Chapter Nine.
An Exciting Adventure and a Rescue.
It was at this moment that Mildmay caught a momentary glimpse of an object far away on the northern horizon, which his practised eye at once told him was a sail of some sort. He instantly seized one of the telescopes suspended in the pilot-house, and brought the instrument to bear in her direction. For nearly a minute he was unsuccessful in his endeavour to find her; but at length she reappeared from behind an intervening berg; and it appeared to him that she was in a situation of considerable peril. She was a barque, under close-reefed topsails, reefed courses, fore topmast staysail, and mizzen; and she appeared to be embayed in the bight of a huge floe, with a whole fleet of bergs in dangerous proximity and apparently bearing down upon her. Perhaps the strangest peculiarity about her was that, notwithstanding her perilous position, she was dressed with flags, from her mast-heads downward, as though it were a gala day on board.
Mildmay’s anxious attitude and expression of face, together with his earnest devotion to his telescope, soon attracted the notice of the rest of the party; and the baronet asked him what object it was that so riveted his attention.
He withdrew his eyes for a moment from the instrument, and, pointing out the small and scarcely distinguishable dark spot on the horizon, said:
“Do you see that object, gentlemen? Well, that is a barque embayed in the ice, and evidently making a supreme effort to free herself—an effort which to me, and at this distance, appears quite hopeless. It is my opinion that, unless the wind changes, or something equally unforeseen occurs, she will within the next half hour be smashed into matchwood—unless, indeed, we can help her.”
“Help her? Of course we can,” said the professor; and without waiting for further discussion, he laid his hand on the engine lever and sent the machinery ahead at nearly half-speed.
The Flying Fish darted forward like a swallow in full flight; and the professor, leaving the baronet in charge of the engines and the steering-gear, summoned Mildmay and the colonel to follow him. The trio hastened to the after part of the deck, and, raising a trap-door which the professor indicated, withdrew therefrom a thin pliant wire hawser—made, like almost everything else in the ship, of aethereum—which, having secured one end of it to a ring-bolt in the after extremity of the deck, they coiled down in readiness for use as a tow-line.
“There!” ejaculated the professor in a gratified tone of voice, “we will give her the end of that rope; and it shall go hard with us, but we will tow her into some place of at least temporary safety.”
“That is all right,” responded Mildmay; “but how are we going to get it on board her? Its weight is a mere nothing, it is true, but it is rather too bulky to heave on board. Have you nothing smaller that we can bend on to the eye of the hawser and use as a heaving-line?”
“Certainly I have,” replied the professor. “I had not thought of that. ‘Every man to his trade.’” And, diving down the hatchway, he rummaged about for a few minutes and finally reappeared with a small coil of very thin light pliant wire line, which Mildmay, pronouncing it to be exactly the thing, proceeded at once to attach to the eye of the hawser.
Meanwhile, the baronet had been anxiously watching the barque through the telescope, and had seen so much to increase his anxiety for her safety that, forgetful of the exposed situation of his companions, he had gradually increased the pace of the Flying Fish until he had brought it up to full speed. This, of course, created so tremendous a draught that not only was it quite impossible for the party aft to make headway against it and thus regain the pilot-house, but they actually had to fling themselves flat on the deck to avoid being blown overboard; and even thus it was only with the utmost difficulty that they were able to save themselves.
And this, unfortunately, was not the worst of it. The light hawser, acted upon by so powerful a draught, was for an instant slightly lifted off the deck, and that slight lift did the mischief. The next moment the coils went streaming away astern one after the other, and, almost before those who witnessed the accident could tell what had happened, the propeller had been fouled and the hawser snapped like a thread.
The powerful jerk thus occasioned caused the baronet to turn his head; and he then saw in a moment what mischief he had done. He, luckily, had presence of mind enough to stop the engines at once; the Flying Fish’s course was stayed, and she immediately began to drive swiftly astern in apparently a dead calm, but actually swept along upon the wings of the gale.
The professor at once scrambled to his feet, and, followed by his companions, hurried to the pilot-house, where, without wasting time in useless words, he at once set himself to look out for a suitable spot upon which to alight, it being absolutely necessary to clear the propeller before again moving the engines, lest in doing so a complete break-down should result.
A favourable spot was at length found—but not until they had drifted completely out of sight of the apparently doomed barque—and the Flying Fish was carefully lowered to the surface of a large floe, her anchor being first let go in order to “bring her up” and prevent her being driven along by the wind over the smooth surface. It was a task more difficult of accomplishment than they had anticipated, the anchor for some time refusing to bite, but it caught at last in a crevice, and immediately on the vessel touching, the grip-anchors were extended and the ship secured.
No sooner was the Flying Fish fairly settled on the ice than Mildmay, who knew exactly what ought to be done, descended to the lower recesses of the ship, and, opening the trap-door in her bottom, made his way out on the ice, dragging with him a ladder which was always kept in the diving-room. He soon reached the stern of the vessel, and, rearing the ladder in a suitable position against the propeller, nimbly ran aloft and began to throw off the convolutions of the entangled hawser. Twenty minutes sufficed, not only to complete the work, but also to assure him that no damage had been done to the hull of the vessel; and, his three companions having followed him and removed the hawser to the interior of the vessel, he re-entered the hull, secured the trap-door after him, and ascended to the deck. He here found Sir Reginald and the colonel busily engaged in adjusting a new hawser ready for use, and, with his assistance, this task was completed in another five minutes, and the ship was once more ready for service.
As the Flying Fish was in the act of rising from off the ice, Sir Reginald asked:
“Should we not make better speed by taking at once to the water, professor?”
“Undoubtedly we should,” was the answer. “Such a course would also have the additional advantage of enabling us to immerse the hull to the proper depth as we go along, thus giving us that hold upon the water necessary to cope successfully with the weight of a large ship like the one of which we are going in search. We might, whilst floating in the air, be able to tow her out of danger, but I am a little doubtful on the point; and, as this is a case in which it will not do to incur any risk by trying experiments, we will take to the water as soon as we can discover a suitable channel. It appears to me that there is something of the kind about six miles ahead and a little to our right.”
There certainly was a channel through the ice at the point indicated by the professor, but whether it was a true channel, or merely a cul de sac, they were for the moment unable to decide. On nearing it to within a mile, however, they found it to be the latter; but about a couple of miles beyond it another streak of water was seen extending, unbroken, as far as the eye could reach. For this they steered, and in a very few minutes afterwards the Flying Fish was once more afloat, with her water-chambers full and her air-compressor working to the full extent of its power.
The hawser being this time temporarily secured in such a manner as to render a repetition of their late accident impossible, and the entire party being, moreover, safely ensconced in the pilot-house, there was no hesitation about again pressing the ship forward at full speed, the channel, luckily, being straight enough to allow of this; and very soon the group of icebergs in which the unfortunate barque was entangled once more appeared in view. Mildmay was at the helm, with the professor standing by the engines; but Sir Reginald and the colonel no sooner saw the bergs than they seized their telescopes and began at once to look out for the barque.
At first they could see nothing of her, but presently she glided into view from behind an intervening berg, and a single glance was sufficient to assure them that another five minutes would decide her fate. She had gradually set down into the triangular extremity of the bight in which she was embayed, so that every tack she made became shorter than the one preceding it, and very soon the water space would become so circumscribed as to leave no room for her to manoeuvre. But this was not the worst feature of the case. As desperate diseases are sometimes combated with desperate remedies, so in her desperate condition the hazardous and almost hopeless expedient of berthing her alongside one of the edges of the floe might have been attempted. But this last resource was denied to the despairing seamen, from the fact that two enormous bergs, the vanguard of the fleet, had already reached the edge of the floe, on opposite sides of the bay, to windward of the entrapped barque, and were rapidly rasping their way down toward the apex of the triangle where the whaler was already shooting into stays for what must evidently be her last tack. This would be so short that she could scarcely fail to miss stays on her next attempt, when she would drift helplessly down into the corner of the bight, and be ground out of existence by the berg which first happened to reach that point.
It was at this critical moment that a cry of dismay arose simultaneously from the lips of the party in the Flying Fish’s pilot-house. A slight turn in the channel had revealed to them the appalling fact that it, also, terminated in a cul de sac, a neck of solid ice, some fifty yards in width, dividing it from the open water in which the barque was still battling for her life.
What was to be done? There was no time to discuss the question; but a happy inspiration flashed through the baronet’s brain.
“We must leap the barrier!” he exclaimed.
“Right! I understand,” was the professor’s brief reply; and, turning the compressed air into the water-chambers, he forced out the water and succeeded in raising the sharp nose of the Flying Fish just above the level of the floe a single instant before she reached it.
It was a tremendous risk to run—one which would never have been thought of in cold blood, as the ship was rushing forward at full speed, and there was no knowing what might happen; but the sympathies of the party were now so fully aroused by the awful peril of the barque—which, in the midst of all her danger, was still gaily dressed in flags—that they never paused to think of the possible consequences, but sent the ship at the barrier as a huntsman sends his horse to a desperate leap. For an infinitesimal fraction of time the four adventurous travellers were thrilled with a feeling of wild exultation as they held their breath and braced themselves for the expected shock. Then the smooth polished hull of the Flying Fish met the ice, and, rising like a hunter to the leap, slid smoothly, and without the slightest jar, up on to the surface of the floe, across the narrow barrier, and into the water beyond.
“Stop her!” shouted Mildmay, checking the exultant cheer which rose to the lips of his companions. “Sheer as close alongside the barque as you can go, Sir Reginald, and give me a chance to get our heaving line on board. Then, as soon as I wave my hand, go ahead gently until you have brought a strain upon the hawser, when you may increase the speed to about twelve knots—not more, or you will tear the windlass out of the barque. Steer straight out between those two bergs, and remember that moments are now precious.”
With these words the lieutenant hurried out on deck and made his way aft, where he at once began to clear away the heaving line and make ready for a cast.
The engines meanwhile had been stopped in obedience to Mildmay’s command, his companions intuitively recognising that he was the man to cope with the present emergency, and the Flying Fish answering the helm, which the baronet, an experienced yachtsman, was deftly manipulating, shot cleverly up along the weather side of the barque.
“Look out for our line, lads!” hailed Mildmay to the crew of the vessel, who were gaping in open-mouthed astonishment at the extraordinary apparition which had thus abruptly put in an appearance alongside them.
“Ay, ay, sir; heave!” answered one smart fellow, who, notwithstanding his surprise, still seemed to have his wits about him. Mildmay hove the line with all a seaman’s skill, and a couple of bights settled down round the neck and shoulders of the expectant tar.
“Haul in, and throw the eye of the hawser over your windlass bitts,” ordered Mildmay; “we will soon have you clear of your present pickle.”
“Thank you, sir,” hailed the skipper; “haul in smart there, for’ard, and take a turn anywhere; those bergs are driving down upon us mighty fast.”
With a joyous “hurrah” at the timely arrival of such unexpected assistance, the men roused the hawser on board, threw the eye over the bitts, passed two or three turns of the slack round the barrel of the windlass, and adjusted the rope in a “fair-lead” with lightning rapidity. Mildmay, who was intently watching their movements, waved his hand as a signal to the baronet the instant he saw that the hawser was properly fast on board the barque, and the Flying Fish immediately began to glide ahead. The baronet was evidently bent on retrieving his character and making up for his past carelessness, for he handled his strangely-shaped vessel with most consummate skill, bringing the strain upon the hawser very gradually, and, when he had done so, coaxing the barque’s head round until her nose and that of the Flying Fish pointed straight toward the rapidly narrowing passage between the bergs. Then, indeed, the thin but tough hawser straightened out taut as a bow-string between the two vessels as the baronet sent his engines powerfully ahead; the barque’s windlass bitts creaked and groaned with the tremendous strain to which they were suddenly subjected; a foaming surge gathered and hissed under her bows, and as her harassed crew, active as wild-cats, skipped about the decks busily letting go and clewing up, away went the two craft toward the closing gap.
It was like steering into the jaws of death. The two bergs were by this time within a bare cable’s-length of the Flying Fish’s conical stem; and as they swept irresistibly onward, their pinnacled summits towering five hundred feet into the air, their rugged sides rasping horribly along the edges of the floe with an awful crushing, grinding sound, and their contiguous sides approaching each other more and more nearly every moment, there was not a man on either of those two vessels who did not hold his breath and stand fascinated in awestricken suspense, gazing upon those menacing walls of ice and waiting for the shock which should be the herald of their destruction.
Rapidly—yet slower than a snail’s pace, as it seemed to those anxious men—the space narrowed between the bergs and the ships; the grinding crash and crackle of the ice grew momentarily more loud and distracting; the freezing wind from the bergs cut their faces like an invisible razor as it swept down upon them in sudden powerful gusts, apparently intent upon retarding their progress until the last hope of escape should be cut off; the gigantic icy cliffs lowered more and more threateningly down upon them; and at last, when the feeling of doubt and suspense was at its highest, the Flying Fish entered the gap. The channel had by this time become so narrow that for the Flying Fish to pass through it seemed utterly impossible; indeed, it looked as though there remained scarcely room for the barque with her much narrower beam; and as the towering crystal walls closed in upon them every man present felt that the final moment had now come. Everything depended upon Sir Reginald; if at this critical instant his nerve failed him there was nothing but quick destruction and a horrible death for every man there. But the baronet’s nerve did not fail him. With a face pale and teeth clenched with excitement, but with a steady pulse and an unquailing eye, he stood with one hand on the tiller and the other on the engine lever, guiding his ship exactly midway through the narrow gorge; and precisely at the right moment, when the Flying Fish’s sides were actually grazing the ice on either side, he increased the pressure of his hand upon the lever, the engines revolved a shade more rapidly, and the flying ship slid through the narrowest part of the pass uninjured, but escaping by the merest hair’s breadth.
But would the barque also get through? She was fully two hundred feet astern of the Flying Fish, and the bergs were revolving on their own centres in such a manner that ere many seconds were past they must inevitably come together with a force which would literally annihilate whatever might happen to be between them. And as for the barque—the way in which her bows were burying themselves in the hissing wave that foamed and surged about her cutwater, and the terrified looks of her crew as they glanced, now aloft at the formidable bergs, and now at the straining hawser—from which they stood warily aloof lest it should part, and in so doing inflict upon some of them a deadly injury—told the baronet that he must not increase by a single ounce the strain upon the rope, lest something should give way on board the whaler and leave her there helpless in the very grip of those awful floating mountains of ice.
It was a race between the bergs and the barque; and Mildmay, standing there by the after rail, told himself, as he breathlessly watched the progress of events, that the bergs would win. The contiguous sides of these monsters were slightly concave in shape; and whilst the whaler, still some dozen yards or so within the passage had a foot or two of clear water on either side of her, the projecting extremities of the bergs had neared each other to within a distance of twenty feet, or some five feet less than the breadth of the imprisoned ship.
Suddenly a tremendous crash was heard, and the party on board the Flying Fish looked to see the unfortunate barque collapse and crumple into a shapeless mass of splintered wood before their eyes. But, to their inexpressible astonishment, nothing of the sort occurred. There was a reverberating sound as of muffled thunder, which echoed and re-echoed in the confined space between the two bergs; a series of tremendous splashes just astern of the whaler; the bergs recoiled violently from each other; the baronet, more by instinct than anything else, threw the engine lever still further forward, and before anyone had time even to draw a breath of relief, the apparently doomed vessel was dragged, with a foaming surge heaped up round her bows as high as the figurehead, out from the reopened portal and clear of all danger a single instant before the two gigantic masses of ice again closed in upon each other with a horrible grinding crunch which must have been audible for miles.
It was not until the barque had been dragged, almost bows under, some fifty or sixty fathoms away from the still grinding and rasping bergs, that her crew were able to realise the astounding fact of their safety, but when they did so they sent up a wild cheer which was as distinct an expression of gratitude to God for their deliverance as ever issued from human lips. Their escape, though it could easily be accounted for, might indeed well be called miraculous, for at the moment when their last hope was extinguished—apparently their last chance gone—two huge overhanging projections on the summits of the bergs had come into contact with such violence that both the projecting masses of ice had become detached and had gone thundering down into the water, fortunately at some few yards’ distance astern of the whaler, and the shock of collision had been so great as to compel the momentary recoil of the bergs, with the fortunate result already described.
Directly it was seen that the barque had indeed escaped, the Flying Fish’s engines were slowed down to their lowest speed, and the whaler, relieved of the enormous tugging strain upon her, once more floated on her normal water-lines. The two craft were now in comparatively open water, the channel being between two and three miles wide, and still widening ahead of them, with a few small bergs in their vicinity, it is true, but with no ice at hand likely to cause them immediate peril. The barque was towed to windward of all these, and then the baronet stopped the Flying Fish altogether, and hailed the skipper of the whaler to know whither he was bound. Upon this the worthy man lowered one of his boats and pulled alongside his strange consort to return thanks in person for his recent rescue.
He was a very fine specimen of a seaman, not very tall, but bluff and hearty-looking in his manifold wraps surmounted by a dreadnought pilot jacket, sealskin cap, and water boots reaching to his thighs; and it was amusing to see his look of surprise as he came up the Flying Fish’s side-ladder and stepped in upon her roomy deck unencumbered by anything but the pilot-house. The four companions of course stepped out on deck in a body to meet him, and after they had all heartily shaken hands with him and deprecatingly received his thanks for the important service rendered in the rescue of his ship from the ice, he was invited to accompany them below to cement the newly-made acquaintance over a glass of grog. And if the worthy seaman was surprised at the exterior of the strange craft he was now visiting, how much greater was his astonishment when he entered her magnificent saloons, revelled in their grateful warmth, and looked round bewildered upon the rich carpets, the handsome furniture, the superb pictures and statuary, and the choice bric à brac, all glowing under the brilliant but cunningly modified electric light. And if he was surprised at all these unwonted sights, his astonishment may be imagined when he was informed that the four refined and cultured men who welcomed him so hospitably, constituted, with the exception of the cook and the steward, the entire crew of the immense craft, and that the owner of all the magnificence he beheld had dared the terrors of the polar regions solely by way of pastime.
“Well, gentlemen,” he remarked, “it’s an old saying that tastes differ, and what you’ve just told me proves it. I’ve been a whaler for nigh on to twenty-five years, but it has been a case of necessity, not choice, with me; and after the first two or three years of the life—when the novelty had worn off a bit, as you may say—I’ve looked forward to only one thing, and that is the scraping together of enough money to retire and get quit of it all for ever. I took to it first as a hand before the mast, and have regularly passed through all the grades—boat-steerer, third, second, and chief mate, master, and at last owner of my own ship, always with the same object ahead. And when, little more than a year ago, I put the savings of a lifetime into the purchase of the old Walrus there, I thought that the dream of my life was soon to be realised, and that one trip more to the nor’ard would bring me in a sufficiency to last me the remainder of my days, and enable me to enjoy ’em in the company of my wife and my little daughter. God bless the child! if she’s still alive she’s five years old to-day.”
“Ah!” interrupted Mildmay, “then that, I suppose, accounts for the flags flying on board you, and the meaning of which we were so utterly unable to guess?”
“That’s it, sir,” was the reply. “I ‘dressed ship’ at eight o’clock this morning in honour of my little Florrie’s birthday, and I hadn’t the heart to haul down the flags even when we found ourselves in such a precious pickle amongst the ice yonder. I thought that if so be it was God’s will that we was to go, we might as well go with the buntin’ still flying in Florrie’s honour as not.”
“And what success have you met with, captain?” asked Sir Reginald.
“Precious little, sir. We’ve been out now more’n a twelvemonth, and we’ve only killed three fish in all that time. Got jammed up here in the ice all last winter. I stayed in hopes of doin’ something in the sealing line, and only got some three hundred skins after all. It’s been a bad speculation for me. An old friend of mine came this way the year before last, and, the season being an open one and not much ice about, he reached as far north as Baffin’s Bay and through Jones’ Sound, fillin’ his ship with oil and bone in a single season. He was lucky enough to hit upon a spot where the sea was fairly alive with whales, and he filled the ship right up in that very spot. The fish seemed tame, as though they hadn’t been interfered with for years; and bein’ an old friend, as I said before, he gave me the latitude and longitude of the place as a great secret, and I’ve been trying to reach the spot ever since we came north, but have been kept back by the ice and the contrary winds. If I could get there, even now, it would make the trip profitable enough to serve my purpose; but I see no chance of it, and the men are getting disheartened.”
“Never mind, captain, cheer up; all may yet be well,” exclaimed the baronet. “We can’t drag your ship over the ice, but if there is only a passage for her we can drag her through it, and for little Florrie’s sake we will. If it is in our power to get you to the spot you wish to reach, you shall go there. Now, as the present open water affords an opportunity too good to be lost, return to your ship, secure our hawser in such a way that we may put a big strain upon it without damaging the vessel, and send a trustworthy hand aloft into the crow’s-nest to look out for the best channels. We will tow you to the northward as long as a channel can be found through the ice, and at seven o’clock I hope you will give us the pleasure of your company on board here to dinner, when we will drink ‘many happy returns of the day’ to Florrie in the best champagne the Flying Fish’s cellar affords.”
The captain of the whaler returned to his own ship in a state of such mingled astonishment and elation that his people were at first inclined to think he had suddenly gone demented. However, the order which he gave them to secure the towing hawser in such a manner as would enable the ship to withstand a heavy strain was intelligible enough; it told them that, with the assistance of their strange rescuers, a supreme effort was now to be made to reach those prolific fishing-grounds which had from the first been the goal of their voyage; and that, best of all, that effort was to be unaccompanied by any of the usual harassing labour of working the ship to windward through the ice, and they set to with a will. A sufficient length of the hawser was hauled on board to enable them to take a couple of turns round the barrel of the windlass and two more round the heel of the foremast, the eye of the hawser being further secured by tackles to every ring-bolt in the ship capable of bearing a good substantial strain; and then, the skipper himself going aloft to the crow’s-nest, the signal was given for the Flying Fish to go ahead.