“No, sir, that is the curious part of it. I can’t see a sign of her; not a vestige, even from the crow’s-nest.”
“What?” cried McBain.
“It is true, sir,” continued the mate. “We were both working through the ice-stream just before darkling. I was too busy to look much about me till we got outside; then I missed her. There are two or three large bergs among the smaller. She may be hidden by one of these. If she isn’t I greatly fear, sir, something has happened to her.”
The captain was on deck in a few minutes, and found the mate’s words were sadly true.
He tacked up and down for hours, so as to see both sides of every large berg in the stream, but no Trefoil was there. She was gone. Never more would this goodly barque sail the northern seas.
Towards noon that day one solitary boat was seen to emerge from the bergs of the ice-stream, and begin advancing towards the Snowbird. One boat—eleven men and the first mate—were all the survivors of the ill-fated ship. She had been struck amidships. A three-cornered piece of ice had gone half-way through her, then receded, and in three minutes’ time she had filled and gone down, the mate and the watch on deck having barely time to cut a boat away.
(The same fate befell the Innuit, of Peterhead, some fifteen years ago; she went down in the short darkling of a summer’s night, a very few minutes after being struck. She had been lying beset, with my own ship and several others, in an ice-pack, to the south-west of Jan Mayen. The hands, however, were saved.—The Author.)
That day, after dinner, the mate told the short but sad history of the Trefoil’s cruise.
“The same captain was in her,” he said, “for three years, and never yet succeeded in getting a paying voyage. His owners weren’t pleased, you may be well sure. Unscrupulous men they are, every one of them. They told him, and they told me and our second mate, before we left England last, that if we were a clean ship this voyage they would rather never see the ‘Trefoil’ again! We knew what that meant. We knew the Trefoil was heavily insured. But the captain was a gentleman; he would have died sooner than harm a timber of the dear old Trefoil. But the second mate—ah! it is wrong, I know, to speak ill of the dead, but I have reasons, strong reasons, for believing that it was he who fired the ship.
“We had bad luck last summer; we never struck a fish. Then we got beset among such terrible ice as I had never seen before, and there we had to winter. There was another ship not far off in the same predicament, though she lay on an evener keel.