“It’s a great pity,” he said to the captain, “that we could not get round that northerly cape I pointed out to you, before the snowstorm and sea-fog set in! There were one or two good bays there marked on the chart, such as Christmas Harbour and Cumberland Bay, which have been properly sounded and have the points laid down; but of this western coast little appears known, and it has been only from surmise that the outlines of the map have been sketched in. I really don’t think any exploring party has ever visited it since Monsieur Lieutenant de Kerguelen-Trémarec briefly surveyed it in 1772—more than a hundred years ago.”
“And it might have changed a lot since then,” observed Captain Dinks.
“Yes,” continued Mr Meldrum; “for the French discoverer narrated all sorts of wonders about a raging volcano, with geysers and hot springs like those of Iceland; and if volcanic agency has been at work since then, no doubt the place is very much altered.”
“If there is a live crater there, it can’t be so very cold then, eh?”
“I don’t know about that,” replied Mr Meldrum. “Away in the north, I have seen boiling water freeze as soon as it was exposed to the outside air; so I don’t suppose it will be much warmer here than we can expect from all accounts.”
But, warm or cold, it was the only haven of refuge for the sinking ship, which slowly, and more slowly still, by reason of the stormy sea and shifting wind, the latter of which grew gustier as the morning advanced, made her laboured way towards the land in crab-like fashion—half sailing, half drifting, and burying her bows deeply every now and then in the heavy rollers she was powerless now to ride over, and rising again from the water so sluggishly that it sometimes seemed impossible that she would recover herself, but must founder, whenever she took a deeper plunge than usual.
Bye and bye, Mr Lathrope came on deck escorting Kate Meldrum; although our heroine looked more like escorting him, for he was very pale and appeared much thinner than before—if that were possible to one belonging to the order of “Pharaoh’s lean kine!”
It was the first appearance of the American outside the cuddy since the accident that had crippled him, and he could not help noticing the altered state of the ship—having last seen her just before she encountered the cyclone.
“Snakes and alligators, Cap, but you hev hed it rough, and no mistake!” said he to Captain Dinks, gazing with surprise at the broken bulwarks, which had been torn away when the masts went by the board, the wrecked forecastle, and the unsightly stumps to which the jury-masts had been attached, which now occupied the place of the tall graceful spars and neatly-braced yards, with the canvas smoothly stowed away in shipshape fashion, that he had left so trim when he went below that stormy night. “Why, you’re busted up entirely, I guess!”
“Not quite yet, I hope,” replied Captain Dinks, smiling mournfully as he, too, looked around; “but, the old Nancy has been sadly battered about. Ah, Mr Lathrope, if she hadn’t been a stout built one, she’d have gone to the bottom before this!”