mind. His panic terrors and outbursts of rage were such extremesof behaviour as suggested some sort of organic decay within. He hadbeen for eight-and-forty years insensible; in all that time the currentof life had been frozen in him, not dried up and extinguished;therefore, taking his age to be fifty-five when the frost seized him, hewould now be one hundred and three years old, having subsisted into thisgreat span of time in fact, though confronting me with the aspect of anelderly man merely. Death ends time, but this man never had been dead, or surely it would not have been in the power of brandy and chafing andfire to arouse him; and though all the processes of nature had beenchecked in him for near half a century, yet he must have been throughoutas much alive as a sleeping man, and consequently when he awoke he arosewith the weight of a hundred and three years upon his brain, which maysuffice to account for the preternatural peculiarities of his character. 

After sitting a long while sullenly smoking in silence, he fetched hismattress and some covers, lay down upon it, and fell fast asleep. Iadmired and envied this display of confidence, and heartily wishedmyself as safe in his hands as he was in mine. The afternoon passed. Iwas on deck a half-dozen times, but never witnessed the least alterationin the ice. My spirits sank very low. There was bitter remorselessdefiance in the white, fierce rigid stare of the ice, and I could notbut believe with the Frenchman that all our labour and expenditure ofpowder was in vain. There was no more noticeable weight in the wind, butthe sea was beginning to beat with some strength upon the coast, andthe schooner sometimes trembled to the vibrations of the blows. Therewas also a continuous crackling noise coming up out of the ice, and justas I came on deck on my third visit, a block of ice, weighing I dare saya couple of hundred tons, fell from the broken shoulder on the starboardquarter, and plunged with a roar like a thunder-clap into the chasm thathad opened in the night. 

I sat before the furnace extremely dejected, whilst the Frenchman snoredon his mattress. I could no longer flatter myself that the explosionshad made the impression I had expected on the ice, and my mind wasutterly at a loss. How to deliver myself from this horrible situation Icould not imagine. As to the treasure, why, if the chests had all beenfilled with gold, they might have gone to the bottom there and then forme, so utterly insignificant did their value seem as against thepricelessness of liberty and the joy of deliverance. Had I been alone Ishould have had a stouter heart, I dare say, for then I should have beenable to do as I pleased; but now I was associated with a bloody-mindedrogue whose soul was in the treasure, and who was certain to oppose anyplan I might propose for the construction of a boat or raft out of thematerial that formed the schooner. The sole ray of hope that gleamedupon me broke out of the belief that this island was going north, andthat when we had come to the height of the summer in these seas, thewasting of the coast or the dislocation of the northern mass wouldrelease us. 

Yet this was but poor comfort too; it threatened a terrible long spellof waiting, with perhaps disappointment in the end, and months ofenforced association with a wretch with whom I should have to live infear of my life. 

When I was getting supper Tassard awoke, quitted his mattress, and cameto his bench. 

"Has anything happened whilst I slept?" said he. 

"Nothing, " I answered. 

"The ice shows no signs of giving?"

"I see none, " said I. 

"Well, " cried he, with a sarcastic sneer, "have you any more fineschemes?"

"'Tis your turn now, " I replied. "Try _your_ hand. If you fail, Ipromise you I shall not be disappointed. "

"But you English sailors, " said he, wagging his head and regarding mewith a great deal of wildness in his eye, "speak of yourselves as thefinest seamen in the world. Justify the maritime reputation of yournation by showing me how we are to escape with the schooner from theice. "

"Mr. Tassard, " said I, approaching him and looking him full in the face, "I would advise you to sweeten your temper and change your tone. I haveborne myself very moderately towards you, submitted to your insults withpatience, and have done you some kindness. I am not afraid of you. Onthe contrary, I look upon you as a swaggering bully and a hoary villain. Do you understand me? I am a desperate man in a desperate situation. Butif I don't fear death, depend upon it, I don't fear _you_--and I takeGod to witness that if you do not use me with the civility I have aright to expect, I will kill you. "

My temper had given way; I meant every word I spoke, and my air andsincerity rendered my speech very formidable. I approached him byanother stride; he started up, as I thought, to seize me, but in realityto recoil, and this he did so effectually as to tumble over his bench, and down he fell, striking his bald head so hard that he lay for severalminutes motionless. 

I stood over him till he chose to sit erect, which he presently did, rubbing his poll and looking at me with an air of mingled bewildermentand fear. 

"This is scurvy usage to give a shipmate in distress, " said he. "'Od'slife, man! I had thought there was some sense of humour in you. Yourhand, Mr. Rodney; I feel dazed. "

I helped him to rise, and he then sat down in a somewhat rickety manner, rubbing his eyes. It might have been fancy, it might have been theillusion of the furnace light combined with the venerable appearance hislong hair and naked pate gave him, but methought in those few minutes hehad grown to look twenty years older. 

"Never concern yourself about my humour, Mr. Tassard, " said I, preserving my determined air and coming close to him again. "How is itto stand between us? I leave the choice to you. If you will treat mecivilly you'll not find me wanting in every disposition to render ourmiserable state tolerable; but if you insult me, use me injuriously, andact the pirate over me, who am an honest man, by God, Mr. Tassard, Iwill kill you. "

He stooped away from me, and raised his hand in a posture as if to fendme off, and cried in a whining manner, "I lost my head--this gunpowderbusiness hath been a hellish disappointment, look you, Mr. Rodney. Come!We will drink a can to our future amity!"

I answered coldly that I wanted no more wine and bade him beware of me, that he had gone far enough, that our hideous condition had filled mysoul with desperation and misery, and that I would not have my life onthis frozen schooner made more abominable than it was by his swagger, lies, and insults, and I added in a loud voice and in a menacing mannerthat death had no terrors for me, and that I would dispatch him with aslittle fear as I should meet my doom, whatever shape it took. 

I marched on deck, not a little astounded by the cowardice of the oldrascal, and very well pleased with the marked impression my bearing andlanguage had produced on him. Not that I supposed for a moment that mybold comportment would save me from his knife or his pistol when heshould think proper to make away with me. No. All I reckoned upon wascowing him into a civiller posture of mind, and checking his aggressionsand insolence. As to his murdering me, I was very sure he would notattempt such an act whilst we remained imprisoned. Loneliness would havemore horrors for him than for me; and though my machinery of mines hadapparently failed, he was shrewd enough, despite his rage ofdisappointment, to understand that more was to be done by two men thanby one, and that between us something might be attempted which would beimpracticable by a simple pair of hands, and particularly old hands, such as his. 

I stayed but a minute or two on deck. Such was the cold that I do notknow I had ever felt it more biting and bitter. The sound of foamingwaters filled the wind, and the wind itself was blowing fairly strong, in gusts that screamed in the frozen rigging or in blasts that had thedeep echo of the thunder-claps of the splitting ice. The clouds werenumerous and dark with the shadow of the night; and the swiftness oftheir motion as they sailed up out of the south-west quarter wasillustrated by the leaping of the few bright stars from one dusky edgeto another. 

I returned below and sat down. The Frenchman asked me no questions. Hehad his can in the oven and his death's head in his great hand, andpuffed out clouds of smoke of the colour of his beard, and indeed in thecandle and fire light looked like a figure of old Time with his longnose and bald head. I addressed one or two civil remarks to him, whichhe answered in a subdued manner, discovering no resentment whatever thatI could trace in his eyes or the expression of his countenance; andbeing wishful to show that I bore no malice I talked of pirates andtheir usages, and asked him if the _Boca del Dragon_ fought under thered or black flag. 

"Why, the black flag, certainly, " said he; "but if we met withresistance, it was our custom to haul it down and hoist the red flag, to let our opponents know we should give no quarter. "

"Where is your flag locker?" said I. 

"In my berth, " he answered. 

"I should like to see the black flag, " I exclaimed: "'tis the one pieceof bunting, I believe, I have never viewed. "

"I'll fetch it, " said he, and taking the lanthorn went aft very quietly, but with a certain stagger in his walk, which I should have put down tothe wine if it was not that his behaviour was free from all symptoms ofebriation. The change in him surprised me, but not so greatly as youmight suppose; indeed, it excited my suspicions rather than my wonder. Fear worked in him unquestionably, but what I seemed to see best wassome malignant design which he hoped to conceal by an air ofconciliation and a quality of respectful _bonhomie_. 

He came back with a flag in his hand, and we spread it between us; itwas black, with a yellow skull grinning in the middle, over this anhourglass, and beneath a cross-bones. 

"What consternation has this signal caused and does still cause!" saidI, surveying it, whilst a hundred fancies of the barbarous scenes it hadflown over, the miserable cries for mercy that had swept up past it tothe ear of God, crowded into my mind. "I think, Mr. Tassard, " said I, "that our first step, should we ever find ourselves afloat in this ship, must be to commit this and all other flags of a like kind on board tothe deep. There is evidence in this piece of drapery to hang an angel. "

He let fall his ends of the flag and sat down suddenly. 

"Yes, " he answered, sending a curious rolling glance around thecook-room and at the same time bringing his hand to the back of hishead, "this is evidence to dangle even an honester man than you, sir. All flags but the ensign we resolve to sail under must go--all flags, and all the wearing apparel, and--and--but"--here he muttered acurse--"we are fixed--there is to be no sailing. "

He shook his head and covered his eyes. His manner was strange, and thestranger for his quietude. 

I said to him, "Are you ill?"

He looked up sharply and cried vehemently, "No, no!" then stretched hislips in a very ghastly grin and turned to take the can from the oven, but his hand missed it, and he appeared to grope as if he were blind, though he looked at the can all the time. Then he catched it and broughtit to his mouth, but trembled so much that he spilt as much as he drank, and after putting the can back sat shaking his beard and stroking thewet off it, methought, in a very mechanical lunatic way. 

I thought to myself, "Is this behaviour some stratagem of his? Whatdevice can such a bearing hide? If he is acting, he plays his partwell. "

I rolled the black flag into a bundle and flung it into a corner, and, resuming my seat and my pipe, continued, more for civility's sake thanbecause of any particular interest I took in the subject, to ask himquestions about the customs and habits of pirates. 

"I believe, " said I, "the buccaneers are so resolute in having clearships that they have neither beds nor seats on board. "

"The English, " he answered, speaking slowly and letting his pipe droopwhilst he spoke with his eyes fixed on deck, "not the Spanish. 'Tis thecustom of most English pirates to eat and sleep upon the decks for thesake of a clear ship, as you say. The Spaniard loves comfort--you mayobserve his fancy in this ship. "

"How is the plunder partitioned?" I asked. 

"Everything is put into the common chest, as we call it, and brought tothe mast and sold by auction--Strange!" he cried, breaking off andputting his hand to his brow. "I find my speech difficult. Do you noticeI halt and utter thickly?"

I replied, No; his voice seemed to be the same as hitherto. 

"Yet I feel ill. Holy Mother of God, what is this feeling coming uponme? O Jesus, how faint and dark!"

He half rose from his bench, but sat again, trembling as if the palsyhad seized him, and I noticed his head dotted with beads of sweat. Hehad drunk so much wine and spirits throughout the day that a dram wouldhave been of no use to him. 

I said, "I expect it will be the blow on the back of your head, when youfell just now, that has produced this feeling of giddiness. Let me helpyou to lie down" (for his mattress was on deck); "the sensation willpass, I don't doubt. "

If he heard he did not heed me, but fell a-muttering and crying tohimself. And now I did certainly remark a quality in his voice that wasnew to my ear; it was not, as he had said, a labour or thickness ofutterance, but a dryness and parchedness of old age, with many breaksfrom high to low notes, and a lean noise of dribbling threading everyword. He sweated and talked and muttered, but this was from sheerterror; he did not swoon, but sat with a stoop, often pressing his browsand gazing about him like one whose senses are all abroad. 

"Gracious Mother of all angels!" he exclaimed, crossing himself severaltimes, but with a feeble, most agitated hand, and speaking in French andEnglish, and sometimes interjecting an invocation in Italian or Spanish, though I give you what he said in my own tongue; "surely I am dying. OLord, how frightful to die! O holy Virgin, be merciful to me. I shall goto hell--O Jesu, I am past forgiveness--for the love of heaven, Mr. Rodney, some brandy! Oh that some saint would interpose for me! Only afew years longer--grant me a few years longer--I beseech for time that Imay repent!" and he extended one quivering hand for the brandy (of whicha draught stood melted in the oven) and made the sign of the cross uponhis breast with the other, whilst he continued to whine out in hiscracked pipes the wildest appeals for mercy, saying a vast deal that Idurst not venture to set down, so plentiful and awful were his clamoursfor time that he might repent, though he never lapsed into blasphemy, but on the contrary discovered an agony of religious horror. 

I was much astonished and puzzled by this illness that had come uponhim, for, though he talked of darkness and faintness and of dying, hecontinued to sit up on his bench and to take pulls at the can of brandyI had handed to him. It might be, indeed, that a sudden faintness hadterrified him nearly out of his senses with a prospect of approachingdeath; but that would not account for the peculiar note and appearanceof age that had entered his figure, face, and voice. Then anextraordinary fancy occurred to me: Had the whole weight of the unhappywretch's years suddenly descended upon him? Or, if not wholly arrived, might not these indications in him mark the first stages of a graduallyincreasing pressure? The heat, the vivacity, the fierceness, spirits, and temper of the life I had been instrumental in restoring to himprobably illustrated his character as it was eight-and-forty yearssince; that had flourished artificially from the moment of his awakeningdown to the present hour; but now the hand of Time was upon this man, whose age was above an hundred. He might be decaying and wasting, evenas he sat there, into such an intellectual condition and physical aspectas he would possess and submit had he come without a break into hispresent age. 

I was fascinated by the mystery of his vitality, and breathlesslywatched him as if I expected to witness some harlequin change in hisface and mark the transformation of his polished brow into the leanausterity of wrinkles. His voice sank into a mere whisper at last, andthen, ceasing to speak altogether, he dropped his chin on to his bosomand began to sway from side to side, catching himself from falling withseveral paralytic starts, but without lifting his head or opening hiseyes that I could see, and manifesting every symptom of extremedrowsiness. 

I got up and laid my hand on his shoulder, on which he turned his faceand viewed me with one eye closed, the other scarce open. 

"How are you feeling now?" said I. 

"Sleepy, very sleepy, " he answered. 

"I'll put your mattress into your hammock, " said I, "and the best thingyou can do is to go and turn in properly and get a long night's rest, and to-morrow morning you'll feel yourself as hearty as ever. "

He mumbled some answer which I interpreted to signify "Very well!" so Ishouldered his mattress and slung a lanthorn in his cabin, and thenreturned to help him to bed. He sat reeling on the bench, his chin onhis breast, catching himself up as before with little sharp terrifiedrecoveries, and I was forced to put my hand on him again to make himunderstand I had come back. He then made as if to rise, but trembled soviolently that he sank down again with a groan, and I was obliged to putmy whole strength to the lifting of him to get him on to his legs. Heleaned heavily upon me, breathing hard, stooping very much andtrembling. When we got to his cabin I perceived that he would never beable to climb into his hammock, nor had I the power to hoist a man ofhis bulk so high. To end the perplexity I cut the hammock down and laidit on the deck, and covering him with a heap of clothes, unslung thelanthorn, wished him good-night, closed the door, and returned to thefurnace. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE ICE BREAKS AWAY. 

It was not yet eight o'clock. I was restless in my mind, under a greatsurprise, and was not sleepy. I filled a pipe, made me a little pannikinof punch, and sat down before the fire to think. If ever I had suspectedthe accuracy of my conjecture that the Frenchman's sudden astonishingindisposition was the effect of his extreme age coming upon him andbreaking down the artificial vitality with which he had bristled intolife under my hands, I must have found fifty signs to set my misgivingsat rest in his drowsiness, nodding, bowed form, weakness, his totteringand trembling, and other features of his latest behaviour. If I wasright, then I had reason to be thankful to Almighty God for thisunparalleled and most happy dispensation, for now I should have nothingto fear from the old rogue's vindictiveness and horrid greed. Supposinghim to be no more than a hundred, the infirmities of five score yearswould stand between him and me, and protect me as effectually as hisdeath. I had nothing to dread from a man who could scarce stand, whosepalsied hand could scarce clasp a knife, whose evil tongue could scarcearticulate the terrors of his soul or the horrors of his recollection. 

The wonder of it all was so great it filled me with admiration andastonishment. Had he been dead and come to life again, as Lazarus, orone of those bodies which arose during the time our Lord hung upon thecross, then, questionless, he must have picked up the chain of his lifeat the link which death had broken, and continued his natural walk intoage and decay (though interrupted by a thousand years of the sepulchre)as if his life had been without this black hiatus, and he was proceedingsteadily and humanly from the cradle. But collecting that the vitalspark could never have been extinguished in him, I understood that time, which has absolute control over life, still knew him as its prey duringall those forty-eight years in which he had lain frozen; that it hadseized him now and suddenly, and pinned upon his back the full burden ofhis lustres. This I say, I believed; but the morrow, of course, wouldgive me further proof. 

Well, 'twas a happy and gracious deliverance for me. He could do me nohurt; the scythe had sheared his talons, and all without occasioning myconscience the least uneasiness whatever: whereas, but for thisinterposition, I did truly and solemnly believe that it must have cometo my having had to slay him that I might preserve my own life. 

Thus I sat for an hour smoking and wetting my lips with the punch, whilst the fire burned low, so exulting in the thought of my escape fromthe treacherous villain I had recovered from the grave, and in thefeeling that I might now be able to go to rest, to move here and there, to act as I pleased without being haunted and terrified by the shadow ofhis foul intent, that I hardly gave my mind for a moment to thesituation of the schooner nor to the barren consequences of my finescheme of mines. 

The wind blew strong. I could hear the humming of it in every fibre ofthe vessel. The bed on which she rested trembled to the blows of theseas upon the rocks. From time to time, in the midst of my musing, Istarted to the sharp claps of parted ice. Still feeling sleepless, Ithrew a few coals on the fire, and catching sight of the pirate flagopened it on the deck as wide as the space would permit, and sat down tocontemplate the hideous insignia embroidered on it. My mind filled witha hundred fancies as my gaze went from the skull on the black field tothe death's-head pipe that had fallen from the grasp of Tassard and layon the deck, and I was sitting lost in a deep dreamlike contemplation, when I was startled and shocked into instantaneous activity by a blastof noise, louder than any thunder-clap that ever I heard, ringing andbooming through the schooner. This was followed by a second and then athird, at intervals during which you might have counted ten, and Ibecame sensible of a strange sickening motion, which lasted about twentyor thirty moments, such as might be experienced by one swiftlydescending in a balloon, or in falling from a height whilst pent up in acoach. 

For a little while the schooner heeled over so violently that thebenches and all things movable in the cook-room slided as far as theycould go, and I heard a great clatter and commotion among the freight inthe hold. She then came upright again, and simultaneously with this avast mass of water tumbled on to the deck and washed over my head, andthen fell another and then another, all in such a way as to make me knowthat the ice had broken and slipped the schooner close to the ocean, where she lay exposed to its surges, but not free of the ice, for shedid not toss or roll. 

I seized the lanthorn and sprang to the cabin, where I hung it up, andmounted the companion-steps. But as I put my hand to the door to thrustit open a sea broke over the side and filled the decks, bubbling andthundering past the companion-hatch in such a way as to advise me that Ineed but open the door to drown the cabin. I waited, my heart beatingvery hard, mad to see what had happened, but not daring to trust myselfon deck lest I should be immediately swept into the sea. 'Twas the mostterrible time I had yet lived through in this experience. To every blowof the billows the schooner trembled fearfully; the crackling noises ofthe ice was as though I was in the thick of a heavy action. The fullweight of the wind seemed to be upon the ship, and the screeching of itin the iron-like shrouds pierced to my ear through the hissing andtearing sounds of the water washing along the decks, and the volcanicnotes of the surges breaking over the vessel. I say, to hear all thisand not to be able to see, to be ignorant of the situation of theschooner, not to know from one second to another whether she would notbe crushed up and crumbled into staves, or be hurled off her bed and bepounded to fragments upon the ice-rocks by the seas, or be dashed by thecannonading of the surge into the water and turned bottom up, made thistime out and away more terrible than the collision between the _LaughingMary_ and the iceberg. 

I drew my breath with difficulty, and stood upon the companion-ladderhearkening with straining ears, my hand upon the door. I was nowsensible of a long-drawn, stately, solemn kind of heaving motion in theschooner, which I put down to the rolling of the ice on which sherested; and this convinced me that the mass in whose hollow she had beenfixed had broken away and was afloat and riding upon the swell thatunder-ran the billows. But I was far too much alarmed to feel any ofthose transports in which I must have indulged had this issue to myscheme happened in daylight and in smooth water. I was terrified by theapprehensions which had occurred to me even whilst I was at work on themines; I mean, that if the bed broke away the schooner would make ittop-heavy and that it would capsize; and thus I stood in a very agony ofexpectancy, caged like a rat, and as helpless as the dead. 

Half an hour must have passed, during which time the decks wereincessantly swept by the seas, insomuch that I never once durst open thedoor even to look out. But nothing having happened to increase myconsternation in this half-hour, though the movement in the schooner wasthat of a very ponderous and majestical rolling and heaving, showing herbed to be afloat, I began to find my spirits and to listen and wait withsome buddings of hope and confidence. At the expiration of this time theseas began to fall less heavily and regularly on to the deck, andpresently I could only hear them breaking forward, but without a quartertheir former weight, and nothing worse came aft than large brisk showersof spray. 

I armed myself with additional clothing for the encounter of the wet, cold, and wind, and then pushed open the door and stepped forth. The skywas dark with rolling clouds, but the ice put its own light into theair, and I could see as plain as if the first of the dawn had broken. Itwas as I had supposed: the mass of the valley in which the schooner hadbeen sepulchred for eight-and-forty years had come away from the main, and lay floating within a cable's length of the coast. A stranger, wonderfuller picture human eye never beheld. The island shore ran arampart of faintness along the darkness to where it died out in liquiddusk to right and left. The schooner sat upon a bed of ice that showed asurface of about half an acre; her stern was close to the sea, and aboutsix feet above it. On her larboard quarter the slope or shoulder of theacclivity had been broken by the rupture, and you looked over the sideinto the clear sea beyond the limit of the ice there; but abreast of theforeshrouds the ice rose in a kind of wall, a great splinter it lookedof what was before a small broad-browed hill, and the wind or the seahaving caused the body on which the schooner lay to veer, this wallstood as a shield betwixt the vessel and the surges, and was nowreceiving those blows which had heretofore struck her starboard sideamidships and filled her decks. 

Oh for a wizard's inkhorn, that I might make you see the picture as Iview it now, even with the eye of memory! The posture of the little bergpointed the schooner's head seawards, about west; the ice-terraces ofthe island lay with the wild strange gleam of their own snow radianceupon them upon the larboard quarter; around the schooner was thewhiteness of her frozen seat, and her outline was an inky, exquisitelydefined configuration upon it; above the crystal wall on the larboardbow rose the spume of the breaking surge in pallid bodies, glancing foran instant, and sometimes shaking a thunder into the ship when a portionof the seething water was flung by the wind upon the forecastle deck; atmoments a larger sea than usual overran the ice on the larboard beam andquarter, and boiled up round about the buttocks of the schooner. Toleeward the smooth backs of the billows rolled away in jet, but thefitful throbbings and feeble flashings of froth commingled with the dimshine of the ice were over all, tincturing the darkness with a spectralsheen, giving to everything a quality of unearthliness that wassharpened yet by the sounds of the wind in the gloom on high and thehissing and foaming of waters sending their leagues-distant voices tothe ear upon the wings of the icy blast. 

The wind, as I have said, blew from the south-west, but the trend of theisland-coast was north-east and as the mass of ice I was upon in partingfrom the main had floated to a cable's length from the cliffs, there wasnot much danger, whilst the wind and sea held, of the berg (if I may soterm it) being thrown upon the island. That the ice under the schoonerwas moving, and if so, at what rate, it was too dark to enable me toknow by observing the marks on the coast. There was to be no sleep forme that night, and knowing this, I stepped below and built up a goodfire, and then went with the lanthorn to see how Tassard did and to givehim the news; but he was in so deep a sleep, that after pulling him alittle without awakening him I let him lie, nothing but the sound of hisbreathing persuading me that he had not lapsed into his old frozen stateagain. 

Of all long nights this was the longest I ever passed through. I didtruly believe that the day was never to break again over the ocean. Imust have gone from the fire to the deck thirty or forty times. Theschooner continued upright. I had no fear of her oversetting; she satvery low, and the ice also showed but a small head above the water, andas the body of it lay pretty flat, then, even supposing its submergedbulk was small, there was little chance of its capsizing. I also noticedthat we were setting seawards--that is to say, to the westward--by anoticeable shrinking of the pallid coast. But I never could stay longenough above to observe with any kind of narrowness, the wind being fullof the wet that was flung over the ice-wall and the cold unendurable. 

All night I kept the fire going, and on several occasions visited theFrenchman, but found him motionless in sleep. I kept too good a look-outto apprehend any sudden calamity short of capsizal, which I no longerfeared, and during the watches of that long night I dreamt a hundredwaking dreams of my deliverance, of my share of the treasure, of myarriving in England, quitting the sea for ever, and setting up as agreat squire, marrying a nobleman's daughter, driving in a fine coach, and ending with a seat in Parliament and a stout well-sounding handle tomy name. 

At last the day broke; I went on deck and found the dawn brighteninginto morning. The wind had fallen and with it the sea; but there stillran a middling strong surge, and the breeze was such as, in sailors'language, you would have shown your top-gallant sails to. I could nowtake measure of our situation, and was not a little astonished anddelighted to observe the island to be at least a mile distant from us, and the north-east end lying very plain, the ocean showing beyond it, though in the south-west the ice died out upon the sea-line. That we hadbeen set away from the main by some current was very certain. There wasa westerly tendency in all the bergs which broke from the island, thesmall ones moving more quickly than the large, for the sea in the northand west was dotted with at least fifty of these white masses, great andlittle. On the other hand, the wind and seas were answerable for theprogress we had made to the north. 

The wall of ice (as I call it) that had stood over against the larboardbow was gone, and the seas tumbled with some heaviness of froth and muchnoise over the ice, past the bows, and washed past the bends on eitherside in froth rising as high as the channels. I noticed a great quantityof broken ice sinking and rising in the dark green curls of the billows, and big blocks would be hurled on to the schooner's bed and then beswept off, sometimes fetching the bilge such a thump as seemed to swinga bellow through her frame. It was only at intervals, however, thatwater fell upon the decks, for the ice broke the beat of the moderatingsurge and forced it to expend its weight in spume, which there was notstrength of wind enough to raise and heave. Since the vessel continuedto lie head to sea, my passionate hope was that these repeated washingsof the waves would in time loosen the ice about her keel, in which caseit would not need much of a billow, smiting her full bows fair, to slideher clean down and off her bed and so launch her. There were manyclouds in the heavens, but the blue was very pure between. The morningbrightening with the rising of the sun, I directed an earnest gaze alongthe horizon, but there was nothing to see but ice. Some of the bergs, however, and more particularly the distant ones, stole out of the blueatmosphere to the sunshine with so complete a resemblance to the liftingcanvas of ships that I would catch myself staring fixedly, my heartbeating fast. But there was no dejection in these disappointments; theecstasy that filled me on beholding the terrible island, the hideousfrozen prison whose crystal bars I had again and again believed werenever to be broken, now lying at a distance with its northern capeimperceptibly opening to our subtle movement, was so violent that Icould not have found my voice for the tears in my heart. 

This, then, was the result of my scheme; it was no failure, as Tassardhad said; as he owed his life to me, so now did he owe me his liberty. Nay, my transports were so great that I would not suffer myself to feelan instant's anxiety touching the condition of the schooner--I meanwhether she would leak or prove sound when she floated--and how we twomen were to manage to navigate so large a craft, that was still as muchspellbound aloft in her frozen canvas and tackle as ever she had been inthe sepulchre in which I discovered her. 

I went below, and put the provisions we needed for breakfast into theoven, and entered Tassard's cabin. On bringing the lanthorn to his faceas he lay under half a score of coats upon the deck, I perceived thathe was awake, and, my heart being full, I cried out cheerily, "Goodnews! good news! the gunpowder did its work! The ice is ruptured and weare afloat, Mr. Tassard, afloat--and progressing north!"

He looked at me vacantly, and giving his head a shake exclaimed, "Howcan I crawl from this mound? My strength is gone. "

If I was amazed that the joyful intelligence I had delivered produced noother response than this querulous inquiry, I was far more astonished bythe sound of his voice. It was the most cracked and venerable pipe thatever tickled the throat of old age, a mingling of wailing falsettos andof hollow gasping growls, the whole very weak. I threw the clothes offhim, and said, "Do you wish to rise? I will bring your breakfast here ifyou wish. "

He looked at me, but made no answer. I bawled again, and observed (bythe dim lanthorn light) that he watched my lips with an air ofattention; and whilst I waited for his reply he said, "I don't hearyou. "

Anxious to ascertain to what extent his hearing was impaired, I kneeledon the deck, and putting my lips to his ear said, not very loud, "Willyou come to the cook-house?" which he did not hear; and then louder, "Will you come to the cook-house?" which he did not hear either. Ibelieved him stone-deaf till, on roaring with all the power of my lungs, he answered "Yes. "

I took him by the hands and hauled him gently on to his feet, and hadto continue holding him or he must have fallen. Time was beginning withhim when he had gone to bed, and the remorseless old soldier hadcompletely finished his work whilst his victim slept. I viewed theFrenchman whilst I grasped his hands, and there stood before me ashrunk, tottering, deaf, bowed, feeble old man. What was yesterday apolished head was now a shrivelled pate, as though the very skull hadshrunk and left the skin to ripple into wrinkles and sit loose andpuckered. His hands trembled excessively. But his lower jaw was held inits place by his teeth, and this perpetuated in the aged dwindledcountenance something of the likeness of the fierce and sinister visagethat had confronted me yesterday. I was thunder-struck by thealteration, and stood overwhelmed with awe, confusion, and alarm. Then, re-collecting my spirits, I supported the miserable relic to the fire, putting his bench to the dresser that he might have a back to leanagainst. 

He could scarce feed himself--indeed, he could hardly hold his chin offhis breast. He had gone to bed a man, as I might take it, of fifty-six, and during the night the angel of Time had visited him, and there hesat, _a hundred and three years of age_!

He looked it. Ha, thought I, I was dreading your treachery yesterday;there is nothing more to fear. Besides that he was nearly stone deaf, hecould hardly see; and I was sure, if he should be able to move at all, he could not stir a leg without the help of sticks. I was going to roarout to him that we were adrift, but he looked so imbecile that Ithought, to what purpose? If there be aught of memory in him, let himsit and chew the cud thereof. He cannot last long; the cold must soonstop his heart. And with that I went on eating my breakfast in silence, but greatly affected by this astonishing mark of the hand of Providence, and under a very heavy and constant sense of awe, for the like of such atransformation I am sure had never before encountered mortal eyes, andit was terrifying to be alone with it. 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE FRENCHMAN DIES. 

However, if I expected my Frenchman to sit very long silent, he soonundeceived me by beginning to complain in his tremulous aged voice ofhis weakness and aching limbs. 

"'Tis the terrible cold that has affected me, " said he, whilst his headnodded nervously. "I feel the rheumatism in every bone. There is noweakness like the rheumatic, I have heard, and 'tis true, 'tis true. Itmay lay me along--yes, by the Virgin, 'tis rheumatism--what else?" Herehe was interrupted by a long fit of coughing, and when it was ended heturned to address me again, but looked at the bulkhead on my right, asif his vision could not fix me. "But my capers are not over!" he cried, setting up his rickety shrill throat; "no, no! Vive l'amour! vive lajoie! The sun is coming--the sun is the fountain of life--ay, mon brave, there are some shakes in these stout legs yet!" He shook his head witha fine air of cunning and knowingness, grinning very oddly; and then, falling grave with a startling suddenness, he began to dribble out apiratical love-story he had once before favoured me with, describing thecharms of the woman with a horrid leer, his head nodding with thenervous affection of age all the time, whilst he looked blindly in mydirection--a hideous and yet pitiful object!

I could not say that his mind was gone, but he talked with many breaksfor breath, and not very coherently, as though the office of his tonguewas performed by habit rather than memory, so that he often went farastray and babbled into sentences that had no reference to what had gonebefore, though on the whole I managed to collect what he meant. I wassure he had not power enough of vision to observe me in the dim reddishlight of the cook-room, and this being so, he could not know I waspresent, more particularly as he could not hear me, yet he persisted inhis poor babble, which was a behaviour in him that, more than even thematter of his speech, persuaded me of his imbecility. 

He made no reference to our situation, and in solemn truth I believe hismemory retained no more than a few odds and ends of the evil story ofhis life, like bits of tarnished lace and a rusty button or two lying inthe bottom of a dark chest that has long been emptied of the clothes itonce held. 

But my condition made such heavy demands upon my thoughts that I hadvery much less attention to give to this surprising phenomenon ofsenility than its uncommon merits deserved. It has puzzled every memberof the faculty that I have mentioned it to, the supposition being that, given the case of suspended animation, there is no waste, and the personwould quit his stupor with the same powers and aspect as he possessedwhen he entered it, though it lasted a thousand years. But grantingthere is no waste, Time is always present waiting to settle accountswhen the sleeper lifts his head. There may be an artificial interval, during which the victim might show as my pirate did, but the poised loadof years is severed on a sudden by the scythe and becomessuperincumbent, and with the weight comes the transformation; and thistheory, as the only eye-witness of the marvellous thing, I will hold andmaintain whilst I have breath in my body to support it. 

I left him gabbling to himself, sometimes grinning as if greatlydiverted, sometimes lifting a trembling hand to help his ghostly recitalby an equally ghostly dumb-show, and went on deck, satisfied that he wastoo weak to get to the fire and meddle with it, but sufficientlyinvigorated by his long night's rest to sit up without tumbling off thebench. 

This time I carried with me an old perspective glass I had noticed inthe chest in my cabin--the chest in which were the nautical instruments, charts, and papers--and levelled it along the coast of the island, butit was a poor glass, and I found I could manage nearly as well with thenaked eye. There was no change of any kind, only that there was asensible diminution in the blowing of the wind and a correspondingdecrease in the height of the seas. The ice stretched in a considerablebed on either hand the ship and ahead of her; the water frothed freelyover it, and there was a great jangling and flashing of broken pieces, but the hull was no longer heavily hit by them. 

I got into the main chains to view the body of the vessel, and noticedwith satisfaction that the constant pouring of the sea had thinned downthe frozen snow to the depth of at least a foot. This encouraged me tohope that the restless tides would sap to her keel at least, and put herinto a posture to be easily launched by the blow of a surge upon herbows--that is if fortune continued to keep her head on. But by thistime, my transports having moderated, I was grown fully sensible of theextreme peril of our position. Should the sea rise and the ice bring herbroadside to it, it was inevitable, it seemed to me, that she must go topieces. Or if the ice on which she floated, fouled some other berg itmight cost us all our spars. Then again occurred the dismal question, Suppose she should launch herself, would she float? For eight-and-fortyyears she had been high and dry; never a caulker's hammer had rung uponher in all that time. Tassard had spoken of her as a stout ship, and soshe was, I did not doubt; but the old rogue talked as if she had beenstranded six months only! I had no other hope than that the intensecold had treated her timbers as it had treated the bodies of her people, an expectation not unreasonable when I considered the state of herstores and the manifest substantiality of her inward fabric. 

I regained the deck and stepped over to the pumps. There were two ofthem, but built up in snow. My business was to save my life if I could, and the schooner too, for the sake of the great treasure in her. Nothingmust disconcert me I said to myself--I must spare no labour, but act ahearty sailor's part and ask for God's countenance. So I trotted below, and selecting some weapons from the arms-room, such as a tomahawk, aspade-headed spear, a pike and a chopper, I returned to the pumps andfell upon them with a will. The ice flew about me, but I continued tosmite, the exercise making me hot and renewing my spirits, and in anhour--but it took me an hour--I had chopped, hacked, and beaten one ofthe pumps pretty clear of its thick crystal coat. They were what iscalled brake-pumps--that is to say, pumps which are worked by handles. The ice, of course, held them immovable, but they looked to be perfectlysound, in good working order, though there would be neither chance norneed to test them until the schooner went afloat. 

I cleared the other one and was well satisfied with my morning's work. But I did bitterly lament the lack of a little crew. Even the Frenchmanas he was yesterday would have served my turn, for between us we mighthave made shift to clamber aloft, and with hatchets break the sailsfree of their ice bonds, and so expose canvas enough to hold the wind, which could not have failed to impart a swifter motion to the berg. Butwith my single pair of hands I could only look up idly at the yards andgaffs standing hard as granite. Still, even such surface as the sparsand rigging offered to the breeze helped our progress. We were but avery little berg, nay, not a berg, but rather a sheet of ice lyingindifferently flat upon the sea, and, as I believe, without much depth. Our spars and gear were as if the ice itself were rigged as a ship, andthen there was the height of the hull besides to offer to the breeze atolerable resistance for its offices of propulsion. In this way Iexplain our progress; but whatever the cause, certain it was that ourbed of ice was fairly under weigh, and at noon the island of ice bore atleast half a league distant from us, and we had opened the sea broadlypast its northern cape. 

I have often diverted myself with wondering what sort of impression theposture of our schooner would have made on the minds of sailors sightingus from their deck. We looked to be floating out of water, and marinerswho regard the devil as a conjuror must have accepted us as one of hispet inventions. 

The many icebergs which encumbered the sea filled me with anxiety. Wewere travelling faster than they, and it seemed impossible that we couldmiss striking one or another of them. Yet perilous as they were, I couldnot but admire their beautiful appearance as they floated upon the darkblue of the running waters, flashing out very gloriously to the sun witha sparkling of tints upon their whiteness as if fires of twentydifferent colours had been kindled upon their craggy steeps, and thenfading into a sulky watchet to the dull violet shadowing of the passingclouds. I particularly marked a very brilliant scene on the opening offive or six of them to the sunshine. They lay in such wise that theshadow of the cloud covered them all as with a veil, the skirts ofwhich, trailing, left them to leap one after the other into the noontidedazzle; and as each one shot from the shadow the flash was like avolcanic spouting of white flame enriched with the prismatic dyes ofemeralds, rubies, sapphires, and gems of lovely hue. 

To determine the hour and our position I fetched a quadrant from mycabin, and was happily just in time to catch the sun crossing themeridian. My watch was half an hour fast, so I had been out of myreckoning to the extent of thirty minutes ever since I had been castaway. I made our latitude to be sixty-four degrees twenty-eight minutessouth, and the computation was perhaps near enough. 

This business ended, I went to the cook-house to prepare dinner, and thefirst object I saw was Tassard flat upon his face near the door thatopened into the cabin. He groaned when I picked him up, which I managedwithout much exertion of strength, for so much had he shrunk that I daresay more than half his weight lay in his clothes; and set him upon hisbench with his back to the dresser. I put my mouth to his ear androared, "Are you hurt?" His head nodded as if he understood me, but Iquestion if he did. He was the completest picture of old age that youcould imagine. I fetched a couple of spears from the arms-room, and, cutting them to his height, put one in each hand that he might keephimself propped; and whilst my own dinner was broiling I made him a messof broth with which I fed him, for now that he had the sticks he wouldnot let go of them. But in any case I doubt if his trembling hand couldhave lifted the spoon to his lips without capsizing the contents downhis beard. 

With some small idea of rallying the old villain, I mixed him a verystiff bumper of brandy, which he supped down out of my hand with theutmost avidity. The draught soon worked in him, and he began to move hishead about, seeking me in his blind way, and then cried in his brokennotes, "I have lost the use of my legs and cannot walk. Mother of God, what shall I do! O holy St. Antonio, what is to become of me?"

I guessed from this that, impelled by habit or some small spur ofreason, he had risen to go on deck and fallen. He went on vapouringpitifully, gazing with sufficient steadfastness to let me understandthat his vision received something of my outline, though he would fixhis eyes either to left or right of me, as though he was not able to seeif he looked straight; and this and his mournful cackle and his noddinghead, bowed form, propped hands, and diminished face made him asdistressful and melancholy a picture of Time as ever mortal man viewed. He broke off in his rambling to ask for more brandy, taking it forgranted that I was still in the cook-room, for I never spoke, and Ifilled a can for him and as before held it to his mouth, which he openedwide, a piece of behaviour which went to show that some of his witsstill hung loose upon him. This was a strong dose, and co-operating withthe other, soon seized hold on his head, and presently he began to laughto himself and talk, and even broke into a stave or two--some Frenchsong which he delivered in a voice like the squeaking of a ratalternating with the growling of a terrier. 

I guess his stumbling upon this old French catch (which I took it to befrom seeing him feebly flourish one of his slicks as if inviting achorus) put him upon speaking his own tongue altogether, for though hecontinued to chatter with all the volubility his breath would permitduring the whole time I sat eating, not one word of English did hespeak, and not one word therefore did I understand. Seeing how it mustbe with him presently, I brought his mattress and rugs from his cabin, and had scarce laid them down when he let fall one of his sticks anddrooped over. I grasped him, and partly lifting, partly hauling, got himon his back and covered him up. In a few minutes he was asleep. 

I trust I shall not be deemed inhuman if I confess that I heartilywished his end would come. If he went on living he promised to be anintolerable burden to me, being quite helpless. Besides, he was much tooold for this world, in which a man who reaches the age of ninety ispointed to as a sort of wonder. 

As there was nothing to be done on deck, I filled my pipe and mademyself comfortable before the furnace, and was speedily sunk inmeditation. I reviewed all the circumstances of my case and consideredmy chances, and the nimble heels of imagination carrying me home withthis schooner, I asked myself, suppose I should have the good fortune toconvey the treasure in safety to England, how was I to secure it? Let meimagine myself arrived in the Thames. The whole world stares at thestrange antique craft sailing up the river; she would be boarded andrummaged by the customs people, who of course would light upon thetreasure. What then? I knew nothing of the law; but I reckoned, since Ishould have to tell the truth, that the money, ore, and jewellery wouldbe claimed as stolen property, and I dismissed with a small reward forbringing it home. There was folly in such contemplation at such a time, when perhaps at this hour to-morrow the chests might be at the bottom ofthe sea, and myself a drowned sailor floating three hundred fathomsdeep. But man is a froward child, who builds mansions out of dreams, and, jockeyed by hope, sets out at a gallop along the visionary road tohis desires; and my mind was so much taken up with considering how Ishould manage when I brought the treasure home, that I spent a couple ofhours in a conflict of schemes, during which time it never onceoccurred to me to reflect that I was a good way from home still, andthat much must happen before I need give myself the least concern as tothe securing of the treasure. 

Nothing worth recording happened that day. The wind slackened, and theice travelled so slow that at sundown I could not discover that we hadmade more than a quarter of a mile of progress to the north since noon, though we had settled by half as much again that distance westwards. Whilst I was below I could hear the ice crackling pretty briskly roundabout the ship, which gave me some comfort; but I could never see anychange of consequence when I looked over the side or bows, only that atabout four o'clock, whilst I was taking a view from the forecastle, alarge block broke away from beyond the starboard bow with the report ofa swivel gun. 

I had not closed my eyes on the previous night, and was tired out whenthe evening arrived, and, as no good could come of my keeping a watch, for the simple reason that it was not in my power to avert anything thatmight happen, I tumbled some further covering over the Frenchman, whohad lain on the deck all the afternoon, sometimes dozing, sometimeswaking and talking to himself, and appearing on the whole very easy andcomfortable, and went to my cabin. 

I slept sound the whole night through, and on waking went on deck beforegoing to the cook-house and lighting the furnace (as was my custom), soimpatient was I to observe our state and to hear such news as the oceanhad for me. It was a very curious day, somewhat darksome, and a deadcalm, with a large long swell out of the south-east. The sky was full ofclouds, with a stooping appearance in the hang of them that reminded youof the belly of a hammock; they were of a sallow brown, very uncommon;some of them round about sipped the sea-line, and their shadows, obliterating those parts of the cincture which they overhung, broke thecontinuity of the horizon as though there were valleys in the oceanthere. A good part of our bed of ice was gone, at least a fourth of it;but the schooner still lay as strongly fixed as before. I had come tothe deck half expecting to find her afloat from the regular manner ofher heaving, and was bitterly disappointed to discover her rooted asstrongly as ever in the ice, though the irritation softened when Inoticed how the bed had diminished. The mass with the ship upon it roseand sank with the sluggish squatting motion of a water-logged vessel. Itwas an odd sensation to my legs after their long rest from suchexercise. The heaving satisfied me that the base of the bed did not godeep, but at the same time it was all too solid for me, I could notdoubt, for had the sheet been as thin as I had hoped it, it must havegiven under the weight of the schooner and released her. 

The island lay a league distant on the larboard beam, and looked awondrous vast field of ice going into the south, and it stared veryghastly upon the dark green sea out of the clouds whose gloom sankbehind it. I could not observe that we had drifted anything to thenorth, whilst our set to the westwards had been steady thoughsnail-like. The sea in the north and north-west swarmed with bergs, likegreat snowdrops on the green undulating fields of the deep. Now andagain the swell, in which fragments of ice floated with the gleam ofcrystal in liquid glass, would be too quick for our dull rise andoverflow the bed, brimming to the channels with much noise of foam andpouring waters, but the interposition of the ice took half its weightout of it, and it never did more than send a tremble through the vessel. 

What to make of the weather I knew not. Certainly, of all the capricesof this huge cold sea, its calms are the shortest lived, but thisknowledge helped me to no other. The clouds did not stir. In thenorth-east a beam of sunshine stood like a golden waterspout, its footin a little flood of glory. It stayed all the while I was on deck, showing that the clouds had scarce any motion, and made the picture ofthe sea that way beyond nature to my sight, by the contrast of thedefined shaft of gold, burning purely, with the dusk of the clouds allabout, and of the pool of dazzle at its foot with the ugly green of thewater that melted into it. 

I went below and got about lighting the fire. The Frenchman lay veryquiet, under as many clothes as would fill a half-dozen of sacks. It wasbitterly cold, sharper in the cook-house than I had ever remembered it, and I could not conceive why this should be, until I recollected that Ihad forgotten to close the companion-hatch before going to bed. Iprepared some broth for my companion, and dressed some ham for myself, and ate my breakfast, supposing he would meanwhile awake. But aftersitting some time and observing that he did not stir, a suspicionflashed into my mind; I kneeled down, and clearing his face, listened. He did not breathe. I brought the lanthorn to him, but his countenancehad been so changed by his unparalleled emergence from a state of middlelife into extreme old age, he was so puckered, hollowed, gaunt, hisfeatures so distorted by the great weight of his years that I was not toknow him dead by merely viewing him. I threw the clothes off him, listened at his mouth breathlessly, felt his hands, which were ice-cold. Dead indeed! thought I. Great Father, 'tis Thy will! And I rose veryslowly and stood surveying the silent figure with an emotion that owedits inspiration partly to the several miracles of vitality I had beheldin him during our association, and to a bitter feeling of lonelinessthat swelled up in me. 

Yes! I had feared and detested this man, but his quick transformationand silent dark exit affected me, and I looked down upon him sadly. Yet, to be perfectly candid with you, I recollect that, though it occurred tome to test if life was out of him by bringing him close to the fire andchafing him and giving him brandy, I would not stir. No, I would nothave moved a finger to recover him, even though I should have been ableto do so by merely putting him to the furnace. He was dead, and therewas an end; and without further ado I carried him into the forecastleand threw a hammock over him, and left him to lie there till thereshould come clear water to the ship to serve him for a grave. 

CHAPTER XXV. 

THE SCHOONER FREES HERSELF. 

All day long the weather remained sullen and still, and the swellpowerful. I was on deck at noon, looking at an iceberg half a leaguedistant when it overset. It was a small berg, though large compared withmost of the others; yet such a mighty volume of foam boiled up as gaveme a startling idea of the prodigious weight of the mass. The sight mademe very anxious about my own state, and to satisfy my mind I got uponthe ice and walked round the vessel, and to get a true view of herposture went to the extreme end of the rocks beyond her bows, andfinally came to the conclusion that, supposing the ice should crumbleaway from her sides so as to cause the weight of the schooner to renderit top-heavy, her buoyancy on touching the water would certainly tearher keel out of its frosty setting and leave her floating. Indeed, sosure was I of this that I saw, next to the ice splitting and freeing herin 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 haltbreak from the bed with a smart clap of noise, and completely rollover. Only a minute before had I been standing on it, and thus had sixtyseconds stood between me and death, for most certainly must I have beendrowned or killed by being beaten against the ice by the swell! I fellupon my knees and lifted up my hands in gratitude to God, feelingextraordinarily comforted by this further mark of His care of me, andvery strongly persuaded that He designed I should come off with my lifeafter all, since His providence would not work so many miracles for mypreservation if I was to perish by this adventure. 

These thoughts did more for my spirits than I can well express; and theintolerable sense of loneliness was mitigated by the knowledge that Iwas 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 atmospherewith a faint hectic, which quickly yielded to the deepest shade ofblackness. The mysterious desperate silence, however, that on deckweighed oppressively on every sense, as something false, menacing, andmalignant in these seas, was qualified below by the peculiar strainingnoises in the schooner's hold caused by the swinging of the ice upon theswell. I was very uneasy; I dreaded a gale. It was impossible but thatthe vessel must quickly go to pieces in a heavy sea upon the ice if shedid not liberate herself. But though this excited a depressionmelancholy enough, nothing else that I can recollect contributed to it. When I reviewed the apprehension the Frenchman had raised, and reflectedhow unsupportable a burden he must have become, I was very wellsatisfied to be alone. Time had fortified me; I had passed throughexperiences so surprising, encountered wonders so preternatural, thatsuperstition lay asleep in my soul, and I found nothing to occasion inme the least uneasiness in thinking of the lifeless shrivelled figure ofwhat was just now a fierce, cowardly, untamed villain, lying in theforecastle. 

I made a good supper, built up a large fire, and mixed myself a heartybowl of punch, not with the view of drowning my anxieties--God forbid! Iwas too grateful for the past, too expectant of the future, to becapable of so brutish a folly--but that I might keep myself in acheerful posture of mind; and being sick of my own company took thelanthorn to the cabin lately used by the Frenchman, and found in a chestthere, among sundry articles of attire, a little parcel of books, somein Dutch and Portuguese, and one in English. 

It was a little old volume, the author's name not given, and proved tobe a relation of the writer's being taken by pirates, and the manydangers he underwent. There was nothing in it, to be sure, that answeredto my own case, yet it interested me mightily as an honest unvarnishednarrative of sea perils; and I see myself now in fancy reading it, thelanthorn hanging by a laniard close beside my head, the book in onehand, my pipe in the other, the furnace roaring pleasantly, my feetclose to it, and the atmosphere of the oven fragrant with the punch thatI put there to prevent it from freezing. I had come to a certain pageand was reading this passage: "_Soon after we were on board we all wentinto the great cabin, where we found nothing but destruction. Twoscrutores I had there were broke to pieces, and all the fine goods andnecessaries in them were all gone. Moreover, two large chests that hadbooks in them were empty, and I was afterwards informed they had beenall thrown overboard; for one of the pirates on opening them swore therewas jaw-work enough (as he called it) to serve a nation, and proposedthat they might be cast into the sea, for he feared there might be somebooks amongst them that might breed mischief enough, and prevent some oftheir comrades from going on in their voyage to hell, whither they wereall bound_"--I say, I was reading this passage, not a little affected bythe impiety of the rascal, for whose portrait my dead Frenchman mightvery well have sat, when I was terrified by an extraordinary loudexplosion, that burst so near and rang with such a prodigious clear noteof thunder through the schooner that I vow to God I believed thegunpowder below had blown up. And in this suspicion I honestly supposedmyself right for a moment, for on running into the cabin I was dazzledby a crimson flame that clothed the whole interior with a wondrous gushof fire; but this being instantly followed by such another clap as theformer, I understood a thunderstorm had broken over the schooner. 

It was exactly overhead, and that accounted for the violence of thecrashes, which were indeed so extreme that they sounded rather like thesplitting of enormous bodies of ice close to, than the flight ofelectric bolts. The hatch lay open; I ran on deck, but scarce had passedmy head through the companion when down came a storm of hail, everystone as big as a pigeon's egg, and in all my time I never heard a morehellish clamour. There was not a breath of air. The hail fell instraight lines, which the fierce near lightning flashed up into theappearance of giant harp strings, on which the black hand of the nightwas playing those heavy notes of thunder. I sat in the shelter of thecompanion, very anxious and alarmed, for there was powder enough in thehold to blow the ship into atoms; and the lightning played socontinuously and piercingly that it was like a hundred darts of fire, violet, crimson, and sun-coloured, in the grasp of spirits who thrust atthe sea, all over its face, with swift movement of the arms, as thoughsearching for the schooner to spear her. 

The hailstorm ceased as suddenly as it had burst. I stepped on to thedeck, and 'twas like treading on shingle. There was not the least motionin the air, and the stagnation gave an almost supernatural character tothe thunder and lightning. The ocean was lighted up to its furthestvisible confines by the flames in the sky, and the repeated explosionsof thunder exceeded the roaring of the ordnance of a dozen squadrons inhot fight. The ice-coast in the east, and the two score bergs in thenorth and west leapt out of one hue into another; and were my days inthis world to exceed those of old Abraham, I should to my last breathremember the solemn and terrible magnificence of that picture oflightning-coloured ice, the sulphur-tinctured shapes of the swollenbodies of clouds bringing their dark electric mines together in ahuddle, the answering flash of the face of the deep to the lancing ofeach spiral dazzling bolt, with the air as still as the atmosphere of acathedral for the thunder to roll its echoes through. 

There was a second furious shower of hail, and when that was over Ilooked forth, and observed that the storm was settling into thenorth-east, whence I concluded that what draught there might be up theresat in the south-west. Nor was I mistaken; for half an hour after thefirst of the outburst, by which time the lightning played weak and atlong intervals low down, and the thunder had ceased, I felt a crawlingof air coming out of the south-west, which presently briskened into asmall steady blowing. But not for long. It freshened yet and yet; thewrinkles crisped into whiteness on the black heavings; they grew intosmall surges with sharp cubbish snarlings preludious of the lion'svoice; and by ten o'clock it was blowing in strong squalls, the seasrising, and the clouds sailing swiftly in smoke-coloured rags under thestars. 

The posture of the ice inclined the schooner's starboard bow to thebillows; and in a very short time she was trembling in every bone to theblows of the surges which rolled boiling over the ice there and struckher, flinging dim clouds of spume in the air, which soon set thescuppers gushing. My case was that of a stranded ship, with thisdifference only, that a vessel ashore lies solid to the beating of thewaves, whereas the ice was buoyant, it rose and fell, sluggishly it istrue, and so somewhat mitigated the severity of the shocks of water. But, spite of this, I was perfectly sure that unless the bed broke underher or she slipt off it, she would be in pieces before the morning. Itwas not in any hull put together by human hands to resist the poundingof those seas. The weight of the mighty ocean along whose breast theyraced 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. Theice-bed was like a whirlpool with the leap and flash and play of thefroth upon it. The black air of the night was whitened by the storms offoam-flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the broken watersincreased 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 tokeep myself alive after the ship should be broken up, the thought neverentered my head. What could I do? There was no boat. I might havecontrived some arrangement of booms and casks to serve as a raft, but towhat purpose? How long would it take the wind and sea to freeze me?

I crouched in the companion-way hearkening to the uproar around, feelingthe convulsions of the schooner, fully prepared for death, dogged andhopeless. No, I was not afraid. Suffering and expectation had brought meto that pass that I did not care. "'Tis such an end as hundreds andthousands of sailors have met, " I remember thinking; "it is the fittestexit for a mariner. I have sinned in my time, but the Almighty God knowsmy heart. " To this tune ran my thoughts. I held my arms tightly foldedupon my breast, and with set lips waited for the first of those crashingand rending sounds which would betoken the ruin and destruction of theschooner. 

So passed half an hour; then, being half perished with the cold, I wentto the furnace, for when the vessel went to pieces it would matterlittle in what part of her I was, and warmed myself and took a dram as afelon swallows a draught on his way to the scaffold. Were I to attemptto describe the character of the thunderous noises in the ship I shouldnot be believed. The seas raised a most deafening roaring as they boiledover the ice and rolled their volumes against the vessel's sides. Everycurl 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 smallrevolving hurricane, feeling no faintest sigh of air upon my cheek, whilst close around whirled the hellish tormenting conflict of whitewaters and yelling blasts. 

On a sudden--in a breath--I felt the vessel rise. She was swung up withthe giddy velocity of a hunter clearing a tall gate; she sank again, and there was a mighty concussion forward, then a pause of steadinesswhilst you might have counted five, then a wild upward heave, a sort ofsharp floating fall, a harsh grating along her keel and sides, as thoughshe was being smartly warped over rocks, followed by an unmistakablefree pitching and rolling motion. 

I had sprung to my feet and stood waiting. But the instant I gathered bythe movements of her that she was released I sprang like a madman up thecompanion-steps. The sea, breaking on her bow, flew in heavy showersalong the deck and half blinded me. But I was semi-delirious, and havingsat so long with Death's hand in mine was in a passionately defiantmood, with a perfect rage of scorn of peril in me, and I walked right onto the forecastle, giving the flying sheets of water there no heed. In aminute a block of sea tumbled upon me and left me breathless; theiciness of it cooled my mind's heat, but not my resolution. I wasdetermined to judge as best I could by the light of the foam of what hadhappened, and holding on tenaciously to whatever came to my hand andprogressing 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'slengths distant, and I could distinguish no more than that. I peeredover 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 thebed with her own weight when the sea rose and threw the ice up, for shehad floated on a sudden, and the noises which attended her releaseindicated that she had been forced through a channel. 

I returned aft, barely escaping a second deluge, and looked over thequarter; no ice was there visible to me. The vessel rolled horribly, andI perceived that she had a decided list to starboard, the result of theshifting of what was in her when the ice came away from the main withher, and it was this heel that brought the sea washing over the bow. Itook hold of the tiller to try it, but either the helm was frozenimmovable or the rudder was jammed in its gudgeons or in some otherfashion fixed. 

Had she been damaged below? was she taking in water? I knew her to be sothickly sheathed with ice that, unless it had been scaled off in placesby the breaking of her bed, I had little fear (until this coveringmelted or dropped off by the working of the frame) of the hull notproving tight. I should have been coated with ice myself had I stayedbut a little longer in my wet clothes in that piercing wind, so I ranbelow, 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'tquestion, in the buttons, lace, and fripperies of the old-fashionedgarments. 

The incident of the schooner's release from the ice had come upon me sosuddenly, and at a time too when my mind was terribly disordered, that Iscarce realized the full meaning of it until I had shifted myself andfortified 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 acask; that she would prove a heavy roller in a sea-way a single glanceat her fat buttocks and swelling bilge might have persuaded me, but Inever could have dreamt she would wallow so monstrously. The oscillationwas rendered more formidable by her list, and there were moments when Icould not keep my feet. She was shipping water very freely over herstarboard rail, but this did not much concern me, for the break of thepoop-deck kept the after part of the vessel indifferently dry, and theforecastle and main hatches were well secured. But there was one greatperil I knew not how to provide against--I mean the flotilla of icebergsin the north and west. They lay in a long chain upon the sea, and thoughto be sure there was no doubt a wide channel between each, through whichit might have been easy to carry a ship under control, yet there wasevery probability of a vessel in the defenceless condition of theschooner, without a stitch of sail on her and under no other governmentof helm than a fixed rudder, being swept against one of those frozenfloating 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 heragain. 

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 myhands 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 andother tribes in that country; they were formed of a hard heavy wood. Itook a length of ratline line and secured it to one of these spears, andcarried it on deck with the powder-room bull's-eye lamp; but when Iprobed the sounding-pipe I found it full of ice, and as it wasimpossible to draw the pumps, I flung my ingenious sounding-rod down ina passion of grief and mortification. 

Yet was I not to be beaten. Such was my temper, had the devil himselfconfronted me, I should have defied him to do his worst, for I had madeup my mind to weather him out. I entered the forecastle, lanthorn inhand, prized open the hatch and dropped into the hold. It needed anexperienced ear to detect the sobbing of internal waters amid theyearning gushes, the long gurgling washings, the thunderous blows, andshrewd rain-like hissings of the seas outside. I listened with strainedhearing for some minutes, but distinguished no sounds to alarm me withassurance of water in the hold. I could not mistake. I hearkened withall 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 goaft and listen. The schooner was by the head, and there could be nowater in the run that would not be forward too. 

Being reassured in respect of the staunchness of the hull, I returned tothe 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 theafter part of the vessel. I supposed she had drifted into a little fieldof broken ice, and that she would go clear presently, and I finishedarming myself for the weather; but the knocking continuing, I went intothe cabin where I heard it very plain, and walked as far as thelazarette hatch, where I stood listening. The noises were a kind ofirregular thumping accompanied by a peculiar grinding sound. In a momentI guessed the truth, rushed on deck, and by the dim light in the air sawthe long tiller mowing to and fro! The beat of the beam seas hadunlocked the frozen bonds of the rudder, and there swung the tiller, asthough like a dog the ship was wagging her tail for joy!

The vessel lay along, rolling so as to bring her starboard rail to alevel with the sea; her main deck was full of water, and the froth of itcombined with the ice that glazed her made her look like a fabric ofmarble 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 heldit in that posture half a minute when to my inexpressible delight Iobserved that she was paying off. Her head fell slowly from the sea; shelurched drunkenly, and some tons of black water rolled over thebulwarks; she reeled consumedly to larboard, and rose squarely andponderously to the height of the surge that was now abaft the beam. In afew moments she was dead before it, the helm amidships, the wind blowingsheer over the stern with half its weight seemingly gone through thevessel running, the tall seas chasing her high stern and floating itupwards, 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 passionof joy that possessed me. Consider the alternations of hope and bitterdespair which had been crowded into that night! We may wonder in timesof security that life should be sweet, and admit the justice of thearguments which several sorts of writers, and the poets even more thanthe parsons, use in defence of death. But when it comes to the pinchhuman nature breaks through. When the old man in Æsop calls upon Deathto relieve him, and the skeleton suddenly rises, the old man changes hismind, and thinks he will go on trying for himself a little longer. Iliked to live, and had no mind for a wet shroud, and this getting theschooner before the wind, along with the old familiar feeling of thedecks reeling and soaring and sinking under my feet, was so cordial anassurance of life that, I tell you, my heart was full to breaking withtransport. 

However, I was still in a situation that made prodigious demands upon mycoolness and wits. The wind was south-west, the schooner was runningnorth-east; the bulk of the icebergs lay on the larboard bow, but therewere others right ahead, and to starboard, where also lay the extremityof 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 mooncurled somewhere among the stars, but she was not to be seen. The cloudsflew dark and hurriedly, and the frosty orbs between were too few tothrow a light. The ocean ahead and around was the duskier for thespectral illumination of the near foam and the glimmer of the ice-coatedship. I tested the vessel with the tiller and found she responded butdully; she would be nimbler under canvas no doubt, but it was enoughthat she should answer her helm at all. Oh, I say, I was mightythankful, most humbly grateful. My heart was never more honest to itsMaker than then. 

She crushed along, pitching pitifully, the dark seas on either handfoaming to her quarters, and her rigging querulous with the wind. Hadthe Frenchman been alive to steer the ship, I might have found strengthenough for my hands in the vigour of my spirit to get the spritsail yardsquare and chop its canvas loose--nay, I might have achieved more thanthat even; but I could not quit the tiller now. I reckoned our speed atabout four miles an hour, as fast as a hearty man could walk. The highstern, narrow as it was, helped us; it was like a mizzen in its way; andall 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 sowe drove along. 

I could just make out the dim pallid loom of the coast of ice upon thestarboard beam, and a blob or two of faintness--most elusive and not tobe fixed by the eye staring straight at them--on the larboard bow. Butit was not long before these blobs, as I term them, grew plainer, andhalf a score swam into the dusk over the bowsprit end, and resembleddull small visionary openings in the dark sky there, or like starsmagnified and dimmed into the merest spectral light by mist. I passedthe first at a distance of a quarter of a mile; it slided byphantasmally, and another stole out right ahead. This I could have gonewidely clear of by a little shift of the helm, but whilst I was in theact of starboarding three or four bergs suddenly showed on the larboardbow, and I saw that unless I had a mind to bring the ship into thetrough again I must keep straight on. So I steered to bring the bergthat was right ahead a little on the bow, with a prayer in my soul thatthere might be no low-lying block in the road for the schooner to splitupon. It went by within a pistol-shot. I was very much accustomed to thesight of ice by this time, yet I found myself glancing at this mass withpretty near as much wonder and awe as if I had never seen such a thingbefore. It was not above thirty feet high, but its shape was exactlythat of a horse's head, the lips sipping the sea, the ears cocked, theneck arching to the water. You would have said it was some vast courserrising out of the deep. The peculiar radiance of ice trembled off itlike a luminous mist into the dusk. The water boiled about its nose, andsuggested a frothing caused by the monster steed's expelled breath. Leta fire have been kindled to glow red where you looked for the eye, andthe illusion would have been frightfully grand. 

The poet speaks of the spirits of the vasty deep; if you want to knowwhat exquisite artists they are, enter the frozen silences of the south. 

Thus threading my way I drove before the seas and wind, striking a pieceof ice but once only, and that a small lump which hit the vessel on thebow and went scraping past, doing the fabric no hurt; but often forcedto slide perilously close by the bergs. I needed twenty instead of onepair of eyes. With ice already on either bow, on a sudden it wouldglimmer 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 highsea you will understand my case; if not, the pen of a Fielding or aDefoe could not put it before you. For what magic has ink to express theroaring of swollen waters bursting into tall pale clouds against themotionless crystal heights, the mystery of the configuration of thefaintness under the swarming shadows of the flying night, the suddenglares of breaking liquid peaks, the palpitating darkness beyond, theplunging and rolling of the ship, making her rigging ring upon the airwith the reeling of her masts, the gradual absorption of the solid massof dim lustre by the gloom astern, the swift spectral dawn of suchanother light over the bows, with many phantasmal outlines slipping byon either hand, like a procession of giant ocean-spectres, travellingwhite and secretly towards the silent dominions of the Pole?

Half this ice came from the island, the rest of it was formed of bergstoo 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 onclinging to the tiller and steering in a most melancholy famishedcondition for another long half-hour before I could satisfy myself thatthe sea was free. 

But now I was nearly dead with the cold. I had stood for five hours atthe helm, during all which time my mind had been wound up to thefiercest tension of anxiety, and my eyes felt as if they were strainedout of their sockets by their searching of the gloom ahead, and naturehaving done her best gave out suddenly, and not to have saved my lifecould I have stood at the tiller for another ten minutes. 

The gear along the rail was so iron-hard that I could not secure thehelm with it, so I softened some lashings by holding them before thefire, and finding the schooner on my return to be coming round tostarboard, I helped her by putting the tiller hard a port and securingit. I then went below, built up the fire, lighted my pipe, and sat downfor warmth and rest. 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

I AM TROUBLED BY THOUGHTS OF THE TREASURE. 

The weight of the wind in the rigging steadied the schooner somewhat, and prevented her from rolling too heavily to starboard, whilst herlist corrected her larboard rolls. So as I sat below she seemed to meto be making tolerably good weather of it. Not much water came aboard;now and again I would hear the clatter of a fall forwards, but atcomfortably long intervals. 

I sat against the dresser with my back upon it, and being dead tiredmust have dropped asleep on a sudden--indeed, before I had half smokedmy pipe out, and I do not believe I gave a thought to my situationbefore I slumbered, so wearied was I. The cold awoke me. The fire wasout and so was the candle in the lanthorn, and I was in coffin darkness. This the tinder-box speedily remedied. I looked at my watch--seveno'clock, as I was a sinner! so that my sleep had lasted between threeand four hours. 

I went on deck and found the night still black upon the sea, the windthe same brisk gale that was blowing when I quitted the helm, the sea noheavier, and the schooner tumbling in true Dutch fashion upon it. Ilooked very earnestly around but could see no signs of ice. There wouldbe daylight presently, so I went below, lighted the fire, and got mybreakfast, and when I returned the sun was up and the sea visible to itsfurthest reaches. 

It was a fine wintry piece; the sea green and running in ridges withfrothing heads, the sky very pale among the dark snow-laden clouds, thesun darting a ray now and again, which was swung into the north by theshadows of the clouds until they extinguished it. Remote in thenorth-west hung the gleam of an iceberg; there was nothing else insight. Yes--something that comforted me exceedingly, though it was notvery many days ago that a like object had heavily scared me--analbatross, a noble bird, sailing on the windward close enough to beshot. The sight of this living thing was inexpressibly cheering; it putinto my head a fancy of ships being at hand, thoughts of help and ofhuman companions. In truth, my imagination was willing to accept it asthe same bird that I had frightened away when in the boat, now returnedto silently reproach me for my treatment of it. Nay, my lonely eye, mysubdued and suffering heart might even have witnessed the good angel ofmy life in that solitary shape of ocean beauty, and have deemed that, though unseen, it had been with me throughout, and was now made visibleto my gaze by the light of hope that had broken into the darkness of myadventure. 

Well, supposing it so, I should not have been the only man who everscared his good angel away and found it faithful afterwards. 

I unlashed the tiller and got the schooner before the wind and steereduntil a little before noon, letting her drive dead before the sea, whichcarried her north-east. Then securing the helm amidships I ran for thequadrant, and whilst waiting for the sun to show himself I observed thatthe vessel held herself very steadily before the wind, which might havebeen owing to her high stern and the great swell of her sides and herround bottom; but be the cause what it might, she ran as fairly with herhelm amidships as if I had been at the tiller to check her, a mostfortunate condition of my navigation, for it privileged me to get aboutother work, whilst, at the same time, every hour was conveying me nearerto the track of ships and further from the bitter regions of the south. 

I got an observation and made out that the vessel had driven aboutfifteen leagues during the night. She must do better than that, thoughtI; and when I had eaten some dinner I took a chopper, and, going on tothe forecastle, lay out upon the bowsprit, and after beating thespritsail-yard block clear of the ice, cut away the gaskets thatconfined the sail to the yard, heartily beating the canvas, that waslike iron, till a clew of it fell. I then came in and braced the yardsquare, and the wind, presently catching the exposed part of the sail, blew more of it out, and yet more, until there was a good surfaceshowing; then to a sudden hard blast of wind the whole sail flew openwith a mighty crackling, as though indeed it was formed of ice; but torender it useful I had to haul the sheets aft, which I could not managewithout the help of the tackles we had used in slinging the powder overthe side; so that, what with one hindrance and another, the setting ofthat sail took me an hour and a half. 

But had it occupied me all day it would have been worth doing. Triflingas it was as a cloth, its effect upon the schooner was like that of acordial upon a fainting man. It was not that she sensibly showed nimblerheels to it; its lifting tendency enabled her to ride the under-runningseas more buoyantly, and if it increased her speed by half a knot anhour it was worth a million to me, whose business it was to take theutmost possible advantage of the southerly gale. 

I returned to the helm, warm with the exercise, and gazed forward not alittle proud of my work. Though the sail was eight-and-forty years oldand perhaps older, it offered as tough and stout a surface to the windas if it was fresh from the sailmaker's hands, so great are thepreserving qualities of ice. I looked wistfully at the topsail, but onreflecting that if it should come on to blow hard enough to compel me toheave the brig to she would never hull with that canvas abroad, Iresolved to let it lie, for I could cut away the spritsail if thenecessity arose and not greatly regret its loss; but to lose the topsailwould be a serious matter, though if I did not cut it adrift it mightcarry away the mast for me; so, as I say, I would not meddle with it. 

Finding that the ship continued to steer herself very well, and thebetter for the spritsail, I thought I would get the body of the oldFrenchman overboard and so obtain a clear hold for myself so far ascorpses went. I carried the lanthorn into the forecastle, but when Ipulled the hammock off him I confess it was not without a stupid fearthat I should find him alive. Recollection of his astounding vitalityfound something imperishable in that ugly anatomy, and though he laybefore me as dead and cold as stone, I yet had a fancy that the seeds oflife were still in him, that 'twas only the current of his being thathad frozen, that if I were to thaw him afresh he might recover, andthat if I buried him I should actually be despatching him. 

But though these fancies possessed, they did not control me. I took hiswatch and whatever else he had in that way, carried him on deck anddropped him over the side, using as little ceremony as he had employedin the disposal of his shipmates, but affected by very differentemotions; for there was not only the idea that the vital spark was stillin him; I could not but handle with awe the most mysterious corpse theeye had ever viewed, one who had lived through a stupor or death-sleep, for eight-and-forty years, in whom in a few hours Time had compressedthe wizardry he stretches in others over half a century; who in a nighthad shrunk from the aspect of his prime into the lean, puckered, bleared-eyed, deaf, and tottering expression of a hundred years. 

But now he was gone! The bubbles which rose to the plunge of his bodywere his epitaph; had they risen blood-red they would have bettersymbolized his life. The albatross stooped to the spot where he hadvanished with a hoarse salt scream like the laugh of a delirious woman, and the wind, freshening momentarily in a squall, made one think of thespirit of Nature as eager to purify the air of heaven from the taint ofthe dead pirate's passage from the bulwarks to the water's surface. 

All that day and through the night that followed the schooner drove, rolling and plunging before the seas, into the north-east, to thepulling of the spritsail. I made several excursions into the fore-hold, but never could hear the sound of water in the vessel. Her sides inplaces were still sheathed in ice, but this crystal armour was graduallydropping off her to the working of her frame in the seas, so that, sinceshe was proving herself tight, it was certain her staunchness owednothing to the glassy plating. I had seen some strange craft in my day;but nothing to beat the appearance this old tub of a hooker submitted tomy gaze as I viewed her from the helm. How so uncouth a structure, withher tall stern, flairing bows, fat buttocks, sloping masts, forecastle-well, and massive head-timbers ever managed to pursue andoverhaul a chase was only to be unriddled by supposing all that she tookto be more unwieldy and clumsy than herself. What would a pirate ofthese days, in his clean-lined polacca or arrowy schooner, have thoughtof such an instrument as this for the practice of his pretty trade? Theice aloft still held for her spars and rigging the resemblance of glass, and to every sunbeam that flashed upon her from between the sweepingclouds she would sparkle out into many-coloured twinklings, marvellouslydelicate in colour, and changing their tints twenty times over in abreath through the swiftness of the reeling of the spars. 

I should but fatigue you to follow the several little stories of thesehours one by one; how I got my food, snatched at sleep, stood at thehelm, gazed around the sea-line and the like. Just before sundown I sawa large iceberg in the north, two leagues distant; no others were insight, but one was enough to make me uneasy, and I spent a very troublednight, repeatedly coming on deck to look about me. The schooner steeredherself as if a man stood at the helm. The spritsail further helped herin this, for, if the curl of a sea under her forefoot brought her tolarboard or starboard, the sail forced her back again. Still, it was avery surprising happy quality in her, the next best thing to my having ashipmate, and a wonderful relief to me who must otherwise have broughther to, under a lashed helm, every time I had occasion to leave thedeck. 

The seaworthiness of the craft, coupled with the reasonable assurance ofpresently falling in with a ship, rendered me so far easy in my mind asto enable me to think very frequently of the treasure and how I was tosecure it. If I fell in with an enemy's cruiser or a privateer I mustexpect to be stripped. This would be the fortune of war, and I must takemy chance. My concern did not lie that way; how was I to protect thisproperty, that was justly mine, against my own countrymen, suppose I hadthe good fortune to carry the schooner safely into English waters? I hada brother-in-law, Jeremiah Mason, Esq. , a Turkey merchant in a small wayof business, whose office was in the City of London, and, if I couldmanage to convey the treasure secretly to him, he would, I knew, find mea handsome account in his settlement of this affair. But it wasimpossible to strike out a plan. I must wait and attend the course ofevents. Yet riches being things which fever the coldest imaginations, Icould not look ahead without excitement and irritability of fancy, Ishould reckon it a hard fate indeed after my cruel experiences, myfreeing the vessel from the ice, my sailing her through some thousand ofmiles of perilous seas, and arriving finally in safety, to bedispossessed of what was strictly mine--as much mine as if I had fishedit up from the bottom of the sea, where it must otherwise have lain tillthe crack of doom. 

I remember that, among other ideas, it entered my head to tell themaster of the first ship I met, if she were British, the whole story ofmy adventure, to acquaint him with the treasure, to offer to tranship itand myself to his vessel and abandon the schooner, and to propose ahandsome reward for his offices. But I could not bring my mind to trustany stranger with so great a secret. The mere circumstance of thetreasure not being mine, in the sense of my having earned it, of itsbeing piratical plunder, and as much one's as another's, might dull theedge even of a fair-dealing conscience and expose me to the machinationsof a heavily tempted mind. 

Therefore, though I had no plan, I was resolved at all hazards to stickto the schooner, and, with a view to providing against the curiosity orrummaging of any persons who should come aboard I fell to the followingwork after getting my breakfast. I hung lanthorns in the run andhatchways and cabin to enable me to pass easily to and fro; I thenemptied one of the chests in my cabin and carried it to where thetreasure was. The chest I filled nearly three-parts full with money, jewellery, &c. , which sank the contents of the other chests to the depthI wanted. I then fetched a quantity of small arms, such as pistols andhangers and cutlasses, and filled up the chests with them, first placinga thickness of canvas over the money and jewellery, that no glittermight show through. To improve the deception I brought another chest tothe run, and wholly filled it with cutlasses, powder-horns, pistols, andthe like, and so fixed it that it must be the first to come to hand. Mycunning amounted to this: that, suppose the run to be rummaged, thecontents of the first chest were sure to be turned out, but, on theother chests being opened, and what they appeared to contain observed, it was as likely as not that the rummagers would be satisfied they werearms-chests, and quit meddling with them. 

Herenow might I indulge in a string of reflections on the troubles andanxieties which money brings, quote from Juvenal and other poets, andhold myself up to your merriment by a contemptuous exhibition of myself, a lonely sailor, labouring to conceal his gold from imaginary knaves, toiling in the dark depth of the vessel, and never heeding that, evenwhilst he so worked, his ship might split upon some half-tide rock ofice, and founder with him and his treasure too, and so on, and so on. But the fact is I was not a fool. Here was money enough to set me up asa fine gentleman for life, and I meant to save it and keep it too, if Icould. A man on his deathbed, a man in such peril that his end iscertain, can afford to be sentimental. He is going where money is drossindeed, and he is in a posture when to moralize upon human greed and thevanity of wishes and riches becomes him. But would not a man whosehealth is hearty, and who hopes to save his life, be worse off than asheep in the matter of brains not to keep a firm grip of Fortune's handwhen she extended it? I know I was very well pleased with my morning'swork when I had accomplished it, and had no mind to qualify mysatisfaction by melancholy and romantic musings on my condition and theuncertainty of the future. This was possibly owing to the fineness ofthe weather; a heavy black gale from the north would doubtless havegiven a very different turn to my humours. 

The wind at dawn had weakened and come into the west. There was a strongswell--indeed there always is in this ocean--but the seas ran small. Thesky looked like marble, with its broad spreadings of high white cloudsand the veins of blue sky between. I wished to make all the northingthat was possible, but there was nothing to be done in that way with thespritsail alone. Had not the capstan been frozen I should have tried toget the mainsail upon the ship, but without the aid of machinery I washelpless. So, with helm amidships, the schooner drove languidly alongwith her head due east, lifting as ponderously as a line-of-battle shipto the floating launches of the high swell, and the albatross hung assteadfastly in the wake of my lonely ocean path as though it had beensome messenger sent by God to watch me into safety. 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

I ENCOUNTER A WHALER. 

I had been six days and nights at sea, and the morning of the seventhday had come. With the exception of one day of strong south-westerlywinds, which ran me something to the northwards, the weather had beenfine, bitterly cold indeed, but bright and clear. In this time I had runa distance of about six hundred and fifty miles to the east, and with noother cloths upon the schooner than her spritsail. 

I confess, as the hours passed away and nothing hove into view, I grewdispirited and restless; but, on the other hand, I was comforted by thebright weather and the favourable winds, and particularly by thevessel's steering herself, which enabled me to get rest, to keep myselfwarm with the fire, and to dress my food, yet ever pushing onwards(however slowly) into the navigated regions of this sea. 

On the morning of the seventh day I came on deck, having slept sincefour o'clock. The wind was icy keen, pretty brisk, about west by south;the movement in the sea was from the south, and rolled very grandly;there was a fog that way, too, that hid the horizon, bringing theocean-line to within a league of the schooner; but the other quartersswept in a dark, clear, blue line against the sky, and there was such aclarity of atmosphere as made the distances appear infinite. 

I went below and lighted the fire and got my breakfast, all veryleisurely, and when I was done I sat down and smoked a pipe. It was sokeen on deck that I had no mind to leave the fire, and, as all was well, I lounged through the best part of two hours in the cook-house, when, thinking it was now time to take another survey of the scene I went ondeck. 

On looking over the larboard bulwark rail, the first thing I saw was aship about two miles off. She was on the larboard tack, under courses, topsails, and main-topgallant sail, heading as if to cross my bows. Thesunshine made her canvas look as white as snow against the skirts of thebody of vapour that had trailed a little to leeward of her, and herblack hull flashed as though she discharged a broadside every time sherose wet to the northern glory out of the hollow of the swell with acurl of silver at her cutwater. 

My heart came into my throat; I seemed not to breathe; not to have savedmy life could I have uttered a cry, so amazed and transported was I bythis unexpected apparition. I stared like one in a dream, and my headfelt as if all the blood in my body had surged into it. But then, all ona sudden, there happened a revulsion of feeling. Suppose she shouldprove a privateer--a French war-vessel--of a nation hostile to my own?Thought so wrought in me that I trembled like an idiot in a fright. Thetelescope was too weak to resolve her, I could do better with my eyes;and I stood at the bulwarks gazing and gazing as if she were the spectreship of the Scandinavian legend. 

There were flags below and I could have hoisted a signal of distress:but to what purpose? If the appearance of the schooner did notsufficiently illustrate her condition, there was certainly no virtue inthe language and declarations of bunting to exceed her own muteassurance. I watched her with a passion of anxiety, never doubting herintention to speak to me, at all events to draw close and look at me, wholly concerning myself with her character. The swell made us bothdance, and the blue brows of the rollers would often hide her to theheight of her rails; but we were closing each other middling fast shetravelling at seven and I at four miles in the hour, and presently Icould see that she carried a number of boats. 

A whaler, thought I; and after a little I was sure of it by perceivingthe rings over her top-gallant rigging for the look-out to stand in. 

On being convinced of this, I ran below for a shawl that was in mycabin, and, jumping on to the bulwarks, stood flourishing it for someminutes to let them know that there was a man aboard. She luffed todeaden her way, that I might swim close, and as we approached each otherI observed a crowd of heads forward looking at me, and several men aft, all staring intently. 

A man scrambled on to the rail, and with an arm clasping a backstayhailed me:

"Schooner ahoy!" he bawled, with a strong nasal twang in his cry. "Whatship's that?"

"The _Boca del Dragon_, " I shouted back. 

"Where are you from, and where are you bound to?"

"I have been locked up in the ice, " I cried, "and am in want of help. What ship are you?"

"The _Susan Tucker_, whaler, of New Bedford, twenty-seven months out, "he returned. "Where in creation got you that hooker?"

"I'm the only man aboard, " I cried, "and have no boat. Send to me, inthe name of God, and let the master come!"

He waved his hand, bawling, "Put your helm down--you're forging ahead!"and so saying, dismounted. 

I immediately cast the tiller adrift, put it hard over, and secured it, then jumped on to the bulwarks again to watch them. She was Yankeebeyond doubt; I had rather met my own countrymen; but, next to aBritish, I would have chosen an American ship to meet. Somehow, despitethe Frenchman, I felt to have been alone throughout my adventure; and sosore was the effect of that solitude upon my spirits that it seemedtwenty years since I had seen a ship, and since I had held commune withmy own species. I was terribly agitated, and shook in every limb. Lifemust have been precious always; but never before had it appeared soprecious as now, whilst I gazed at that homely ship, with hermain-topsail to the mast, swinging stately upon the swell, the faces ofthe seamen plain, the smoke of her galley-fire breaking from thechimney, the sounds of creaking blocks and groaning parrels stealingfrom her. Such a fountain of joy broke out of my heart that my wholebeing was flooded with it, and had that mood lasted I believe I shouldhave exposed the treasure in the run, and invited all the men of thewhaler to share in it with me. 

They stared fixedly; little wonder that they should be astounded by suchan appearance as my ship exhibited. One of the several boats which hungat her davits was lowered, the oars flashed, and presently she was nearenough to be hit with a biscuit; but when there the master, as Isupposed him to be, who was steering, sung out, "'Vast rowing!" the boatcame to a stand, and her people to a man stared at me with their chinsupon their shoulders as if I had been a fiend. It was plain as apikestaff that they were frightened, and that the superstitions of theforecastle were hard at work in them whilst they viewed me. They lookeda queer company: two were negroes, the others pale-faced bearded men, wrapped up in clothes to the aspect of scarecrows. The fellow whosteered had a face as long as a wet hammock, and it was lengthened yetto the eye by a beard like a goat's hanging at the extremity of hischin. 

He stood up--a tall, lank figure, with legs like a pair ofcompasses--and hailed me afresh, but the high swell, regular as theswing of a pendulum, interposed its brow between him and me, so that atone moment he was a sharply-lined figure against the sky of the horizon, and the next he and his boat and crew were sheer gone out of sight, andthis made an exchange of sentences slow and troublesome. 

"Say, master, " he sung out, "what d'ye say the schooner's name is?"

"The _Boca del Dragon_, " I replied. 

"And who are _you_, matey?"

"An English sailor who has been cast away on an island of ice, " Ianswered, talking very shortly that the replies might follow thequestions before the swell sank him. 

"Ay, ay, " says he, "that's very well; but _when_ was you cast away, bully?"

I gave him the date. 

"That's not a month ago, " cried he. 

"It's long enough, whatever the time, " said I. 

Here the crew fell a-talking, turning from one another to stare at me, and the negroes' eyes showed as big as saucers in the dismay of theirregard. 

"See, here, master, " sung out the long man, "if you han't been cast awaymore than a month, how come you clothed as men went dressed a centurysin', hey?"

The reason of their misgivings flashed upon me. It was not so much theschooner as my appearance. The truth was, my clothes having been wetted, I had ever since been wearing such thick garments as I met with in thecabin, keeping my legs warm with jackboots, and I had become so used tothe garb that I forgot I had it on. You will judge, then, that I musthave presented a figure very nicely calculated to excite the wonder andapprehension of a body of men whose superstitious instincts were alreadysufficiently fluttered by the appearance of the schooner, when I tellyou that, in addition to the jackboots and a great fur cap, my costumewas formed of a red plush waistcoat laced with silver, purple breeches, a coat of frieze with yellow braiding and huge cuffs, and the cloak thatI had taken from the body of Mendoza. 

"Captain, " cried I, "if so be you are the captain, in the name of Godand humanity come aboard, sir. " Here I had to wait till he reappeared. "My story is an extraordinary one. You have nothing to fear. I am aplain English sailor; my ship was the _Laughing Mary_, bound in ballastfrom Callao to the Cape. " Here I had to wait again. "Pray, sir, comeaboard. There is nothing to fear. I am alone--in grievous distress, andin want of help. Pray come, sir!"

There was so little of the goblin in this appeal that it resolved him. The crew hung in the wind, but he addressed them peremptorily. I heardhim damn them for a set of curs, and tell them that if they put himaboard they might lie off till he was ready to return, where they wouldbe safe, as the devil could not swim; and presently they buckled totheir oars again and the boat came alongside. The long man, watching hischance, sprang with great agility into the chains, and stepped on deck. I ran up to him and seized his hand with both mine. 

"Sir, " cried I, speaking with difficulty, so great was the tumult of myspirits and the joy and gratitude that swelled my heart, "I thank you athousand times over for this visit. I am in the most helpless conditionthat can be imagined. I am not astonished that you should have beenstartled by the appearance of this vessel and by the figure I make inthese clothes, but, sir, you will be much more amazed when you haveheard my story. "

He eyed me steadfastly, examining me very earnestly from my boots to mycap, and then cast a glance around him before he made any reply to myaddress. He had the gauntness, sallowness of complexion, anddeliberateness of manner peculiar to the people of New England. Andthough he was a very ugly, lank, uncouth man, I protest he was as fairin my sight as if he had been the ambrosial angel described by Milton. 

"Well, cook my gizzard, " he exclaimed presently, through his nose, andafter another good look at me and along the decks and up aloft, "if thisain't mi-raculous, tew. Durned if we didn't take this hooker for someghost ship riz from the sea, in charge of a merman rigged out to fit herage. Y' are all alone, air you?"

"All alone, " said I. 

"Broach me every barrel aboard if ever I see sich a vessel, " he cried, his astonishment rising with the searching glances he directed aloft andalow. "How old be she?"

"She was cast away in seventeen hundred and fifty-three, " said I. 

"Well, I'm durned. She's froze hard, sirree; I reckon she'll want a hotsun to thaw her. Split me, mister, if she ain't worth sailing home as ashow-box. "

I interrupted his ejaculations by asking him to step below, where wecould sit warm whilst I related my story, and I asked him to invite hisboat's crew into the cabin that I might regale them with a bowl of suchliquor as I ventured to say had never passed their lips in this life. Onthis he went to the side, and, hailing the men, ordered all but one tostep aboard and drink to the health of the lonesome sailor they had comeacross. The word "drink" acted like a charm; they instantly hauled uponthe painter and brought the boat to the chains and tumbled over theside, one of the negroes remaining in her. They fell together in a body, and surveyed me and the ship with a hundred marks of astonishment. 

"My lads, " said I, "my rig is a strange one, but I'll explain allshortly. The clothes I was cast away in are below, and I'll show youthem. I'm no spectre, but as real as you; though I have gone through somuch that, if I am not a ghost, it is no fault of old ocean, but owingto the mercy of God. My name is Paul Rodney, and I'm a native of London. You, sir, " says I, addressing the long man, "are, I presume, the masterof the _Susan Tucker_?"

"At your sarvice--Josiah Tucker is my name, and that ship is my wifeSusan. "

"Captain Tucker, and you, men, will you please step below, " says I. "Theweather promises fair; I have much to tell, and there is that in thecabin which will give you patience to hear me. "

I descended the companion-stairs, and they all followed, making theinterior that had been so long silent ring with their heavy tread, whilst from time to time a gruff, hoarse whisper broke from one of them. But superstition lay strong upon their imagination, and they were awedand quiet. The daylight came down the hatch, but for all that the cabinwas darksome. 

I waited till the last man had entered, and then said, "Before we settledown to a bowl and a yarn, captain, I should like to show you this ship. It'll save me a deal of description and explanation if you will bepleased to take a view. "

"Lead on, mister, " said he; "but we shall have to snap our eyelids andraise fire in that way, for durned if I, for one, can see in the dark. "

I fetched three or four lanthorns, and, lighting the candles, distributed them among the men, and then, in a procession, headed by thecaptain and me, we made the rounds. I had half-cleared the arms-room, but there were weapons enough left, and they stared at them like yokelsin a booth. I showed them the cook-house and the forecastle, where thedeck was still littered with clothes, and chests, and hammocks; and, after carrying them aft to the cabins, gave them a sight of the hold. Inever saw men more amazed. They filled the vessel with theirexclamations. They never offered to touch anything, being too much awed, but stepped about with their heads uncovered, as quietly as they could, as though they had been in a crypt, and the influence of strange andterrifying memorials was upon them. I also showed them the clothes I hadcome away from the _Laughing Mary_ in; and, that I might submit such anaspect to them as should touch their sympathies, I whipped off the cloakand put on my own pilot-cloth coat. 

There being nothing more to see, I led them to the cook-room, and therebrewed a great hearty bowl of brandy-punch, which I seasoned with lemon, sugar, and spices into as relishable a draught as my knowledge in thatway could compass, and, giving every man a pannikin, bade him dip andwelcome, myself first drinking to them with a brief speech, yet not sobrief but that I broke down towards the close of it, and ended with adry sob or two. 

They would have been unworthy their country and their calling not tohave been touched by my natural manifestation of emotion; besides, thebrandy was an incomparably fine spirit, and the very perfume of thesteaming bowl was sufficient to stimulate the kindly qualities ofsailors who had been locked up for months in a greasy old ship, with nodiviner smells about than the stink of the try-works. The captain, standing up, called upon his men to drink to me, promising me that hewas very glad to have fallen in with my schooner, and then, looking atthe others, made a sign, whereupon they all fixed their eyes upon me anddrank as one man, every one emptying his pot and inverting it as aproof, and fetching a rousing sigh of satisfaction. 

This ceremony ended, I began my story, beginning with the loss of the_Laughing Mary_, and proceeding step by step. I told them of the deadbody of Mendoza, but said nothing about the Frenchman and the mate, andthe Portugal boatswain, lest I should make them afraid of the vessel, and so get no help to work her. As to acquainting them with my recoveryof Tassard, after his stupor of eight-and-forty years, I should havebeen mute on that head in any case, for so extraordinary a relationcould, from such people, have earned me but one of two opinions: eitherthat I was mad and believed in an impossibility, or that I was a rogueand dealt in magic, and to be vehemently shunned. Yet there were wondersenough in my story without this, and I recited it to a runningcommentary of all sorts of queer Yankee exclamations. 

There were seven seamen and the captain and I made nine, and we prettynearly filled the cook-room. 'Twas a scene to be handled by a Dutchbrush. We were a shaggy company, in several kinds of rude attire, andthe crimson light of the furnace, whose playing flames darted shadowsthrough the steady light of the lanthorns, caused us to appear verywild. The mariners' eyes gleamed redly as their glances rove round theplace, and, had you come suddenly among us, I believe you would havethought this band of pale, fire-touched, hairy men, with the one ebonvisage among them, rendered the vessel a vast deal more ghostly thanever she could have shown when sailing along with me alone on board. 

They were a good deal puzzled when I told them of the mines I had madeand sprung in the ice. They reckoned the notion fine, but could notconceive how I had, single-handed, broken out the powder-barrels, gotthem over the side, and fixed them. 

"Why, " said I, "'twas slow, heavy work, of course; but a man who laboursfor his life will do marvellous things. It is like the jump of a huntedstag. "

"True for you, " says the captain. "A swim of two miles spends me inpleasurin'; but I've swum eight mile to save my life, and stranded freshas a new-hooked cod. What's your intentions, sir?"

"To sail the schooner home, " said I, "if I can get help. She's too goodto abandon. She'll fetch money in England. "

"Ay, as a show. "

"Yes, and as a coalman. Rig her modernly, and carry your forecastle deckinto the head, captain, and she's a brave ship, fit for a Baltimoreeye. "

He stroked down the hair upon his chin. 

"Dip, captain, dip, my lads; there's enough of this to drown ye in thehold, " said I, pointing to the bowl. "Come, this is a happy meeting forme; let it be a merry one. Captain, I drink to the _Susan Tucker_. "

"Sir, your servant. Here's to your sweetheart, be she wife or maid. Bill, jump on deck and take a look round. See to the boat. "

One of the men went out. 

"Captain, " said I, "you are a full ship?"

"That's so. "

"Bound home?"

"Right away. "

"You have men enough and to spare. Lend me three of your hands to helpme to the Thames, and I'll repay you thus; there should be near ahundred tons of wine and brandy, of exquisite vintage, and choice withage beyond language in the hold. Take what you will of that freight;there'll be ten times the value of your lay in your pickings, modest asyou may prove. Help yourself to the clothes in the cabin and forecastle;they will turn to account. For the men you will spare, and who willvolunteer to help me, this will be my undertaking: the ship and all thatis in her to be sold on her arrival, and the proceeds equally divided. Shall we call it a thousand pounds apiece? Captain, she's well found:her inventory would make a list as long as you; I'd name a bigger sum, but here she is, you shall overhaul her hold and judge for yourself. "

I watched him anxiously. No man spoke, but every eye was upon him. Hesat pulling down the hair on his chin, then, jumping up on a sudden andextending his hand, he cried, "Shake! it's a bargain, if the men 'lljine. "

"I'll jine!" exclaimed a man. 

There was a pause. 

"And me, " said the negro. 

I was glad of this, and looked earnestly at the others. 

"Is she tight?" said a man. 

"As a bottle, " said I. 

They fell silent again. 

"Joe Wilkinson and Washington Cromwell--them two jines, " said thecaptain. "Bullies, he wants a third. Don't speak all together. "

The man named "Bill" at this moment returned to the cook-room, andreported all well above. My offer was repeated to him, but he shook hishead. 

"This is the Horn, mates, " said he. "There's a deal o' water 'tween thisand the Thames. How do she sail?--no man knows. "

"I want none but willing men, " said I. "Americans make as good sailorsas the English. What an English seaman can face any of you can. There isanother negro in the boat. Will you let him step aboard, captain? He mayjoin. "

A man was sent to take his place. Presently he arrived, and I gave him acup of punch. 

"'Splain the business to him, sir, " said the captain, filling hispannikin; "his name's Billy Pitt. "

I did so; and when I told him that Washington Cromwell had offered, heinstantly said, "All right, massa, I'll be ob yah. "

This was exactly what I wanted, and had there been a third negro I'dhave preferred him to the white man. 

"But how are you going to navigate this craft home with three men?" saidthe man "Bill" to me. 

"There'll be four; we shall do. The fewer the more dollars, hey, Wilkinson?"

He grinned, and Cromwell broke into a ventral laugh. 

They seemed very well satisfied, and so was I. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

I STRIKE A BARGAIN WITH THE YANKEE. 

The captain put his cup down; the bowl was empty; I offered to brewanother jorum, but he thanked me and said no, adding significantly thathe would have no more _here_, by which he meant that he would brew forhimself in his own ship anon. The drink had made him cheerful andgood-natured. He recommended that we should go on deck and set abouttranshipping whilst the weather held, for he was an old hand in theseseas and never trusted the sky longer than a quarter of an hour. 

"This here list, " says he, "wants remedying and that'll follow oureasin' of the hold. "

"Yes, " said I, "and I should be mighty thankful if some of your menwould see all clear aloft for me, that we might start with runningrigging that will travel, capstans that'll revolve, and sails that'llspread. "

"Oh, we'll manage that for you, " said he. "Tru-ly, she's been bad froze, very bad froze. Durned if ever I see a worse freeze. "

So saying he called to "Bill, " who seemed the principal man of theboat's crew, and gave him some directions, and immediately afterwardsall the men entered the boat and rowed away to the ship. 

Whilst they were absent I carried the captain into the hold and left himto overhaul it. I told him that all the spirits, provisions, and thelike were in the hold and lazarette, which was true enough, wanting tokeep him out of the run, though, thanks to the precaution I had taken, Iwas in no fear even if he should penetrate so deep aft. Before he cameout five-and-twenty stout fellows arrived in four boats from the ship, and when we went on deck, we found them going the rounds of the vessel, scraping the guns to get a view of them, peering down the companion, overhauling the forecastle-well, as I call the hollow beyond theforecastle, and staring aloft with their faces full of grinning wonder. The captain sang out to them and they all mustered aft. 

"Now, lads, " said he, "there's a big job before you--a big job for CapeHorn, I mean; and you'll have to slip through it as if you was grease. When done there'll be a carouse, and I'll warrant ye all such a sup thatthe most romantic among ye'll never cast another pining thought in thedirection o' your mother's milk. "

Having delivered this preface, he divided the men into two gangs; one, under the boatswain, to attend to the rigging, clear the canvas of theice, get the pumps and the capstans to work, and see all ready forgetting sail on the schooner; the other, under the second mate, to gettackles aloft and break out the cargo, taking care to trim ship whilstso doing. 

They fell to their several jobs with a will. 'Tis the habit of ourcountrymen to sneer at the Americans as sailors, affirming that if everthey win a battle at sea it is by the help of British renegades. Butthis I protest; after witnessing the smartness of those Yankee whalemen, I would sooner charge the English than the Americans with lubberlinesscame the nautical merits of the two nations ever before me to decideupon. They had the hatches open, tackles aloft, and men at work belowwhilst the mariners of other countries would have been standing lookingon and "jawing" upon the course to be taken. Some overran the fabricaloft, clearing, cutting away, pounding, making the ice fly in storms;others sweated the capstans till they clanked; others fell to the pumps, working with hammers and kettles of boiling water. The wondrous oldschooner was never busier, no, not in the heyday of her flag, when herguns were blazing and her people yelling. 

I doubt whether even a man-of-war could have given this work thedespatch the whaler furnished. She had eight boats and sixty men, andevery boat was afloat and alongside us ready to carry what she could tothe ship. I wished to help, but the captain would not let me do so; hekept me walking and talking, asking me scores of questions about theschooner, and all so shrewd that, without appearing reserved, Iprofessed to know little. The great show of clothes puzzled him. He alsoasked if the crucifix in the cabin was silver. I said I believed it was, fetched it, and asked him to accept it, saying if he would give me thesmallest of his boats for it I should be very much obliged. 

"Oh, yes, " says he, "you can have a boat. The men would not sail withyou without a boat;" and after weighing the crucifix without the leastexhibition of veneration in his manner, he put it in his pocket, sayinghe knew a man who would give him a couple of hundred dollars for thething on his telling him that the Pope had blessed it. 

"Ay, but, " says I, "how do you know the Pope has blessed it?"

"Then _I_'ll bless it, " cried he; "why, am I a cold Johnny-cake that myblessing ain't as good as another man's?"

I was glad I had hidden the black flag; I mean, that I had stowed itaway in the cabin of the Frenchman after he was dead. The Yankee neededbut the sight to make his suspicions of the original character of the_Boca del Dragon_ flame up; and you may suppose that I was exceedinglyanxious he should not be sure that the schooner had been a pirate, lesthe might have been tempted to scrutinize her rather more closely thanwould have been agreeable to me. 

He asked me if I had met with any money in her: and I answered evasivelythat in searching the dead man on the rocks, I had discovered a fewpieces in his pocket, but that I had left them, being much toomelancholy and convinced of my approaching end to meddle with such auseless commodity. From time to time he would quit me to go to the hatchand sing down orders to the second mate in the hold. How many casks hemeant to take I did not know; when he asked me how much I would give, Ireplied: "Leave me enough to keep me ballasted; that will satisfy me. "

The high swell demanded caution, but they managed wonderfully well. Theynever swung more than three casks into a boat, and with this cargo shewould row away to the ship that lay hove-to close, and the men in herhoisted the casks aboard. 

The wind remained light till half-past three; it then freshened a bit. Though all hands had knocked off at noon to get dinner--and a fine mealI gave them of ham, tongue, beef, biscuits, wine, and brandy--byhalf-past three they had eased the hold of ten boatloads of casks, besides clearing out the whole of the clothes from the forecastle alongwith as much of the bedding as we did not require; and I began to thinkthat my Yankee intended to leave me a clean ship to carry home, though Idurst not remonstrate. Yet was my turn handsomely served too. The pumpshad been cleared and tried, and found to work well, and--which was gladnews to me--the well found dry. The running rigging had been overhauled, and it travelled handsomely. The sails had been loosed and hoisted andlowered again, and the canvas found in good condition. The jibboom hadbeen run out, and the stays set up. The stock of fresh water had beenexamined and found plentiful, and the casks in the head brought out andsecured on the main deck. In short, the American boatswain had workedwith the judgment and care of a master-rigger, of a great artist inropes, booms, and sails, and the schooner was left to my hands as fitfor any navigation as the whaler that rose and fell on our quarter. 

But, as I have said, at half-past three in the afternoon, the breezebegan to sit in dark curls upon the water, and there was evidence enoughin the haziness in the west, and in the loom of the shoulders of vapourin the dark-blue obscure there, to warrant a sackful for this capfulpresently. 

"I reckon, " says the captain to me, after looking into the west, "thatwe'd best knock off now. There's snow and wind yonder, and we'd bettersee all snug while there's time. "

He called to one of the men to tell the second mate to come up frombelow and get the hatches on, and bringing me to the rail, he pointed toa boat, and asked if that would do? I said yes, and thanked him heartilyfor the gift, which was handsome, I must say, the boat being a very goodone, though, to be sure, he had got many times its value out of theschooner; and a party of men were forthwith told off to get the boathoisted and stowed. 

"Now, Mr. Rodney, " said the captain, standing in the gangway, "how can Iserve you further?"

"Sir, " said I, "you are very obliging. Two things I stand sadly in needof: a chart of these waters and a chronometer. "

"I'll send you a chart, " said he, "that'll carry you as high as SanRoque; but I've only got one chronometer, sir, and can't spare him. "

"Well then, " said I, "if, when you get aboard, you'll give me the timeby your chronometer, I'll set my watch by it; but I'll thank you verymuch for the chart. The tracings below are as shapeless as the moonsetting in a fog. "

"You shall have the chart, " said he, and then called to Wilkinson andthe two negroes. 

"Lads, " said he, "you're quite content, I hope?"

They answered "Yes. "

"You've all three a claim upon me for the amount of what's owing ye, "said he, "and when you turn up at New Bedford you shall have it--that'ssquare. I see fifteen hundred dollars a man on this job, if so be as yedon't broach too thirstily as you go along. Mr. Rodney, Joe here's asteady, 'spectable man, and'll make you a good mate. Cromwell and BillyPitt are black only in their hides; all else's as good as white. "

He then shook me by the hand, and, calling a farewell to Wilkinson andthe negroes, scrambled into the chains and dropped into his boat, veryhighly satisfied, I make no doubt, with the business he had done thatday. 

A boat's crew were left behind to help us to make sail. But the weatherlooking somewhat wild in the west with the red light of the sun amongthe clouds there, and the dark heave of the swell running into a sicklycrimson under the sun and then glowing out dusky again, I got them totreble-reef the mainsail and hoist it, and then thanking them, advisedthem to be off. Then, putting Cromwell to the tiller, I went forwardwith the others and set the topsail and forestaysail (the spritsaillying furled), which would be show enough of canvas till I saw what theweather was to be like. I kept the topsail aback, waiting for a boat toarrive with my chart, and in a few minutes the boat we had cheeredreturned with what I wanted. 

Meanwhile they were shortening sail on the whaler, and though she was nobeauty, yet, I tell you, I found her as picturesque as any ship I hadever beheld as she lay with her main-topgallant-sail clewed up, hertopsail yards on the caps, and the heads of men knotting the reef-pointsshowing black over the white cloths, her hull floating up out of thehollow and flinging a wet orange gleam to the west, a tumble of creamyfoam about her to her rolling, shadows like the passage of phantom handshurrying over her sails to the swaying of her masts, and the swellingsea darkling from her into the east. 

I hollowed my hands, and, hailing the captain, who was on thequarter-deck, asked him for the time by his chronometer. He flourishedhis arm and disappeared and, presently returning, shouted to know if Iwas ready. I put the key in my watch and answered yes, and then he gaveme the time. My watch, though antique, was a noble piece of mechanism, and I have little doubt, as trustworthy as his chronometer. But I wascareful to let it lie snug in my hand. I did not want the negro at thetiller nor the others to see it. They would wonder that so fine ajewelled piece as this should be in the possession of the second mate ofa little brig, and it was my business to manage that they never shouldhave cause to wonder at anything in that way. 

The dusk of the evening came quick out of the east, and the windfreshened with a long cry in our rigging as if the eastern darkness wasa foe it was rushing out of the west to meet. I brought the schoonernorth-north-east by my compass and watched her behaviour anxiously. Theswell was on the quarter, and the wind and sea a trifle abaft thelarboard beam; she leaned a little to the weight of her clothes, but wassurprisingly stiff considering how light she was. Wilkinson and thenegro came and stood by my side. The sea broke heavily from the weatherbow, and the water roared white under the lee bends and spread astern ina broad wake of foam. The whaler did not brace his yards up till afterwe had started, and now hung a pale faint mass in the windy darkness onthe quarter. A tincture of rusty red hovered like smoke coloured by thefurnace that produces it, in the west, but the night had drawn downquick and dark; the washing noise of the water was sharp, the windpiercingly cold; each sweep of the schooner's masts to windward wasfollowed by a dull roaring of the blast rushing out of the hollows ofthe canvas, and she swung to the seas with wild yaws, but withregularity sufficient to prove the strict government of the helm. 

But it was being at sea! homeward bound too! There was no wish of mine, engendered by my hideous loneliness on the ice, by my abhorredassociation with the Frenchman, that I could not refer to as, down tothis moment, gratified. My heart bounded; my spirits could not have beenhigher had this ocean been the Thames, and yonder dark flowing hills ofwater the banks of Erith and the Gravesend shore. 

I turned to the three men: "My lads, " said I, "you prove yourselves finebold fellows by thus volunteering. Do not fear: if God guides ushome--to my home, I mean--you shall find a handsome account in thisbusiness. "

"Six more chaps would have jined had th'ole man bin willin', " saidWilkinson. "But best as it is, master, though she's a trifleshort-handed. "

"Why, yes, " said I; "but being fore and aft, you know! It isn't as ifwe'd got courses to hand and topsails to reef. "

"Ay, ay, dat's de troof, " cried Billy Pitt. "I tort o' dat. Fore an' aftmakes de difference. Don't guess I should hab volunteer had she been abrig. "

"There are four of us, " said I. "You're my chief mate, Wilkinson. Chooseyour watch. "

"I choose Cromwell, " said he; "he was in my watch aboard the whaler. "

"Very well, " I exclaimed; and this being settled, and both negroesdeclaring themselves good cooks, we arranged that they shouldalternately have the dressing of our victuals, that Wilkinson shouldhave the cabin next mine, and the negroes the one in which the Frenchmanhad slept, one taking the other's place as he was relieved. 

I asked Wilkinson what he thought of the schooner. He answered that hewas watching her. 

"There's nothing to find fault with yet, " said he; "she's a whale atrolling, sartinly. I guess she walks, though. I reckon she's had enoughof the sea, like me, and's got the scent o' the land in her nose. Iguess old Noah wasn't far off when her lines was laid. Mebbe his sonshad the building of her. There's something scriptural in her cut. Howold's she, master?"

"Fifty years and more, " said I. 

"Dere's nuffin' pertickler in dat, " cried Cromwell. "I knows a wesseldat am a hundred an' four year old, s'elp me as I stand. "

"I don't know how the whaler's heading, " said I, "but this schooner's acanoe if we aren't dropping her!"

Indeed she was scarce visible astern, a mere windy flicker hovering uponthe pale flashings of the foam. It might be perhaps that the whaler wasmaking a more northerly course than we, and under very snug canvas, though ours was snug enough, too; but be this as it may, I was mightypleased with the slipping qualities of the schooner. I never could havedreamt that so odd and ugly a figure of a ship would show such heels. But I think this: we are too prone to view the handiwork of our sireswith contempt. I do not know but that their ships were as fast as ours. They made many good passages. They might have proved themselves fleeternavigators had they had the sextant and chronometer to help them along. Fifty years hence perhaps mankind will be laughing at our crudities; atus, by heaven, who flatter ourselves that the art of ship-building andnavigation will never be carried higher than the pitch to which we haveraised them!

Cromwell being at the tiller, I told Billy Pitt to go below and getsupper, instructing him what to dress and how much to melt for a bowl, for as you know there was nothing but spirits and wine to season ourrepasts with. I saw Cromwell grin widely into the binnacle candle flamewhen he heard me talk of ham, tongue, sweetmeats, marmalade and the likefor supper, together with a can of hot claret, and knowing sailor'snature middling well, I did not doubt that the fare of the schoonerwould bring the three men more into love with the adventure than eventhe reward that was to follow it. 

I had noticed that the bundles which had been sent from the whaler asbelonging to the poor fellows were meagre enough and showed indeed likethe end of a long voyage, and I detained Billy Pitt a minute whilst Itold them that there was a handsome stock of clothes in the cabins, together with linen, boots, and other articles of that sort; that, though the coats, breeches, and waistcoats were of bright colour andold-fashioned, they would keep them as warm as if they had been cut by atailor of to-day. 

"These things, " said I, "you can wear at sea, keeping your own clothesready to slip on should we be spoken or to wear when we arrive inEngland. To-morrow they shall be divided among you, and they willbecome your property. The suit you saw me in to-day is all that I shallneed. "

Both negroes burst into a most diverting laugh of joy on hearing this. Nothing delights a black man more than coloured apparel. They had seenthe clothes in the forecastle and guessed the kind of garments I meantto present them with. 

Whilst supper was getting, I walked the deck with Wilkinson, both of uskeeping a bright look-out, for it was blowing fresh; the darkness laythick about us, there might be ice near us, and the schooner wasstorming under her reefed mainsail, topsail, and staysail through thehollow seas, thundering with a great roaring seething noise into thetrough, and lifting to the foaming slope with her masts wildly aslant. Italked to my companion very freely, being anxious to find out what kindof person he was, and I must say that there was something in hisconversation that impressed me very favourably. He told me that he had awife at New Bedford, that he was heartily sick of the sea, and that hehoped the money he would get by this adventure, added to his _lay_, would enable him to set up for himself ashore. 

"Well, " said I, "we will see to-morrow what cargo Captain Tucker hasleft us. But that you may be under no misapprehension, Wilkinson, if weare fortunate enough to bring the ship safely to England, I will enterinto a bond to pay you five hundred pounds sterling for your share oneweek after the date of our arrival. "

He answered that if he could get that sum he would be a made man forlife. "But it's too much to expect, sir, " says he. 

I told him that he had no idea of the value of the cargo. The wines andspirits were of such a quality I would stake my interest in the schoonerin their fetching a large sum of money. 

"That'll depend, " said he, "on how much the capt'n left us. "

"He helped himself freely, " I answered, "but we are well off too. Youshall judge to-morrow. Then there's the schooner--as she stands: besidesa noble stock of stores of all kinds, sails, ropes, tools, ammunitionand several chests of small arms. I tell you I will give you fivehundred pounds for your share. "

His satisfaction was expressed by his silence. 

"But, " continued I, "we must act with judgment. What we have we mustkeep. Are the negroes trustworthy men?"

"Yes, they are honest fellows. I wouldn't have shipped with them else. "

"We shall not require much for ourselves, " said I, "and the rest we'llbatten down and keep snug. There'll be some man[oe]uvring needed inorder to come off clear with this booty when we arrive: but there'splenty of time to think that over, and our business till then is to lookafter the ship and pray for luck to keep clear of anything hostile. "

And then we fell to other talk; in the course of which he told me he wasan Englishman born, but having been pressed into a man-o-war, desertedher at Halifax and made several voyages in American ships. He waswrecked on the Peruvian coast and became a beachcomber, and then got aberth in a whaler. He married at New Bedford and sailed with CaptainTucker--this was his second whaling trip, he said, and he wanted nomore. I told him I was glad to learn that he was a countryman of mine, but not surprised. His speech was well-larded with americanisms, "but, "said I, "the true twang is wanting, and, " added I, laughing, "I shouldknow you for Hampshire for all your reckons and guesses if I had to eatyou should I be mistaken. "

"The press-gang's the best friend the Yankees has, " said he a littlesheepishly. "Do any man suppose I hadn't sooner hail from my native townSouthampton than from New Bedford? Half the American foksles is made upof Yankees who'd prove hearts of oak if it wasn't for the press. "

His candour gratified me as showing that he already looked upon me as ashipmate to be trusted, and, as I have said, this first chat with theman left me strongly disposed to consider myself fortunate in having himas an associate. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

I VALUE THE LADING. 

The day had been so full of business, there had been so much to engagemy mind, that it was not until I was seated at supper in the oldcook-room in which I had passed so many melancholy hours, that I foundmyself able to take a calm survey of my situation, and to compare thevarious motions of my fortunes. I could scarcely indeed believe that Iwas not in a dream from which I should awake presently, and discovermyself still securely imprisoned in the ice, and all those passages ofthe powder-blasts, the liberation of the schooner, my lonely days in herafloat, my encounter with the whaler, as visionary and vanishing asthose dusky forms of vapour which had swarmed in giant-shape over mylittle open boat. 

But even if confirmation had been wanting in the sable visage of BillyPitt, who sat near the furnace munching away with prodigious enjoymentof his food and bringing his can of hot spiced wine from his vastblubber lips with a mighty sigh of deep delight, I must have found it ineach hissing leap and roaring plunge of the old piratical bucket, sofull of the vitality of the wind-swollen canvas, so quick with all thelife-instincts of a vessel storming through the deep with buoyant keeland under full control. Oh, heaven! how different from the dull amblingof the morning, the sluggish pitching and rolling to the weak pulling ofthe spritsail!

Wilkinson and Cromwell kept the deck whilst Billy Pitt and I got oursupper, and I had some talk with my negro, who seemed to be a verysimple childish fellow, heartily in love with his stomach and very eagerto see England. He told me that he had heard it was a fine country, andhis wish to see it was one reason of his volunteering. 

"Dey say, " said he, "dat Lunnon's a very fine place, sah, bigger danPhiladelphy, and dat a man's skin don' tell agin him among de yallergals dere. "

I laughed and said, that in my country people were judged rather by thecolour of their hearts than by the hue of their faces. 

"But dollars count for something too, sah, I spects?" said he. 

"Why, yes, " said I, "with dollars enough you can make black white inEngland. "

"Hum!" cried he, scratching his head. "I guess it 'ud take an almightyload of dollars to make me white, massa. "

"Put money in your pocket and chink it, " said I, "and your face'll befound white enough, I warrant. "

"By golly!" cried he, "I'll do it den. S'elp me de Lord, massa, I'dchink twenty year for a white face. Dat comes ob bein' civilized. Tell'ee what dey dew, massa, dey makes you feel like a white man, butdey lets you keep black, blast 'em!"

I checked his excitement by telling him that in my country he would findthat the negro was a person held in very high esteem, that the women inparticular valued him for that very dinginess which the Americans founddistasteful, and told him that I could name several ladies of qualitywho had married their black servants. 

He looked surprised, but not incredulous, and said in his peculiardialect that he had no doubt I spoke the truth, as he had always heardthat England was a fine country to live in. I then led him insensiblyfrom this topic to talk of the sea and his experiences, and found thathe had seen a very great deal, having been freed when young, and keepingto the ocean ever since in many different sorts of craft. Indeed, I wasas much pleased with him as with Wilkinson, but then I had foreseen asimplicity in both the negroes, and in expectation of finding thisquality, so useful to one in my strange position, I was overjoyed whenthey consented to help me sail the schooner to the Thames. 

We went on deck to relieve Wilkinson and Cromwell. Billy Pitt took thetiller and I walked to either rail and stared into the darkness. It wasvery thick with occasional squalls of snow, which put a screaming as oftortured cats into the wind as they swung through it. The sea was high, but the schooner was making excellent weather of it, whilst she rolledand pitched through the troubled darkness at seven knots in the hour. 'Twas noble useful sailing, yet a speed not to be relished in thesewaters amid so deep a shadow. Still the temptation to "hold on all, " aswe say, was very great; every mile carried us by so much nearer to thetemperate parallels, and shortened to that extent the long, long passagethat lay before us. 

I was pacing the deck briskly, for the wind was horribly keen, when Pittsuddenly called out, "I say, massa!"

"Hullo, " I replied. 

"Sah, " he cried, "I smell ice!"

I knew that this was a capacity not uncommon among men who had voyagedmuch in the frosty regions of the deep, and instantly exclaimed, "Luff, then, luff! shake the way out of her!" sniffing as I spoke, butdetecting no added shrewdness in the air that was already freezinglycold. He put the helm down, and I called to the others below to come ondeck and flatten in the main sheet. They were up in a trice and tailedon with me, asking no questions, till we had the boom nearly amidships. 

I was about to speak when Wilkinson cried out, "I smell ice. " He sniffeda moment: "Yes, there's an island aboard. Anybody see it?"

"Ay, dere it am, sure enough!" cried Cromwell. "Dere--on de lee-bow--seeit, sah? See it, Billy?"

Yes, I saw it plain enough when I knew where to look for it. 'Twas justsuch another lump of faintness as had wrecked the _Laughing Mary_, amass of dull spectral light upon the throbbing blackness, and it layexactly in a line with the course we had been steering when Pitt firstcalled out, so that assuredly we had not shifted our helm a minute toosoon. We chopped and wallowed past it slowly, keeping a sharp look-outfor like apparitions in other quarters, and when it had disappeared, Imade up my mind to heave the schooner to and keep her in that posturetill daylight, unless the night cleared. So we got the mainsail down andstowed it, clewed up the topsail (which I lent a hand to roll up), andlet the vessel lie under a reefed foresail with her helm lashed. Theweather, however, must have ultimately compelled what the thickness hadrequired; for by ten o'clock it was blowing a hard gale, with a frequenthoariness of clouds of snow upon the blackness, the seas very high andfoaming, and the wind crying madly in the rigging. 

I let some time go by, and then sounded the well and found no more waterthan the depth at which the pumps sucked. This did wonders in the way ofreassuring the men, who were rendered uneasy by the violent motions ofthe unwieldy vessel, and by the very harsh straining noises which roseout of the hold, which latter they would naturally attribute to thecraziness of the fabric, though the true cause of it lay in the numberof loose, movable bulkheads. 

"It's amazin' to me that she holds together at all, " cried Wilkinson, "so ancient she is!"

"She's only old, " said I, "in the sound of the years she's been inexistence. The ice has kept her young. Would the hams and tongues we'reeating be taken to be half a century old? yet where could you buysweeter and better meat of the kind ashore? A ship's well is your onlyhonest reporter of her condition. Ours has vouched in a way that shouldkeep you easy. "

"Arter de _Soosan Tucker_ dis is like bein' hung up to dry, " exclaimedone of the negroes. "It war pump, pump dere and no mistake. I call dis awerry beautiful little sheep, massa; yes, s'elp me de Lord, dere'snuffin could persuade me she ain't what I says she am. "

However, I was up and down a good deal during the night. But for thetreasure I should have been less anxious, I dare say. I had come sosuccessfully to this point that I was resolved, if my hopes were tomiscarry, the misfortune should not be owing to want of vigilance on mypart; and there happened an incident which inevitably tended to sharpenmy watchfulness, though I was perfectly conscious there was a million toone against its occurring a second time. I came on deck to relieveWilkinson, at midnight, after a half-hour's nodding doze by the furnacebelow. He went to his cabin; I stood under the lee of a cloth seized inthe weather main rigging. Pitt arrived, and I told him he could returnto the cook-house and stay there till I called him. The helm beinglashed, and the schooner doing very well, nothing wanted watching inparticular, yet I would not have the deck abandoned, and meant to keep alook-out, turn and turn about with Pitt, as Wilkinson and Cromwell had. The snow had ceased; but it was very dark and thick, the ocean a roaringshadow, palpitating upon the eyes in rolling folds of blackness, withthe quick expiring flash of foam to windward. On a sudden, looking overthe weather quarter, methought I discerned a deeper shade in the nightthere than was elsewhere perceptible. It was like a great blot of inkupon the darkness. Even whilst I speculated, it drew out in the shape ofa ship running before the gale. She seemed to be heading directly forus. The roof of my mouth turned dry as desert-sand; my tongue and limbsrefused their office; I could neither cry nor stir, being indeedparalyzed by the terrible suddenness of that apparition and theimminence of our peril. It all happened whilst you could have toldthirty. The great black mass surged up with the water boiling about thebows; she brought a thunder along with her in her rigging and sails asshe soared to the crowns of the seas she was sweeping before. I couldnot tell what canvas she was under, but her speed was a full ten knots, and as I did not see her till she was close, she looked to come upon usas with a single bound. She passed us to windward within a stone'sthrow, and vanished like a dark cloud melting into the surroundingblackness. Not a gleam of light broke from her; you heard nothing butthe boiling at her bows and the thunderous pealing of the gale in hercanvas. A quarter turn of the wheel would have sent us to the bottom, and her, no doubt, on top of us. Whether she was the _Susan Tucker_, orsome other whaler, or a big South-Sea-man driven low and getting whateasting she could out of the gale, I know not. She was as complete amystery of the ocean night as any spectral fabric, and a heavier terrorto me than a phantasm worked by ghosts could have proved. 

I knew such a thing could not happen again, yet when I called Pitt Italked to him about it as though we must certainly be run down if he didnot keep a sharp look-out, and when my watch below came round at fouro'clock, I was so agitated that I was up and down till daybreak, asthough my duty did not end till then. 

The gale moderated at sunrise, and, though it was a gloomy, true CapeHorn morning, with dark driving clouds, the sea a dusky olive, veryhollow, and frequent small quick squalls of sleet which brought the windto us in sharp guns, yet as we could see where we were going, I got theschooner before it, heading her east-north-east, and under a reefedtopsail, mainsail, and staysail, the old bucket stormed through it withthe sputter and rage of a line-of-battle ship. There was a log-reel andline on deck, and I found a sand-glass in the chest in my cabin in whichI had met with the quadrants, perspective glass, and the like, and Ikept this log regularly going, marking a point of departure on the chartthe American captain had given me, which I afterwards found to be withintwo leagues and a half of the true position. But for three days theweather continued so heavy that there was nothing to be done in theshape of gratifying the men's expectations by overhauling what was leftof the cargo. Indeed, we had no leisure for such work; all our wakinghours had to be strictly dedicated to the schooner, and in keeping alook-out for ice. But the morning of the fourth day broke with a finesky and a brisk breeze from a little to the east of south, to which weshowed every cloth the schooner had to throw abroad, and being now bydead reckoning within a few leagues of the meridian of sixty degrees, Ishaped a course north by east by my compass, with the design of gettinga view of Staten Island that I might correct my calculations. 

When we had made sail and got our breakfast, I told Wilkinson andCromwell (Pitt being at the tiller) that now was a good opportunity forinspecting the contents of the hold; and (not to be tedious in this partof my relation, however I may have sinned in this respect elsewhere) wecarried lanthorns below, and spent the better part of the forenoon intaking stock. From a copy of the memorandum I made on that occasion(still in my possession), we discovered that the Yankee captain had leftus the following: thirty casks of rum, twenty-eight hogsheads of claret, seventy-five casks of brandy, fifty of sherry, and eighteen cases ofbeer in bottles. In addition to this were the stores in the lazarette(besides a quantity of several kinds of wine in jars, &c. ) elsewhereenumerated, besides all the ship's furniture, her guns, powder, small-arms, &c, as well as the ship herself. I took the men into the runand showed them the chests, opening the little one which I had stockedwith small-arms, and lifting the lids of two or three of the others. They were perfectly satisfied, fully believing all the chests to befilled with small-arms and nothing else, and so we came away andreturned to the cabin, where, to please them, I put down the value ofthe cargo at a venture, setting figures against each article, and makingout a total of two thousand six hundred and forty pounds. This of courseincluded the ship. 

"How much'll dat be a man, massa?" asked Cromwell. 

"Six hundred and sixty pounds, " I answered. 

The poor fellow was so transported that, after staring at me in silencewith the corners of his mouth stretched to his ears, he tossed up hishands, burst into a roar of laughter, and made several skips about thedeck. 

"Of course, " said I, addressing Wilkinson, "my figures may be ahead orshort of the truth. But if you are disposed to take the chance, I'lltell you what I'll do; I'll stand by my figures, accepting the risk ofthe value of the lading being less than what I say it is, and undertaketo give each man of you six hundred and sixty pounds for your share. "

"Well, sir, " said he, "I don't know that I ought to object. But a fewpounds is a matter of great consequence to me, and I reckon if thesehere goods and the wessel should turn out to be worth more than yeoffer, the loss 'ud go agin the grit, ay, if 'twere twenty dollars aman. "

I laughed, and told him to let the matter rest, there was plenty of timebefore us; I should be willing to stand to my offer even if I lost byit, so heartily obliged was I to them for coming to my assistance. Andin this I spoke the truth, though, as you will understand who know myposition, I had to finesse. It went against my conscience to make outthat the chests were full of small-arms, but I should have been mad totell them the truth, and, perhaps, by the truth made devils of men whowere, and promised to remain, steady, temperate, honest fellows. I wasnot governed by the desire to keep all the treasure to myself; no, I vowto God I should have been glad to give them a moiety of it, had I notapprehended the very gravest consequences if I were candid with them. But this, surely, must be so plain that it is idle to go on insisting onit. 

The fine weather, the golden issue that was to attend our successfulnavigation, the satisfactory behaviour of the schooner, put us into ahigh good-humour with one another; and when it came to my collecting allthe clothes in the after cabins and distributing them among the threemen, I thought Billy Pitt and Cromwell would have gone mad with delight. To the best of my recollection the apparel that had been left us by theAmerican captain (who, as you know, had cleared the forecastle of theclothes there) consisted of several coats of cut velvet, trimmed withgold and silver lace, some frocks of white drab with large platebuttons, brocade waistcoats of blue satin and green silk, crimson andother coloured cloth breeches, along with some cloaks, three-cornerhats, black and white stockings, a number of ruffled shirts, and otherarticles, of which I recollect the character, though my ignorance of thecostumes of that period prevents me from naming them. 

Any one acquainted with the negro's delight in coloured clothes willhardly need to be told of the extravagant joy raised in the blackbreasts of Cromwell and Pitt by my distribution of this fine attire. Thelace, to be sure, was tarnished, and some of the colours faded, but allthe same the apparel furnished a brave show; and such was the aviditywith which the poor creatures snatched at the garments as I offered themfirst to one and then another, that I believe they would have beenperfectly satisfied with the clothes alone as payment for theirservices. I made this distribution on the quarter-deck, or little poop, rather, that all might be present: Wilkinson was at the tiller, andappeared highly delighted with the bundle allotted him, saying that hemight reckon upon a hearty welcome from his wife when she came to knowwhat was in his chest. The negroes were wild to clothe themselves atonce; I advised them to wait for the warm weather, but they were tooimpatient to put on their fine feathers to heed my advice. They ranbelow, and were gone half an hour, during which time I have no doubtthey put on all they had; and when at last they returned, theirappearance was so exquisitely absurd that I laughed till I came near tosuffocating. Each negro had tied a silver laced hat on to his woollyhead; one wore a pair of crimson, the other a pair of black, velvetbreeches; over their cucumber shanks they had drawn white silkstockings, regardless of the cold; their feet were encased in buckledshoes, and their costumes were completed by scarlet and blue waistcoatswhich fell to their knees, and crimson and blue coats with immenseskirts. What struck me as most astonishing was their gravity. Theirself-complacency was prodigious; they eyed each other with dignifiedapprobation, and strutted with the air of provincial mayors and aldermennewly arrived from the presence of royalty. 

"They're in keepin' with the schooner, any ways, " said Wilkinson. 

And so perhaps they were. The antique fabric needed the sparkle of thosecostumes on her deck to make her aspect fit in with the imaginations shebred. But, as I had anticipated, the cold proved too powerful for theirconceit, and they were presently glad to ship their more moderntrousers, though they clung obstinately to their waistcoats, and couldnot be persuaded to remove their hats on any account whatever. 

CHAPTER XXX. 

OUR PROGRESS TO THE CHANNEL. 

When I started to relate my adventure I never designed to write anaccount of the journey home at large. On the contrary, I foresaw that, by the time I had arrived at this part, you would have had enough of thesea. Let me now, then, be as brief as possible. 

The melting of the ice and the slowly increasing power of the sun wereinexpressibly consoling to me who had had so much of the cold that I doprotest if Elysium were bleak, no matter how radiant, and the abode ofthe fiends as hot as it is pictured, I would choose to turn my back uponthe angels. I cannot say, however, that the schooner was properly thaweduntil we were hard upon the parallels of the Falkland Islands; she thenshowed her timbers naked to the sun, and exposed a brown solid deckrendered ugly by several dark patches which, scrape as we might, wecould not obliterate. We struck the guns into the hold for the betterballasting of the vessel, got studding-sail booms aloft, overhauled hersuits of canvas and found a great square sail which proved ofinestimable importance in light winds and in running. After the ice waswholly melted out of her frame she made a little water, yet not so muchbut that half an hour's spell at the pump twice a day easily freed her. But, curiously enough, at the end of a fortnight she became tight again, which I attribute to the swelling of her timbers. 

We were a slender company, but we managed extraordinarily well. The menwere wonderfully content; I never heard so much as a murmur escape oneof them; they never exceeded their rations nor asked for a drop more ofliquor than we had agreed among us should be served out. But, as I hadanticipated, our security lay in our slenderness. We were too few fordisaffection. The negroes were as simple as children, Wilkinson lookedto find his account in a happy arrival, and if I was not, strictlyspeaking, their captain, I was their navigator without whom their casewould have been as perilous as mine was on the ice. 

Outside the natural dangers of the sea we had but one anxiety, and thatconcerned our being chased and taken. This fear was heartily shared bymy companions, to whom I also represented that it must be our businessto give even the ships of our country a wide berth; for, though I hadlong since flung all the compromising bunting overboard, and destroyedall the papers I could come across, which being written in a language Iwas ignorant of, might, for all I knew, contain some damninginformation, a British ship would be sure to board us and I should haveto tell the truth or take the risks of prevaricating. If I told thetruth, then I should have to admit that the lading of the vessel waspiratical plunder; and though I knew not how the law stood with regardto booty rescued from certain destruction after the lapse of hard uponhalf a century, yet it was a hundred to one that the whole would beclaimed in the king's name under a talk of restitution, which signifiedthat we should never hear more of it. On the other hand prevaricationwould not fail to excite suspicion, and on our not being able tosatisfactorily account for our possession of the ship and what was inher, it might end in our actually being seized as pirates and perhapsexecuted. 

This reasoning went very well with the men and filled them with suchanxiety that they were for ever on the look-out for a sail. But, as youmay guess, my own solicitude sank very much deeper; for, supposing theschooner to be rummaged by an English crew, it was as certain as that myhand was affixed to my arm that the chests of treasure would betranshipped and lost to me by the law's trickery. 

Now, till we were to the north of the equator we sighted nothing; no, inall those days not a single sail ever hove into view to break themelancholy continuity of the sea-line. But between the parallels of 12°and 22° N. We met with no less than eight ships, the nearest within aleague. We watched them as cats watch mice; making a point to bear awayif they were going our road, or, if they were coming towards us, toshift our helm--but never very markedly--so as to let them pass us atthe widest possible distance. Some of them showed a colour, but we neveranswered their signals. That they were all harmless traders I will notaffirm; but none of them offered to chase us. Yet could I have been sureof a ship, I should have been glad to speak. My longitude was littlemore than guesswork; my latitude not very certain; and my compass wasout. However, I supported my own and the spirits of my little company bytelling them of the early navigators; how Columbus, Candish, Drake, Schouten and other heroic marine worthies of distant times had navigatedthe globe, discovered new worlds, penetrated into the most secretsolitudes of the deep without any notion of longitude and with no betterinstruments to take the sun's height than the forestaff and astrolabe. We were better off than they, and I had not the least doubt, I toldthem, of bringing the old schooner to a safe berth off Deal orGravesend. 

But it happened that we were chased when on the polar verge of theNorth-East Trade-wind. It was blowing brisk, the sea breaking in snowupon the weather bow, the sky overcast with clouds, and the schoonerwashing through it under a single-reefed mainsail and whole topsail. Itwas noon: I was taking an observation, when Pitt at the tiller sang out"Sail ho!" and looking, I spied the swelling cloud-like canvas of avessel on a line with our starboard cathead. I told Pitt to let theschooner fall off three points, and with slackened sheets the old _Bocadel Dragon_ hummed through it brilliantly, flinging the foam as far aftas the gangway. The strange sail rose rapidly, and the lifting of herhull discovered her to be a line-of-battle ship. We held on as we were, hoping to escape her notice; but whether she did not like ourappearance, or that there was something in the figure we cut thatexcited her curiosity, she, on a sudden, put her helm up and steered atrue course for us. 

At the first sight of her I had called Wilkinson and Cromwell on deck, and I now cried out, "Lads, d'ye see, she's after us. If she catches usour dream of dollars is over. Lively now, boys, and give her all she canstagger under; and what she can't carry she must drag. " And we sprang tomake sail, briskly as apes, and every one working with two-man power. Iknew the old _Boca's_ best point; it was with the wind a point abaft thebeam; we put her to that, got the great square-sail on her, shook outall reefs, and gave all she had to the wind. The wake roared away fromher like a white torrent that flies from the foot of a foaming cataract. She had the pirate's instincts, and being put to her trumps, was nimble. God! how she did swing through it! Never had I driven the aged bucketbefore like this, and I understood that speed at sea is notirreconcilable with odd bodies. But the great ship to windward hungsteady; a cloud of bland and swelling cloths. When we had set thestudding-sail we had nothing more to fly with; and so we stood looking. She slapped six shots at us, one after another, as a haughty hint to usto stop; but we meant to escape, and at last we did, outsailing her bythirteen inches to her foot--one foot to her twelve--though she stuck toour skirts the whole afternoon and kept us in an agony of anxiety. 

The sun was setting when she abandoned us: she was then some five or sixmiles distant on our weather quarter. What her nation was I did notknow; but Wilkinson reckoned her French when she gave us up. We rushedsteadily along the same course into the darkness of the night and then, shortening sail, brought the schooner to the wind again, after which wedrank to the frisky old jade in an honestly-earned bowl. 

It was on the 5th of December that we sighted the Scilly Isles. Iguessed what that land was, but so vague had been my navigation that Idurst not be sure; until, spying a smack with her nets over, I steeredfor her and got the information I needed from her people. They answeredus with an air of fear, and in truth the fellows had reason; for, besides the singular appearance of the ship, the four of us wereapparelled in odds and ends of the antique clothes, and I have littledoubt they considered us lunatics of another country, who had run awaywith a ship belonging to parts where the tastes and fashions were behindthe age. 

Now, as you may suppose, by this time I had settled my plans; and as wesailed up channel, I unfolded them to my companions. I pointed out thatbefore we entered the river it would be necessary to discharge ourlading into some little vessel that would smuggle the booty ashore forus. The figure the schooner made was so peculiar she would inevitablyattract attention; she would instantly be boarded in the Thames on ourcoming to anchor, and, if I told the truth, she would be seized as apirate, and ourselves dismissed with a small reward, and perhaps withnothing. 

"My scheme, " said I, "is this: I have a relative in London to whom Ishall communicate the news of my arrival and tell him my story. You, Wilkinson must be the bearer of this letter. He is a shrewd, active man, and I will leave it to him to engage the help we want. There is no lackof the right kind of serviceable men at Deal, and if they are promised asubstantial interest in smuggling our lading ashore, they will run thegoods successfully, do not fear. As there is sure to be a man-of-warstationed in the Downs, we must keep clear of that anchorage. I willland you at Lydd, whence you will make your way to Dover and thence toLondon. Cromwell and Pitt will return and help me to keep cruising. Myletter to my relative will tell him where to seek me, and I shall knowhis boat by her flying a jack. When we have discharged our lading wewill sail to the Thames, and then let who will come aboard, for we shallhave a clean hold. This, " continued I, "is the best scheme I can devise. The risk of smuggling attend it, to be sure; but against those risks wehave to put the certainty of our forfeiting our just claims to theproperty if we carry the schooner to the Thames. Even suppose, whenthere, that we should not be immediately visited, and so be providedwith an opportunity to land our stuff--whom have we to trust? The Thamesabounds with river thieves, with lumpers, scuffle-hunters, mud-larks, glutmen, rogues of all sorts, to hire whom would mean to bribe them withthe value of half the lading and to risk their stealing the other half. But this is the lesser difficulty; the main one lies in this: there aresome sixteen hundred men employed in the London Custom House, most ofwhom are on river duty as watchmen; thirty of these people are clappedaboard an East Indiaman, five or six on West India ships, and a likeproportion in other vessels. So strange a craft as ours would bevisited, depend on't, and smartly, too. D'ye see the danger, lads? Whatdo you say, then, to my scheme?"

The negroes immediately answered that they left it to me; I knew best;they would be satisfied with whatever I did. 

Wilkinson mused a while and then said, "Smuggling was risky work. Howwould it be if we represented that we had found the schooner washingabout with nobody aboard?"

"The tale wouldn't be credited, " said I. "The age of the vessel wouldtell against such a story, even if you removed all other evidence bythrowing the clothes and small-arms overboard and whatever else might goto prove that the schooner must have been floating about abandoned sincethe year 1750!"

"Musn't lose de clothes, massa, on no account, " cried Pitt. 

"Well, sir, " says Wilkinson, after another spell of reflection, "Ireckon you're right. If so be the law would seize the vessel and goodson the grounds that she had been a pirate and all that's in her wasplunder, why, then, certainly, I don't see nothin' else but to make asmuggling job of it, as you say, sir. "

This being settled (Wilkinson's concurrence being rendered the easier bymy telling him that, providing the lading was safely run, I would adhereto my undertaking to give them six hundred and sixty pounds each fortheir share), I went below and spent half an hour over a letter to Mr. Jeremiah Mason. There was no ink, but I found a pencil, and for paper Iused the fly-leaves of the books in my cabin. I opened with a sketch ofmy adventures, and then went on to relate that the _Boca_ was a _richship_; that as she had been a pirate, I risked her seizure by carryingher to London; that I stood grievously in need of his counsel and help, and begged him not to lose a moment in returning with the messenger toDeal, and there hiring a boat and coming to me, whom he would findcruising off Beachy Head. That I might know his boat, I bade him fly ajack a little below the masthead. "As for the _Boca del Dragon_, " Iadded, "Wilkinson would recognize her if she were in the middle of athousand sail, and indeed a farmer's boy would be able to distinguishher for her uncommon oddness of figure. " I was satisfied to underscorethe words "a rich ship, " quite certain his imagination would besufficiently fired by the expression. At anything further I durst nothint, as the letter would be open for Wilkinson to read. 

When I had finished, I took a lanthorn and the keys of the chest andwent very secretly and expeditiously to the run, and removing the layersof small-arms from the top of the case that held the money, I picked outsome English pieces, quickly returned the small-arms, locked the chest, and returned. 

All this time we were running up Channel before a fresh westerly wind. It was true December weather, very raw, and the horizon thick, but Iknew my road well, and whilst the loom of the land showed, I desirednothing better than this thickness. 

But wary sailing delayed us; and it was not till ten o'clock on thenight of the seventh that we hove the schooner to off the shingly beachof Lydd within sound of the wash of the sea upon it. The bay shelteredus; we got the boat over; I gave Wilkinson the letter and ten guineas, bidding him keep them hidden and to use them cautiously with the silverchange he would receive, for they were all guineas of the first Georgeand might excite comment if he, a poor sailor, ill-clad, should pullthem out and exhibit them. Happily, in the hurry of the time, he did notthink to ask me how I had come by them. He thrust them into his pocket, shook my hand and dropped into the boat, and the negroes immediatelyrowed him ashore. 

I stood holding a lanthorn upon the rail to serve them as a guide, waiting for the boat to return, and never breathed more freely in mylife than when I heard the sound of oars. The two negroes camealongside, and, clapping the tackles on to the boat, we hoisted her withthe capstan, and then under very small canvas stood out to sea again. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

THE END. 

I should require to write to the length of this book over again to dofull justice by description to the difficulties and anxieties of thedays that now followed. If it had not been thick weather all the time, Ido not know how I should have fared, I am sure. I was between two fires, so to say; on the one side the French cruisers and privateers, and onthe other side the ships of my own country, and particularly the revenuecutters and the sloops and the like cruising after the smugglers. As Iknew that my relative could not be with me under four days, I steeredout of sight of land into the middle of the Channel, betwixt Beachy Headand the Seine coast, and there dodged about under very small canvas, heartily grateful for the haze that shrouded the sea to within a mile ofme. I scarcely closed my eyes in sleep, and though my worries were nowof a very different kind from those which had racked me on the ice, theywere, in their way, to the full as tormenting. Every sail that loomed inthe dinginess filled me with alarm. Several ships passed me close, and Icould scarce breathe till they were out of sight. Indeed, I lay skulkingout upon that sea as if I was some common thief broken loose from jail. However, it pleased heaven that I should manage to keep out of sight ofthose whom I most strenuously desired not to see; and the afternoon ofthe fourth day found the _Boca_ lying off Beachy Head, and I peeringover the rail, with a haggard face, at the dark shadow of the land. 

It had been blowing and snowing all day. The seas ran short andspitefully. It was a dismal December afternoon, and the more sensiblydisgusting to us who were fresh from several weeks of the balm and gloryof the tropics. And yet I would not have exchanged it for a clear fineday for all that I was like to be worth. 

It was the most reasonable thing in the world that a vessel should behove-to in such sombre weather, and so I was under no concern that ourposture in this respect would excite suspicion, should we be descried. The hours stole away one by one. Now and again a little coaster wouldpass, some hoy bound west, a sloop for the Thames, a lugger on someunguessable mission: all small ships, oozing dark and damp out of thesnow and mist and passing silently. I kept the land close aboard to beout of the way of the bigger craft, and held the vessel in the windtill it was necessary to reach to our station. The three of us weremighty pensive and eager, staring incessantly with all our eyes; but itlooked as if we were not to expect anything that day when the night putits darkness into the weather. Then, as I foresaw a serious danger ifthe wind shifted into the south, and as I could not obtain a glimpse ofa shore-light, I resolved to bring up and ride till dawn. Long ago wehad got the schooner's old anchors at the catheads and the cables bent, so, lowering the mainsail and hauling down the stay foresail, we letfall the starboard anchor, and the ship came to a stand. I put the leadover the side that we might know if she dragged, hung a lantern on theforestay and one on either quarter that our presence might be marked bymy relative should he be out in quest of us, and went below, leavingCromwell to keep the look-out. 

I was extremely fretful and anxious and had no patience to talk withBilly Pitt. There were too many risks, too many vague chances in thisexploit to render contemplation of it tolerable. Suppose my relativeshould be dead? Suppose Wilkinson should be robbed of his money? fall tothe cutting of capers, as a sailor newly delivered to the pleasures ofthe land with ten guineas in his pocket? Get locked up for breaking thepeace? Blab of us in his cups and start the Customs on our trail? Therewas no end to such conjectures, and I made myself so melancholy that Iwas fool enough to think that the treasure was no better than a curse, and that on the whole I was better off on the ice than here with theanchor in English ground and my native soil within gunshot. 

I was up and about till midnight, and then, being in the cabin andexhausted, I fell asleep across the table, and in that posture lay asone dead. Some one dragging at my arm, with very little tenderness, awoke me. I was in the midst of a dream of the schooner having beenboarded by a party of French privateersmen, with Tassard at their head, and the roughness with which I was aroused was exactly calculated toextend into my waking the horror and grief of my sleep. 

I instantly sprang to my feet and saw Washington Cromwell. 

"Massa Rodney, " he bawled, "Massa Rodney, de gent's 'longside--him an'Wilkinson--yaas, by de good Lord--dey'se both dere! Dey hail me an' Ianswer and say who are you, and dey say are you de _Boca_? We am, I say, and dey say----"

I had stood stupidly staring at him, but my full understanding comingto me on a sudden, I jumped to the ladder and darted on deck. I heardvoices over the starboard side and ran there. It was not so darkbut that I could see the outline of a Deal lugger. Whilst I waspeering, the voice of my man Wilkinson cried out, "On deck, there!Cromwell--Billy--where's Mr. Rodney?"

"Here I am!" cried I. 

"My God, Paul!" exclaimed the voice of Mr. Mason, "this encounter isfortunate indeed. "

I shouted to the negroes to show a light, and in a few minutes Mr. Mason, Wilkinson, and a couple of Deal boatmen came over the side. Igrasped my relative by both hands. I had not seen him for four years. 

"This is good of you, indeed!" I cried. "But you must be perished withthe cold of that open boat. Come below at once--come Wilkinson, and youmen--there's a fire in the cook-room and drink to warm us;" and down Ibundled in the wildest condition of excitement, followed by Mason andthe others. 

My relative was warmly clad and did not seem to suffer from the cold. Hetook me by the hand and brought me to the lanthorn-light, and stoodviewing me. 

"Ay, " said he, "you are your old self: a bit worried looking, butthat'll pass. Stout and burnt. Odd's heart! Paul, if you have passedthrough the experiences Wilkinson has given me a sketch of, we must haveyour life, man, we must have your life--for the booksellers. "

Well, I need not detain you by reciting all the civilities andcongratulations which he and I exchanged. He and Wilkinson had arrivedat Deal at three o'clock that afternoon, and, after a hurried meal, hadhired a lugger and started at once for Beachy Head. It was now threeo'clock in the morning; and what I may consider a truly extraordinarycircumstance is, that they had sailed as true a course for the schooneras if she had lain plain to the gaze at the very start; that since thenight had drawn down they had met no vessel of any kind or description, until they came up to us; that in all probability they would have runstem on into us if they had not seen our lights, and that their seeingour lights had caused them to hail us, their "ship ahoy!" beinginstantly answered by Cromwell. 

"Well, " said I, "there are stranger things to tell of than this, even. Now, Wilkinson, and you Billy, and Cromwell, get us a good supper andmix a proper bowl. How many more of you are in the lugger?"

"Four, sir, " says one of the boatmen. 

"Then fetch as many as may safely leave the boat, " said I. "Billy, getcandles and make a good light here. Throw on coal, boys; there's enoughto carry us home. "

I saw Mason gazing curiously about him. 

"'Tis like a tale out of the Arabian Nights, Paul, " he exclaimed. 

"Ay, " said I, "but written in bitter prose, and no hint of enchantmentanywhere. But, thank God, you are come! I have passed a dismal time ofexpectation, I promise you. " I added softly, "I have somethingsecret--we will sup first, man--I shall amaze you! We must talk apartpresently. "

He bowed his head. 

Three more boatmen arrived, giving us the company of five of them. Soonthere was a hearty sound of frying and a smell of good things upon theair. Pitt put plates and glasses upon the cabin table, two great bowlsof punch were brewed, and in a little time we had all fallen to. Iwhispered Wilkinson, who sat next me, "These boatmen know nothing of ourbusiness; I shall have to take Mr. Mason apart and arrange with him. These fellows may not be fit for our service. Let no hint escape you. "

"Right, sir, " said he. 

This I said to disarm his suspicions should he see me talking alone withMr. Mason. He entertained us with an account of his excursion to London;and then, partly to appease the profound curiosity of the boatmen andpartly to save time when I should come to confer with my relative, Igave them the story of my shipwreck, and told how I had met with theschooner and how I had managed to escape with her. 

"And now, Mason, " said I, "whilst our friends here empty these bowls, come you with me to the cook-room. " And with that we quitted the cabin. 

"D'ye mean to tell me, Paul, " was the first question my relative asked, "that this vessel was on the ice eight-and-forty years?"

"Yes, " I replied. 

"Surely you dream?"

"I think not. "

"What we have been eating and drinking--is that forty-eight years old, too?"

"Ay, and older. "

"Well, such a thing shall make me credulous enough to duck old women forwitches. But what brandy--what brandy! Never had spirit such a bouquet. Every pint is worth its weight in guineas to a rich man. To think ofDeal boatmen and niggers swilling such nectar!"

"Mason, " said I, speaking low, "give me now your attention. In the runof this schooner are ten chests loaded with money, bars of silver andgold, and jewellery. This vessel was a pirate, and her people valuedtheir booty at ninety to a hundred thousand pounds. "

His jaw fell; he stared as if he knew not whether it was he or I thatwas mad. 

"Here is evidence that I speak the truth, " said I. "A little sampleonly--but look at it!" And I put the pirate captain's watch into hishand. 

He eyed it as though he discredited the intelligence of his sight, turned it about, and returned it to me with a faint "Heaven preserveme!" Then said he, still faintly, "You found some of the pirates alive?"

"No. "

"Who told you that the people of the vessel valued their plunder at thatamount?"

I answered by giving him the story of the recovery of the Frenchman. 

He listened with a gaze of consternation: I saw how it was; he believedmy sufferings had affected my reason. There was only one way to settlehis mind; I took a lanthorn, and asked him to follow me. As we passedthrough the cabin I whispered Wilkinson that I meant to show my relativethe lading below, and bade him keep the Deal men about him. I had thekeys of the chests in my pocket: lifting the after-hatch, we entered thelazarette, and Mason gazed about him with astonishment. But I was in toogreat a hurry to return to suffer him to idly stand and stare. I openedthe second hatch and descended into the run, and crawling to the jewelchest opened it, removed a few of the small-arms, and bade him look forhimself. 

"Incredible! incredible!" he cried. "Is it possible! is it possible!Well, to be sure!" And for some moments he could find no more to say, soamazed and confounded was he. 

I quickly showed him the gold and silver ingots and then returned thefirearms and locked the chests. 

"_These_, " said I emphatically, pointing to the cases, "have been mydifficulty; not the lading, though there is value there too. My crewknow nothing of these chests: of their value, I mean; they believe themcases of small-arms. How am I to get them ashore? If I tell the truth, they will be seized as piratical plunder. If I equivocate, I may tumbleinto a pit of difficulties. I durst not carry them to the Thames, theriver swarms with thieves and Custom House people. I am terrified tolinger here, lest I be boarded and the booty discovered. There is butone plan, I think: we must hire some Deal smugglers to run these chestsand the cargo for us. The boat now alongside might serve, and I don'tdoubt the men are to be had at their own price. "

My relative had regained his wits, which the sight of the treasure hadtemporarily scattered, and surveyed me thoughtfully whilst I spoke; andthen said, "Let us return to the fire; I think I have a better schemethan yours. "

The men still sat around the table talking. Some liquor yet lay in oneof the bowls, and the fellows were happy enough. I smiled at Wilkinsonas I passed, that he might suppose our inspection below verysatisfactory, and I saw him look meaningly and pleasantly at WashingtonCromwell, who sat with a laced hat on his head. 

"Paul, " said Mason, sitting down and folding his arms, "your smugglingplan will not do. It would be the height of madness to trust thosechests to the risks of running and to the honesty of the rogues engagedin that business. "

"What is to be done?"

"Tell me your lading, " said he. 

I gave it to him as accurately as I could. 

"Why, " he exclaimed, "a single boat would take a long time to dischargeye--observe the perils--several boats would mean a large number of men;they would eat you up; they would demand so much, you would have nothingleft. And suppose they opened the chests! No, your scheme is worthless. "

"What's to do, then, in God's name?"

"I'll tell you!" he exclaimed, smiling with the complacency of a man whois master of a great fancy. "I shall sail to Dover at once. 'Tis now aquarter past four. Give me twelve hours to make Dover: I shall poststraight to London and be there by early morning. Now, Paul, attend youto this. To-day is Wednesday; by to-morrow night you must contrive tobring your ship to an anchor off Barking Level. "

"The Thames!" I cried. 

He nodded. 

I looked at him anxiously. He leaned to me, putting his hand on my leg. 

"I own a lighter, " said he: "she will be alongside of you at dusk. Ihave people of my own whom I can trust. The lighter will empty your holdand convey the lading to a ship chartered by me, arrived from the BlackSea on Sunday and lying in the Pool. The stuff can be sold from thatship as it is--"

"But the chests--the chests, Mason!"

"They shall be lowered into another boat, and taken ashore and put intoa waggon that will be in waiting--I in it--and driven to my home. "

I clapped him on the shoulder in a transport. 

"Nobly schemed indeed!" I cried; "but have we nothing to fear from theCustoms people?"

"No, not low down the river and at dark. You bring up for convenience, d'ye see. Mind it is dark when you anchor. A lighter and boat shall beawaiting you. It is down the river, you know, that all the lumpers dropwith the lighters they go adrift in from ships' sides. There's moresafety in smuggling over Thames mud than on this coast shingle. Onethought more: you say that Wilkinson believes the chests holdsmall-arms?"

"Yes. "

"Then account to him for sending the chests away separately by sayingthat I have found a purchaser, and that they are going to him direct. You have your cue--you see all!"

"All. "

"Let me hurry, then, Paul; that brandy should fetch you half a guinea apint. You are in luck's way, Paul. See that you bring your ship alongsafely. Till to-morrow night!"

He clasped and wrung my hand and ran into the cabin. 

"Now, lads, off with us!" he cried. "Off to Dover! Put me ashore theresmartly and you shall find your account. Off now--time presses. "

Five minutes afterwards the boat was gone. 

When fortune falls in love with a man she makes him a bounteousmistress. Everything fell out as I could have desired. We got our anchorat five, and by daybreak were off Hastings jogging quietly along towardsLondon river, the weather conveniently obscure, the wind south, andforty hours before us to do the run in. I exactly explained myrelative's scheme to Wilkinson and the others, who declared themselvesperfectly satisfied, Wilkinson adding that though he had not objected tothe Deal smuggling project he throughout considered the risk too heavyto adventure. I told them that Mr. Mason believed he could immediatelyfind a purchaser for the small-arms, in which case they would have to besent privately ashore; and to give a proper colour to this ruse I madethem pack away all the remaining weapons in the arms-room and carry themto the run, ready to be taken with the other chests. 

Once fairly round the Forelands half my anxieties fell from me. Therewas no longer the French cruiser or privateer to be feared, and howeverwonderingly the people of my own country's vessels might stare at theuncommon figure of my schooner, they could find no excuse to board us. Besides, as I have said, I was greatly helped by the weather, whichcontinuing hazy, though happily never so thick as to oblige me to stop, delivered me to the sight only of such vessels as passed close, andoffered me as a mere smudge to the shore. 

We arrived off Barking Level on the Thursday night, and dropped anchorclose to a lighter that lay there with a large boat hanging by her. Itwas then very dark. The first person to come on board was Mason. He wasfollowed by several men, one of whom he introduced to me as his headclerk, who would see to the unloading of the schooner and to thetranshipment of the goods to the ship in the Pool. He informed me thatthere was a covered van waiting on shore; and telling Wilkinson that thesmall-arms had been disposed of, and that Mr. Mason would hand over theproceeds on our calling at his office, I went with a party of myrelative's men into the run and presently had the whole of the chests inthe boat. Mason went with her. 

Then, as she disappeared in the darkness, but not till then, did I drawthe first easy breath I had fetched since the hour of the collision ofthe _Laughing Mary_ with the iceberg. A sob shook me: I had gone throughmuch: many wonderful things had happened to me: I had been deliveredfrom such perils that the mere recollection of them will stir my hair, though it is years since; my duty I knew, and I discharged it bywithdrawing to my cabin and kneeling with humble and grateful heartbefore the throne of that Being to whom I owed everything. 

POSTSCRIPT. 

Here concludes the remarkable narrative of Mr. Paul Rodney. It is to bewished that he had found the patience to tell us a little more. Thecircumstance of his dying in 1823, worth 31, 000_l. _, leads me to suspectthat his associate Tassard greatly exaggerated the value of thetreasure. I am assured that he lived very quietly, and that the lady hemarried, who bore him two children, both of whom died young, was of anunlike simplicity of character and loved show and extravagance aslittle as her husband. Hence there is no reason to suppose that hesquandered any portion of the fortune that had in the most extraordinarymanner ever heard of fallen into his hands. I have ascertained that hevery substantially discharged the great obligation that his relativeMason laid him under, and that his three men received a thousand poundsapiece. It is possible, then, that the pirates were themselves deceived, that what they had taken to be gold or silver ingots were not all so; orit might be that the case of jewellery was less valuable than theadmiring and astonished eyes of a plain sailor, who admits that he hadnever before seen such a sight, figured it. Be this, however, as it may, it is nevertheless certain, as proved by Mr. Rodney's last will andtestament, that he did uncommonly well out of his adventure on the ice. 

Whatever may be thought of his story of the Frenchman's restoration tolife, in other directions Mr. Rodney's accuracy seems unimpeachable. Itis quite conceivable that a stoutly-built vessel locked up in the iceand thickly glazed, should continue in an excellent state ofpreservation for years. The confession of his superstitious fearsexhibits honesty and candour. It is related that a Captain Warren, master of an English merchant-ship, found a derelict (in August, 1775)that had long been ice-bound, with her cabins filled with the bodies ofthe frozen crew. "His own sailors, however, would not suffer him tosearch the vessel thoroughly, through superstition, and wished to leaveher immediately. " A pity they did not try their hands at thawing one ofthe poor fellows: the result might have kept Mr. Rodney's strangeexperience in countenance!

Accounts of vast bodies of ice, such as that which Mr. Rodney fell inwith, will be found in the South Atlantic Directory. For instance:--

"Sir James C. Ross crossed Weddel's track in Lat. 65° S. , and where hehad found an open sea, Ross found an ice-pack of an impassablecharacter, along which he sailed for 160 miles; and again, when only onedegree beyond the track of Cook, who had no occasion to enter the pack, Ross was navigating among it for fifty-six days. 

"But these appear insignificant when compared with a body of icereputed to have been passed by twenty-one ships during the months ofDecember, 1854, and January, February, March, and April, 1855, floatingin the South Atlantic from Lat 44° S. , Long. 28° W. , to Lat. 40° S. , Long. 20° W. Its elevation in no case exceeded 300 feet. The firstaccount of it was received from the _Great Britain_, which in December, 1854, was reported to have steamed 50 miles along the outer side of thelonger shank. " One ship was lost upon it: others embayed. 

THE END.