After a successful whale fishing in latitude 76°-77°, they had been again, or were still, beset.
"1st May, 1801; hoisted a garland of false flowers, made by our wives and sweethearts at home in Scotland, between the fore and mainmast........"
Then followed days and weeks, to the effect that they were still beset. These memoranda were in the handwriting of various persons, and were frequently mingled with earnest prayers for release. Then scurvy appears to have broken out among them, and disease was quickly followed by death.
"1802. Birnie from Buchan-ness, off duty, unwell—Birnie's teeth fell out of his head. Willie Cairns from Southhouse Head, off duty, unwell. Poor Birnie died, and was buried in the ice, where the others lie, half a mile off, on the starboard bow. God rest them!
"May 6th. Jobson ill with scurvy and blindness—Cairns died, and was buried beside Birnie ........."
Many leaves totally illegible followed, till we deciphered a passage like this—
"1802, 4th Dec. The captain died in his berth this day at 8 A.M., and we are too weak to move him. Smith, Arthur, and the cook are dead, or dying of hunger on the cabin floor! We have now been beset two years and twenty-one days. In that time twenty-four men have died out of a crew of nine-and-twenty—no hope! no mercy! My God! where is all this to end? We sailed upon a Friday, and this ........"
I shut the book abruptly, for I could perceive in the twilight a blank horror stealing over the pale features of my companions as we stood beside that old vessel—a frozen tomb; and favoured by the light of the rising moon, we proceeded to regain the Leda, with all the speed we could exert; for to some it appeared as if our future fate was fearfully foreshadowed in the story of this old doomed whale-ship. Half a mile distant, on her starboard bow, an ice-coated pole was visible. It seemed to indicate where her dead were buried.
Hans Peterkin and three others strapped the collar-ropes over their shoulders for the first "spell," and proceeded briskly in front with our sledge of blankets, &c. The rest followed in silence, and only turned from time to time to cast a backward glance at the old whaler, whose decaying spars, coated with ice, glimmered darkly against the starry sky. The moon arose in her full northern splendour—clear, glorious, and wondrous! The sharp summits of the bergs (the ice-mountains that rose from the plains of ice) gleamed and glittered like mighty prisms, or spires, pyramids, and obelisks of crystal and spar.
After all we had seen, the dead, the awful stillness of the frozen sea—that snow-clad plain, "the silence of which seemed to come from afar and to go afar," impressed us with deep and solemn emotions. Thus, for several miles we trod gloomily on, equally desirous of reaching the Leda and of leaving far behind the scene of gloom I have described.