I reflected, and after recalling the weather, and estimating the boat's sailing powers and the like, I answered if she was to be sought she might be found about one hundred and fifty miles distant west-south-west.

'I make her further than that,' said the captain.

'Perhaps so, sir.'

'But your bearings about tally with mine. I think it's our duty to give those people a chance for their lives. Three of them! and two of the three, women, Mr. Selby! And the passenger, I understand from Wall the bo'sun, is the daughter of an English baronet—the skipper's wife was her old nurse—she was sent out for her health.'

He looked thoughtfully round the sea, then told me to get the yards braced in, and going to the wheel, shifted the course, making a fair wind of the breeze, and the ship drove along.

The main difficulty lay in the shortness of the time of daylight. We were not going to hunt for a large becalmed craft, clothed like a pyramid to the trucks, and courting the eye like an iceberg, but for a low dismasted hull, which might slide past us within musket-shot in some hour of blackness, and no man dream it was near. But the captain was resolved to give the poor people a chance: there could be no question that the master of the ship, his wife, and a young lady were alive, locked up, helpless and hopeless, aboard a hull which at any hour might float away in staves from the side of an icehill; and it was right, it was our duty, it was a service that God would expect of us, that humanity required of us, to search, even at some peril to ourselves—loss of time counting for nothing when the errand is one of mercy—seeing that the hull lay, perhaps, within two hundred miles off, and her inmates in a situation to continue alive for a long while, the boatswain Wall having told Captain Parry that she was plentifully stocked with coal, provisions, and liquor.

All that day, till night blackened out the scene, we kept an eager watch upon the sea. It held fairly clear, a slender promise overhead in greenish streaks of an opening heaven, though the horizon scowled with snow-clouds. We sighted several icebergs, but saw nothing of the wreck. When it fell dark that afternoon, we shortened sail to two close-reefed topsails, furling the foresail, and rolled onwards slowly. The swell was high and ran strong from the westward, but the sea curled lightly. A few wan stars blinked in the rifts. The cold was intense. The rigging seemed to take a new thickness of ice when the night came, and the running gear was as stiff as bar-iron in the shears.

I guessed that Captain Burke (as I was told his name was) would show a light every night: he had lanterns and oil and an altitude that, with his freeboard, might give him twenty feet above the water in his stump of foremast. But we searched in vain for a sparkle. For my part, I took but a halfhearted view of the quest; yet it was a thing not to be omitted by an English seaman: no man of the slenderest mercy of heart would have foregone it.

I had charge of the middle watch, and being a man of some imagination, I cast my mind into the misery of the poor people who were somewhere out upon those black, swollen waters in a flat wallowing hull, and I shuddered and grieved when I thought of them. The life of a lofty superstructure of masts and spars, with canvas to spread or reduce at will, was in our ship; I felt the buoyant rise of her on hills of ink rolling invisible; I'd step aft to search the gloom astern and on either quarter, and mark the dim snow of the wake sheeting to the taffrail with the droop of her stern, and hear the grind of the wheel-chains, and see the illuminated disc of card trembling the course at the lubber's mark betwixt faithful oscillations, as though it were the spirit of the ship, naked and shining, and revealed in all its sublime guiding and informing motions; and then my mind would go again to that dismantled hull somewhere out in the freezing blackness here or there, a coffin of a ship with three live people locked up in it!