‘Let’s drop this subject, messmates; it’s no use talking about it,’ said another. ‘Come, whose turn is it to spin a yarn?’
‘Aye, whose turn is it?’ asked several voices at the same time.
‘Come, Brace,’ said one or two of the men, ‘it’s yours, so just come to an anchor alongside here on this chest, and pay out.’
‘Ay, ay, my hearties. Avast there, Terrence Moony with your blarney, while I spin a yarn, do you hear, boy?’
‘Ay, ay, brother, go ahead,’ said Terrence, good naturedly.
Bolling a monstrous quid of tobacco about his mouth for a few minutes, he who was to speak, at length settled it quietly in one side of his cheek, plugging it well down with his tongue, then lounging into an easy attitude, he began:
‘It may be that there is some of you as have sailed up there to the Northerd, where it is so cold that a man don’t dare to stand still for a moment for fear that he shall be frozen to death. No? Well, I have then, and it’s about one of them cruises that I’m going to tell you. You see, we were up there knocking about for some good reason, but for what I don’t know, as our captain sailed with sealed orders, and a foremast man is not very often enlightened by a look at the log of the captain’s mind.
‘But the king had ordered the ship to go there, and I was a pressed man on board so I was there too. And there we were three hundred as fine fellows as you ever set eyes on, or as ever ran up a rattlin, freezing our fingers and toes every watch, and half the time the ship was shut in entirely by the ice; and in this way we remained seven or eight days, I remember, fitted into the ice as close as our carpenter could lay in a plank, nothing to be seen for miles in any direction but one long and almost endless field of ice, with once in a while a walrus, or a sea-horse out of the water and laying sleeping by the small crevices that were formed here and here in the neighborhood of the ship.
‘Well, one day it came on to blow big guns, and such a cracking and snapping among the frozen rigging you never listened to; and the water seemed to be in a perfect rage beneath the ice, as if it did not relish very well living under hatches. Well, this lasted through one whole night and day, during which time I thought, we should have chafed all to pieces; but the captain said that we sat so snugly in the ice, that it was all that saved us, while I could not but wish that we might have a little more room, if only to float free of the ice and its cursed chafin.
‘Well, the next night we were knocked about till daylight, when we found that the ice had broken up, and that we were going before the gale at a tremendous rate, and mostly free of ice. On, on, we went, until at last we approached another field, we could not avoid it, so we sought the safest place where we might lay the ship to ride out the storm, which was now in full blast.