Mr. Winchester was a man of iron nerve. He demonstrated this now as he did many times afterward. He was as skillful a navigator as he was a fearless one. He knew his reckonings were good. He knew that when the squall shut out the world the brig's nose was pointed directly at the center of Unimak Pass. So he did not veer to east or west, or seek to tack back from the dangerous coasts on our bows, but drove the vessel straight upon its course into the blank white wall of mist and snow.
An hour later the squall lifted as quickly as it had come. Blue skies and sunshine came back. We found ourselves almost becalmed on a placid sea. To the south lay the outline of a lofty coast.
A boat-steerer bustled forward. "We are in Behring Sea," he said with a laugh.
We had shot through the narrow channel without sighting the shores. I have often wondered just how close to port or starboard death was to us that morning on the black cliffs of Unimak Pass.
[CHAPTER X]
IN THE ICE
From Unalaska, into which port we put to have the captain's leg attended to, the brig stood northwesterly for the spring whaling on the bowhead and right whale grounds off the Siberian coast. We were a week's sail from the Fox Islands when we encountered our first ice. It appeared in small chunks floating down from the north. The blocks became more numerous until they dappled the sea. They grew in size. Strings and floes appeared. Then we brought up against a great ice field stretching to the north as far as the eye could see. It was all floe ice broken into hummocks and pressure ridges and pinnacles, with level spaces between. There were no towering 'bergs such as are launched into the sea from the glaciers on the Greenland coast and the Pacific coast of Alaska. The highest 'berg I saw on the voyage was not more than forty feet high. It was composed of floe ice which had been forced upward by the pressure of the pack.
The crow's nest was now rigged and placed in position on the cross-trees abaft the fore-mast, between the topsail and the fore-top-gallant-sail yard. It was a square box of heavy white canvas nailed upon a wooden frame-work. When a man stood in it the canvas sides reached to his breast and were a protection against the bitter winds. From early morning until dark an officer and a boat-steerer occupied the crow's nest and kept a constant lookout for whales.