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

by William Clark Russell

'Here are big islands,' she cried, pointing to the South Shetlands. 'Aren't there people upon them? And if so, couldn't we manage to get to the place where they're settled? It's not far,' she added, looking up at me.

'It's a long way,' said I, 'for all it looks but the span of a hand on this paper, and we have no boat.'

'People must have been in some such another dreadful situation as this before now,' she exclaimed. 'How did they manage?'

'We'll manage, depend on't', said I, with all the hearty cheerfulness I could summon. 'We'll write letters to the sea, telling our distress, and send them adrift in bottles. I'll fashion rafts out of some of the theatre stuff in the hold and send them afloat with the story of our condition mastheaded on them in cans. It's not for us to be hopeless. Wouldn't you rather be here than knocking about amongst the ice?'

'Oh yes,' she cried; 'but if we are locked up—hidden away?'

She started as if she would rise, and asked me to take her on deck that she might see where we were, but I thought proper to keep her below in the warmth and encourage her, and rouse her spirits by representations of our prospects of deliverance, before letting her view the situation of the hull; in truth I could not look at her and observe how delicate and fragile she was, and reflect on the depressing, heart-subduing influence of the terrors and experiences she had passed through, without fearing the effect of a sudden shock, such as might prove the sight of the savage wildness of the frowning, frozen cradle in which the hull lay as in a tomb.

I went about to get some breakfast. When I got on deck with a chopper to fill the kettle, I found that the mould of fresh-water ice I had split out of the scuttlebutt was gone. I had no mind to enter the hold; indeed, I had not strength enough then to break open the frozen hatch-covers; and water being wanted for a cup of hot coffee, I chipped at a spear of ice on the bulwark and found it sweet, and perhaps sweeter than the water we had been drinking. Why? Because nearly all those frozen heads and devices of barbs and spikes were frozen snow and mist. But never could we lack fresh water in this part of the world; the cliffs ahead and astern were fresh; we were beached in fresh-water ice. Even in that early time of my distress, whilst I sucked a little piece of ice off the bulwarks to learn its quality, I found myself lifting up my eyes with amazement at those giant heights, formed, as I knew, of the vapour of the air and the sleet of the cloud and the gale. It was like thinking of some vast, soft fog clinging to the face of the land and freezing there into precipitous iron-hard rocks.

Whilst making my way to the hatch with the ice, I heard a sudden great roar astern; a sharp tremble ran through the hull as though a mine had been sprung close alongside; the noise was exactly that of a broadside from a liner, every great gun discharged at once. Yet I saw no movement in the ice, nor heard any sound as of a fall. This put it into my head to fancy it might not be long before the great berg that was linked astern of us was sundered and on its way to join the rest of the mighty fleet, every one of which had had a like berth and such a despatch as awaited this.

I clawed my way to the side and looked over. The beach that held the berg to the main was perhaps a quarter of a mile long; I could not be sure; it went out of sight in a slope on the port hand. But, in comparison with the mighty bulk it yoked to the island, it was a slender tie indeed, to be snapped in any moment of storm as you'd break a clay pipe-stem. I peered down, wondering if the severance happened whether we should go with the berg or be left a-dry under the cliff as we now lay; but it was a hopeless and therefore a silly speculation; though all the same I prayed heartily whilst I stood staring about me that the berg would go, and speedily, whether it took us or left us, since, whilst we lay hidden by it, there was not the remotest chance, that I could imagine, of our being rescued.

I remember thinking, as I turned from the rail and made with the ice in my hand towards the companion, that one of the hardest parts of this terrible experience for the poor girl below, though she would have to be dumb on the subject, was the prospect of being locked up with me—alone with a young man, a sailor, who was a stranger without existence to her a few days ago; to be locked up, I say, it might be for months, with a threat even of years in the run of time, with a person whose character and history she knew nothing about, whose calling sunk him far below her socially. This ran in my head with the swiftness of thought whilst I was going below, and after I was in the cabin going about the business of boiling coffee for a meal.