It was a busy scene, and one that can only be witnessed in Greenland north.
In three days all the skins were made off and stowed away. All this time the men had been as merry as sheep-shearers, and only on the last day did Silas splice the main-brace, even then diluting the rum with warm coffee.
Then came the cleaning up, and scouring of decks below and above, and white-washing and mast-scraping. After this McBain sent his painters on board, and in less than four-and-twenty hours she looked like a new ship.
And Rory was busy below on the ’tween decks. The Highland lassie had been unshipped, and taken below for him to paint and gild. Rory, mind you, did not wish it to be unshipped. He would have preferred being swung overboard. There would have been more fun in it, he said. But Silas would not hear of such a thing. The cold, he feared, would benumb him so that he might drop off into the sea, to the infinite joy and satisfaction of a gang of unprincipled sharks that kept up with the ship, but to the everlasting sorrow of him, Captain Silas Grig.
When the ship was all painted, and the masts scraped and varnished, and the Highland lassie—brightly arrayed in gold and McGregor tartan—re-shipped, why then, I do not think a prouder or happier man than Silas Grig ever trod a quarter-deck.
The day after this everybody on the Arrandoon was busy, busy, busy writing letters for home.
They were thus engaged, when a shout came from the crow’s-nest,—
“Heavy ice ahead!”
It was the ice-bound shores of the southernmost islands of Spitzbergen they had sighted. They passed between several of these, and grandly beautiful they looked, with their fantastically-shaped sides glittering green and blue and white in the sunshine. These islands seemed to be the northern home or summer retreat of the great bladder-nosed seal and the giant walrus. They basked on the smaller bergs that floated around them, while hundreds of strange sea-birds nodded half asleep on the snow-clad rocks.
It was here where the two ships parted, the Canny Scotia bearing up for the sunny south, the Arrandoon clewing sails and lighting fires to steam away to The Unknown Land.