I now went below to see to my berth and arrange my traps; but came to a halt at the cabin table, to lean upon it and think. This interior was wholly unlike the 'Lady Emma's'; yet the skylight, the lockers, and several trifling details of cabin furniture brought to my recollection that day in the Thames when I had said good-bye to Marie in her cabin, alone. What had been her sufferings since? If she was in the hull she had been imprisoned at this date for five months, and by the time we got to her six! For six months she would have been locked up in a motionless hulk, high perched upon a savage island, heavily faced with ice, with a thunder of surf far down for ever in her ear, and always the same white, desolate, fierce prospect of frozen cliffs and rolling ocean. Would it not have killed her? I clasped my hands in the torment of the thought. Should I be making this voyage to a remote ice-girt island merely to enter the wreck and behold the remains of my Marie as I had looked into that coffin in Cape Town beholding another?
I passed into my own berth, a small but comfortable box, and after busying myself for half an hour, during which I had recalled my mind to something of its former composure, I re-entered the cabin and found the table laid for dinner. The little sea parlour looked cheerful with this hospitable setting. The heel of a windsail buzzed in the skylight. There had happened a little shift of wind whilst I was below, for the brig leaned over and I heard a smart hissing—the seething of foam sliding past; it was as cooling a noise as the sound of a hard shower of rain on a dusty August day at home.
I stepped on deck to take a look; the land was melting into a vast roll of shadow astern and on the port quarter, filming down to the Cape end; the breeze hung steady, only it came fresher, more fiery and sparkling out here in the wide ocean, we had changed our course by two or three points, bringing it somewhat abaft the beam; I saw no cloud, nothing but a glad race of flashing bright blue seas ridging from an horizon that rose into a dome of untarnished blue in the midst of which was the sun, making a dazzling plain of a great surface of water in the north.
Captain Cliffe came to the compass-stand whilst I stood looking at the card; I felt his little blinking eyes were upon me when my sight went to the hollow canvas, and to the sea-smoke that from time to time blew away in little puffs from off the lee bow when the brig stooped with a sheering plunge shouldering a knoll of the blue brine into a long roar of foam.
'This is good sailing,' said I.
'It beats steam anyhow,' said he, turning to look at the race of wake astern.
'What's the speed?'
'Nine,' he answered with a convulsive grimace of triumph, 'and I understand they never could get more than seven out of the steamer you came out in.'
The mate walked in the gangway; I saw but one man forward. The captain told me the crew were at dinner. But whilst I stood first one man and then another came up through a little hole in the fore part of the brig, and in a few minutes half a dozen of them were sprawling and lounging in the shadows the canvas made upon the forecastle, smoking, but scarcely speaking for heat and loathing of movement.
I could not forbear a smile when I reflected that to all intents and purposes I was veritably the owner of this white brig sweeping south-west, and the master of those people yonder. What would my prosaic friends of the City think of such an adventure as this I was upon? But put Marie by my side, or bid me know for a God's-truth that she was safe, and I'd have sworn there was nothing in this wide world of delights comparable with such sailing as this. Sickness had been cured by the 'Cambrian.' The heave of the deck, the slant of the hull, the feel of the speeding of the fabric of white cloud through the sun-bright gushing of wind were as a buoyancy of spirits; you did not heed them, yet they worked like wine in the blood. I wanted but peace at my heart, the tranquility of conviction, to have tasted a perfect happiness in this glorious Cape noon of flashing ocean, of rushing brig and wind filled with the music of the strands.
My reverie was disturbed—for Cliffe stood silent by my side—by the sight of the boy coming along with the cabin dinner, and presently the captain and I were seated at table.
This was my first meal aboard, and I often laugh silently when memory returns me the image of my little skipper sitting behind a roast fowl, blinking and stretching his lips at it, then rising and lurching over it, being too short to carve it sitting. He saw amusement in my face, for on beginning to eat he said he often lamented that he had come in at the tail end of his family when nearly all the height had been served out. He was the last born, and arrived when not very many inches were left. He had a brother six foot high, and his mother was a big woman. He told me that he once dined with a company of people when the Queen's health was proposed and everyone stood. His neighbour requested him to stand up as the Queen's health was being drunk. He answered he was up. These were the sort of mortifications, he said, to which little men were subjected.
After a bit, talking always as I now did on the subject of the 'Lady Emma' and our chances of finding Miss Otway alive in the wreck, I asked if the boatswain of the brig—that jumping seaman who had been whaling seven years—had ever sighted the New Orkneys?
'I didn't think of asking,' he answered, 'but I'll soon find out, sir.'
'Would you object to his coming here?'
'This is your ship, Mr. Moore.'
'I'd like to ask him some questions.'
He at once told the boy who waited on us to send Bodkin aft. In a few minutes the man came; by this time we had dined, but the captain lingered to hear what this boatswain had to say before he went on deck to send the mate to his dinner.
'I've been telling this gentleman,' said the captain, leaning his little figure against a stanchion and discharging a whole broadside of grimaces at Bodkin, who stood staring at us and around him, astonished at the summons, 'that you've been a-whaling seven years in the Pacific and Southern Ocean.'
Here Bodkin lifted his hand to his forehead in the seaman's salute to me.
'Know anything of the New Orkneys?' said the captain with nervous abruptness like the briskness of a bird.
'Well, sir, bin off 'em again and again.'
'Sit down,' said I. 'Boy, give Mr. Bodkin a glass of sherry.'
Bodkin put down his cap and sat; he had evidently been called from some heavy work, and his face and hairy arms bare to the elbows, and his well-baked throat naked to the iron-grey hairs upon his chest, shone with sweat. He took the glass and tipped down the wine.
I then said, 'Do you know that we're sailing to the New Orkneys?'
'Oh, yes. I signed for that run.'
'Is our errand known to you?'
'It's to search for a wreck, ain't it, sir?'
'A wreck with live people in it,' said Captain Cliffe. 'I made that clear, didn't I?'
'Then I hope we shan't find 'em,' said Bodkin.
'What!' shouted Cliffe with a hideous face.
'For their own sakes. Who'd lock a dog up there?' said the man, running the length of his wet bare arm along his streaming forehead ''Tain't imagined here, with the pitch 'twixt the seams like suet, and the paint-work blistering into scabs. I've been off the larger of them islands five times. Yer wouldn't know 'em from icebergs, 'cept for here and there a piece of naked black rock showing where ice hadn't formed or snow couldn't keep a hold of.'
'Could a boat land?' I exclaimed, scarcely bearing to hear him when he talked like that.
'Why yes, sir. This time of the year—watching a smooth—'tain't always what they calls weather down there; but it's b—— cold.'
'Were ye ever ashore on them islands?' inquired the captain.
'No, sir.'
'Did your ship send a boat ashore?' I asked.
'The last time I was off them rocks a boat was sent and she came back again; they was nearly capsized, and that was all they did.'
'Describe the land,' said I.
His recollection, however, was not very clear. He talked of tall ice cliffs and of a huge dim mountain far inland; and of peaks and projections showing and disappearing amidst storms of snow.
'Is there much ice about the island?' said I.
'Plenty,' he answered. 'The biggest berg I ever see in all my life was close in with that land, third time I wur off it.'
'Suppose the hull of a ship was on a ledge of ice, thirty or forty feet above the wash of the sea; she was lying plain in sight of the ocean'—I named the date on which the skipper of the whaler 'Sea Queen' had passed her—'would you expect to find her still exposed, lying in full view?'
He looked at me with a working mind, his words being too few to help him quickly; then said, turning his eyes upon the captain:
'All things considered, I allow it's more'n likely she'd be smothered up.'
'What's to smother her?' cried Captain Cliffe.
'The congregating of bergs,' answered the other.
'Is that all ye know of ice?' exclaimed the little man. 'Haven't you heard that ice fetches away from the main and works north this time o' year?'
'I'm asked a question,' said the man with a note of sullenness in his voice, 'and I'm expected, I suppose, for to speak the truth, being sent for. All I know is there's nothen so shifting as ice, and therefore nothen so smothering.'
'But the hull's ashore on an island,' I exclaimed.
'That's not going to stop the ice from a-blocking of her out,' he answered.
'I'm afraid you won't get much encouragement out of this man,' said Captain Cliffe, turning and grimacing at me.
'Yer see, sir,' said Bodkin, directing a languishing look at the decanter of sherry in the hands of the boy as he went to the pantry, ''tain't only the chance of that there hull being hobscurified by the congregating of ice right in front of her; she lies under slifts which are constantly a-going to pieces and tumbling down in thundering lumps.'
'Then,' said I, 'I take it, Mr. Bodkin, that you, who have had plenty of experience of the ice down south, give me little reason to hope that we shall find the wreck whole or the people abandoned in her alive?'
He rolled his monkey eyes briskly at this, fretting first one cropped grey whisker and then the other with the palm of his hand.
'I allow,' he answered after a silence, during which little Captain Cliffe viewed him as sternly as his nervous distorting affection permitted, 'that your chance is as good as any chance at sea hever can be. But I don't mind saying,' he added, standing up, catching hold of his cap and revolving it, 'that our number is agin your luck.'
'What's that?' exclaimed the captain.
'Let the gent count us. There's thirteen souls.'
'Go forward,' said the captain, 'and get on with your work.'
The man, with a civil flourish of his hand to his brow, left the cabin.
'There's no fool like Jack fool,' said Captain Cliffe.
I confess, however, that when I reckoned up to myself the number of people on board and made No. 13, I felt a little uneasy. I said nothing to the captain, but the thing weighed upon me. It was perfectly natural that at such a time I should be superstitious; certainly a good omen would have heartened me: why, then, should not so unlucky a circumstance as that of thirteen forming the number of us in the brig prove depressing? I was so weak in this way that I had serious thoughts of ordering Cliffe to tranship one of the men at the first chance that offered. Also, the boatswain Bodkin's description of the island, his talk of the cliffs, of ice-splitting and thundering down in blocks, worried me by exciting new apprehensions. I was sorry I had sent for the man. I had come from the deck to my dinner in tolerably good spirits, and when I returned on deck I felt as melancholy as ever I had been in my gloomiest hour aboard the 'Cambrian.'
The mood lasted for the remainder of the day, so that, spite of the noble sailing breeze, this, my first start in search of Marie, seemed as inauspicious as though the scheme had failed in the first breath of it. But after a long chat with Cliffe in the evening I grew cheerfuller. The sun was sinking in splendour: the dark blue sea ran in frothing lines; the brig was sailing swiftly, heeling down and smoking onwards as though, like something living, she blew the breath of life in steam from the nostrils of her hawsepipes as she fled. Every hour of such progress shortened the term of expectation; all might yet be well; I could not but reflect that, until the worst was known, the best might most rationally be hoped for. I had come to Cape Town thinking to find my sweetheart dead; it was not she that lay there. Though we should board the wreck and find nobody in her, still I should have a right to believe that the three had been rescued, and perhaps at that very time were at home in safety.
Thus I reasoned with myself after my talk with Cliffe in the evening and was somewhat easier at heart, which indeed in this whistling evening, merry with progress, spacious with the splendour of the setting sun, and the distance of the eastern seaboard faintly flushed, might have been at rest but for the gloom of the silly superstition of thirteen!
About this time, a little before it fell dark, whilst looking towards the forecastle where most of the crew were smoking and talking, I saw a man come out of the hatch, hugging something to his breast. The sailors jumped up and pressed around him. Hands were outstretched to what the fellow held, and I heard some laughter. Cliffe was below. The mate Bland was walking near me abreast of the skylight. He bawled out:
'What have you there, my lads?'
On which the boatswain Bodkin, snatching the object from the hold of the man, held it high, shouting:
'Here's good luck to the brig "Albatross;" and now there's fourteen all told.'
I started, and saw it was a cat he held. It was black as coal.
'Bring it here,' I cried.
He came, the others grinning as they stood in a huddle looking aft. It was a young cat, and it mewed as the man approached with it. Cliffe came on deck at that moment.
'Where was it found?' I asked, stroking the thing as it lay mewing in Bodkin's hands.
'In one of the men's hammocks, sir.'
'It's a cat!' exclaimed Cliffe with a grimace. 'Who brought it aboard?'
'No man owns to it,' responded Bodkin.
'But who would bring it aboard if it wasn't its own legs, Mr. Moore?' said Cliffe, turning to me. 'D'ye know I'd ask for no better stroke of luck in all my seafaring days than this same beast's presence,' and he advanced his little hand and tickled the cat's head.
'There's fourteen of us now, sir,' said Bodkin, with a darting roll of his eyes.
'Fourteen and a stroke of luck besides, eh?' said I with a foolish laugh of good spirits spite of myself.
'Go and give it something to eat and see that it don't jump overboard,' said Captain Cliffe; and whilst the boatswain walked forward handling the cat tenderly enough and talking to it, the little skipper with a snap of his eyes and a voice of conviction exclaimed: 'That cat's squared the yards, Mr. Moore. We shall find the wreck, sir, and do your business.'
On the morning of January 29, 1861, Captain Cliffe at dinner told me that our position by dead reckoning—he had not been able to obtain an observation for two days—was latitude 58° 30´ S., longitude 45° W. I pulled out my note-book on hearing this and started violently.
'Good God, Cliffe!' cried I, 'do you know that we are within a mile or two of the place where the "Lady Emma" was abandoned by her crew?'
'Is that so?' said the little man after a pause, closing his knife and fork. 'But it's true all the same: I'll back my runs for the last two days, log-reckoned as they are, right, longitude and latitude, within ten mile.'
It was bitterly cold, and when I had come below so dense a fog overhung the sea that the main-yard was out of sight from the wheel. The brig was lying hove to under small canvas, a large smooth Cape Horn swell was running out of the sallow thickness, and the little vessel was rolling horribly, falling into the hollows and swinging to the summits, now on her beam ends, now on a level keel, now with a dip forward that seemed to make her all stern, now with a drop aft that shook the cabin with a hollow roar, every motion being so abrupt, and exaggerated, that it was almost impossible to walk, to stand, even to eat, the plate flying from your hand, whilst the boy waited with a broken head through a fall down the companion ladder.
We had passed several icebergs on the previous day, during a very thick morning and afternoon, when the sky had been dark with driving cloud, and the strong wind white with snow, and throughout the night a sharp look-out had been kept for ice; but since daybreak it had been as dense as it was now with an awful silence all round: nothing had once broken the amazing, oppressive stillness upon that sea, sallow as the fog, labouring in volumes of brine soundlessly, saving a strange, fierce noise of blowing heard close upon the bow, though nothing was to be seen there. Cliffe said it was a whale, and I might have guessed that by the sight of the boatswain Bodkin springing with an amazing jump into the fore-shrouds, and leaning away from the ratline he grasped with pricked ears, staring as out of love for his old sport into the choking wool the breathless air was filled with.
I was as anxious and restless on account of the ice as any man aboard, though I was no sailor: Cliffe had said it didn't follow, though a hurricane blew, that the smother would clear. I knew that ice must be about: for still we had headed south after passing many bergs, and if wind came and gave us a drift without clearing the ocean for us, we might be foul of an ice mountain ere the mass of it was fairly shaped to the sight within toss of a man's cap.
But I forgot our situation for awhile when Cliffe told me where we were and I looked into my note-book. Deep love, deep grief, consecrated to my heart this scene and place of silent hills of water. Here the 'Lady Emma' had been abandoned; here, if the horizon had been visible, then, within the compass of it Marie had been left with her two companions in a dismasted hull amid such floating ice as during the past few days I had gazed at with fear and amazement: from this point the three in that mere raft of ship had drifted—the vessel on to the ice of Coronation Island; that, undoubtedly, she had been seen, described, reported, but her inmates—had they been taken out of her? Or were they frozen corpses in her? Or were they living, within reach of a day or two's sail from the place of ocean Cliffe had found us in that day?
A fire glowed in the little brass grate. The cabin was snug and warm enough with the companion doors closed; but I speedily grew restless after Cliffe had gone on deck. I asked the mate when he came down to dinner how the weather looked.
'Thick as muck, sir.'
'Any signs of wind, Bland?'
'None. But there's no trusting the next minute.'
'Any ice near us, think you?'
'The boatswain's been a snuffling and says he can hear the noise of the beating of water. Nary man else do, though. Them whalemen are so clever they can thread needles with their toes. They can smell grease in a field of grass.'
Here he began to munch, and I let him eat.
I put on a thick coat and went on deck. The brig's arrest on the smoke-thickened water, when one thought that if it would but clear and the sun flood the south with the sparkling splendour of the South Afric parallels from the mastheads of the brig the loom of the huge dim hill past the cliff where the hull was lying might be seen—this, I say, was maddening. I never could have imagined so dense a fog out of London. It was thick as soup, of a sort of dirty yellow, as though charged with the soot of a city of factories. The dripping wet of it froze as it gathered, and our shrouds were swollen with the glazing, as much of the brig as could be seen was beautiful and novel with fantasies of ice. The topsail clapped in the blankness overhead like shells exploding there: but you could not see it. That was the only noise saving an occasional long sobbing wash of water when the brig heeled straining from the yearning send of the swell.
I held by a backstay, Cliffe standing beside me, and rolled my eyes around the sallow blindness, till all of a moment I heard a very faint moan like the noise of a sea running into a cave: it sounded afar, and yet not far either, as though something stood between the cause of it and us.
Cliffe heard nothing, though he grimaced in the direction I indicated, and dropped his head on his shoulder to hearken.
About this time the mate came up from his dinner. I asked him to listen, suspecting that the noise I had heard was the sound of sea upon ice. After a pretty good spell of silence the three of us listening with all our might, Bland said:
'Sometimes if ice is near and can't be smelt or seen, it may be heard. If you fire off this gun,' said he, putting his hand upon the brass piece, 'and ice is by, it'll answer.'
'Try it,' said I.
He promptly went below and returned with the necessary ammunition; where our powder was kept I never inquired. He and Cliffe loaded the gun, the skipper snapping grimace after grimace with nervous excitement.
'Are you all ready?' said I.
Bland said 'Yes,' and then shouted to the men forward to stand by to listen for an echo and note its bearings. The forms of the seamen loomed in mere smudges in the fog as they lurched to the rolling bulwarks to hearken.
'Fire!' cried I.
The piece blazed and thundered, lighting up the fog like a volcanic upheaval with a wild crimson glare as though it was the night itself the powder flashed against. But stunning as the roar was, it was not so deafening but that I, for one, caught an echo stinging back through the thickness on the starboard hand like a slap of tall becalmed topsail against a mast.
'Hear it?' shouted a voice forward.
'We were answered yonder,' I cried, pointing.
'Ship ahoy!' at that instant came in a hoarse but clear, thin, far voice out of the blankness on the port bow.
'Good God, we are hailed!' cried Cliffe. 'Bland, answer. Your lungs have got more carrying power than mine.'
'Hallo!' shouted Bland, going to the side in a spring, and sending his voice in the direction of the hail in a deep, roaring, melancholy note.
'What ship's that?' came back distinct but remote, so wonderful was the hush, so burnished the swell. We made answer, and then roared Bland:
'What ship's that?'
'The "Helen MacGregor" of Hull, twenty months out. What's wrong with you, that you're firing guns?'
'All's right with us,' bawled Bland. 'Any ice about, d'ye know?'
'Not used my eyes since daybreak,' echoed the far, thin, hoarse voice.
It was strange to hear it, to look into the thickness and see nothing, to know that a ship was there, and listen to a man talking on her! But conversation all that way off was not to be kept up long.
After remaining twenty minutes on deck I felt the cold so severely that I returned to the cabin. After I had been below about half an hour the brig heeled sharply on a slant of swell without recovery as before, whence I guessed it had come on to blow suddenly. In fact, I might have known it by the noise of feet overhead and the gushing and hissing of water in motion, shouldered off in foam. I wrapped myself up and went on deck and found the brig lying down close hauled under the canvas she had been brought-to with early in the morning—a reefed maintopsail and foresail; she was looking up for a tall, black, full-rigged ship that was lying with her topsail to the mast on the weather bow as though waiting for us.
The scene of ocean was wonderfully grand at this hour: it was not blowing hard, yet the wind out of the heads off the ridges it made, and the swell was rolling now in furrows of foam. The fog was broken up and sailing off in compact masses with the wide white-lived heave of sea gleaming and glancing through the foundations of vapour, till you looked to see the stuff rock as though afloat. Lanes and openings stretched in all directions, and I did not know where to direct my eyes first, so noble, wild, and startling was the picture of that tall black ship showing in a wide, clear space, her canvas waving in squares of light in the framing of the sallow smother, whilst on the starboard quarter hung a stately incomparable spectacle of iceberg, a giant mass, the height vaster to the imagination because the fog showed you bits of it only—in one place marble white cliffs staring through a passage of vapour, a little further on, a gray pinnacle piercing the stuff which streamed off it like torn rag. And now I could hear, but faintly, the noise of the sea breaking along its base.
We had passed a good deal of ice during the week; but this was the place where the 'Lady Emma' was abandoned; that white vapour-clothed mountain took a significance none other had. I thought of it as ice that had been seen by Marie's own eyes. It was as a revelation, too, of the savage, forbidding, tremendous scene of desolation the brig was bound to, with myself in her, dreaming, hoping, praying to Almighty God I should find my sweetheart in the hull alive.
Many large white and grey birds flew out of the vapour into the openings; they glanced against the marble-like abrupt and vanished. In the midst of a wide flaw right abeam to port, another tall berg was floating. It, too, was a sight of terror and awful beauty, with a look as of frozen foam about the brows of it where the fog was flying, the vapour whitening out to the shadow of the ice as though moon-smitten, whilst low down on the right arched a piece of marvellous architecture, like a Titanic Gothic doorway, through which every swell of the sea flashed, bursting into a terrible fury and dazzling brightness of foam.
I looked on in silence, keeping the shelter of the companion, whilst the brig under her little show of cloths broke her way to windward, helped by the tall black ship whose drift was towards us. After some waiting we were within hailing distance. She was just such another whaler as the 'Sea Queen,' but bigger by a couple of hundred tons, worn and weedy, rolling dark decks at us with a glimpse of a black-roofed galley and smoking chimney. She was rich with ice device: fathoms of thick crystal hung from her tops, catheads, bowsprit and quarters; a dull light sank down her glass-like rigging as she swayed. A crowd of men viewed us over her rail, and a man stood awaiting us beside the mizzen rigging, an arm wrapping a backstay, and his figure like a bear's with fur to his heels.
'What southing are you from?' shouted Cliffe, who, dwarf as he was to the sight, had something bugle-like in the clear, small penetrating note of his throat's delivery.
'Sixty-one, sighting Elephant Island. Nothing to the south'ard of it,' shouted back the man in the bear-like coat.
'Been off the South Orkneys?' cried Cliffe.
'Just caught a sight of the north-west point of Coronation Island? 'Twas blowing hard, and the weather coming on thick,' answered the other.
The two vessels rolled at a distance apart not wider than a wide street: each man's voice rang through the wind in distinct syllables spite of the splashing and groaning sounds and the howling and whistling aloft when the brig's spars sheared to windward on the slope of the sea. When I heard the whaleman speak of Coronation Island, I thought my heart had stopped. I wanted to speak, but could not.
'How was the ice?' bawled Cliffe.
'Plentiful to the south'ard and west'ard.'
'How was the ice about the New Orkneys?'
'More'n ye'll want if you're bound there,' was the answer.
'D'ye know that land?'
'Ay' was the answer that was accompanied by a significant ironical flourish of the arm.
'Where's a man's chance of getting ashore?'
The whaleman seemed to address another, probably the mate, who stood a little distance from him.
'There's some landing-places on the south side,' he presently called. 'There's shelter there from the westerly winds. But you must see to your ship, for the ice is plentiful and dangerous.'
'The wreck lies on the north side of the island,' I called to Cliffe.
'Is there no landing on the north of the island?' shouted the little fellow.
The other answered, but the words were lost in a sudden blast or squall of wind which blew betwixt our masts in a shriek like a locomotive's. A moment later I saw the skipper of the whaler, as I presumed the bear-coated man to be, motioning to his crew and heard him, but faintly, shouting; thereupon the ship's topsail-yard was swung: the man brandished his fist in a farewell to us, and whilst we still lay as though hove, with the weather leech-rope of our band of topsail shaking at every smoking plunge of the brig's head, the ship heeled over, and gathering way, broke the seas off her lee bow with glaring heaps, and melted into a swollen smudge in the heart of a body of vapour when our crew were trimming sail for the course to the New Orkneys.
The rolling ocean, sallow still, was thick in many places with fog. We saw now that ice lay all about us. There was scarce an opening in the vaporous folds that was not filled with a berg near or distant, a dull, pale, motionless mass; the vast island that had been off our starboard quarter when the wind broke up the thickness, we had now brought on to our port bow, and were slowly passing; its loom was more like a blue shadow of land in the dull yellow light of that Antarctic afternoon, summer as it was, than ice: yet it was a vast berg stretching west and east: its westermost point was nearest and hung like a mass of foreland, wild with the vapour that flew smoking off its face and points, and with the leap of the surf at its base in lofty columns of foam, whose heads the wind swept off in clouds.
I stood beside Cliffe under the shelter of a large square of canvas in the main rigging: oilskinned figures watched on the forecastle; we drove very slowly; the running rigging had been seen to and carefully coiled down ready for instant handling should a sudden cry from the forecastle compel a shift of helm. I saw many birds flying in the hollow seas, and turning to mark the bearings of a small berg which had come and gone and come again on the starboard bow, I observed slowly swinging past about a half-acre of the giant kelp of this part of the world, a huge seaweed, glancing black in the whiteness of the froth, and hissing like shingle as the salt shot through it.
'Now that we are under way again,' I exclaimed, 'I am realising that the end of this cruise is at hand.'
'Were it all clear water and fine weather,' answered the little man, 'we should be off the island by noon to-morrow.'
'What distance do you reckon it?'
'Eighty miles.'
'That ship we have just spoken makes me believe the hull has been sighted again and again.'
'Why, perhaps so,' he answered, 'but not of necessity.'
'She was off the island, close enough to see the rocks.'
'And who's to say that she's not the first that's been off that land this six months—close in with the coast, I mean? Depend upon it, Mr. Moore,' he went on with his face full of earnestness betwixt his grimaces, 'you're doing the right thing for your own peace of mind, and in the cause of humanity....'
'Oh, it goes higher than humanity, man, higher than humanity,' I interrupted.
'In finding out for yourself,' he continued, 'whether the hull's the wreck of the "Lady Emma," and whether the captain, and his wife, and your young lady are still aboard——'
'By heaven, yes, then!' I exclaimed; 'Only to think of her as being on board, and perishing there for the want of my coming to her help! Whether she's there or not, Cliffe, it was the right thing to do, as you say, and even in that thought I find a sort of comfort. Shall you heave-to when it comes on dark?'
'I'm for shoving on, sir, but we'll take no risks.'
'None, though the job of heaving the land into view should fill another month.'
And still expectation and excitement so worked in me, I felt ill with the conflict. I was up and down ceaselessly till the dusk blackened the scene out. The cold drove me below, restlessness forced me above again. It was always the same picture, the rolling and plunging figure of the brig, gleaming with barbs, and spears, and motionless pennons of ice: the glare of her band of topsail dingy against the ice beyond as she swung it through the howling sweep of wind: the quick dazzle of froth recoiling in thunder from the thrust of the bows: the large grey swell coursed by the breaking surge, and to right and left, and ahead and astern, the shadows and clear shapes of ice, some with brows in the flying scud, some table-like and flashing like sunlight as the seas charged them and burst, one showing a hatchet-like edge till our rolling brig, opened it into a coast of marble that vanished in a haze of mist and spray.
Happily, after it had been dark about an hour, the brig still blowing forward under reefed topsail and foresail, whilst I sat in the cabin warming myself, drinking some hot brandy and water, but always with ears straining to catch a cry on deck, Cliffe came below, and gave me the good news of a shift of wind into the north-west, with a scanting of it, and a plenty of starlight, and the Southern Cross looking almost upright.
'What does that signify?' said I.
'Nothing,' he answered with a cheerful grimace. 'Except, that as the Southern Cross is upright at midnight on one day only in the year, the sight of it almost on end now is interesting.'
'When is it actually upright?'
'On March 26.'
'D'ye know, Cliffe,' said I, getting up, meaning to take a look round, 'that it's comforted me sometimes to think of that symbol of God overhanging these waters. It should be a sight to freshen a man's faith in a time of distress.'
'Strange to find it hung up down here where they're all heathens,' said Cliffe.
'Much ice?'
'No more than there was, sir.'
I went on deck. The dusk of the night was hard and clear, and I observed a keen blue in the trembling gleam of many of the stars. But though there was no wet in the air, I had never felt the cold so bitter as on this night. The sight of the nearer of the ice mountains in the gloom under the light of the stars was marvellously fine and awful; some shone with a light of their own; it was the snow upon them, I suppose, that made that sheen. I noticed, however, that though the sea was covered with these faint and pallid masses, there was plenty of sea-room in the lanes and highways they made. A startling and alarming part was the crackling and crashing noises which came from them, and shortly before I was driven below by the cold, an island on the port quarter, wan as a cloud touched by a corner of moon, vanished; it may have shown in another shape by daylight; it had overset and perhaps rose flat and invisible in that light. But the spectacle was wonderful: it made a deep impression on me. Cliffe who saw it bid me listen, and sure enough after a little there came slanting through the wind such a prodigious noise of hissing and seething that, but for knowing what made it, you would have looked in its direction for the foaming waters of a sudden gale.
There was to be little rest for the crew that night. Cliffe informed me the men had been told that all hands would have to stand by throughout the dark hours, ready to jump to the first call if the brig was to remain a brig. A seaman was stationed on each bow: a third aloft on the foreyard: the mate and the boatswain were to relieve each other every two hours in keeping a look-out on the forecastle. A man was stationed aft ready in a breath to help at the helm. The galley fire was kept burning all night, and hot coffee, and at longer intervals small drams of rum, were served out to the crew.
The chief peril lay in the smaller blocks of ice floating on the water; they were hard to see before they were dangerously close to; and yet, comparatively small as they were, any one of them was big enough to knock a hole in the brig's bottom, and founder her out of hand.
Right through the night we held on. At first the cries of 'Ice ahead,' 'Ice on the port bow,' 'Starboard your helm,' and the like, alarmed me; but I presently got used to them, nor indeed were they so frequent as to be terrifying; once only, that is, in my hearing, was a cry raised as for life or death in a sudden passion or panic; then it was an immense flat ragged-edged piece of ice under the bow; a swift turn of the helm sent the brig clear, giving us a sight of the stuff alongside, and the brave little ship ploughed her way onwards.
Happily, it was midsummer, and the night comparatively short. The dawn was fair and rosy, and the sun rose upon a dark blue sea, frothing far as the eye could pierce, and magnificent with ice. I cannot express the gorgeous scene of colour that sunrise called into being. In all directions the ice lay in a hundred shapes, some of the islands sparkling like prisms; I beheld floating cities of porcelain, enormous shapes in alabaster, figures of marble, monstrous and grotesque as those huge forms of rock which stand in a congregation of Titans at the base of some of the precipitous heights of Table Bay.
But though there was plenty of ice in the south, there was an abundance of room too for our passage; the mate came down from the fore royal yard with a telescope slung on his back and said he saw no barrier; he thought, but would not then swear, he could make out a faint shadow of land. If he was right, then the mountain that centres Coronation Island was in sight! The breeze was fresh out of the north-west, with a high following sea, and soon after the sun was risen and Cliffe had taken a long look round, he ordered sail to be made. The foretopsail was loosed, reefs shaken out, and cloths piled upon the little vessel to the topgallant yards; then, like something alive and released, the little ship fled southwards.
But it was not till next day that we had the land in view, and then it was ten o'clock on February morning, making it a few days above a month since we had sailed out of Table Bay. As on the previous day, so on this, the sun shone brightly, with even some comfort of warmth in its light. Many great clouds of a milk-white softness were sailing into the east; the wind was fresh out of the west, but though the sea ran briskly, with a shrewd vapour of salt in the shrill fling of the frothing curls, it was not a hollow sea; it rolled the brig in stately measures, but she was now under small sail, the ice being very plentiful and the sea crowded with bergs of all sizes, whilst right ahead were tall cliffs of ice backed by a blue shadow of mountain rising into a silver faintness where the eternal snows upon it sparkled and died out from the sight in the deep blue.
I was beside myself with excitement and wretched with distress of expectation, dread, and hope. That height of white cliff right ahead, broken in the foreground by pale floating islands, its face discoloured in places as though the ice that masked the rock had broken from the black and savage rampart, was Coronation Island, and on the port bow, looming distant but immense, were the mountains of Laurie Island.
Our anchors were at the cathead, ready for letting go in case of sudden need; the men hung about on the look-out for ice, ready in an instant to trim sail. We were sailing towards the island through an avenue of bergs: clear water sparkled from the thrust of our stem to the very wash of the distant surf, with no other obstructions than here and there a lump of the crystal stuff lifting sullenly with the swell, flashing gloriously, and so proclaiming itself to the sight when the sunbeam smote the foam that poured off it.
A chart of the islands lay upon the skylight, and every few minutes I would be dropping the telescope to look at the chart, to gather from the tracing the point of coast we were heading for. The whaleman had said that the wreck lay on a ledge in Palmer's Bay, and Cliffe and I were agreed that that large indent was between the two towering shadows, to the right of the taller peak that soared a thousand feet higher than Table Mountain.
The icebergs obstructed the view. The line of coast was studded with them: yet every moment I was sinking my sight through the lenses into each opening betwixt the bergs. The brig's progress under her small canvas was about four knots and a half; I'd glanced for a moment at some stately frozen pile majestically rocking and slowly veering by, then put my eye to the glass afresh. My very soul was now loathing the sight of the ice. The largest of the islands was no longer an object of splendour and sublimity, but of horror and heart-weariness, charged with a spirit of desolation that subdued me to a sort of numbness of mind if I looked long: it seemed to stonefy the very principle of life in me, as though there was a horrid magic in its bald white stare to look a man into craziness, and emptiness, and into its own frozen lifelessness.
But now, as we approached, the features of the land began to steal out into a brilliant keenness wherever there was space for them to show betwixt the floating ice, and on a sudden, whilst I was looking through the glass, the motion of the brig slided a seaborne hill away to the left, and exposed a front of cliff that lay with a shadow upon it as though it was a sort of ravine, at the foot of which, though I instantly guessed it would lift to some height above the sea as we got nearer, lay a black speck. I looked again, and cried out wild with excitement:
'Cliffe, I have the hull! I have the hull!'
The little man came headlong to my side, and put his grimacing face to the telescope.
'Yes! I see it, I have it!' he shouted. 'Just as reported—high above the wash—fair in the heart of the Bay. It'll be all plain sailing now. Lor, but there ought to be no difficulty in boarding her.'
He returned the glass to me: I levelled it afresh at the instant that the corner of a big heap of berg floated right into the field of vision.
It needed another hour of careful sailing to expose the hull anew: then through the glass I saw her clearly. She lay, a large black hulk of ship, upon a projection of ice that was at least thirty feet above the sea. I made out her bowsprit, and the stump of her foremast. The cliffs soared sheer and abrupt at the back of her to a great height. Even at that distance it was not hard to guess that, after having stranded, she had been lifted by some earthquake dislocation of ice into the posture she rested in. Suppose the sea clear, she must have been visible to passing ships for leagues.
The seamen were congregated in the bows, leaning over the rail, Bodkin amongst them pointing eagerly. The mate roared to them to keep a bright look-out, they then scattered, but the sight of that wreck had brought them heedlessly together as one man. Cliffe's glass was not a powerful one, yet the hull in the lens lay within half a mile, and I saw her plainly. She had her head towards the cliffs, and sat very nearly upon a level keel. A great portion of her starboard bulwarks were gone. She was a mass of ice under her stern: looked to be fixed there to her bed of white pillars. The sun shot sparkles into her as we advanced, and still she showed black, as though the ice that coated her was as glass. Nothing moved: I strained my vision till my brain reeled and the object swung in the glass and was eclipsed: Cliffe looked, he saw no smoke nor signs of life any more than I.
'If there's anyone alive aboard her,' said he, 'now's our time for letting them know we're here.'
'Right,' I answered, speaking with my teeth almost set; 'do what you will, Cliffe; do what is for the best.'
He called to Bland and a man, and they fetched a number of blank charges for the cannon. The little skipper left the gun to the mate's handling, himself taking charge of the brig, which needed exquisite watching and management, so crowded was the water here with loose ice.
'Let fly fast as you can load, Mr. Bland,' said the captain; 'fire six rounds.'
As he spoke came a cry from the forecastle: 'Lie close under the port bow, sir!'
Thus was it, thus had it been, saving that now the pack stuff had thickened perilously.
The gun was fired; it made a noble thunder, and roared in dying echoes from near ice crag to ice crag. Again it was fired, yet again; all this while the brig was rolling forwards with her helm going up and down to the cries from the forecastle and to the gestures of the little captain.
I stood at a backstay with a levelled glass steadied against it, and in the moment of the third explosion I saw smoke rise feathering from the deck of the hull; still watching, my breath so thick and difficult it was as though a hand was upon my throat, I marked that the smoke thickened; but I could not see the red of the flame, nor the figure of the person feeding it. I daresay I was as white as any corpse when I stepped over to the captain and, putting the glass into his hand, said: 'There is life there.'
'There's smoke arising from that wreck,' shouted someone forward.
'We're here for some purpose, then, anyway,' cried Cliffe with a small oath, letting fall the glass to his side with the most extravagant grimace I had ever beheld in him.
One saw the smoke easily now with the naked eye; it rose black against the whiteness past it, curled featherwise, and blew scattering against the face of the cliff. I levelled the glass again and saw the figure of a man walking toward the stump of the foremast; I watched him; in a few moments a square of colour rose to the summit of the mutilated spar, where it blew steadily; it was a large English ensign, Jack down.
Bland let fly a fourth gun.
'Stop it!' roared Cliffe, 'we are seen! Hoist the ensign and dip it thrice.'
The colour soared to the trysail gaff end; it blew out large on the bight of the halliards when it was dipped, and was easily within the observation of the man on the hull. When I looked through the glass once more I saw a second figure; it was upon the hull's quarter, where the rail or bulwarks rose to a height that hindered me from perceiving how it was clad. I asked Cliffe to look; he steadied the glass, and answered with a snap of his whole face, and a voice high-pitched with delight:
'As God's my hope, Mr. Moore, it's a woman!'
The glass so shook in my hands that I could not use it; I took a few turns, then looked again. The figure watched us from the same place, but I could not tell whether it was a man or a woman. If it was a woman, then it might be Mrs. Burke. I wanted three figures to make sure of Marie; I saw but two; where was the third?
I strained my sight at the telescope with a heart of fever, half strangled by conflicting passions.
The figure that had hoisted the colour went to the side of the other, and they both stood watching, nothing visible of them above their waists. It was blowing a fresh breeze, and before this time Cliffe had taken in certain canvas; I think the brig was under topsails only, the foresail hauled up and hanging in its gear; the vessel drove slowly with an occasional crackling noise of ice along her sides when she sheared through some thin sludge stuff you could not see till you were in it; fortunately the drift ice that had threatened a thick surface just now had loosened here and tossed scattered; as we advanced moreover, we found that the icebergs which had looked to sit close in with the coast rode with a good offing; the sea was covered with these floating islands off that part of the island marked Foul Point; the eastern horizon was also like a terrace of ice, but the face of the cliffs from Foul Point down to where the land rounded into Lewthwaite Strait was fairly open.
All this while the sun shone brightly and with warmth. The sea streamed in a glorious dye of violet; we rolled slowly onwards till we were within about three-quarters of a mile of the coast and right abreast of the wreck. The helm was then put down; the main topsail laid aback; the gun again fired, and the ensign dipped. It was now about noon.
By this time I had made out that one of the figures was a woman; I saw but two persons. Who the woman was I could not tell, fierce as had been the struggle of my vision to resolve the glimmer of her face into lineaments.
When the brig had been brought to a stand, Cliffe called a council. We had ample sea room. The nearest floating ice lay about a quarter of a mile distant on the port quarter; the smaller blocks were not numerous, nor was there weight of sea to make them dangerous. All along the base of the ice-clad cliffs the water was pouring in a thunder of boiling surf; it was not the breakers but the great breathing swell of this mighty ocean which worked all that noise and fury along the cliffs' foot. The white brine sometimes shot twenty feet high, though it blew but a moderate fresh breeze, and the surge ran small.
Cliffe, myself, Bland, and the boatswain Bodkin came together at the companion hatch to consider. We had swept with the glass the line of coast from the beach under the hull to as far as we could see on the right, and beheld nothing but lofty coils of frothing combers raging in surf; there was no chance for a boat anywhere that way. The left presented a like scene, saving that there was a point in Palmer's Bay that, cruising eastwards, shut out the view of perhaps a quarter of a mile of the water it enclosed. Upon that point our eyes were fastened.
'We must lower a boat,' said Cliffe, 'and find out how the land lies past that arm of land.'
'It's the only sheltered bit along the whole boiling, I allow,' said Bland.
Bodkin, putting down the telescope, exclaimed:
'She lies about forty feet high above the wash. The ice is broke and irregular from the water to where she sits, and I reckon a man might walk upon it if there's a landing-place round the point. But I won't swear to it till I'm close in. Ice is deceitful stuff. Capt'n, there'll be nothen to say till we've taken a look round. 'Tis certain there's to be no getting at the hull from the bottom of the height she rests on, even if the boat could land there.'
'Then lower away, Mr. Bland, as quickly as possible, and be off and back with a report, that we may make up our minds what to do before it falls dark.'
Whilst some hands were getting one of the whale-boats over, others were busy with the deep-sea lead: but we were away, pulling for the shore, before they sounded. I went in the boat, taking the telescope with me. She was a five-oared boat; Bodkin pulled stroke; one of our smartest seamen was in the bows. The fellows bent their backs, and the buoyant little craft, swift of model with the whale-hunter's lines, flashed over the blue ridges; often I sought to bring the glass to bear upon the two figures watching us; to no purpose. The mate would not let me stand up, and I put down the telescope in despair.
'That vessel,' said the mate, 'never berthed herself like that. She's been chucked right up by the ice, and 'twas sudden too, bet yer heart, Bodkin.'
The picture grew amazing as we advanced. The cliffs behind the hull rose to about two hundred feet; I call them cliffs, they were a solid, precipitous, rugged face of ice, how deeply sheathing the black rock of the island no man could tell: the whole stretch of land resembled a gigantic iceberg. The hull lay upon a huge block, the top about forty feet high; it projected in a wide ledge, then fell sheer. You might know it had been snapped from some parent monster by the smooth side it showed to the sea, so clean cut to the eye, it might have been done by the chisel and hammer of a giant big as the blue shadow of mountains beyond.
My eyes were fixed on the wreck, and on the figures standing at her bulwark rail. Now again I tried to bring the telescope to bear: the jumping of the boat made the effort useless. All in a minute one of the figures sprang on to the bulwark; flourished his arms, and then motioned frantically towards the part of the bay concealed by the curve of the ice.
'Hail him, in God's name!' I cried. 'Try him with your voice, Mr. Bland.'
The mate stood up and roared, the full volume of his lungs trumpeting into the inshore wind like a soldier's call, the sweep and lift of the whale-boat to the summit of a large swell helping.
'How many are there of you?'
'Two,' came back the answer, dull through the roar of the surf but distinguishable.
'Who is the other?'
The men were now resting on their oars, the boat sinking and lifting in the sea that was great and hollow for so small a fabric; we were within a pistol-shot of the base of the cliff on which the hull sat, but so high perched was the craft, so bewrapped the two people, I could not make out their faces. The man held up his hand as though he had not heard.
The mate roared again, 'Who is the other?'
'A young lady.'
'Is it Miss Otway?'
He brandished an assent, and his figure stiffened in a posture of amazement.
'Is that her alongside of you?'
Again the figure flourished an affirmative.
'Then here's Mr. Moore come to take her home,' thundered the mate.
When he said that, Marie—for it was she—leaned forward: she was motionless whilst you might have counted twenty; she then stretched out her arms. I pulled off my hat and flourished it, that she might know me among the crowd we made in that boat, then lifted up my hands to her. But even had my voice possessed Bland's carrying power I could not have called. There, high above, upon the rail of the wreck, flanked by towering walls of ice, stood, with arms outstretched in appeal to me, the figure of my beloved. I had thought to find her dead—she was there; I had thought to find her lying in an African grave—and there, on that high-poised wreck she stood in silent appeal. For weeks and weeks I had been mourning for her, asking of God that I might behold her, seeing her in my dreams, a frozen corpse upon the deck of that hull there: and now she stood up yonder, alive, full in sight.
The boiling of the surf ran a maddening noise of thunder round the bay. But one saw what the man, whoever he might be, had frantically pointed to. The water was smooth from the end of the point to away round for some hundreds of paces. The sea could not get at the frozen beach there: it flashed at the point, and recoiled in clouds.
'Put me ashore,' I exclaimed, 'I can climb those crags. Look how they wind to the ledge: Bodkin will help me. I must go on board that wreck.'
'Sit down, I beg, sir,' exclaimed the mate, catching me by the arm as I toppled half-delirious. 'Tumbling overboard's an easy job. Your eyes deceive you; you could no more climb those rocks than jump ashore from where you sit. What d'ye say, Bodkin?'
The man had already and quickly made up his mind. He glanced at the fall of crags of headlong abruptness in places, huge and nodding, yet so blending in their whiteness with the whiteness they stood out on as to cheat the unpractised eye with an appearance of easy road-way, and answered firmly, 'There's no mortal legs and arms as is a-going to carry a man to the wreck by them rocks.'
'Why did the man motion to that landing-place?' I said.
The mate turned his sheep-eyed face round the bay, and answered, 'He didn't know who we were. He was afraid that boiling,' said he, pointing to the surf, 'would drive us away.'
'How is the wreck to be entered?' I asked, looking up and waving my hat, and then again stretching forth my arms.
'It's a sailor's job. Have no fear. We'll get 'em out of that,' answered the mate, and standing up he hailed the man. The other flourished his arm. 'We're here to take you off,' bellowed Bland, 'and we'll do it. Don't take any notice of our leaving you. It won't be for long. D'ye hear me?'
'Ay, ay!' came the answer, feebly through the ceaseless thunder.
It tore my heart to look up at the wreck, as we pulled away, and see Marie there, sundered from me by that curse of roaring foam, inaccessible, to be come at only by patience, naval skill, efforts which might have to be again and again repeated, always perilous. I cannot express how marvellously strange this ice-ramparted bay looked, with that wreck cradled on high, like a huge model in glass, tinted black, smoke lifting still cloudily from her deck, and the red inverted flag streaming like a square of fire against the marble white beyond. Many large pieces of ice floated in this sweep of water: but they showed plain, and the boat went securely. One piece was almost a berg: a miniature island. Here and there the sea broke over it. It was almost in the middle of the bay, and exactly abreast of the wreck. I observed that Mr. Bland ran his eye curiously over it as we pulled past.
Who was the man on the hull that had answered us? He was not Captain Burke. My sight had not distinguished his face, yet I should have known him by his voice had he been Burke. Three had been left, so Wall the boatswain reported: Burke and his wife, and Miss Otway; I saw but two. The man had said there were two only: one was Marie: where were the others, and who was that stranger?
We arrived alongside the brig, and with little difficulty I got aboard. The pull had occupied so short a while there had been scarce time to talk: but in any case the hurry and wildness of my spirits, my deep agitation, amazement and delight, mingled with dark wonder and jealous alarm, must have held me mute.
Cliffe impatiently awaited us: Bland and Bodkin came on board, leaving the men in the boat. Bland immediately said:
'We must get them out with a cradle. There's no other way.'
'No landing, then, round that point there?' said Cliffe.
'Ay, sir, but the rocks are not to be climbed by anything wanting hoofs and horns.'
'Who are they?'
'One's the young lady,' said the mate.
Cliffe spun round and stretched his hand to me.
'I do congratulate you,' he cried, convulsing his countenance. 'It's a noble errand nobly rounded off. Hurrah!' and in a sudden ecstasy he pulled off his hat and whirled it three or four times over his head. He then cried, 'But two only? The third ain't dead, I hope?'
'Captain Burke and his wife are not there,' said I.
He grimaced at me, and said, 'Who's the man, then? But asking questions won't get them out of it. What d'ye propose?'
As he spoke he whipped out his watch: as it lay in his hand I saw the hour; the time was two, we had therefore a long afternoon of daylight before us.
'We must take the mortar in the boat and communicate with it,' answered Bland. 'There's a big piece of ice to anchor the boat to,' said he, pointing to the lump I had observed him look at. 'We shall want a cradle.'
'A cask 'll answer,' said Cliffe.
'Better have both boats in the water,' said Bland.
They exchanged further remarks to this effect, but I was no sailor and could not follow them. No time, however, was lost. In less than half-an-hour both boats were alongside, rising and falling singly under the lee of the brig. In one boat was the mortar, with a complete apparatus of gear and cradle for connection with the wreck. The cradle consisted of a large cask cleverly slung, and so contrived as to slide along a line when the rope attached to it was pulled. We were nobly favoured by the weather. The send of the swell was as steady as the tick of a clock: the seas ran short and small, with a rich sunny feathering of foam that made a wonder of the ice, so tropic was it with the blue overhead where floated a few large white clouds of a coppery effulgence of swollen breast.
We got away by a quarter to three, one boat in tow of the other; the wind and seas helped us, and we quickly entered the bay. We were of the same number as before, and the same people. We drove with lifted oars to the former talking place, and Bland hailed the man, and, with his loudest roar, told him we were going to fire the end of a line to the wreck and send him a tackle by it for a cradle. Did he understand?
The man responded with a peculiar flourish of his arm, and Bland instantly said to me, 'He is a sailor.'
I had no eyes save for Marie. She had showed on a sudden at the rail on the quarter as we entered the bay, and stood as still as a statue watching us. Before Bland hailed I kissed my hand and flourished my hat to her, and extended my arms; and she then stretched her hands, lifting them immediately afterwards.
The surf held us several hundreds of feet away from the beach: the hull stood about forty feet above; no cry I was capable of could have reached her through the noise of the trembling combers; but the wind, however, was brilliant, and Marie's form stood clear cut against the white background; nevertheless, I could not distinguish her features.
The boat, with the other in tow, now pulled for the lee of the large mass of ice that lay floating abreast of the wreck. The water swung foamless and quiet under the shelter of this block. A couple of men jumped out, and between them carried an anchor to some near crevice, in which they half sank it. Thus were the boats solidly secured.
The mortar was then loaded: I saw the man on the wreck turn as though addressing Marie, who immediately withdrew and disappeared. When all was ready, Bland with many wild gestures and flourishes signalled to the man to stand by. Our seamen were deeply interested and greatly excited, particularly Bodkin, who had the handling of the mortar.