Heart of Oak: A Three-Stranded Yarn, vol. 2.

by William Clark Russell

'Ay, miss.'

'I thought when a vessel was dismasted she became a wreck, and went quickly to pieces.'

'Over and over,' said he, 'you may have heard, you must have read, of derelicts, whose log-books showed they'd been washing about for months, sliding north and south, east and west through the summers and winters of the ocean. A well-built ship is so hard to knock to pieces that when she's abandoned she's as dangerous to navigation as an uncharted rock. Again and again they talk of sending gunboats to blow derelicts to pieces and clear the road. They're hard to extinguish, even with gunpowder, as hard to expel as a madman's fancies. This craft is safe, believe me, and will provide us with a secure sea-home until we're fallen in with, which may be tomorrow.'

This sort of talk did me a world of good, and I began to cheer up and feel something like my old self. I was now used to the motion of the hulk, at least in such a sea as then ran, though a landsman coming on board for the first time would have been instantly thrown, so swift, abrupt, and shooting were the rolls. This afternoon we did not notice any particular weight in the race and lift of the swell and sea; there had been a dumbness in the looks of the weather throughout the day, though a fresh wind blew with a flaying, razor-like edge of frost in it. Captain Burke said he expected a quiet night; that is, no more wind than had blown through the day. He built up a good fire for us, and got his wife to boil some coffee, whilst he fetched a number of rockets to carry on deck.

With the wish to amuse me he asked if I would like to see a rocket fired, and whilst Mrs. Burke made some coffee I followed him above. Night was upon the sea, and its shadow was as a wall for the ice spears along our rails to brandish their gleams upon. The captain fitted a candle-shaped thing into a rocket in the bulwarks near the wheel and fired it, and the rocket sprang high in a line of sparkles, leaving a red ball of flame floating close against the clouds, which reflected the radiance as though to a touch of sunset. I watched the red ball float down the wind and expire.

'We'll send up a second for luck,' said the captain.

This was a white light and the dazzle of the flash was lightning-like: a thin long wake of the brilliance dimly glanced, serpentine, off the peaks and slants of the heaving waters and the sky opened as to a star. But the night was the darker for that light when it went.

'Now, who's to tell,' said Captain Burke, 'what eye has seen those rockets? Never give up heart at sea, miss. We'll go below for a cup of hot coffee, and then the brightest burning lantern aboard shall be made fast in some place where it can be seen.'

I returned to the cabin with a little spirit of elation working in me, a strange possession in the presence of that reeling shadow of frosted hull and the blackness winding round about, pallid here and there with the wild dim light of froth. It was occasioned, no doubt, by the sending up of the rockets, by some faint hope or fancy of their being seen, with a half-formed vision of the ship the crew that day had pursued staggering down towards us then, a pale shaft aslant, gaunt with lean canvas breasting slowly, with many eyes on the look-out.