It was about six o'clock then. I lighted a bull's-eye and went into the captain's berth for the log-book which I had noticed upon the table, and to overhaul a bag of charts. I brought the log-book and the chart I wanted to the cabin table: Miss Otway seeing me at this, came opposite and stood there looking on. I wished to see the last entry in the log-book; which done, I opened the chart, and was startled to observe that, supposing the drift of the vessel to have been continuously to the southward, as somehow I imagined it was, that group of islands called the South Orkneys, stretching some sixty-five miles east and west, could not be farther than twenty-five or thirty leagues.
'Are you finding out where we are?' said Miss Otway.
'I shall know exactly when I get an observation,' said I, and carried the log-book and chart back into the captain's cabin.
But I confess my heart was sunk. To be sure, throughout I had vaguely known our place—could have named it within fifty or eighty miles perhaps—yet the business I had been about ever since I woke up stopped me from realising till I looked on the chart, when of course I understood that if our drift was south we stood to go to pieces upon land that would be the most God-forsaken on the wide face of the oceans of the globe, if it were not that, hard by them, covering a range of eight or nine degrees of longitude, lay groups of rocks with a range of mountainous continent stretching due south (magnetic) even more desolate, naked and iron-sheathed.
But we were not ashore yet: nor could I know certainly that our drift was south; and then there was to-morrow's daylight with its hope of succour.
I sat beside the stove and talked with Miss Otway. She spoke of the voyage and of the apparition which had haunted the memory and depressed the spirits of Captain Burke down to the hour of his death. I sought to amuse her by relating certain experiences of my own; and she forgot her situation whilst listening to some of my yarns. The truth is I had gone to sea at the age of thirteen and had followed the life fourteen years, during which I had served in several capacities in many kinds of vessels, though my experiences lay chiefly in the India and China trade. I had plenty then to talk about: it amused me to yarn, and she listened with more life and intelligence than I should have expected in one with so fixed an expression of dismay, of hearkening consternation and mourning.
After satisfying myself with a look around on deck, I returned, and going to the bookshelves, read the names of some of the volumes. It was a good collection of books: the best of the poets and novelists were there, with odds and ends of scrappy reading like Hone's and D'Israeli's. Here I found dear old 'Peter Simple,' and carrying the tale to the stove, I read bits aloud, and once or twice she laughed. Then something suggesting the topic, I got telling her about shipwrecks, my notion being to let her understand how much better off were we than others who had suffered from disasters at sea. I talked of the raft of the 'Medusa,' described that pathetic, lamentable scene in the round-house of the 'Abergavenny'—the wax-lights, the captain clasping his daughters to him—related the loss of the 'Amphitrite,' as told to me by a man I had sailed with who had been one of the survivors of that most tragic of shipwrecks, which littered the Boulogne sands with scores of bodies of handsome, finely built young women.
'Are there instances of people,' she asked, 'who have been wrecked upon icebergs and survived?'
I spun her a few yarns of polar experiences in this way: of Russian seamen found floating on ice: of a whaler half full of men stranded on a berg and floating in her giant cradle down into open waters where she was boarded and the people taken out of her.
'How long had they been locked up?'