The Frozen Pirate

by William Clark Russell

In this uneasy posture, despite the intense cold, I continued to sleep soundly during the greater part of the night. I was awakened by a horrid dream of some giant shape stalking down the slope of ice to seize and devour me, and sat up trembling with horror that was not a little increased by my inability to recollect myself, and by my therefore conceiving the canvas that covered me to be the groping of the ogre's hand over my face.

I pushed the sail away and stood up, but had instantly to sit again, my legs being terribly cramped. A drink of spirits helped me; my blood presently flowed with briskness.

The moon was in the west; she hung large, red, and distorted, and shed no light save her reflection that waved in the sea under her like several lengths of undulating red-hot wire. My haven was still very tranquil—the boat lay calm; but there was a deeper tone in the booming sound of the distant surf, and a more menacing note in the echoing of the blows of the swell along this side of the coast, whence I concluded that, despite the fairness of the weather, the heave of the deep had, whilst I slept, gathered a greater weight, which might signify stormy winds not very many leagues away.

The pale stare of the heights of ice at that red and shapeless disc was shocking. "Oh," I cried aloud, as I had once cried before, "but for one, even but for one, companion to speak to!"

I had no mind to lie down again. The cold indeed was cruelly sharp, and the smoke sped from my mouth with every breath as though I held a tobacco pipe betwixt my teeth. I got upon the ice and stepped about it quickly, darting searching glances into the gloom to left and right of the setting moon; but all lay bare, bleak, and black. I pulled off my stout gloves with the hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handling the snow; but it was frozen so hard I could not scrape up with my nails as much as a half-dozen of flakes would make. What I got I dissolved in my mouth and found it brackish; however, I suspected it would be sweeter and perhaps not so stonily frozen higher up, where there was less chance of the salt spray mingling with it, and I resolved when the light came to fill my empty beer-bottles as with salt or pounded sugar for use hereafter—that is, if it should prove sweet; as to melting it, I had indeed a tinder-box and the means of obtaining fire, but no fuel.

It seemed as if the night had only just descended, so tardy was the dawn. Outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swell swept past in a gurgling, bubbling, drowning sound, dismal and ghastly, as though in truth some such ogre as the monster I had dreamt of lay suffocating there. I welcomed the cold colouring of the east as if it had been a ship, and watched the stars dying and the frozen shore darkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it, against which the outline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink. The rising of the sun gave me fresh life. The ice flashed out of its slatish hue into a radiant white, the ocean changed into a rich blue that seemed as violet under the paler azure of the heavens; but I could now see that the swell was heavier than I had suspected from the echo of its remote roaring in the north. It ran steadily out of the north-east. This was miserable to see, for the line of its running was directly my course, and if I committed myself to it in that little boat, the impulse of the long and swinging folds could not but set me steadily southwards, unless a breeze sprang up in that quarter to blow me towards the sun. There was a small current of air stirring, a mere trickle of wind from the north-west.

I made up my mind to climb as high as I could, taking the oar with me to serve as a pole, that I might view the ice and the ocean round about and form a judgment of the weather by the aspect of the sky, of which only the western part was visible from my low strand. But first I must break my fast. I remember bitterly lamenting the lack of means to make a fire, that I might obtain a warm meal and a hot drink and dry my gloves, coat, and breeches, to which the damp of the salt clung tenaciously. Had this ice been land, though the most desolate, gloomy, repulsive spot in the world, I had surely found something that would burn.

I sat in the boat to eat, and whilst thus occupied pondered over this great field of ice, and wondered how so mighty a berg should travel in such compacted bulk so far north—that is, so far north from the seat of its creation. Now leisurely and curiously observing it, it seemed to me that the north part of it, from much about the spot where my boat lay, was formed of a chain of icebergs knitted one to another in a consolidated range of irregular low steeps. The beautiful appearances of spires, towers, and the like seemed as if they had been formed by an upheaval, as of an earthquake, of splinters and bodies of the frozen stuff; for, so far as it was possible for me to see from the low shore, wherever these radiant and lovely figures were assembled I noticed great rents, spacious chasms, narrow and tortuous ravines. Certain appearances, however, caused me to suspect that this island was steadily decaying, and that, large as it still was, it had been many times vaster when it broke away from the continent about the Pole. Naturally, as it progressed northwards it would dissolve, and the cracking and thunderous noises I had heard in the night, sounds very audible now when I gave them my attention—sometimes a hollow distant rumbling as of some great body dislodged and set rolling far off, sometimes an inwards roaring crack or blast of noise like the report of a cannon fired deep down—advised me that the work of dissolution was perpetually progressing, and that this prodigious island which appeared to barricade the horizon might in a few months be dwindled into half a score of rapidly dissolving bergs.

My slender repast ended, I pulled the oar out of the crevice, and found it would make me a good pole to probe my way with and support myself by up the slope. The boat was now held by the mast, which I shook and found very firm. I put an empty beer-bottle in my pocket, meaning to see if I could fill it, if the snow above was sweet enough to be well-tasted, and then with a final look at the boat I started.

The slope was extremely craggy. Blocks of ice lay about, some on top of the others, like the stones of which the pyramids are built; the white glare of the snow caused these stones at a little distance to appear flat—that is, by merging them into and blending them with the soft brilliance of the background; and I had sometimes to warily walk fifty or sixty paces round these blocks to come at a part of the slope that was smooth.