The Honour of the Flag Part 11

It was very cold, the wind about north-west, the sky a pale grey, with patches of weak hazy blue in it here and there; and here and there again lay some darker shadow of cloud curled clean as though painted.

There was nothing in sight saving the topmost cloths of a little barque heading eastwards away down to leeward. Quiet as the morning was, not once during the pa.s.sage had I found the temperature so cold.

I was glad when the job of washing down was over, and not a little grateful for the hook-pot of steam tea which I took from the galley to my quarters in the steerage.

I breakfasted in true ocean fashion, off ship's biscuit, a piece of pork, the remains of yesterday's dinner, and a potful of black liquor called tea, sweetened by mola.s.ses and thickened with sodden leaves and fragments of twigs; and then, cutting a pipeful of tobacco from a stick of cavendish, I climbed into my hammock, and lay there smoking and trying to read in Norie's _Epitome_ until my pipe went out, on which I fell asleep.

I was awakened by young Halsted, whose hand was upon the edge of my hammock.

"Not time to turn out yet, I hope?" I exclaimed. "I don't feel to have been below ten minutes."

"There's the finest sight to see on deck," said he, "that you're likely to turn up this side of Boston. Tumble up and have a look if only for five minutes"; and without another word he hastened up the ladder.

I dropped out of my hammock, pulled on my boots and monkey-jacket, and went on deck, noting the hour by the cabin clock to be twenty minutes before eleven. The captain stood at the mizzen-rigging with a telescope at his eye, and beside him stood Mr. Sweers, likewise holding a gla.s.s, and both men pointed their telescopes towards the sea on the lee bow, where--never having before beheld an iceberg--I perceived what I imagined to be an island covered with snow.

An iceberg it was--not a very large one. It was about five miles distant; it had a ragged sky line which made it resemble a piece of cliff gone adrift--such a fragment of cliff as, let me say, a quarter of a mile of the chalk of the South Foreland would make, if you can imagine a ma.s.s of the stuff detaching itself from under the verdure at the top and floating off jagged and precipitous. There was nothing to be seen but that iceberg. No others. The sea ran smooth as oil, and of a hard green, piebald foam lines as in the earlier morning, with but a light swell out of the west, which came lifting stealthily to the side of the schooner. There was a small breeze; the sky had a somewhat gloomy look; the schooner was at this hour crawling along at the rate of about four and a half knots.

I said to Halsted: "There was nothing in sight when I went below at eight bells. Where's that berg come from?"

"From behind the horizon," he answered. "The breeze freshened soon after you left the deck, and only slackened a little while since."

"What can they see to keep them staring so hard?" said I, referring to the captain and Mr. Sweers, who kept their gla.s.ses steadily levelled at the iceberg.

"They've made out a ship upon the ice," he answered; "a ship high and dry upon a slope of foresh.o.r.e. I believe I can see her now--the gleam of the snow is confusing; there's a black spot at the base almost amidships of the berg."

I had a good sight in those days. I peered awhile and made out the object, but with the naked eye I could never have distinguished it as a ship at that distance.

"She's a barque," I heard Mr. Sweers say.

"I see that," said the captain.

"She's got a pretty strong list," continued the mate, talking with the gla.s.s at his eye; "her topgallantmasts are struck, but her topmasts are standing."

"I tell you what it is," said the captain, after a pause, likewise speaking whilst he gazed through his telescope, "that ship's come down somewhere from out of the North Pole. She never could have struck the ice and gone ash.o.r.e as we see her there. She's been locked up; then the piece she's on broke away and made sail to the south. I've fallen in with bergs with live polar bears on them in my time."

"What is she--a whaler?" said Mr. Sweers. "She's got a lumbersome look about the bulwarks, as though she wasn't short of cranes; but I can't make out any boats, and there's no appearance of life aboard her."

"Let her go off a point," said the captain to the fellow at the wheel.

"Mr. Sweers, she'll be worth looking at," he continued, slowly directing his gaze round the sea-line, as though considering the weather. 'You've heard of Sir John Franklin?'

"Have I heard?" said the mate, with a Dutch shrug.

"It's the duty of every English sailor," said the captain, "to keep his weather eye lifting whenever he smells ice north of the equator; for who's to tell what relics of the Franklin expedition he may not light on? And how are we to know," continued he, again directing his gla.s.s at the berg, "that yonder vessel may not have taken part in that expedition?"

"There's a reward going," said Mr. Sweers, "for the man who can discover anything about Sir John Franklin and his party."

The captain grinned and quickly grew grave.

We drew slowly towards the iceberg, at which I gazed with some degree of disappointment; for, never before having beheld ice in a great ma.s.s like the heap that was yonder, I had expected to see something admirable and magnificent, an island of gla.s.s, full of fiery sparklings and ruby and emerald beams, a shape of crystal cut by the hand of King Frost into a hundred inimitable devices. Instead of which, the island of ice, on which lay the hull of the ship, was of a dead, unpolished whiteness, abrupt at the extremities, about a hundred and twenty feet tall at its loftiest point, not more picturesque than a rock covered with snow, and interesting only to my mind because of the distance it had measured, and because of the fancies it raised in one of the white, silent, and stirless princ.i.p.alities from which it had floated into these parts.

"Get the jolly-boat over, Mr. Sweers," said the captain, "and take a hand with you, and go and have a look at that craft there; and if you can board her, do so, and bring away her log-book, if you come across it. The newspapers sha'n't say that I fell in with such an object as that and pa.s.sed on without taking any notice."

I caught Mr. Sweers' eye. "You'll do," said he, and in a few minutes he and I were pulling away in the direction of the ice, I in the bow and he aft, rowing fisherman fashion, face forward. The schooner had backed her yards on the fore when she was within a mile of the berg, and we had not far to row. Our four arms made the fat little jolly-boat buzz over the wrinkled surface of the green, cold water.

The wreck--if a wreck she could be called--lay with her decks sloping seawards upon an inclined shelf or beach of ice, with a ma.s.s of rugged, abrupt stuff behind her, and vast coagulated lumps heaped like a Stonehenge at her bows and at her stern. When we approached the beach, as I may term it, Salamon Sweers said:

"I'll tell you what: I am not going to board that craft alone, Kerry.

Who's to tell what's inside of her? She may have been lying twenty years, for all we know, frozen up where it's always day or always night--where everything's out of the order of nature, in fact; and rat me if I'm going to be the first man to enter her cabin."

"I'm along with you," said I.

"So you are, David," said he, "and we'll overhaul her together, and the best way to secure the boat'll be to drag her high and dry"; and as he said this, the stem of the boat touched the ice, and we both of us jumped out, and, catching hold of her by the gunwale, walked her up the slope by some five times her own length, where she lay as snug as though chocked aboard her own mother, the schooner.

Sweers and I stood, first of all, to take a view of the barque--for a barque she was: her topgallantmasts down, but her topsail and lower yards across, sails bent, all gear rove, and everything right so far as we could see, saving that her flying jib-boom was gone. There was no need to look long at her to know that she hadn't been one of Franklin's ships. Her name and the place she hailed from were on her stern: the _President_, New Bedford. And now it was easy to see that she was a Yankee whaler. Her sides bristled with cranes or davits for boats, but every boat was gone. The tackles were overhauled, and the blocks of two of them lay upon the ice. She was a stout, ma.s.sive, round-bowed structure, to all appearances as sound as on the day when she was launched. She was coppered; not a sheet of metal was off, not a rent anywhere visible through the length and breadth of the dingy green surface of it.

We first of all walked round her, not knowing but that on the other side, concealed from the landing-place by the interposition of the hull, some remains of her people might be lying; but there was nothing in that way to see. We united our voices in a loud "Hallo!" and the rocks re-echoed us; but all was still, frozen, lifeless.

"Let's get aboard," said Mr. Sweers, gazing, nevertheless, up at the ship's side with a flat face of reluctance and doubt.

I grasped a boat's fall and went up hand over hand, and Sweers followed me. The angle of the deck was considerable, but owing to the flat bilge of the whaler's bottom, not greater than the inclination of the deck of a ship under a heavy press of canvas. It was possible to walk. We put our legs over the rail and came to a stand, and took a view of the decks of the ship. Nothing, saving the boats, seemed to be missing. Every detail of deck furniture was as complete as though the ship were ready for getting under way, with a full hold, for a final start home. Caboose, scuttle-b.u.t.ts, harness-cask, wheel, binnacle, companion-cover, skylight, winch, pumps, capstan--nothing was wanting; nothing but boats and men.

"Is it possible that all hands can be below?" said Sweers, straining his ear.

I looked aloft and about me, wondering that the body of the vessel and her masts and rigging should not be sheathed with ice; but if ever the structure had been glazed in her time, when she lay hard and fast far to the north of Spitzbergen, for all one could tell, nothing was now frozen; there was not so much as an icicle anywhere visible about her.

The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as though frosted to the core.

"The vessel seems to have been thawed through," said I, "and I expect that this berg is only a fragment of the ma.s.s that broke adrift with her."

"Likely enough," said Sweers. "Hark! what is that?"

"What do you hear?" I exclaimed.

"Why, _that_!" cried he, pointing to a shallow fissure in the icy rocks which towered above the ship: and down the fissure I spied a cascade of water falling like smoke, with a harsh, hissing noise, which I had mistaken for the seething of the sea. I ran my eye over the face of the heights and witnessed many similar falls of water.

"There'll not be much of this iceberg left soon," said I, "if the drift is to the southward."

"What d'ye think,--that the drift's northerly?" exclaimed Sweers.

"I'll tell you what it is; it's these icebergs drifting in ma.s.ses down south into the Atlantic which cause the sudden spells of cold weather you get in England during seasons when it ought to be hot."

As he said this he walked to the companion-hatch, the cover of which was closed, and the door shut. The cover yielded to a thrust of his hand. He then pulled open the doors and put his head in, and I heard him spit.

"There's foul air here," said he; "but where a match will burn a man can breathe, I've learnt."

He struck a match, and descended two or three steps of the ladder, and then called out to me to follow. The air was not foul, but it was close, and there was a dampish smell upon it, and it was charged with a fishy odour like that of decaying sp.a.w.n and dead marine vegetation.

Light fell through the companion-way, and a sort of blurred dimness drained through the grimy skylight.

We thoroughly overhauled this interior, spending some time in looking about us, for Sweers' fear of beholding something affrighting vanished when he found himself in a plain ship's cabin, with nothing more terrible to behold than the ship's furniture of a whaleman's living-room of near half a century old. There were three sleeping-berths, and these we explored, but met with nothing that in any way hinted at the story of the ship. It was impossible to tell, indeed, which had been the captain's cabin. All three berths were filled alike with lockers, hammocks, wash-stands, and so forth; and two of them were lighted by dirty little scuttles in the ship's side; but the third lay athwartships, and all the light that it received came from the cabin through its open door.

I don't know how long we were occupied in hunting these cabins for any sort of papers which would enable Captain Funnel to make out the story of the barque. We were too eager and curious and interested to heed the pa.s.sage of time. There were harpoons and muskets racked in the state cabin, some wearing apparel in the berths, a few books on nautical subjects, but without the owners' names in them, and there was a bundle of what proved to be bear's skins stowed away in the corner of the berth that was without a scuttle. A door led to a couple of bulkheaded compartments in the fore part of the state cabin, and Sweers was in the act of advancing to it when he cried out:

"By the tunder of heaven, what is dot?" losing his customary hold of the English tongue in the excitement of the moment.