Chapter Two.
Escape of the “Cranky Jane.”
A Story about an Iceberg.
One day, some three years ago or so, I chanced to be down at Sheerness dockyard, and, while there, utilised my time by inspecting the various vessels scattered about this naval repository. Some of the specimens exhibited all the latest “improvements” in marine architecture, being built to develop every destructive property—huge floating citadels and infernal machines; while others were old, and now useless, types of the past “wooden walls of old England,” ships that once had braved the perils of the main in all the panoply of their spreading canvas, and whose broadsides had thundered at Trafalgar, making music in the ears of the immortal Nelson and his compeers.
Amongst the different craft that caught my eye—old hulks, placidly resting their weary timbers on the muddy bosom of the Medway, dismantled, dismasted, and having pent-houses like the roofs of barns over their upper decks in lieu of awnings; armour-plated cruisers, in the First Class Steam Reserve, ready to be commissioned at a moment’s notice; and ships in various degrees of construction, on the building slips and in dry dock—was a vessel which seemed to be undergoing the operation of “padding her hull,” if the phrase be admissible as explaining what I noticed about her, the planking, from which the copper sheathing had been previously stripped, being doubled, apparently, and protected in weak places by additional beams and braces being fixed to the sides. Of course, I may be all wrong in this, but it was what seemed to me to be the case.
On inquiry I learnt that the vessel was the Alert, which it may be recollected was one of the two ships in the Arctic expedition commanded by Sir George Nares. I wondered why so many workmen were busy about her, hammering, sawing, planing, riveting, fitting and boring holes with giant gimlets, so I asked the reason for this unwonted activity, when it might have been reasonably supposed that the vessel had played her part in the service and might have been allowed to pass the remainder of her days afloat in an honourable retreat up the estuary on which the dockyard stands.
But, no.
I was informed that the Alert had yet many more days of Arctic experience in store for her, our government having placed her at the disposal of the United States authorities to take part in the relief of Lieutenant Greeley’s Polar expedition.—I may here mention in parenthesis that the vessel subsequently successfully performed the task committed to her substantial frame; and it was mainly by means of the stores deposited by her in a câche in Smith Sound that the survivors of the expedition were enabled to be transported home again in safety.—I, really, only mention the vessel’s name on account of the man who told me about her—a gentleman who entered into conversation with me about the cold regions of the north generally, and of the escapes of ships from icebergs in particular.
He was a seafaring man. I could see that at a glance, although he was not one I should have thought who had donned her majesty’s uniform, for he lacked that dapper look that the blue-jackets of the service are usually distinguished by; but he was a veritable old salt, or “shell-back,” none the less, sniffing of the ocean all over, and having his face seamed with those little venous streaks of pink (as if he indulged in a dab of rouge on the sly occasionally) which variegate the tanned countenances of men exposed to all the rigours of the elements, and who encounter with an equal mind the freezing blast of the frozen sea or the blazing sun of Africa.
I told this worthy that once, when on a voyage in one of the Inman line of steamers from Halifax to Liverpool, I had gone—or rather the vessel had, to be more correct—perilously near an iceberg, when my nautical friend proceeded to give vent to his own exposition of the “glacial theory,” saying that a lot of nonsense was written about the ice in the Arctic regions by people who never went beyond their own firesides at home and had never seen an iceberg. It made him mad, he said, to read it!
“I daresay you’ve read a lot of rubbish on the subject?” said the old gentleman, getting excited about the matter, as if he only wanted a good start to be off and away on his hobby.
“I daresay I have,” I replied.
“Well, what with all the fiction that has been written and the fabulous stories told of the Arctic and its belongings, the ‘green hand’ who makes the voyage for the first time is full of expectations concerning all the wonderful sights he’s going to see in ‘the perennial realms of ice and snow’—that’s the phrase the newspaper chaps always use—expectations which are bound to be disappointed,—and why?”
“I’m sure I can’t tell!” said I.
“Because the things that he fancies he’s going to see don’t really exist, nor never yet did in spite of what book-learned people may say! The voyager who goes north for the first time is bound, let us say for illustration, for Baffin’s Bay; and, from what he has learnt beforehand, bears and walruses, seals and sea-lions, whale blubber and the Esquimaux who eat it, all occupy some considerable share of his imagination. But, above all these, the first thing that he looks forward to see are the icebergs, or floating mountains of ice, which are so especially the creation of the cold regions to which he is sailing. These icebergs, sir, form the staple background of every Arctic view, without which none would be deemed for a moment complete. Their gigantic peaks and jagged precipices are familiar to most, in a score of pictures and engravings drawn by artists who were never beyond the Lizard Lights; and really, I believe that if one was sketched that wasn’t at least a thousand feet high or more, and didn’t have a polar bear perched on top and a full rigged ship sailing right underneath it, why, the generality of people would think it wasn’t a bit like the real thing!”
“And what is the ‘real thing’ like?” I asked with some curiosity.
“There you have me,” said the old sailor, who had from his speech evidently received a good education; and if once “before the mast” had now certainly risen to something much higher. “To men whose minds have been wrought up to such a pitch of fancy and expectation, the first sight of a real iceberg is a complete take-down to their imagination. Your ship is pitching about, say, in the cross seas near the mouth of Davis Strait, preparatory to entering within the smooth water of the Arctic circle, when in the far distance your eye catches sight of a lump of ice, looking, as it rises and falls sluggishly in the trough of the sea, not unlike a hencoop covered with snow, after it had been pitched overboard by some passing ship, or like a gigantic lump of foam tossed on the crest of a wave. If the day is sunless, the reflection of light which gives it that glistening appearance, so remarkable as the midnight sun glances among an array of these objects, is wanting to add dignity to the contour of what it is a rude dissipation of life’s young dream to learn is an iceberg—though on a very small scale. It is simply a wave-worn straggler from the fleet which will soon be met sailing southward out of the Greenland fjords. The warm waters of the Atlantic will in the course of a few days be too much for it. The sun will be at work on it; it will get undermined by the wash of the breakers, until, being top-heavy, it will speedily capsize. Then the war between the ice and the elements will begin afresh, until the once stately ice-mountain will become the ‘bergy bit,’ as whalers call the slowly-lessening mass of crumbling, spongy ice, until it finally disappears in the waters; but only to rise again in the form of vapour, which the cold of the north will convert into snow, the parent of that inland ice about the polar regions which forms the source of subsequent icebergs afresh—the process being always going on, never ending!”
“Why, you are quite a philosopher,” I observed.
“A bit of a one, sir,” said the old gentleman with a smile. “Those who go down to the sea in ships, you know, see wonders in the deep! But, to continue what I was telling you about the icebergs. As your ship proceeds further north they become more numerous and of larger dimensions, until, as you pass the entrance of some of those great fjords, or inlets, which intersect the Greenland coast-line, they pour out in such numbers that the wary mariner is thankful for the continuous daylight and summer seas that enable him so easily to avoid these floating rocks. Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the ‘ice-mountains’ of the fancy artist. One ashore close into the land, and yet not stranded or on account of its depth in the water getting into any very shallow soundings, you may see in your mind’s eye, as I’ve seen them scores of times in reality. It presents to your notice a dull white mass of untransparent ice—not transparent, with objects to be seen through it on the other side, as I have noticed in more than one picture of the North Pole taken by an artist on the spot! This mass is generally jagged at the top with saw-like edges, and it doesn’t so very much resemble those Gothic cathedral spires as Arctic writers try to make out. Still, on the whole, the shape of this monster floating mass of ice is very striking to those seeing it for the first time; and when you come to look at it more closely, its size and general character lose nothing by having the details ciphered down, as a Yankee skipper would say.”
“Are the icebergs very big?” I inquired.
“Well,” said the old gentleman, quite pleased at being asked for information on the subject, and evidently wishing to convert me to his own practical way of thinking in opposition to Arctic fiction-mongers, “they may sometimes be seen of a hundred and fifty feet high, occasionally reaching to a couple of hundred, while sometimes I’ve seen an iceberg that towered up more than double that height; but the majority of them do not exceed a hundred feet at most. The colour, as I’ve said, is not emerald green, as most folks think—that is, not unless it is seen under what science-folks call the prismatic action of light—but a dull white that is almost opaque. The sides are, generally, dripping with the little streams of water formed by the melting of the ice, and glistening in the rays of the sun; but a dull white is the principal colour of the mass. Its base is broader than its summit, and is here and there hollowed into little caverns by the action of the waves. The pinnacles seen in the pictures of the illustrated papers I’ve spoken of are not very plain. Indeed, both the one we are supposing and the other bergs, that are always, like the ‘birds of a feather’ of the proverb, to be seen close together, are flattened on the top; and if here and there worn into fantastic shapes by the weather, they mostly go back to a shape which may be roughly described as broader at the base than the top; otherwise the berg would speedily capsize. When this happens, they go over with a tremendous splash, rocking and churning up the sea for miles round, and sending wave circles spreading and widening out as from the whirlpool in the centre, in the same way as when a child pitches a stone into a pond.
“On some of the bergs are masses of earth, gravel and stone, proving that they must lately have been connected with the land; for owing to the old bergs becoming undermined by the waves, they soon turn over, and so of course send their load to the bottom. An examination of the sides of the ice-mass also shows to the eye some other peculiarities. The greater part of the ice is white and thoroughly full of air-bubbles, which lie in very thin lines parallel to each other; but throughout the white ice there are numerous slight cracks or streaks, of an intensely blue and transparent ice, which, on being exposed to heat, before melting, I’ve been told by the surgeon of the ship I was in, dissolve into large angular grains. These blue cracks cross and cross over again in the mass of the berg, and may possibly be water which has melted and been frozen again either on the surface of the berg, or in its crevasses or cracks when it was a part of the glacier from which it first came. But, besides the blue ice, in some icebergs may be seen a kind of conglomerate of ice-blocks of various sizes, the spaces between them being filled up with snow or crumbled ice. This conglomerate exists usually in cracks, though it is found also in layers, and even forms large masses of the larger bergs, mixed up with stones and earthy lumps.”
“Did you ever have any adventure amongst the icebergs?” I asked the old gentleman at this juncture, thinking I had quite enough of the scientific aspect of the subject, and dreading lest he might dive further into the original composition of ice.
“Not in the Arctic Ocean,” he replied; “but once, when I was only a common sailor before the mast and aboard a vessel in the Australian trade, I came across icebergs in the southern latitudes which were mighty perilous; and one of these bergs was, by the way, bigger than any I ever saw in northern seas.”
“Tell me all about it,” I said, glad to get him on to a regular sea yarn.
The old gentleman was nothing loth; and I noticed that the moment he began to speak of his old experiences as a merchant seaman, he dropped the somewhat affected phraseology in which he had previously been expounding his theories for my information concerning the polar regions and the formation of icebergs—thenceforth speaking much more naturally in the ordinary vernacular of Jack tars.
“I suppose it’s forty years ago, more or less,” he began, “since I shipped in the brig Jane, John Jiggins master, bound from London to Melbourne with an assorted cargo.
“She was a decent-sized brig enough, and handy to manage when she had plenty of sea-room, and a wind right aft; but on a bowline, or when the wind was on the quarter, and there was a bit of a sea on, she kept such a stiff weather-helm, and was such a downright cranky vessel, never bending down to a breeze or lifting to the swell, that it was no wonder that as soon as the hands got used to her ways, and tumbled to her contrary points—and she was that contrary sometimes as to remind you of a woman’s temper on washing days, most ladies then being not particularly pleasant, and feeling more inclined to drive a man mad rather than to coax and wheedle him—as soon as we all got used to her ways, I say, we christened her the ‘Cranky Jane,’ and that she was more or less, barring when she had a fair wind, with an easy sea and everything agreeable for her, as I said before.
“Old Cap’en Jiggins, however, wasn’t of our way of thinking.
“He was the part owner as well as master of the vessel; and loved the old brig—the ‘Janey’ he called her, the old fool!—like the very apple of his eye, always praising her up to the nines and not allowing anybody to say a word against her sea-going qualities.
“Sometimes, when the man at the wheel would be swearing at the lubberly craft in a silent way, so that you could see he was suffocating himself with passion and ready to burst himself, for the way in which she would fall off, or bowse up into the wind’s eye, and try to go her own way, like a horse that gets the bit between his teeth and sets his ears back, then you’d hear old Jiggins a-talking to himself about the blessed old tub.
“‘That’s it, my beauty! Look how she rides, the darling, like a duck! What a clipper she is, to be sure; so easy to handle! a child could steer her with a piece of thread!’
“When, p’raps it took all one man’s strength, and perhaps two, to bring up the beast a single point to the wind!
“In spite of Cap’en Jiggins’ praise, I never sailed in such an out-and-out obstinate craft as that identical Cranky Jane. She seemed to have been laid down on the lines and constructed, plank by plank, especially to spile a man’s temper! Somehow or other, with the very lightest of breezes—except, as I’ve said before, we had the wind right dead aft—we could never get her to lay to her course and keep it. She was always falling off and breaking away in every way but the right one, and wanting to go just in the very opposite direction to what we did; exactly like Paddy’s pig when he’s taking it to market, and he has to whisper in its ear that he’s going to Cork, when he really wants to meet the dealer at Bandon!
“This peculiarity of the brig, of course, very naturally set the men against her; as, although what is usually called a ‘dry ship’—that is, the hands could sleep comfortably in the forecastle, instead of being drenched through day and night, by the seas she took in over the bows, as is the case in some clippers I’ve sailed in—she was so dreadfully hard to steer that a man’s trick at the wheel was like going on the treadmill! And yet, that very peculiarity and contrariness that made us cuss and swear too, only induced Captain Jiggins to say occasionally when she was most outrageous wide in her yawing, ‘Pretty dear!’ or some such trash—this very peculiarity, I say, saved all our lives from the most dreadful fate, and brought us home safe to England after encountering one of the most deadly perils of the deep. Curious, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you all about it. Here goes for the yarn.
“We had done the voyage out in pretty fair time from London to Port Philip; for, most of the way, the wind was fair and almost dead aft from the meridian of the Cape of Good Hope, down in the ‘roaring forties,’ till we got to the Heads. Consequently, the brig couldn’t help herself but go straight onward, when the trades were shoving her along and while nobody wanted her to tack, or beat up, or otherwise perform any of those delicate little points of seamanship which a true sailor likes to see his ship go through, almost against his own interest, sometimes, as far as hard work is concerned in reefing and furling and taking in sail, or piling on the canvas and ‘letting her rip.’ So long as nothing of this sort was wanted from her the brig was as easy-going as you could wish and all probably that Cap’en Jiggins thought her; but, you had only just to try to get her to sail up in the wind’s eye or run with the breeze a bit ahead of the beam, and you’d soon have seen for yourself how cantankerous she could be!
“No, it was all plain sailing to Port Philip Heads; and even after we had unloaded our home cargo, and went round, first to Sydney, and afterwards to the Fiji Islands—I shan’t forget Suva Suva Bay in a hurry, I can tell you. So far, everything went serene; for, no matter where we wanted to go—and you see, the skipper wasn’t tied to any especial port to seek a cargo, but being part owner, could please himself by going to the best market; which, being a shrewd man, with his head screwed on straight, you can bet he did!—no matter where we wanted to go, as I say, the wind seemed to favour us, for it was always right astern, and everything set below and aloft, and the wind blowing us there beautifully right before it all the way—just as the old Jane liked it, sweet and not too strong!
“So far, going out to Australia, and looking in at Sydney and Fiji and the islands for cargo, and loading up choke-full with just everything that our skipper counted at the highest freight, with no dead weight to break the brig’s back—so far, everything went ‘high-falutin’’ as the Yanks say; but when we came to leave Polynesia—it ought to be christened Magnesia, I consider, for it contains a bigger continent, with a larger number of islands than Europe—and shape a course homewards to the white cliffs of Old Albion, that we longed to see again after our long absence, for we were away good two years in all, the cap’en thinking nothing of time, being his own charterer, so long as he got a good cargo from port to port, and we were engaged on a trading voyage, and not merely out and home again directly—then it was that the Cranky Jane came out in her true colours, and made us love her—oh yes! just as the skipper did—over the left!
“Why, sir, she was that aggravating, that, as Bill the boatswain and I agreed, we should have liked to run her ashore on the very first land we came to, beach her and chop her up there and then for firewood; and we wouldn’t have been content till we had burned up the very last fragment of her obstinate old hull!
“After leaving Suva Suva Bay, Fiji, where we filled up the last remaining space in the Cranky Jane’s hold with copra—which is a lot of cocoa-nuts smashed up so as to stow easy, out of which they make oil at home for moderator lamps—we went south further than I ever went before in any ship. Captain Jiggins, as I heard him explaining to the first officer when I was taking my trick at the wheel, and blessing the brig as usual for her stiff helm, intended making the quickest passage that ever was made, he said, by striking down into them outlandish latitudes before he steered east and made the Horn; and I suppose he knew what he was about, as he was as good a navigator as ever handled a sextant. He called it great circle sailing; but I called it queer-sailing; and so did most of the hands, barring Bill the boatswain, who said the captain was right; but anyways, right or wrong, it led us into an ugly corner, as you shall hear.
“Well, we went down the latitudes like one o’clock, the brig, running free before the north-east monsoon as if she were sailing for a wager in a barge-race on the Thames; and the weather as fine as you please, warm and sunny—too much so, sometimes—so that a man hadn’t to do a stroke of work on board, save to take his turn at the wheel. Watch on deck, and watch below, we had nothing to do but loll about, with a stray pull at a brace here and a sheet there, or else walk into our grub and then turn into our bunks; for Cap’en Jiggins was the proper sort of skipper. None of your making work for him when there was nothing to do; but when the hands were wanted, why he did expect them to look alive, and have no skulking—small blame to him, say I, for one!
“We had run down below the parallel of Cape Horn, pretty considerable I should think, when we at last had to ask the old brig to bear up eastwards to lie her proper course; and then you should have seen the tricks she played—confound her! Why, we had to treat her as gingerly as if she were a yacht rounding a mark-boat to make her bear up a point or go to the wind; although I’ll give her the credit of saying, if she were cranky—and she was that, and no mistake—she made no leeway, which was a blessing at all events.
“It was some days after we had altered our course to East South East, with as much more easterly as we could get out of her—and that wasn’t much, try all we could, with as much fore and aft sail as we could get on her—when the weather began to change, and the wind, which had been steadily blowing from the north-east, chopped round a bit more ahead, the sea getting up, and a stray squall coming now and again, which made us more alert trimming the sails, and taking in and letting out canvas as occasion arose. It was no use, however, trying to drive the brig to the eastward any longer with this wind shifting about, humour her as we might; so the skipper altered her course again more to the south, although we were then as far down as we ought to have gone.
“‘The darling,’ says he to the first officer when he gave the order to lay her head South South East, ‘she’s a little playful with the heavy cargo we’ve got on board, and wants to keep warm as long as she can! Let her run a hundred miles or so more south, and then we’ll fetch up to the Horn, and be able to spin along like winking, just as the beautiful creature wants!’
“Well! it did make us mad to hear the old man talk like this about the clumsy old tub; but of course we couldn’t help ourselves, so we only grinned, and said to each other,—‘Catch us coming again in the Cranky Jane when once we’re safe ashore!’
“Would you believe it? The blessed brig, although the new course she was on brought the wind aft instead of on her beam, she was that spiteful over it, that, as it was blowing much stronger than it had been, it took two of us to keep her head from deviating from her proper track, and we had hard work to prevent her from breaking off more than she did.
“The wind came on towards the afternoon to blow harder and harder; and by nightfall—you know it gets dark as soon as the sun goes down in those latitudes—we had to shorten sail so much that the Cranky Jane was staggering along at the rate of nearly fourteen knots an hour with reefed top-sails and jib and main-sail besides the stay-sails.
“The weather got wilder and wilder as time went on, the heavens quite dark overhead, except an occasional glint of a star which didn’t know whether he ought to show or not; but still, although we were pretty far below the equator, the night was warm and even sultry, so that we expected a hurricane, or cyclone, or something of that sort, for it was quite unnatural to feel as if in the tropics when fifty degrees south!
“The cap’en, I know, thought it would blow by and by, for before he turned in he caused even the reefed top-sails and stay-sails to be taken in, and left her snug for the night, with only a close-reefed main-sail and the jib on her.
“‘Keep a good look-out, Mr Stanchion,’ says he to the chief officer, as he went down the companion-ladder to his cabin, ‘and call me if there’s the slightest change.’
“‘Ay, ay, sir,’ says Mr Stanchion; and so the skipper goes below with a cheerful good-night, in spite of the weather looking dirty and squalls being handy before morning.
“Now, as luck would have it—as some folks say, although others put it down to something more than luck—Mr Stanchion wasn’t like one of those jolly, devil-may-care, slap-dash sort of officers, that your regular shell-backs like best. He was a silent, quiet, reflective man, who looked and spoke as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth; and yet he thought deeper and further than your dash-and-go gentlemen, who act on the spur of the moment without cogitating.
“As soon as the skipper had turned in, he did a thing which perhaps not one officer in a hundred would have done in his place, considering we were on the open ocean out of the track of passing vessels, and that it wasn’t much darker than it is on most nights when there’s no moon, and the sky is cloudy.
“What do you think it was? Why, he put a man on the look-out on the forecastle, just as if we were going up channel, or in a crowded sea-way! The skipper had meant him to look-out himself, but another wouldn’t be amiss, he said.
“Providentially, too, the very man whom he accidentally selected was the very best person he could have placed as look-out, if he had picked the whole crew over from the captain downward; although the mate did not know this when he sang out to him to go on the forecastle.
“This was Pat O’Brien—‘Paddy,’ as all the hands called him—an Irishman, of course, as you would judge from his name, who had been in one of the Arctic expeditions, which we were speaking of just now. He went out with Sir Leopold McClintock I think; but all I know is, that he once was up a whole winter in the Polar Sea, and there had got laid on his back with scurvy, besides having his toes frost-bitten, as he frequently told us when yarning amongst the crew of an evening.
“Generally speaking, he was a careless, happy-go-lucky fellow, and one might have wondered that Mr Stanchion called him from out the watch that had just came on deck; but, as I said before, the mate could not possibly have made a better selection, as it turned out afterwards.
“Pat O’Brien was a comic chap, full of fun, and always making jokes; so that as soon as he opened his mouth almost to say anything the other fellows would laugh, for they knew that some lark was coming.
“‘Be jabers,’ says Pat, as he goes forward in obedience to the chief officer’s order, ‘it’s a nice pleasant look-out I’ll have all by meeself! while you’re coilin’ the ropes here, I’ll be thinkin’ of my colleen there!’ and he went out on the foc’sl.
“By and by we could hear him muttering to himself. ‘Wurrah, wurrah! Holy mother, can’t you let me be aisy!’ he sang out presently aloud as if he was suffering from something, or in pain.
“‘Look-out, ahoy!’ hails Mr Stanchion from aft; ‘what’s the matter ahead—what are you making all that row about?’
“‘Sure an’ it’s my poor feet, save yer honour, that are hurting of me, they feels the frost terrible!’
“The first mate naturally thought Master Paddy was trying to play off one of his capers on him—for it wouldn’t be the first time he tried the game on; so this answer got up his temper, making him shout back an answer to the Irishman that would tell him he wasn’t going to catch him napping.
“‘Nonsense, man,’ he calls out—‘frost? Why, you are dreaming! The thermometer is up to over sixty degrees, and it’s warm enough almost for the tropics.’
“The hands, of course, thought too that Pat was only joking in his usual way and endeavouring to make fun of Mr Stanchion; and they waited to hear what would come next from the Irishman, knowing that he was not easily shut up when once he had made up his mind for anything. However, they soon could tell from the tone of voice in which Pat spoke again that he wasn’t joking this time, or else he was acting very well in carrying out his joke on the mate; for as we were laughing about his ‘poor feet,’ which was a slang term in those days, Paddy calls out again in reply to the mate:—
“‘Faix,’ says he, ‘it’s ne’er a lie I’m telling, yer honour. Be jabers! my feet feel as if they were in the ice now, and frost-bitten all over!’
“Another officer in Mr Stanchion’s place would, as likely as not, have consigned poor Pat to a warmer locality in order to warm his limbs there; but Mr Stanchion, as I’ve said, was a man of a different stamp, and a reflective one, too; and the words of the Irishman made him think of something he had read once of a frost-bitten limb having been discovered by a well-known meteorologist to be an unfailing weather-token of the approach of cold. Instead, therefore, of angrily telling Pat to hold his tongue and look-out as he ought, Mr Stanchion went forward and joined him; we on deck, of course, being on the look-out at once.
“Presently, we could see the chief officer and the Irishman on the forecastle, peering out together over the ship’s bows as if looking for something.
“‘I’m certain, sir,’ I heard Pat say earnestly, ‘we’re near ice whenever my feet feels the cold, yer honour; and there, be jabers, there’s the ice-blink, as they calls it in the Arctic seas, and we’re amongst the icebergs, as sure as you live!’
“At the same moment, the atmosphere lightened up with a whitish blue light—somewhat like pale moonshine—and Mr Stanchion shouted out at the top of his voice, louder than we ever dreamt he could speak—‘Hard a-starboard! Down with the helm for your life!’
“Bill, the boatswain, and I, who were together at the wheel, jammed down the spokes with all our strength; but the blessed brig wouldn’t come up to the wind as we wanted her. She wouldn’t, although we both almost hung on the wheel and wrenched it off the deck. ‘Hard up with the helm, men, do you hear?’ again sings out the chief officer, rushing aft as he spoke. ‘Hard up, men! all our lives are at stake!’
“And the brig wouldn’t come up, try all we could. Bill and I could have screamed with rage; but in another minute we were laughing with joy.
“The light got clear; and there, to our horror, just where we wanted the dear old brig to go—and she wouldn’t go, like a sensible creature, although we cursed her for not obeying the helm—was an enormous iceberg rising out of the depths of the ocean, and towering above the masts of the poor Jane, which I feel loth to call ‘cranky’ any longer—as high almost as the eyes could see, like the cliffs at Dover, only a hundred yards higher, without exaggeration! If the brig had come up to the wind, as Mr Stanchion sang out for us to make her, why, two minutes after, she would have struck full into the iceberg, and running, as she was, good fourteen knots and more under her jib and main-sail, her bows would have stoved in, and we’d all have been in Davy Jones’s locker before we could have said Jack Robinson!
“As it was, we weren’t out of danger by any means. There were icebergs to the right of us; icebergs astern of us, by which we had passed probably when Pat first complained of feeling the cold; icebergs ahead of us, through which we would have gingerly to make our way, for we had no option with the gale that was blowing but to keep the same course we were on, as to lie to amidst all that ice would be more dangerous even than moving on; and the big, enormous berg we had just escaped was on our left, or port side properly speaking—looking, for all the world, like a curving range of cliffs on some rock-bound coast, as it spread out more than five or six miles in length. It was certainly the biggest iceberg I ever saw in my life, beating to nothing all that I afterwards noticed in the Arctic seas when I went north in the Polaris; and perhaps that is the reason why all the ice mounds I saw there became so dwarfed by comparison that they looked quite insignificant.
“Pat kept on the forecastle, looking out and directing the course of the vessel, as the cap’en, who had just come on deck, roused by the noise, thought the Irishman’s experience in the Arctic seas would make him more useful even than himself in coursing the ship.
“The skipper was right as usual; and Pat had soon a chance of showing that his choice had not been misplaced.
“‘Kape her away! kape her away!’ Pat shouted out in a minute or two after the cap’en had come on deck ‘The top of the berg is loosenin’, yer honour; and sure it’s falling on us it will be in a brace of shakes! Kape her away, or, be jabers, it’s lost we’ll be for sartin!’
“The old brig, although she wouldn’t come up to the wind when we wanted her, and thus saved our lives by disobeying orders, now answered her helm promptly without any demur, and dashed away from the mass of ice before the gale at, I should be ashamed to say what speed.
“Bless the old Cranky Jane! How could we ever have reviled her and despised her? She seemed almost as if she had human intelligence and a kind of foresight.
“We only just weathered the berg when the summit toppled over with a crash, missing the after-part of the brig by a very few yards, and churning up the sea far around with a sort of creamy surf, that dashed over our decks, and swept us fore and aft.
“It was a marvellous escape, and only second to that we had just before had in avoiding running on to the same gigantic mass of floating ice, which had probably come up from the Antarctic regions for the summer season—at least, that was Pat O’Brien’s explanation for our meeting with it there.
“All that night and next morning we were passing through bergs of every size, big and little, although none were so large as the one which had been so risky to us—bergs that in their splendid architecture and magnificence, with fantastic peaks and fine pinnacles, that glittered in the rising sun with all the colours of the rainbow, flashing out rays and lights of violet and purple, topaz blue and emerald green, blush rose and pink and red, mingled with shades of crimson and gleams of gold, with a frosting over all of silver and bright white light—Those who haven’t seen an iceberg at sea at sunrise have no idea of the depth and breadth of beauty in nature, though I, one who has served his time before the mast, says so. But, avast with such flummery and wordage!”
“Good gracious me!” I exclaimed, aghast at the old gentleman turning round so completely from the statement he had made when we first entered into conversation. “I thought you said just now that all icebergs were a dull white without any other colour, save a streak of blue sometimes running through them like a vein; and yet, here you are painting them in all the varied tints of the rainbow!”
He was not a bit put out, however, by this accusation of inconsistency.
“This was how they looked at sunrise, which, like a brilliant sunset, as you know, makes a very great difference in the appearance of objects, causing even the most common things to look brilliant, and dignifying the common so as to make it look sublime! But, with your permission,” added the old gentleman courteously, “I will finish my story of the brig’s escape.
“After we passed all the ice, the wind came round, as the captain said it would, right favourable for our course; and the Cranky Jane behaved like a good one. We made all our easting on one tack, and passed the Cape still a good distance to the south, but in as good a latitude as we could have passed it in for the weather we had, which was first-rate.
“And when we began to mount northwards again, towards the little island which we all prize so much, although it is but a little spot on the map of Europe, why, the wind changed too, still almost due aft as the dear old Cranky Jane liked, much to the delight and joy of everybody on board, especially the skipper, who exclaimed, as he rubbed his hands together in joy, and walked up and down the poop,—‘Bless the darling, she’s a walker! And I wouldn’t swop her for the best clipper in the China trade!’
“We had a good land-fall all right, entering the Channel shortly after sighting the Lizard, making the quickest passage ever known for a sailing brig from Fiji; and, in spite of all the dear old craft’s shortcomings and temper and weather-helm, myself and the rest of the crew, including of course Pat O’Brien and his ‘poor feet,’ were willing, even after all the perils we had passed through, and the dangers we had escaped, every mother’s son of us, with Captain Jiggins’ permission, and the chief officer’s favour, to sign articles, and ship for another voyage in the old Cranky Jane; and, what is more, we did too, sticking to the brig till she went to pieces off Cape Lewis to the south of New Zealand in her last voyage out. That’s all!”
So saying, the old gentleman, bowing to me politely, took his departure from Sheerness dockyard, which I also left soon afterwards, pleased with all that I had seen and more than glad of having visited the place if only for the chance it afforded me of hearing his yarn.