Master Rockafellar's Voyage

by William Clark Russell

And only a little bit of it, too. Spite of our oilskins, we were so repeatedly wet through that it came to our having no dry clothes to put on. I have known what it is to come down from aloft after reefing the mizzen topsail, and to shed tears, child as I was, with the agony of the cold in my hands. The cook could do nothing with the galley-fire, and there was no warm food to be had. Again and again would we of the watch on deck go below, and appease our hunger by a meal of mouldy biscuit, which I would endeavour to sweeten with a coating of salt butter and moist sugar, and with a pannikin of cold water, tasting already like the end of a voyage. The passengers remained in the cuddy. The every-day ship’s routine could not be carried on, and the sailors kept under cover, but always ready to rush out at the first summons. The decks therefore seemed deserted, and, but for the two hands at the wheel, and but for the mate of the watch, who crouched hugging himself under the lee of a square of canvas in the mizzen rigging, the ship might have been deemed abandoned—a craft speeding aimlessly before the gale with a company of souls dead below!

Never shall I forget the impression produced upon me one night by the sight of the sea. I came on deck at twelve o’clock, and found the ship hove-to under a close-reefed main topsail and fore-topmast staysail. There was a curl of reddish moon in the northern sky, and over that shapeless blotch of light, as it looked to be, the loose scud was flying like rolls of brown smoke at hurricane speed. The roaring of the surges was almost deafening, and there is nothing in language to convey the astounding noise of the wind in the ice-glaced rigging—the shrieking, the shrilling, the whistling of it, as it split in fiendish howlings upon the ropes, and swept away under the foot of the bursting band of topsail, with a note of thunder like the noise of a train of empty waggons speeding along the metals in tow of a locomotive.

I crept up the lee poop-ladder, but on gaining the deck was pinned to the rail for some minutes by the force of the wind. Then, finding I could do nothing with my legs, I fell upon my knees and crawled like a rat to windward; and, still crawling, I passed along under the shelter of the line of hencoops until I arrived at the mizzen rigging, where the mate stood protected by the piece of sailcoth fastened to the shrouds. He handed me the end of a rope, which I passed round my waist and belayed to a pin, and then I could stand up without fear of falling, otherwise the prodigious slope of the deck rendered the feet entirely helpless.

I could now look about me. The first thing I saw, broad on the weather-bow, was a huge mass of faintness—a great blurr as it seemed of dim light—that seemed to blend with the flying gloom as you gazed, though if you withdrew your eye from it for a moment and then looked afresh, it showed, I may even say, it shone out clearly. I shouted to Mr. Johnson to tell me what it was.

“An iceberg,” he roared; for I can tell you it needed all the wind our lungs could hold to render ourselves audible to each other amid the fierce clamour of that Cape Horn night.

It was the first ice that I had seen. Several bergs of magnitude had been passed during the week, but always when I was below, and, as the weather was continuously thick, they were out of sight promptly, long before eight bells called me to keep my watch.

I stared, fascinated by the huge visionary spectral mass that lay, of the colour of faint starlight, out upon the bow. It came and went, for our ship was rolling furiously. Never could I have dreamt that the waves of the ocean raged to such a height as they were now running to. One moment the ship was on a level keel in the trough, in a valley deep down, with moving walls of water on either hand of her; for a breathless moment there was a lull, the gale seemed to have been spent, you heard nothing but the howl of it on high, and the savage hissing of boiling foam.

But in a moment the vessel was sweeping up the huge liquid incline—up and yet up, with sickening rapidity, with spars sloping till the angle of the deck was like that of the roof of a house, with all her top hamper shrieking anew, as it soared into the full weight of the gale. Then would follow another instant’s pause, whilst she hung poised on the flickering peak of the sea that had hoisted her, when once more down she would slip, reeling to windward as she went, until the heart of the valley was again reached, with its terrifying interval of calm and its deafening uproar of storm above.

I forgot the iceberg presently in watching the tremendous billows; and for a considerable time I swung in the bight of the rope that was round me, full of consternation. As I looked at the approaching seas it seemed impossible that the ship could ride to them; but she was a noble vessel, buoyant as an ocean bird, and she took every surge with a magnificent ease, falling away, as it were, from the first Titanic blow of it upon her bow, then rising, like a thing on wings and full of life, never shipping a drain of water save right forwards, where now and again you would see the spray blowing in a smoke of crystals right over the forecastle head.

Her glorious behaviour after a while restored confidence to me, and then I looked at the iceberg again. I longed to ask Mr. Johnson questions about it, but talking, beyond now and again a brief shout, was out of the question. Such a night as this was the right sort of frame in which to view the picture of that dim, wild, gigantic berg. The distorted smudge of red moon, the sweeping shadows of vapour, the enormous seas, frothing, as it seemed, to the very sky, the darkness, the savage, warring noises of the tempest, all concurred to impart an inexpressible quality of awe and mystery and terror to that silent mass of paleness which loomed up out of the obscurity of the horizon each time our ship rose to the height of the sea.