Down went the sun and up rose the wind. Twilight is very long in these regions, and before it had quite given place to night, the sea from being rippled got rough. The breeze seemed uncertain at first where to come from, and went puffing about from three to four points of the compass. Then it appeared to say to itself, “First thoughts are best; I’ll follow the swell; I’ll soon blow that down.” So it came roaring out of the north-west. Long before it did blow “a stiffener,” as the mate called it, looking up ahead through the gloaming air, you could have seen mysterious-looking great grey blankets of clouds, drifting fast and furiously towards the south-east. They might have been a few miles high, but soon the stream of clouds was lowered and thickened and darkened, till the horizon was hardly three cables’ length away all round. Then it was night—night with an ever-increasing breeze and a choppy, frothy sea.
The wind did blow the swell pretty flat, but substituted in its place genuine waves, as ragged and jagged as the mountain peaks of Iceland.
And the good ship by-and-by creaked and groaned in every timber, and thick darkness fell, and Claude had to trust to Providence, to steam, and the compass. There were two men at the wheel at midnight, and at that time probably the gale was at its worst, for on heaving the log it was found she was barely making one knot an hour. The seas—whole water—were coming in over the bows by tons, and sweeping right aft like a miniature Niagara; but the hatches had been battened down early in the evening, and the boats secured, so there was little injury done, though the load of water sadly hampered the vessel’s motion: it was not able to get away fast enough.
About two bells in the middle watch the Icebear struck.
Struck? But what or where? I know not; I cannot tell; it was no island, no rock. It may have been the carcase of some floating monster of the deep; or—who knows?—some wretched derelict or a portion of a wreck. It was a mystery. But she struck with a dull thud that quite stopped her way, and for a time made every heart beat with fear for her safety. She must have struck not only on the bows, but gone over something; all along her keel was the quivering grating felt, as if of a substance underneath.
For a while, too, the rudder and screw were hampered and the vessel’s way all but stopped.
As it was she staggered and began to broach to. It was a moment of the greatest danger, but only a moment. Then it was over, and the Icebear was struggling once more with the stormy head wind and raging sea.
By morning light, though the wind still held, it was less furious, and the seas but broke in froth and spray against the descending bows, and went singing aft on each side, their tops twisting and curling in the gale.
Down in the darkened wardroom at breakfast that morning the talk was naturally about the storm. Although Claude retained his own quarters abaft, still he preferred taking all his meals with his officers.
“What was it we struck, do I think?” said the doctor in answer to a question put by Lloyd. “Some unhappy fishing-boat or walrus-hunter on his way to the east shores of Greenland.”