CHAPTER XVI
THE FIRST ICE
Before they hove to the Selache, daylight broke on a frothing sea, across which scudded wisps of smoke-adrift and thin showers of snow. With two little wet rags of canvas set the schooner lay almost head on to the big combers. Having little way upon her, she lurched over instead of ramming the waves, and though now and then one curled on board across her rail it was not often that there was much heavy water upon her slanted deck.
All around the narrow circle a leaden sky met the sea. It was bitterly cold, and the spray stung the skin like half-spent pellets from a gun. There was only one man, in turn, exposed to the weather, and he had little to do but brace himself against the savage buffeting of the wind as he clutched the wheel. The Selache, for the most part, steered herself, lifting buoyantly while the froth came sluicing aft from her tilted bows, falling off a little with a vicious leeward roll when a comber bigger than usual smote her to weather, and coming up again streaming to meet the next. Sometimes she forged ahead in what is called at sea, by courtesy, a “smooth,” and all the time shroud and stay to weather gave out tumultuous harmonies, and the slack of every rope to leeward blew out in unyielding curves.
Three of the white men lay sleeping or smoking in the little cabin, which was partly raised above and partly sunk beneath the after-deck. It was a reasonably strong structure, but it worked, and sweated, as they sat at sea, and the heat of the stove had further opened up the seams in it. Moisture dripped from the beams overhead, moisture trickled up and down the slanting deck, there were great globules of water on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men’s clothes and blankets, was wet. The men lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a laborious matter to sit. They said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amid the cataclysm of elemental sound. It became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight, dimmed by flying spray, to take a turn at the jarring wheel.
For three days the bad weather continued, and then, when the gale broke and a little pale sunshine streamed down on the tumbling sea, changing the gray combers to flashing white and green, the skipper gave her a double-reefed mainsail, part of the boom-foresail, and a jib or two, and thrashed her slowly back to the northward on the starboard tack. More than one of the men glanced over the taffrail longingly as the schooner gathered way. She was fast, and with a little driving and that breeze over her quarter she would bear them south toward warmth and ease at some two hundred miles a day, while the way they were going it would be a fight for every fathom with bitter, charging seas, and there lay ahead of them only cold and peril and toil incredible.
There are times at sea when human nature revolts from the strain that the overtaxed body must bear, the leaden weariness of worn-out limbs, and the subconscious effort to retain warmth and vitality in spite of the ceaseless lashing of the icy gale. Then, as aching muscles grow lax, the nervous tension becomes more insupportable, unless, indeed, utter weariness breeds indifference to the personal peril each time the decks are swept by a frothing flood, or a slippery spar must be clung to with frost-numbed and often bleeding hands. The men on the Selache knew this, and it was to their credit that they obeyed when Dampier gave the word to put the helm up and trim the sheets over. Wyllard, however, stood a little apart with a hard-set face, and he looked forward over the plunging bows, for he was troubled by a sense of responsibility such as he had not felt since he had, one night several years before, asked for volunteers. He realized that an account of these men’s lives might be demanded from him.
It was a fortnight later, and they had twice made a perilous landing without finding any sign of life on or behind the hammered beach, when they ran into the first of the ice. The gray day was near its end. The long heave faintly twinkling here and there, ran sluggishly after them. When creeping through a belt of haze they came into sight of several blurrs of grayish white that swung with the dim, green swell. The Selache was slowly lurching over it with everything aloft to the topsails then, and Dampier glanced at the ice with a feeling of deep anxiety.
“Earlier than I expected,” he commented. “Anyway, it’s a sure thing there’s plenty more where that came from.”