“Jan dared not meet the loving eyes of poor Nanette, but gazed dreamily into the fire as he told them the news that some shipwrecked sailors had brought to the port of Katrinesand, from which they had last sailed, of wealth immeasurable to be made on an island far away in the frozen ocean, and of mines of ivory to be had for the gathering, and of the captain’s resolve to make one last—certainly the last—Jan little knew how prophetically he spoke—voyage in the brig, and that this voyage was to be to the Arctic regions; and that neither he nor the captain doubted that this single voyage would make wealthy men of them both.
“The wife was the first to reply, for poor Nanette was sobbing as if her heart would break.
“‘Oh!’ cried the captain’s wife, ‘it is ever, ever thus. Do not go, I beseech you, oh! my husband. Do not rashly brave the terrors of that dreadful sea of ice. There has been a cloud on my heart for weeks that I could not understand till now, and both Nanette and myself have dreamed dreams that bode no good to us or ours. Husband, husband, stay at home!’
“But a determined man will have his way, and the captain’s mind was so bent on the new project that nothing would induce him to give it up. What his wife must suffer, but Nanette even more, for wherever her father went Jan was bound to follow, and the danger would be the same to both!
“On the twenty-first day of April, in seventeen hundred and ninety-six, there sailed away from Shetland the sturdy brig Danish Queen, well manned, mated, found and commanded, and with it went the hearts of the gentle Nanette and her mother.
“The day was mild and balmy. A soft south wind blew over the sea and filled the sails, and wafted the brig—oh! how fast she seemed to fly—away and away and away, till she disappeared on the northern horizon, and the poor bereaved ones, clasped in each other’s arms, wept in silence now, for neither could find a word of comfort for the other; hope itself had fled from their hearts.
“And the Danish Queen returned again no more to Shetland shores.
“Two years and a half had barely passed since she sailed away, and the autumn leaves were mingling with the long green grass in the little churchyard of Dergen, when two new-made graves might have been seen there, side by side. One was that of little Nanette, the other the grave of her heartbroken mother.
“And the time flew by, and the Danish Queen was soon forgotten, and people had ceased to speak of her, and the friends of her brave sailors had doffed the garb of mourning for five long years.
“But one day there arrived in Shetland the whaling barque Clotho, direct from the Greenland Ocean, and one passenger, the sole survivor, by his own account, of the ill-fated Danish Queen. If it were indeed as he said, there must be some strange mystery about his existence for so many years on the sea of ice, which even Jan Jansen himself—for it was he—could not, or rather would not, then explain. He was found dressed in bear-skins, a young man, but with snow-white hair and beard, wandering purposelessly on the ice, and taken on board. All that he would tell was that his unfortunate vessel had been dashed to pieces against the ice just three months after he had left Shetland, and that he alone of all on board had been saved from a watery grave.