And one by one the North King’s searching lance
Touch’d, and they stiffen’d at their task, and died;
And their stout leader glanced a farewell glance;
‘God is as close by sea as land,’ he cried,
‘In His own light not nearer than this gloom,’—
And look’d as one who o’er the mountains sees his home.
Home!—happy sound of vanish’d happiness!
—But when the unwilling sun crept up again,
And loosed the sea from winter and duresse,
The seal-wrapt race that roams the Lapland main
Saw in Arzina, wondering, fearing more,
The tatter’d ships, in snows entomb’d and vaulted o’er:
And clomb the decks, and found the gallant crew,
As forms congeal’d to stone, where frozen fate
Took each man in his turn, and gently slew:—
Nor knew the heroic chieftain, as he sate,
English through every fibre, in his place,
The smile of duty done upon the steadfast face.
Sir Hugh Willoughby, in the Bona Esperanza, with two other vessels, sailed May 10, 1553, saluting the palace of Greenwich is they passed. By September 18 he, with one consort, reached the harbour of Arzina, where all perished early in 1554. His will, dated in January of that year, was found when the ships were discovered by the Russians soon after.
Willoughby has been taken here as the representative of the great age of British naval adventure and exploration.
Arzina is placed near the western headland of the White Sea, east of the Waranger Fiord, and west of Nova Zembla and the mouth of the Petchora.
CROSSING SOLWAY
May 16: 1568
Blow from the North, thou bitter North wind,
Blow over the western bay,
Where Nith and Eden and Esk run in
And fight with the salt sea spray,
And the sun shines high through the sailing sky
In the freshness of blue Mid-may.
Blow North-North-West, and hollow the sails
Of a Queen who slips over the sea
As a hare from the hounds; and her covert afar;
And now she can only flee;
And death before and the sisterly shore
That smiles perfidiously.