“Borne on rough seas to a far-distant shore,
Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.”
“Heigho! matie,” sighed Silas, talking to his chief officer and giving orders all in one breath, “I don’t think we’ll—haul aft the jib-sheet—ever see them again. I don’t think they can—take a pull on the main-brace—ever get back from among that fearful—luff a little, lad, luff—ice, matie. And the poor boys, if any one had told Silas he could have loved them as much as he does in so short a time, he would have laughed in his face. Come below, matie, and we’ll have a drop o’ green ginger. Keep her close, Mortimer, but don’t let her shiver.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” said the man at the wheel.
In a few hours the wind got more aft, and so, heading now for more southern climes, away went the Canny Scotia, with stun’sails up. I cannot say that she bounded over the waters like a thing of life. No; but she looked as happy and frisky as a plough-horse on a gala day, that has just been taken home from the miry fields, fed and groomed, and dressed with ribbons and started off in a light spring-van with a load of laughing children.
But eastwards and north steamed the Arrandoon. Indeed, she tried to do all the northing she could, with just as little easting as possible. She passed islands innumerable; islands that we fail to see in the chart, owing, no doubt, to the fact that they are usually covered entirely with ice and snow, and would be taken for immense icebergs. But this was a singularly open year, and there was no mistaking solid rocky land for floating ice.
The bearings of all these were carefully put down in the charts—I say charts, because not only the captain and mate, but our young heroes as well, took the daily reckoning, and kept a log, though I am bound in the interests of truth to say that Ralph very often did not write up his log for days and days, and then he impudently “fudged” it from Rory’s.
“Are you done with my log?” Rory would sometimes modestly inquire of Ralph as he sat at the table busily “fudging.”
“Not yet, youngster,” Ralph would reply; “there, you go away and amuse yourself with your fiddle till I’m done with it, unless you specially want your ears pulled.”
McBain landed at many of these islands, and hoisted beacons on them. These beacons were simply spare spars, with bunches of light wood lashed to their top ends, so that at some little distance they looked like tall brooms. He hoisted one on the highest peak of every island that lay in his route.
They came at length to what seemed the very northernmost and most easterly of these islands, and on this McBain determined to land provisions and store them. It would tend to lighten the ship; and “on the return voyage,” said the captain, “if so be that Providence shall protect and spare us, they will be a welcome sight.”