After a while, the gig was manned, and, with the captain and chief mate, we pulled round our harbour to a spot where, from the ship, a part of the ice-curtain seemed low and pretty accessible. So it had appeared; but when we reached it we found fifty feet of perpendicular slippery wall between our boat’s gunwale and the summit of the ridge we had hoped to mount.
‘We’re in a pooty nice kind o’ a fix,’ said our mate, as we returned. ‘An’,’ glancing at the lowering sky, ‘I reckon it’s going to blow some, presently. Mebbe it’ll blow us out o’ these chunks of ice.’
The captain made no reply, but he was evidently not in a very cheerful state of mind.
That evening it did begin to blow very hard. Not that we felt it much, but we could hear the storm howling and roaring outside, and the thunderous breakers which dashed themselves against our sheltering bergs, causing them to tremble and pitch now and again as the mighty seas struck their bases. We had shifted the Boadicea out to the extreme end of the jetty, double-banked our fenders, and taken every other precaution we could think of, in addition to standing-by through the night to cast off and sheet home at a minute’s notice.
There was no more silence now; for, although we were all drifting away together about E. half S. before the wind, the bergs forming our enclosure ground against each other with an incessant rending, tearing [175] ]sound, which now, although seeming to foretell an early dissolution of partnership, filled us with terror lest some of them should topple over on the ship.
The ship herself, no longer steady, was hove violently up and down with every motion of the bergs; whilst the great wooden fenders, cut from spare spars, were torn to splinters, and the hawsers surged round their icy mooring posts with a curious, screaming, intermittent noise, making us think that every moment they were about to part.
Four bells in the morning watch had just struck when we heard a terrific crash rising high above the surrounding din, and the next instant a great wave came rushing over the Boadicea, filling her decks, nearly lifting her on to the ice, and then slamming her down with such force as to snap the hawsers like threads and smash the bulwarks to matchwood the whole length of the port side. Drifting away from our friendly jetty, we at once felt that our prison was broken up; for, now, the gale from which we had been so long sheltered howled and tore through the rigging, whilst cataracts of bitter cold water rushed in quick succession over the decks, and lumps of ice bumped up against the Boadicea’s bows and sides.
‘Set the lower fore-top-sail and mizzen-stay-sail!’
And now the slatting and banging of canvas, the rattle of iron sheets and hanks, the hoarse cries of the men as they staggered about the wet, slippery planking, together with the rending and smashing of [176] ]ice all around, made up a scene that defies description; whilst to lend it an additional weirdness, a ‘flare-up’ of oakum and tar, which had been run up to a lower-stuns’l boom-end, blazed wildly overhead like a great fierce eye looking down upon us out of the thick darkness. So closely were we beset, however, that, spite of the canvas, we soon found that we were simply drifting aimlessly about amidst immense fragments of capsized bergs, which threatened every moment to crush us. Indeed, we did get one squeeze that made the ship crack again, and whose after effect was seen by the fact that the cabin doors for the rest of the passage refused to close by a good six inches. Presently, grinding and scraping up alongside a small berg—or portion of a larger one, we cannot tell which—we make fast to it as well as we are able, and direct all our efforts to fending off its companions. As daylight approaches, we notice that the ice becomes rarer, and sails by at longer intervals; and as it breaks more fully out of a lowering yellowish sky a wild sight meets our eyes.
The sea is dotted with bergs—small ones nodding and bobbing along, big ones gliding majestically before the wind, till, a pair of these latter colliding, down crumble spires and minarets, towers and pinnacles, suddenly as a child’s card-built house, sending up tall columns of water as they fall.