The Frozen Pirate

by William Clark Russell

"It is eighteen hundred and one," I cried, and as I said this I recoiled a step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundred demonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuaded would have been my posture had any man roused me from a slumber and told me I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years.

He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression in his eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising and bewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard, looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; then drew out his feet and looked at them; then very slowly, but without visible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, and proceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms and using his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over his naked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, "What do you say this year is, sir?"

"Eighteen hundred and one," I replied.

"Bah!" said he, and shook his head very knowingly. "No matter; you have been shipwrecked too! Sir, shipwreck shuffles dates as a player does cards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, and peril. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir, that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine."

I saw how it was—he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction to place upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a few moments' reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, for unless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and it was inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozen condition for eight-and-forty years.

I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. His appearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a very dark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost in the dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed an indescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which I attributed to the large quantity of liquor he had swallowed. This contrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from his baldness—that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have before said, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above the ears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life he had been scalped.

I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man's company. For some companion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and again with heart-breaking passion; and now a living man sat before me, yet I was sensible of no gladness. In truth, I was overawed by him; he frightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that had entered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man ever returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he had risen and walked.

I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him that I had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over my figure and then round the cook-room, and said, "I am impatient to learn your story, sir."

"Why, sir," said I, "my story is summed up in what I have already told you." But that he might not be at a loss—for to be sure he had only very newly collected his intellects—I related my adventures at large. He drew nearer to the furnace whilst I talked, bringing his covering of clothes along with him, and held out his great hands to toast at the fire, all the time observing me with scarce a wink of the eye. Arrived at the end of my tale, I told him how only last night I had dragged his companion on deck, and how he was to have followed but for his posture.

"Ha!" cried he, "you might have caused my flesh to mortify by laying me close to the fire. It would have been better to rub me with snow."