“Of the earlier days of Silas Grig little need be said. I daresay he was no better and no worse than other boys. He nearly plagued the life out of his grandmother, and drove three maiden aunts to the verge of distraction, and made any amount of work for the tailor and the shoemaker; and when they couldn’t stand him any longer at home they sent him to school, reminding the teacher ere they left him there, that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. The teacher didn’t forget that; he whipped me three times a day, drilled me through the English grammar and Grey’s arithmetic, then flogged me into Caesar; and when I translated the passage, ‘Caesar triduas vias fecit’ (Caesar made three days’ journey.) into ‘Caesar made three roads,’ the dominie gave me such a dressing that I followed Caesar’s example—I made three days’ journey due north, and never returned to my maiden aunts, nor the dominie either.
“I found myself now in the heart of what I then took to be a big town, for I wasn’t very big myself, you know. It was only Peterhead, after all. I marched boldly down to the docks, and on board a great raking-masted Greenlandman.
“‘What use would you be?’ inquired the skipper when I told him what I wanted. ‘Bless me!’ he added, ‘you ain’t any size at all; the bears would eat you up.’
“‘I’ll have him,’ said the doctor, ‘if you’ll let me, captain. He can be my lob-lolly-boy and body-guard.’
“And so, gentlemen, from that day to this I’ve been a sailor o’ the northern seas; and there isn’t much to be seen in these regions that old Silas hasn’t come across, from Baffin’s Bay to Kamschatka, from lonely Spitzbergen in the north to Iceland in the south.”
“And so you’ve been in Spitzbergen, have you?” said McBain.
“Why, bless you, yes,” replied Silas. “It was there I was in at the death of the great white whale, and a sad day it was for us, I can tell you. He was white with age. (Very old whales are sometimes found in the far northern seas covered with a kind of parasite, which gives them a white or light-grey appearance.) I should think he couldn’t have been much under a hundred years old, and just as sly and wary as a hundred and forty foxes all rolled in to one. Many and many a boat had tried to catch him, but he had a way of diving and doubling to avoid the harpoons that some believed was rather more than natural; then when you thought he was miles and miles away, pop! up he would come among the very midst of the boats, and a funny thing it would be if he didn’t knock one o’ them to smithereens with that tail o’ his. We killed him though. Our skipper himself speared him, but it was hours after that before he died. And before he died terrible was the revenge he took on his destroyers. Gentlemen, Silas Grig has no language in his vocabulary to describe the vicious wrath of that sea-demon. I think I see him now as he rose to the surface, blowing blood and spray, snorting with fury, with fire seeming to flash out of his little evil eyes. We in the boats thought our last hour had come, as he ploughed down through us. But our hearts stood still with fear and dread when he dashed past us and made for the ship itself. Onward with lightning speed went the brute, leaving a wake astern such as a man-o’-war might have left.
“Our craft—a small brig—was lying with her foreyard aback. She looked as if sleeping on the gently rippling water. No one spoke in the boats, every eye was fixed on our ship—our home, and on the fearful monster advancing to attack her. We could see that the people left on the brig knew the whole extent of their danger, for they seemed all on deck. There were wild shouts, and guns were fired, but nothing availed to avert the catastrophe. Then, oh! the sad, despairing cry that rose to heaven from that doomed ship! It seems to ring in my ears whenever I think of it. The whale struck her right amidships, and she went over and down at once. No soul was saved; and when we rode up to the spot, there was nothing to be seen, and nothing to be heard, save the body of the great white whale, dead, on his side, with the waves lap-lapping against it as it slowly rose and fell.
“For six long, cold, weary days we lived in the open boats, feeding on the flesh of the seals we happened to kill, and quenching our thirst with the snow we gathered from the ice. When we had almost despaired of being saved, for we were far to the nor’ard and east of the usual fishing-grounds, a Norwegian walrus-hunter picked us up, and landed us at last, in midwinter, on a dreary shore in Lapland. But, gentlemen, that is nothing to what we, the survivors of the ill-fated Jonathan Grey, suffered some years afterwards. The ship got ‘in the nips’ coming out o’ the pack. We were crushed just as you might crash an egg-shell between your fingers. Thirty of us embarked upon the very iceberg that had caused our ruin, with two casks of biscuit, and hardly clothes enough to cover us. Then it came on to blow, and, huddled together in the centre of the berg, we were blown out to sea, trying in vain to keep each other warm, and defend ourselves from the cruel cold seas that dashed over us, heavier than lead, more remorseless than the grave. Fifteen days were we on the berg, and every day some one dropped off, ay, and the living seemed to envy the quiet, calm sleep of the dead. A sail in sight at last; and how many of us, think you, were alive to see it? Three I only three! It was a year after this before I was fit to brave the Arctic seas again, and meanwhile I had met my Peggy—my little wife that is. Some difference, you will allow, gentlemen, between Silas Grig afloat on a solitary iceberg in a troubled northern sea, and Silas strolling on the top of a breezy cliff in the bright moonlight of midsummer, with Peggy on his arm, and just as happy as the sea-birds.
“Were these the only times that I was cast away? No—for I lost my ship by fire once in the northern ice of Western Greenland, and it was two whole years before either myself or my messmates placed foot again on British soil. There wasn’t a ship anywhere near us, and the nearest settlement was a colony of transported Danes, that lived about three hundred miles south of us. We saved all we could from the burning barque, and that was little enough; then we constructed rough sledges, and tied our food and chattels thereon, and set out upon our long, dreary march. It took us well-nigh two months to accomplish our journey, for the way was a rough one, and the region was wild and desolate in the extreme. It was late in autumn, and the sun shone by day, but his beams were sadly shorn by the falling snow. Five suns in all we could count at times, though four, you know, were merely mirages. We did not all reach the colony; indeed, many succumbed to the fatigue of the march, to frost-bites, and to scurvy; and we laid them to rest in hastily-dug graves, and the snow was their only winding-sheet. It was more than a year before we found a passage back to our own country, and kind though the poor people all were to us, the governor included, we had to rough it, I can tell you. But you see, sailors who choose the Arctic Seas as their cruising-grounds must expect to suffer at times.