The night of the day on which we had snugged the [170] ]Boadicea down was dark as pitch, and you could feel the fog as it hung low and clingingly to everything. Some time in the middle watch the breeze died away, giving place to light, unsteady airs—catspaws almost—and occasional falls of snow.
Imagine, if you can, the big ship creeping timorously and uncertainly through the thick Polar darkness and mist, a shapeless mass of yet thicker darkness, emitting here and there ruddy flashes of light, reflected momentarily back from snow-covered deck or coil of frozen rope. No sound breaks the silence except a gentle lap-lapping of water under her fore-foot as the canvas just fills enough to draw. Now snow falls, not deliberately, but with a soft, fleecy, rushing motion, which speedily fills up any inequalities about the decks, and would fill them from rail to rail if it lasted long. Presently a dozen bulky spectres move noiselessly around the galley door, which, being withdrawn, a warm glow streams out upon the watch come for hot cocoa.
Imagine, too, just as the tired men are about to drag their half-frozen limbs below, a sudden deeper silence, and a strange feeling of warmth and calm pervading the ship; the sails giving one mighty creaking flap up there in the gloom; the crash and rattle of ice falling from their frozen folds, and a cluster of awe-struck, up-turned faces, shining pallidly in the glow of the galley fire, as the Boadicea, but for a slight roll, lies idle and at rest.
Everyone knows and feels that something unusual has taken place, but no man there can say what it is. A [171] ]muttered order is heard, and in a minute a flood of vivid blue fire pours out into the darkness from the ship’s quarter, and a great subdued ‘Ah!’ runs fore and aft her, as, by its glare, we see tall, jagged cliffs, weird and ghastly in the strange light, towering far on high above our mast-heads, which appear to touch them.
‘Get the deep-sea lead overboard!’ shouts the captain.
‘Watch, there, watch!’ needlessly cry the men, as the line slips from their hands; and no bottom at one hundred fathoms.
‘’Taint land at all,’ says the mate quietly. ‘I kin smell ice; an’ ef we don’t mind we may calculate to winter ’mongst it ’stead o’ makin’ tracks for the Antipodes. Lower the quarter-boat,’ he goes on, ‘an’ tie the ship up for the night, as, ef I ain’t mistook, we’re pooty nigh surrounded.’
More bluelights are burned, and by their help and those of lanterns, the Boadicea, in a somewhat unnatural plight, is warped alongside a kind of ice jetty which stretches out from the main mass, and which, as if to save us the trouble of carrying out anchors, also to complete the resemblance to a pier, is furnished here and there with great knobs, to which we make fast our lines.
If you will try and picture to yourself the scene I have described, you will, I think, be willing to admit that ship seldom entered stranger harbour in a stranger manner, or that the ‘sweet little cherub, sitting up aloft,’ who is supposed to keep a special look-out for [172] ]‘
poor Jack,’ and who on the present occasion—all the more honour to him—must have felt colder even than the proverbial upper hank of a Greenlandman’s gib