“Back for your lives, men, to your stations!” he shouted. “Although the bows are stove in, the bulkhead forward will prevent the water from flooding us beyond the fore compartment and give us time to run the ship ashore, when we can all escape. No boat could live in the sea that’s now on; and if it did, it would run a worse chance of being stove in by the ice than our poor vessel had!”
His words made the men hang back, all save Bill Moody and a couple of others, who began casting off the lashings of the longboat; but Mr McCarthy rushing down on the main deck and seizing a capstan bar with which he threatened to brain the first man who resisted the captain’s authority, the unruly ones desisted for the time, slinking forwards grumblingly.
“Carpenter,” called out Captain Dinks, “sound the well and see what damage has been done; and, Mr Adams, send the port watch aft to clear away this top hamper. It is thumping away alongside and may make another breach in our timbers!”
The captain’s apparent calmness, combined with the sense of duty paramount on ship-board, made the men set to work with a will; besides which, they well knew that by acting together in harmony they had a better chance of escape than by any mere individual effort. Mr McCarthy, too, and Adams showed themselves equally as capable as Captain Dinks in lending a hand and encouraging the crew—Frank Harness being not one whit behindhand either; so that, within a very few minutes after the consternation which the catastrophe had caused on its first happening had passed away, all, recovering that equanimity habitual to sailors in almost any predicament or calamity, were engaged in carrying out the orders given them, as coolly as if the Nancy Bell were snug at anchor in some safe harbour. But, in what a sadly different position was she now!
Battered as she had been by the storm in the Bay of Biscay and crippled by the terrible cyclone off the Cape, which had left her tossing rudderless and almost dismasted on the deep, her then condition was favourable in comparison with her present state—that of a complete wreck, with her bows stove in, her masts all carried by the board, and her decks swept fore and aft of everything!
Fortunately, as the mainmast had fallen over the side, it had jammed against the iceberg with which they had collided, so fending off the vessel’s head that she had sheered to starboard and thus passed by the floating mountain; otherwise, probably, the poor Nancy Bell would have been ground down by the pressure of the ice below the surface of the sea. Ben Boltrope, too, returning from forward after a survey of the damage, in accordance with the captain’s command, reported another piece of good news. The bows had been stove in, it was true, and the bulkhead smashed, filling the fore compartment and bringing the ship’s head so much down that it would be almost impossible to sail her even in a smooth sea; but the jury-mast, which had been rigged forward in place of the lost foremast, had gone over on the port bow, instead of falling to the starboard side of the ship like the other masts, and the fore staysail attached to it, dragging overboard, had got sucked into the hole which the iceberg had made, thus stopping the inrun of water to any appreciable extent Ben said that he believed they would be able so to patch up the damaged place in the bows after a time, thanks to this circumstance, that they might hope to make a shift of rigging up a sail again to run the ship ashore with.
“Bravo!” said Captain Dinks on hearing this. “Take what men you like and commence the repairs at once, for there’s no time to be lost Mr Meldrum, what say you to this?”
But, Mr Meldrum had gone below to his daughters, well imagining the state of alarm they would be in and rather surprised that Kate had not already made her appearance on deck. When he reached the cuddy, the reason of her absence was explained.
Poor Florry had met with an accident, the concussion when the ship had struck the iceberg having thrown her out of her berth, cutting her head against the cabin door; and Kate, assisted by Mr Lathrope, was binding up the wound and comforting the sufferer.
“I guess, mister,” said the American, looking up as Mr Meldrum entered the main saloon, “I’ve had to act the good Samaritan, same as your gal did to me when I got jammed together t’other day in my innards agin the wash-stand! We’re fixin’ up the little miss finely. ’Tain’t much of an injoory, I kalkerlate, missy, though thar be a sight of blood, and it’ll soon git closed up agin!”