Kenneth McAlpine Part 24

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

A TALE TOLD ON THE SEA OF ICE.

"The mariner whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is h.o.a.r."

Coleridge.

Scene: The good ship _Brilliant_ in the Doldrums. Crew at their Christmas dinner. The doctor continues his story.

"'In the year 18--, I sailed from Hull in the good barque _Constance_, bound for Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen, in pursuit of seals and walruses.

I was a very young man then, and, indeed, white though my hair be and snowy my beard, I am not old yet. It is not age that has made me grey, but grief, and one of the most terrible experiences it has probably ever been the lot of man to undergo.

"'Our voyage to the Arctic seas was a pleasant enough one. We did not encounter a single gale, and we made the country in less than a fortnight. We met the seals a little north of Mount Beerenberg, coming southward to the low pack ice in thousands; nay, but in millions; for the sea was black with their beautiful heads for miles on each side of our ship, and as far north as we could see from the masthead. Oh, didn't our hearts beat high then! We saw fortune within our reach, and had bright visions of a splendid voyage, a ship full to the hatches, with bings of skins on deck, and an early return to sunny England, our sweethearts and wives. We put about and followed the seals, and ere many days were past had the satisfaction of seeing them take the ice.

There would soon be enough to fill all the ships in the Greenland fleet.

We had but to wait a week or two until the young were big enough to capture. What a happy crew we were now! It was singing forward and laughing aft, all day long. But alas! and alas! for the fickleness of fortune, a wretched, greedy old Dutch ship came in, and no sooner saw the seals on the ice than she lowered her boats, and in spite of our remonstrances, proceeded to the ice. Twenty-four hours afterwards there was not one single seal, of all the myriads that had taken the ice, visible anywhere, above or below--the Dutch boats had scared them all away. It was all our captain and myself--I had only that spring got my certificate as mate--could do to prevent our men from boarding the Dutchman, and taking summary vengeance on that idiot skipper and his idiot crew.

"'We got up sail as soon as possible, and began forging through the loose pack ice, in the hope of again falling in with fortune in the shape of seals. We did sight them far in towards the west, and on heavier ice than we generally cared to venture among; but we did not think twice about the matter then. We worked our vessel in, and in, and in, towards our game, when the wind failed us all at once, and every seal disappeared as if by magic, or as if they had been but phantoms of the brain. To add to our grief, hard frost set in, and lasted for many weeks. We hoped against hope we would get clear before long, and still be in time to follow the old seals northwards toward Spitzbergen. So we dreamt. Well, clouds banked up on the southern horizon at last, and snow fell, such snow as I had never seen before, and have seen but once or twice since. Every flake was as big as a hand. In less than twelve hours the whole of that vast ice-pack was one level surface, one unbroken field of dazzling snow. But then came the wind--a fierce and fearful gale--and the bergs rose and fell around us and tossed and tumbled, as if we had been in the middle of a troubled sea, the waves of which were walls of snow. Our barque was heaved up, now forward, now aft, and ground and torn, till we could hear the very timbers cracking and rending beneath us, and we knew then she was doomed--knew that when the ice that nipped her receded, and the pressure abated, she would sink. This happened sooner far than we could have believed possible.

While the wind still roared through the rigging, and all between decks was as dark as a winter midnight with the clouds of drifting, driving snow, suddenly the sides of the saloon, in which the captain, myself, and the other mate were sitting, came crashing and splintering in upon us, and we had barely time to spring to the companion ladder before the freer ice was grinding amid a chaos of broken boards and timbers in the very place where we had been sitting barely three seconds before.

Almost at the same moment the after-part of the ship took fire.

"'How this happened I cannot tell. Friction itself would fire the rum, or the blazing coals from the broken stove might have been thrown among the staved casks. Explosion after explosion occurred; then the water rushed forward, and the vessel began at once to be sucked under. We had barely a quarter of an hour to clear out, but even in that short time we managed to land three boats with blankets and provisions on the ice, and this, too, in spite of the storm, in spite of the numbing wind, and the drifting, choking, powdery snow.

"'We huddled together beneath the boats for hours and hours, and when the wind went down at last, we crawled out--those who could crawl--the living from among the dead, the maimed and sick. Out of a crew of thirty-nine only twenty-four answered to their names the morning after the wreck of the good barque _Constance_. We sunk the dead between the bergs, and waited for others to die--waited days and days; then the remainder of us started southwards with two of the whalers to seek for the open water. The frost had set in again harder than ever, and the sun was very bright, but it was a terrible journey, nevertheless, and five more of us, including our captain, succ.u.mbed to cold and hardship before we stood at last on the edge of the solid pack with the open water all before us.

"'Ay, there it was--the open water, the Southern Sea--black as ink in the foreground, blue beyond, and dotted here and there with little floating bergs, just as the sky above was flecked with little fleecy, floating clouds. And we knew well that hundreds of miles beneath the horizon lay Iceland, the country we must try to reach, even if we perished in the attempt.

"'We launched our boats and grasped our oars, and so began our long and dangerous voyage. Provisions we had, and compa.s.ses; water we had none, but we took on board huge pieces of fresh-water ice that we were lucky enough to find on top of the salt sea bergs.

"'All went well for days and days, and, much to our joy, a breeze sprang up. The sail was set. We were so far south now that, summer though it was, the sun set; then we steered by the stars, for as yet clouds had not obscured the sky. I had command of our boat; the steward had charge of the other.

"'One morning I was saddened to see a body launched overboard from our companion boat, which was a little way ahead at the time. As we sailed up I had just time to notice it was the steward himself ere a terrible specimen of the hammer-headed shark sprang, monster-like, out of the sea, and next moment the body had disappeared.

"'The rugged mountain peaks of Iceland at last! With what joy we hailed them, only those who have been so situated can understand or appreciate.

Yes, the mountains were very rugged, very much peaked and jagged, but we knew that in the freer glens betwixt them, and at the head waters of many a lonely fiord, dwelt a rude but kindly-hearted people, who would gladly welcome and shelter the shipwrecked mariners.

"'And in two days at the furthest our trials would be over; so we fondly imagined. Alas! they were but beginning. In a few hours after we had sighted the distant hills the wind completely failed us, while up from the south came, rolling and tumbling along the surface of the ocean, a bank of dark fog, and we were soon completely enveloped. We called to the other boat to keep near us, and trusting now entirely to our compa.s.ses, we took to our oars once more.

"'For half a day our boats kept together, but as soon as night and darkness fell, the wind got up, and the sea became rough, dashing continually on board of us, and necessitating constant work in baling.

Towards morning the wind had increased to a gale, and we were running before it under our small, closely reefed mainsail and a trifle of jib.

Where we were running we knew not, and, I think, hardly cared. We were completely exhausted with the wet and the cold. Our ice and the provisions were gone, and even the compa.s.s lost.

"'The sun broke through the fog at last, and to some extent the wind abated, but the sea still ran houses high. I looked up from the place where I sat, mechanically grasping the tiller. Heavens! what a sight I witnessed! When night had come on, we had been seven in our boat; now we were but three, that is two more than myself. Of the others two had leapt overboard mad, or been washed away; two sat alive but pale and ghastly, grasping in white-blue hands, that I could see were sadly frost-bitten, the icy sheets of the sails. One poor fellow was curled up dead under the bows; the other had fallen backwards over a thwart as if he had caught a crab, and there he lay with his long yellow hair floating in the water with which the boat was half full, and his sightless eyes turned sunwards.

"The life still there upon his hair, The death within his eyes."

"Bale, men, bale the boat," I cried, "bale her, or we shall sink."

"'They turned their awful cadaverous faces towards me, they opened their mouths as if to speak, but a sound 'twixt a moan and a gurgle was all that came from their throats; then they lifted their hands and tapped the backs of their fingers against the gunwale of the boat, and they rattled as if they had been made of wood, so sorely were they frozen.

"'Many, many times during that long and dreadful day did those two poor fellows turn towards me, and they kept signing, signing to me for the help they were pleading for in vain, and ever from their throats came that awful gurgling moan. Oh! men, I think I see and hear them now.

"'Night fell at last, night and pitchy darkness, and next morning I was alone on the sea. Alone with the dead!

"'And all that day I sat there, as if in the power of some strange nightmare. The use of every limb I retained as well as that of head and body, but still I did not or could not move, but I kept praying, praying not for the cold and icy wind to fall, not for the clouds and fog to roll away, or the sea to go down, but praying for death, a share of the death I saw around me.

"'Towards the afternoon I think I must have slept or fallen into a kind of a trance. The wind had quite gone down when I again recovered a sort of consciousness. There was no more broken water, but a heavy tumbling swell on the eastward when I looked. These huge heaving smooth waves seemed to take on the appearance of monsters of the deep, raising their awful heads and backs, grim and grey and cold, above the sea; but westward they were moving ma.s.ses crimson and black. The sky was a wonderful sight. From the sun's upper limit to the zenith it was hung with curtains of blue-grey clouds, one behind the other, as it were, the edges all zig-zagged and fringed with red. All round the sun itself was a coppery haze. To the north the sky was clear and of a bright lemon yellow; to the east it was clear also, and _green_.

"'I sat gazing at clouds, and sky till they faded into the gloom of night; they got thinner and thinner then, and stars shone through them, and soon they vanished entirely, and the stars had it all their own way.

"'I felt no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no pleasure; my condition was one of pure apathy; my very soul appeared dead within me.

"'Soon a bright light shone out of the north with tints of carmine, pale yellow, and green; it was the aurora, and long fringes of pale phosph.o.r.escent light descended from the sky overhead. I could have touched them with my hand had they been tangible. They were independent of the far-off aurora. They a.s.sumed the forms of gigantic fern leaves and danced dazzlingly before my eyes, and I could almost imagine they emitted a hissing, crackling sound.

"'Then my brain began to reel, and I fell forward in the boat among my dead companions.

"'A shock awoke me at last. Cold and shivering now, I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Morning was breaking gloomy and grey over the sea, and some gulls were wheeling and screaming about in the air.

"'Once again the shock, and the boat trembled from stem to stern, and some birds rose up out of the bows and floated slowly away. They had been gorging on the dead.

"'The shocks to the boat were easily accounted for: the sea was alive with monster sharks.

"'O G.o.d! men, it was a fearful sight. There was something appalling and horrible in the very way they _gambolled_ around the boat. Their eyes told me one thing: they had come for the dead--and the living.

"'I cannot tell you whether I really did lift the bodies of my late companions and throw them overboard. I would even now fain believe this was but a dream. If so, it was terribly real, the fighting, wrangling sharks in the sea, the birds wheeling and screaming above.

"'My boat was picked up that day by some Icelandic fisherman; there was no one in it but myself, men, white in hair, white in beard, as you now behold me.'"

So ended the spectioneer's story, and so ended that Christmas dinner in the Doldrums, but both Kenneth and Archie long, long after this used to speak about it amid other scenes and in other climes, and both agreed it was one of the pleasantest afternoons ever they had spent in life.

The two friends made many a voyage together in the _Brilliant_, and together came through no little adventure, and saw many a strange sight in many a strange sea. They came to love the vessel at last, for real sailors do love their ships. They loved her and called her the saucy _Brilliant_, and the dear old ship, and quite a host of other pet names.

"But alas! and alas?" said Kenneth to Archie one day, while they stood together on the quarter-deck, "we are not making our fortunes. We will never get rich at sea. And by-and-bye, you know, we'll be getting fearfully old."

"Yes," said Archie, "I'm feeling old already. We are both of us over twenty."

"Sad thought! yes?" added Kenneth. "So I propose we leave the dear old stupid craft at the end of this voyage, Archie."

And so they did, reader. And thus our tale runs on, but the scenes must change.

End of Book Two.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

ON THE UNKNOWN RIVER.

"Most glorious night, Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and fair delight."