I was soon to find out why the mate referred to the Antarctic as mean. Father had set a course around to the southward of Tasmania. For three weeks we sailed with fair wind and clear skies, and then the fair wind gradually changed to a stinging sharpness. The skies misted up in a sort of transparent fog, and mirages appeared on the horizon. Mirrored against the indefinite horizon were two islands with tropical foliage seemingly floating in space. The mirage is a dangerous thing to mariners, for it confuses even the most careful navigation.
“Joan, you ain’t much use, you go on the fo’c’s’le head and turn the foghorn, three short blasts a minute, then one long one,” said my father.
“Are you afraid of running into another vessel down here?” I asked.
“Not a chance of sighting even a hunk of driftwood, but the marine law says we have to squawk a foghorn when we get in the iceberg region.”
I had never seen an iceberg, and I was over-eager to be on the lookout on the fo’c’s’le head to sight the first one. Our foghorn was a contraption that looked like a big coffee grinder. It was green with tarnish and thick with rust. I took my position just port of the capstan and ground away. I was rewarded by a rasping grunt. It took all my strength to spin the handle around just to make one blast. In spite of the cold I soon got very warm trying to make the three short and one long blasts come. Father came forward and watched me straining away on it. He grinned at my exhaustion and said he thought that would keep me out of deviltry for a while, or make me so tired that I’d be willing to sleep and give him a respite from watching me.
The noise of the horn began to echo back at me in an eerie tone. I called to Father:
“We must be near land. The echo is coming back at me strong.”
He dashed to the fo’c’s’le head, and peered into the thickening mush of fog. The sea was so still that every sound became magnified. In a few minutes the suck-suck sound of water washing against some bulk came to our ears.
“Drop the topsails,” he bellowed, “bring her around.” With a violent jerk, the ship came up in the wind and stopped. Ahead of us, not more than five hundred yards away, loomed a giant iceberg. As we watched it, it sank deep in the black water and then, as if it were some living beast, it heaved high out of the sea. The swish of the water around it, the suction of its movements, made a dangerous current. We began to drift nearer to it. Our ship had no power except that of the sails, and the wind had dropped and left them limp and powerless.
“Throw over the kedge anchors,” Father ordered. Kedge anchors are small, and used for emergency cases. The men rushed aft and threw one over each side the vessel. They gave weight and pulled us back from drifting head on to the iceberg. For a few minutes they held, but the water around us was a seething mass of cross currents. Other bergs, larger and deeper, were in the offing. We had run into a whole nest of them. A steamer could have backed away, turned around, and left the place of danger, but our ship was helpless to move. The bergs made deep valleys, and whatever wind there was was cut off by their height. The water sounded as if it were boiling around us. The mate threw over a chip of wood to see which way we were drifting, but the chip just whirled around and went down. A typhoon would have been a welcome visitor then, for at least its wind would have carried us away—but just being becalmed, waiting for the jaws of the iceberg to finish us, was like a terrible nightmare.