Hartly, Hans Peterkin, Cuffy, and I performed this melancholy office, when we had no lamp but the twinkling stars and the sharp streamers of the northern lights, shooting upward from the icebergs that edged the plain, over which the wind blew keen and bitingly.
Grim seemed the pale faces of the dead in that wavering gloom, as we lowered them into their last home, heaped the ice above them, and returned to the Leda, leaving them to sleep the sleep of death among their shipmates half a mile distant on her starboard bow.
And now with each day there sank a deeper horror over us—the horror that, like the old whaler at the horizon, the Leda was a ship foredoomed! Yet, like her, we had not sailed upon a Friday.
We were without a surgeon; but Hartly was a skilful fellow, and by administering such simples as we possessed, he endeavoured to ameliorate the condition of his suffering crew.
Common potatoes he washed, cut into thin slices, and gave raw to some, for the cure of their swollen and bleeding gums—usually a sovereign remedy in this case. To others he gave decoctions of tamarinds, scraped from an old gallipot, and boiled with cream of tartar; or a ship biscuit pounded into a panada, and sweetened with sugar; or gargles made of honey of roses and elixir of vitriol; but, ere long, even these remedies failed us; and we had Reeves, Hans Peterkin, and more than half our remaining crew, unable to raise their heads or hands, sick and despairing.
The miserable Esquimaux, by scraping the snow from their native rocks, can find coarse berries, sorrel, and cresses, with which to correct their blubber food; but in that world of ice we had no such boon accorded us.
Armed with our rifles and knives, I set forth with two of our healthiest men, Dick and James Abbot, two brothers, in search of a few fresh seals, as they had learned to shun our locality, and had ceased to venture through their holes in the ice for some time past.
We left the brig about two o'clock, P.M.
On this day the wind was blowing hard, the white scud was flying fast through the blue sky, and for the first time we felt a heaving motion in the ice, which warned us instinctively not to venture far from the Leda. After a ramble of three hours, we had only shot one seal and knocked two cubs on the head with our rifle-butts, when we sat down on a hummock to rest, at the distance of two miles or so from our ice-bound home.
"I wonder much how the masts of that old craft the Bounty have stood these many years?" said Dick Abbot, breaking a long silence.