The Frozen Pirate Read online

  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 run
ning 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.