Heart of Oak: A Three-Stranded Yarn, vol. 3

by William Clark Russell

But I forgot our situation for awhile when Cliffe told me where we were and I looked into my note-book. Deep love, deep grief, consecrated to my heart this scene and place of silent hills of water. Here the 'Lady Emma' had been abandoned; here, if the horizon had been visible, then, within the compass of it Marie had been left with her two companions in a dismasted hull amid such floating ice as during the past few days I had gazed at with fear and amazement: from this point the three in that mere raft of ship had drifted—the vessel on to the ice of Coronation Island; that, undoubtedly, she had been seen, described, reported, but her inmates—had they been taken out of her? Or were they frozen corpses in her? Or were they living, within reach of a day or two's sail from the place of ocean Cliffe had found us in that day?

A fire glowed in the little brass grate. The cabin was snug and warm enough with the companion doors closed; but I speedily grew restless after Cliffe had gone on deck. I asked the mate when he came down to dinner how the weather looked.

'Thick as muck, sir.'

'Any signs of wind, Bland?'

'None. But there's no trusting the next minute.'

'Any ice near us, think you?'

'The boatswain's been a snuffling and says he can hear the noise of the beating of water. Nary man else do, though. Them whalemen are so clever they can thread needles with their toes. They can smell grease in a field of grass.'

Here he began to munch, and I let him eat.

I put on a thick coat and went on deck. The brig's arrest on the smoke-thickened water, when one thought that if it would but clear and the sun flood the south with the sparkling splendour of the South Afric parallels from the mastheads of the brig the loom of the huge dim hill past the cliff where the hull was lying might be seen—this, I say, was maddening. I never could have imagined so dense a fog out of London. It was thick as soup, of a sort of dirty yellow, as though charged with the soot of a city of factories. The dripping wet of it froze as it gathered, and our shrouds were swollen with the glazing, as much of the brig as could be seen was beautiful and novel with fantasies of ice. The topsail clapped in the blankness overhead like shells exploding there: but you could not see it. That was the only noise saving an occasional long sobbing wash of water when the brig heeled straining from the yearning send of the swell.