However, I stopped the Boreal in time, and later on lowered the kayak, and boarded the other.
This ship had evidently been stricken silent in the midst of a perfect drama of activity, for I saw not one of her crew of sixty-two who was not busy, except one boy. I found her a good-sized thing of 500 odd tons, ship-rigged, with auxiliary engine of seventy horse-power, and pretty heavily armour-plated round the bows. There was no part of her which I did not over-haul, and I could see that they had had a great time with whales, for a mighty carcass, attached to the outside of the ship by the powerful cant-purchase tackle, had been in process of flensing and cutting-in, and on the deck two great blankets of blubber, looking each a ton-weight, surrounded by twenty-seven men in many attitudes, some terrifying to see, some disgusting, several grotesque, all so unhuman, the whale dead, and the men dead, too, and death was there, and the rank-flourishing germs of Inanity, and a mesmerism, and a silence, whose dominion was established, and its reign was growing old. Four of them, who had been removing the gums from a mass of stratified whalebone at the mizzen-mast foot, were quite imbedded in whale-flesh; also, in a barrel lashed to the top of the main top-gallant masthead was visible the head of a man with a long pointed beard, looking steadily out over the sea to the S.W., which made me notice that five only of the probable eight or nine boats were on board; and after visiting the 'tween-decks, where I saw considerable quantities of stowed whalebone plates, and about fifty or sixty iron oil-tanks, and cut-up blubber; and after visiting cabin, engine-room, fo'cas'le, where I saw a lonely boy of fourteen with his hand grasping a bottle of rum under all the turned-up clothes in a chest, he, at the moment of death, being evidently intent upon hiding it; and after two hours' search of the ship, I got back to my own, and half an hour later came upon all the three missing whale-boats about a mile apart, and steered zig-zag near to each. They contained five men each and a steerer, and one had the harpoon-gun fired, with the loose line coiled round and round the head and upper part of the stroke line-manager; and in the others hundreds of fathoms of coiled rope, with toggle-irons, whale-lances, hand-harpoons, and dropped heads, and grins, and lazy abandon, and eyes that stared, and eyes that dozed, and eyes that winked.
After this I began to sight ships not infrequently, and used regularly to have the three lights burning all night. On the 12th July I met one, on the 15th two, on the 16th one, on the 17th three, on the 18th two—all Greenlanders, I think: but, of the nine, I boarded only three, the glass quite clearly showing me, when yet far off, that on the others was no life; and on the three which I boarded were dead men; so that that suspicion which I had, and that fear, grew very heavy upon me.
I went on southward, day after day southward, sentinel there at my wheel; clear sunshine by day, when the calm pale sea sometimes seemed mixed with regions of milk, and at night the immense desolation of a world lit by a sun that was long dead, and by a light that was gloom. It was like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly grew. But still the Boreal moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless Eternity: and I reached latitude 72°, not far now from Northern Europe.
And now, as to that blossomy peach-scent—even while some floes were yet around me—I was just like some fantastic mariner, who, having set out to search for Eden and the Blessed Islands, finds them, and balmy gales from their gardens come out, while he is yet afar, to meet him with their perfumes of almond and champac, cornel and jasmin and lotus. For I had now reached a zone where the peach-aroma was constant; all the world seemed embalmed in its spicy fragrance; and I could easily imagine myself voyaging beyond the world toward some clime of perpetual and enchanting Spring.
Well, I saw at last what whalers used to call 'the blink of the ice'; that is to say, its bright apparition or reflection in the sky when it is left behind, or not yet come-to. By this time I was in a region where a good many craft of various sorts were to be seen; I was continually meeting them; and not one did I omit to investigate, while many I boarded in the kayak or the larch-wood pram. Just below latitude 70° I came upon a good large fleet of what I supposed to be Lafoden cod and herring fishers, which must have drifted somewhat on a northward current. They had had a great season, for the boats were well laden with curing fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. The evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-looking brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. The fishers were braw carles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from the chin-point, with hanging woollen caps. In every case I found below-decks a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked aquavit, two of which I took into the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another of them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the Boreal's liquid air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to jump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an awful whisper: 'Anyone? Anyone?' Nothing answered me: and when I went up again, the Boreal had drifted three yards beyond my reach. There being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for the ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.
Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boats these, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers. Most of these, too, I boarded. In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of the Virgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boy who had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now, his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand. These stalwart blue woollen blouses and tarpaulin sou'-westers lay in every pose of death, every detail of feature and expression still perfectly preserved. The sloops were all the same, all, all: with sing-song creaks they rocked a little, nonchalantly: each, as it were, with a certain sub-consciousness of its own personality, and callous unconsciousness of all the others round it: yet each a copy of the others: the same hooks and lines, disembowelling-knives, barrels of salt and pickle, piles and casks of opened cod, kegs of biscuit, and low-creaking rockings, and a bilgy smell, and dead men. The next day, about eighty miles south of the latitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to be the French cruiser Lazare Tréport. I boarded and overhauled her during three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, to her lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her two big, rusted turret-guns. Three men in the engine-room had been much mangled, after death, I presume, by a burst boiler; floating about 800 yards to the north-east lay a long-boat of hers, low in the water, crammed with marines, one oar still there, jammed between the row-lock and the rower's forced-back chin; on the ship's starboard deck, in the long stretch of space between the two masts, the blue-jackets had evidently been piped up, for they lay there in a sort of serried disorder, to the number of two hundred and seventy-five. Nothing could be of suggestion more tragic than the wasted and helpless power of this poor wandering vessel, around whose stolid mass myriads of wavelets, busy as aspen-leaves, bickered with a continual weltering splash that was quite loud to hear. I sat a good time that afternoon in one of her steely port main-deck casemates on a gun-carriage, my head sunken on my breast, furtively eyeing the bluish turned-up feet, all shrunk, exsanguined, of a sailor who lay on his back before me; his soles were all that I could see, the rest of him lying head-downwards beyond the steel door-sill.
Drenched in seas of lugubrious reverie I sat, till, with a shuddering start, I awoke, paddled back to the Boreal, and, till sleep conquered me, went on my way. At ten the next morning, coming on deck, I spied to the west a group of craft, and turned my course upon them. They turned out to be eight Shetland sixerns, which must have drifted north-eastward hither. I examined them well, but they were as the long list of the others: for all the men, and all the boys, and all the dogs on them were dead.