From Sea to Sea; Or, Clint Webb's Cruise on the Windjammer

by W. Bert Foster

I was dumfounded by this story of Job Perkins. Later it was corroborated by the other hands. It had really been Adoniram Tugg and the Sea Spell that had sailed near enough to this ship for conversation between the two skippers. And the Sea Spell actually had that old whaleship in tow.

This was the astonishing part of it: The fact that the Firebrand was not at the bottom of the seas. I thought I had seen her rained upon by ice—beaten down by the bursting berg—driven under the leaping waves.

Yet, come to think of it, the rotating icefield had turned so as to hide the frozen ship from us aboard the Gypsey Girl when the ice split up, and a curtain of ice-mist and leaping waves had really hidden the spot where the Firebrand lay.

I had taken it for granted that the frozen ship—more than a year and a half in the ice—had found her grave right then and there. But I remembered how sound the hulk of the whaleship seemed when I went aboard of her. Only her spars and upper works were wrecked. She had collided with the ice and slid right out of the sea at the collision. Perhaps the blow had never made her leak a drop!

And then it smote upon my mind that the man of mystery, Tugg’s partner, must be alive, too.

That stern, sturdy man with his gray beard and hair, and his wonderfully sharp eyes, who had stuck by the frozen ship when his mates were driven off, and had battled against the gang of sealers to preserve the treasure of oil from their greed—this man in whose presence I had felt a thrill not yet to be explained even in my most serious times of thought. Why, Professor Vose must be alive! There was no doubt of that.

I could remember very distinctly our brief interview upon the frozen ship. How quickly he had disarmed me and showed me that he was my master. I could imagine that he had not given up hope even when the ice split up and the Firebrand had slid back into the water amid the crashing bergs and boiling sea.

Whoever this man was, he was a person of marked character. He had impressed me deeply and I felt that I could never really get him out of my mind. Be he Jim Carver, the renegade that had stolen money from the fish firm back in Bolderhead, or Professor Vose, the marvelous scientist that Tugg claimed him to be, the man who had risked his life for the fortune of oil aboard the Firebrand, was an individual whom I should never forget.

I can’t say that I was as pleased, as the hours passed, with my situation aboard the Seamew as I had been on her sister ship. In the first place, I had no proper niche here. I was not one of the crew. I was really an outsider—and from the enemy’s camp at that.

There seemed to be a different spirit in this crew. They spoke more bitterly of the Gullwing’s company. They seemed to have no good word for Captain Bowditch and Mate Gates, and it was from Job Perkins that I finally got an insight into the real significance of the rivalry between the sister ships.