The Frozen Pirate

by William Clark Russell

The Frenchman snored, and I sat considering him. The impression he had made upon me was not agreeable. To be sure he had suffered heavily, and there was something not displeasing in the spirit he discovered in telling the story—a spirit I am unable to communicate, as it owed everything to French vivacity largely spiced with devilment, and to sudden turns and ejaculations beyond the capacity of my pen to imitate. But a professional fierceness ran through it too; it was as if he had licked his chops when he talked of dismissing the captured ship with her people confined below and her cabin on fire. He had been as good as dead for nearly fifty years, yet he brought with him into life exactly the same qualities he had carried with him in his exit. Hence I never now hear that expression taken from the Latin, "Of the dead speak nothing unless good," without despising it as an unworthy concession to sentiment; for I have not the least doubt in my mind that, spite of deathbed repentances and all the horrors which crowd upon the imagination of a bad man in his last moments—I say I have not the least doubt that of every hundred persons who die, ninety-nine of them, could they be raised from the dead, no matter how many years or even centuries they might have lain in their graves, would exhibit their original natures, and pursue exactly the same courses which made them loved or scorned or feared or neglected before, which brought them to the gallows or which qualified them to die in peace with faces brightening to the opening heavens. If Nero did not again fire Rome he would be equal to crimes as great, and desire nothing better than the opportunity for them. Cæsar would again be the tyrant, and the sword of Brutus would once more fulfil its mission. Richard III. would emerge in his winding-sheet with the same humpbacked character in which he had expired, the Queen of Scots return warm to her gallantries, and the Stuarts repeat those blunders and crimes which terminated in the headsman or in banishment.

But these are my thoughts of to-day; I was of another temper whilst I sat smoking and listening to the snoring of Monsieur Jules Tassard. Now that I had a companion should I be able to escape from this horrid situation? He had spoken of chests of silver—where was the treasure? in the run? There might be booty enough in the hold to make a great man, a fine gentleman of me ashore. It would be a noble ending to an amazing adventure to come off with as much money as would render me independent for life, and enable me to turn my back for ever upon the hardest calling to which the destiny of man can wed him.

Of such were the fancies which hurried through my mind, coupled with visitations of awe and wonder when I cast my eyes upon the sleeping Frenchman. After all it was ridiculous that I should feel mortified because he supposed me crazy in the matter of dates. How was it conceivable he should believe he had lain lifeless for eight-and-forty years? I knew a man who after a terrible adventure had slept three days and nights without stirring; the assurances of the people about him failed to persuade him that he had slumbered so long, and it was not until he walked abroad and met a hundred evidences as to the passage of the time during which he had slept that he allowed himself to become convinced.

I wished to see how the schooner lay and what change had befallen the ice in the night, and went on deck. It was blowing a whole gale of wind from the north-west. Inside the ship, with the hatches on, and protected moreover by the sides of the hollow in which she lay, it would have been impossible to guess at the weight of the gale, though all along I had supposed it to be storming pretty fiercely by the thunderous humming noise which resounded in the cabin. But I had no notion that so great a wind raged till I gained the deck and heard the prodigious bellowing of it above the rocks. The sky was one great cloud of slate, and there was no flying darkness or yellow scud to give the least movement of life to it. The sea was swelling very furiously, and I could divine its tempestuous character by clouds of spray which sped like volumes of steam under the sullen dusky heavens high over the mastheads. The schooner lay with a list of about fifteen degrees and her bows high cocked. I looked over the stern and saw that the ice had sunk there, and that there were twenty great rents and yawning seams where I had before noticed but one. A vast block of ice had fallen on the starboard side, and lay so close on the quarter that I could have sprung on to it. No other marked changes were observable, but there were a hundred sounds to assure me that neither the sea nor the gale was wholly wasting its strength upon this crystal territory, and that if I thought proper to climb the slope and expose myself to the wind, I should behold a face of ice somewhat different from what I had before gazed upon.

But the bitter cold held me in dread, and there was no need besides for me to take a survey. All that concerned me lay in the hollow in which the schooner was frozen; but so far as the slopes were concerned I could see nothing to render me uneasy. The declivities were gradual, and there was little fear of even a violent convulsion throwing the ice upon us. The danger lay below, under the keel; if the ice split, then down would drop the ship and stave herself, or if she escaped that peril she must be so wedged as to render the least further pressure of the ice against her sides destructive.

I was about to go below again, when my eye was taken by the two figures lying upon the deck. No dead bodies ever looked more dead, but after the wondrous restoration of the Frenchman I could not view their forms without fancying that they were but as he had been, and that if they were carried to the furnace and treated with brandy and rubbing and the like they might be brought to. Full of thoughts concerning them I stepped into the cabin, and, going to the cook-room, found Tassard still heavily sleeping. The coal in the corner was low, and as it wanted an hour of dinner-time I took the lanthorn and a bucket and went into the forepeak, and after several journeys stocked up a good provision of coal in the corner. I made noise enough, but Tassard slept on. When this was ended I boiled some water to cleanse myself, and then set about getting the dinner ready.

The going into the forepeak had put my mind upon the treasure, which, as I had gathered from the Frenchman's narrative, was somewhere hidden in the schooner—in the run, as I doubted not; I mean in the hold, under the lazarette, for you will recollect that, being weary and half-perished with the cold, I had turned my back on that dark part after having looked into the powder-room. All the time I was fetching the coal and dressing the dinner my imagination was on fire with fancies of the treasure in this ship. The Frenchman had told me that they had been well enough pleased with their hauls in the South Sea to resolve them upon heading round the Horn for their haunt, wherever it might be, in the Spanish main; and I had too good an understanding of the character of pirates to believe that they would have quitted a rich hunting-field before they had handsomely lined their pockets. What, then, was the treasure in the run, if indeed it were there? I recalled a dozen stories of the doings of the buccaneers, not to speak of the famous Acapulco ship taken by Anson a little before the year in which the Boca del Dragon was fishing in those waters; and I feasted my fancy with all sorts of sparkling dreams of gold and silver and precious stones, of the costly ecclesiastical furniture of New Spain, of which methought I found a hint in that silver crucifix in the cabin, of rings, sword-hilts, watches, buckles, snuff-boxes, and the like. Lord! thought I, that this island were of good honest mother earth instead of ice, that we might bury the pirate's booty if we could not save the ship, and make a princely mine of its grave, ready for the mattock should we survive to fetch it!

I was mechanically stirring the saucepan full of broth I had prepared, lost in these golden thoughts, when the Frenchman suddenly sat up on his mattress.

"Ha!" cried he, sniffing vigorously, "I smell something good—something I am ready for. There is no physic like sleep," and with that he stretched out his arms with a great yawn, then rose very agilely, kicking the clothes and mattress on one side and bringing a bench close to the furnace. "What time is it, sir?"

"Something after twelve by the captain's watch," said I, pulling it out and looking at it. "But 'tis guesswork time."