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

by William Clark Russell

At one o'clock it was a savage and tremendous scene of warring waters and flying sky of soot, and giant forms of ice vanishing and reappearing amid headlong flights of wool-white vapour, and through all, in deep notes, ran the thunder of the surge-smitten, frozen heights, with frequent rending and crashing noises of dislocation. I was now very sure that our drift was not less than three miles an hour, and perhaps four. This I gathered by observing a vast shape of ice that suddenly showed off the starboard bow. It was nearly a mile long, and I should think two hundred feet high. It was a grand, truly sublime ocean piece, with its numerous lofty arches and caverns, out of which the sea, in recoil, flashed in immense bursts of foam. I spied the white wings of birds glancing upon it, but I had it not often very clear in sight, for the steam-like smother drove down at quick intervals, leaving some pale eminence gleaming on high against the whirl of the clouds, to vanish in some swift outfly of snow, so that the whole thing would be as completely gone to the eye as if it had sunk.

But by staying and watching it as often as it emerged in whole or in part, I got at the rate of our drift. It was quickly on our port bow with others coming out of the thickness to leeward, all wild and terrific in that dull light of storm, with the glare of the leaping foam at their base and their own ghastly stare through the rent curtains of cloud flying under the dark sky.

Soon after two, when it was almost dark, I thought we were lost, for I saw the loom of an iceberg right abeam to leeward; but whether it was God's guidance of the devoted hull, or that the set of the long rolling sea ran a sort of sweep of tide round these floating islands, when we were within a musket shot of the mass, with an occasional shock of loose ice sounding through the hulk, our drift made a little departure. I vow it was for all the world as though the fabric was alive and, dreading her fate, avoided it, or as though she were under command, with a cool hand and a critical eye for sea measurement at the helm. Certain it is we drove past clear; it might be that we owed our preservation to the rebound of the sea.

It was almost black with the night when that berg was on our lee quarter, but I knew by a sudden enormous roar of water, and by an indescribably hissing sound lasting for a few minutes, as though a thousand locomotives were blowing off steam, that an immense mass of the island had fallen, not very many ships' lengths distant, which I have no genius to do justice to, nor even to communicate, though I need but close my eyes to behold the terrible picture, with its uproar of trampling seas, and howling wind, and cracking masses. A little after four in the morning, whilst I sat in the cabin with Miss Otway, every instant expecting the hull to strike, her motions grew suddenly quiet. I felt her rise and fall upon a long swell, and knew instinctively by the feel of her that she was under the lee of something.

I sprang to my feet and ran on deck. It was pitch dark, with a strange phantasmal glimmer on either hand, so vague, so indeterminable I could not see it when I looked at it. The roar of the gale, the hiss and beat of the driven seas, came as from a distance. Thrice as high as the masthead of a ship sounded the low, continuous thunder of the wind, as though it blew over mountain tops; but down where we were it was calm. Icy gusts came in moans from half a dozen quarters. The long, invisible heave was as rhythmic as the ocean pulse of swell. I understood we were embayed and foresaw certainly now that our being stranded, or being hammered to pieces against the ice, was only a question of minutes.

I went into the cabin with a loathing of life coming into me out of the sheer despair that was as frost on my heart, caring not a curse how it went, so sick I was of it all after the unendurable hours of watching and expectation I had passed through; and then again I felt that, whatever was to happen, it was right I should be by the poor girl's side: not that it was in my power to comfort her—not, indeed, if the hull went to pieces, that I could be of the least use to her or myself, but I was company for her, and out of me she'd get some solace of companionship in what I reckoned these dying minutes of ours.

'Has the wind fallen? Where are we?' she shrieked as I approached her.

'We are embayed,' I answered. 'We are got under the lee of something.'

Just as I spoke those words a harsh, grating roar ran through the hull; the vessel trembled as though in the first throe of bursting; another like roar succeeded; I felt the thrill of the scraping of the bilge and keel as the fabric was rushed by some ponderous heave of swell. Again, another huge thrust of the sea, another long roar of scraping keel and bilge, another quiver and thrill throughout the hulk as though every timber was straining ere flying to the shock of an explosion. She lay right over to starboard. The lamp swung and lay hard against the upper deck. Whatever was movable fetched away. So acute was the angle that Miss Otway, unable to maintain her seat upon the couch, shot from it to me; but I was firmly planted, saw her coming, and received her so that she was not hurt, and with a vigorous swing I cleared and placed her breathless and moaning in a cleated armchair that stood close to where I sat.

The blind, soft, thunderous thrusts of the sea continued. I heard the water in tons washing over the decks, but every time this happened a roar of grinding and scaling shook the hull as she was driven by the wash of the swell higher and yet higher. The companion was closed and no water descended. I knew by the noise of the sea that the hull lay broadside to the swing of the swell. I got out of my chair, but was heavily thrown, and could scarcely regain my feet, so extreme was the slant, and so completely did it pin me against the cabin wall.