Prayers are seldom more impressive than when repeated away out in the middle of the boundless ocean, but there is even more solemnity in them when heard amid the eternal silence of Greenland wilds. I don’t think there was one poor soul on board the Icebear who would have missed those morning prayers for anything.
Jack-the-Sailor is a rough stick, I must confess, and, as a rule, a very jolly stick. Yet, nevertheless, he has his solemn moments, as well as you, reader, who, maybe, never were afloat on blue water, have.
“I feels some sentences o’ them prayers, that the captain reads, go kind o’ round my heart,” said Chips one day down in the half-deck mess. “That bit, for instance, ‘O God, at whose command the wind blows, and lifts up the waves of the sea and stills the raging thereof.’”
“You hain’t got the words what you might say altogether correct,” said Bos’n Bowman; “but, howsomedever, you’ve got the main thing, and that’s the sense.”
“Well, Pipes,” replied Chips, “you’re more of a scollard than me.”
“And,” put in Spectioneer Wray, “there’s that bit, you know, ‘When we gave up all for lost, our ship, our goods, our lives, Thou didst mercifully look upon us, and wonderfully command a deliverance.’”
“I’ve often found the truth of that,” said Pipes. “So ’as most on us,” said Chips, solemnly. “But,” continued Pipes, “there’s these words: ‘That we may return in safety to enjoy the blessings of the land.’ Don’t they bring old England up before your mind, with her green valleys and flowery fields, and all that kind of thing, eh, maties?”
“Ay, and there’s those as follows,” said Chips, who was a married man and hailed from Rotherhithe, “‘Enjoy the fruits of our labours,’ which means, o’ course, take the missus and the children to Margate for a whole month.”
After prayers, till “pipe for dinner,” there were the various duties of the ship to be carried on, and there was not an officer or man, from Claude himself to little saucy Boy Bounce, who emptied the cook’s ashes, helped to clean the coppers, and attended to the aviary and the wants of Fingal, who did not find something to do. Dinner and smoking done, if the weather permitted, a pleasure party for the shore would be told off.
The doctor and his merry men could do but little exploring now, and his mines lay some distance in the interior among the wild hills, and, from its colour, the ore could not easily be worked by lamplight.