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

by William Clark Russell

I crawled on my knees to the couch, and pulled the clothes from it and covered Miss Otway with them, swathing her head and so wrapping her that nothing showed but a little piece of the face. The poor girl's teeth chattered, and she shivered ceaselessly. By carefully crawling I got upon the table and managed to get hold of a glass and a decanter of wine. She drank a little and I took a good pull of the wine myself. Indeed it was an extraordinary situation—the hull on her beam ends, the cabin alight, we two crouched on the deck, the stillness after the fury we had come through, the stillness, I say, saving a low roar of distant sea, with an occasional beat of the swell upon the hulk, and the scaling and rushing of water overhead. An amazing situation indeed; there is nothing like it, nothing stranger in the maritime records, that I can recollect.

At last the starboard cabin windows, high in the broadside, showed of a pale steel grey; I went on my hands and feet to the steps and reached the deck. I stood a little while in the companion-way thunderstruck; I was confounded and could not credit my sight. The hull lay stranded in a very well of ice. Ahead and astern rose masses of cliffs to an altitude of four or five hundred feet. The vessel lay on a frozen beach; 'twas a sloping sweep of the stuff, apparently linking the iceberg astern to the ice over the bows. The bight or bay we had drifted into was ramparted by the iceberg which sank from a vast terrace to a point in an arm of natural breakwater like marble; but the ice ahead was fixed to the face of the land. After looking a little I spied the iron frown of dusky rocks perpendicular and smooth as though planed, showing amidst the snow.

Past the hinder ice and beyond the giant limb of marble-like breakwater was the rolling ocean. It still blew hard, the seas raced angrily. Whatever of ice they smote they flashed upon; over the lower parts of the ice terrace the surge was bursting in lofty clouds, bright as light. The heave came round the point in a wide swell, which did not break in foam upon the beach where we lay, but swept silent, in a glass-green volume, along the slope, just as the foamless lift of the sea washes past the side of a ship; it broke only where it met with anything rugged, and quickly lost its weight in the curve, soundlessly recoiling from the base of the iceberg astern, though mightily troubling the surface of the water by conflict with the succeeding heave.

The sky between the cliffs was wild with flying scud and rusty brown masses of vapour rushing southwards. The vessel lay close in to the land; she rested on her side at an angle of hard upon fifty degrees. On either hand was open sky, the picture of it to port showing as at the extremity of an immense ravine. Save but for sudden, quick shootings of little short-lived draughts and blasts, the calm and even the repose down here was as though we were in a well. The swell never swept nearer to us than twenty feet. I crept to the side and lay over, watching anxiously, and thus made sure of this after following the quiet sweep of at least twenty successive heaves of brine.

The desolation was awful! The picture savage, forbidding, terrifying beyond imagination to one immured with its clouded crystal heights over the bows, and the rugged slopes of ice over the stern forking into fifty shapes of pinnacle, turret, spire, column, tower, as though on the flat of the summit were the ruins of a city of marble.

The decks were swept of everything save the companion. Wheel, binnacle, capstans, galley, all were gone. I watched the ocean rolling past the arm of ice astern, it was but a bit of it. The great berg that formed the bay blocked the view of the deep; there was nothing to see but the abrupt white walls ahead and astern, and the flying soot overhead and away down to port, and, on the right, tall cliffs of ice and snow glazing the land, with here and there a space of staring, black rock.

Our isolation was shocking. My heart seemed to stop whilst I looked around, realising the terrors and hopelessness of this new imprisonment by the granite-hued light that was gaining a little in power. Though a whaler stood within half a mile of the coast, how should she see us? It would be hard enough to discern the speck of wreck we made had the bay of ice in which we rested gaped naked to the sea, but we were as much hidden here as if we had gone to the bottom. We were worse off, indeed, than had we stranded upon a floating berg, because in that case we might have fallen in with the ice which might have split and freed us; but now we were aground upon ice hardening into the face of an island and stationary; months might pass before the body we were upon broke away and became a water-borne bulk, and then, in the throes of the liberation of the frozen cliffs, what of splintering, of volcanic-like upheaval and disruption might happen to crush the little toy of hull lying after many months as she lay now?

I don't doubt I stared about me with something of a madman's wildness, glancing up at the inaccessible heights, then at the sea rolling in white lines beyond the limb of ice, then into the desolation of the whirling sky on the left, till, recollecting that I had a companion who looked to me for heart and encouragement, whom, by God's mercy, wonderful as it would afterwards appear, I might yet be the means of delivering from this hideous situation, I pulled my wits together and returned to the cabin.

The poor young lady was on the deck before the black stove as I had left her. She could not have stood upon that angle of plank without danger and distress. She began to question me in a voice that shuddered with the cold. I answered I would talk with her when I had lighted a fire, for I had now some spirit and saw things a little clearly, and was no longer afraid of setting the hull in flames.

I split up a bunk board, and picked a bucket full of capsized coal out of the wash to leeward, as I may call it, and made a fire; but I moved with pain and difficulty; the decks were wet, and as slippery as though coated with ice, and the slope was that of a ship bulwarks under.