Our expedition was not without several dangers. Fog might come on and conceal both ships from us; a blinding storm of snow might have the same effect, and pile its drifts above our corpses for ever. The ice-field might break up, and separate us from our ship so long that when our slender stock of necessaries was expended, we should infallibly perish. Each man among us thought of these possible and terrible contingencies as the distance increased between us and the Leda—our home amid the icy waste—but none spoke of them then; all sang cheerily, and pushed on to overhaul the strange craft; thus about five in the afternoon we found ourselves alongside, and all paused to survey her with deep and undefinable emotions of awe in our breasts, for she had evidently been long deserted, and now wore a most chilling and desolate aspect.
She was an old-fashioned pink-built barque, of about six hundred tons, with bulging ribs and bluff bows; broad and clumsy in the counter and deep in the bends—all fenced about with iron bands; she looked like a whaler of George the Second's time, for, with a fiddle head, she had the remains of a jack-staff and spritsail yard upon her bowsprit. Her hull and spars were thickly coated with ice.
Her fore and main topmasts were gone; her mizen was broken off at the crosstrees, and hung, truck downward, in its gear.
The topping-lifts and braces of the yards had long since given way, and tatters of them swung mournfully on the wind. Many of the yards had dropped from their slings, and lay athwart the deck or among the ice alongside, where the gales had tossed them.
Her ironwork was red and corroded; almost every vestige of paint and tar had long since disappeared, as if she had been scraped by the ice; beaten, battered, and washed by Arctic storms, American fogs, and Greenland showers of sleet and rain, for many, many years must have elapsed since the keel of this old craft had last been in blue water, and first been frozen in the treacherous ice; years of drifting to and fro in the far and frozen regions of the north, where perchance not even the eye of the Esquimaux had seen her.
We seemed all to read and know her history instinctively at a glance; but her crew—what had their fate been?
Inspired by a strange emotion, we hung back, while gazing at her, as she stood like a silent ruin, or the ghost of a ship in the frosty sunshine of the April evening; but no man attempted to board her, till Paul Reeves, taking a hatchet from the sledge, exclaimed,
"Come on, shipmates—we'll overhaul her!" and proceeded at once to mount from the ice into her mainchains. As he grasped the starboard shrouds about the upper dead-eyes, the whole gave way from their rotten cat-harpings and crashed about him, with a shower of the ice that had coated them for years.
"By Jove! lads, 'twas not yesterday this craft left the rigger's hands!" said he, as we clambered after him, and at length stood upon her deck, which was coated about two feet deep with hard frozen snow, on the pure whiteness of which no foot-track was visible.
Sailors are ever superstitious; but theirs is an honest and reverential superstition, very different from that of the landsman; thus in breathless silence our party paused upon her deck, as if it had been the lid of a huge coffin.