The Frozen Pirate

by William Clark Russell

I never needed to peep an inch beyond the companion-way to view the sky; nor for the matter of that was there ever any occasion to leave the cabin to guess at the weather, for the perpetual thunder of it echoed strong in every part of the vessel below, and the whole fabric was constantly shivering to the blows of the falls of water on her decks.

At first the Frenchman and I would sit in the greatest fear imaginable, constantly expecting some mighty disaster, such as the rending of the ice under our keel and our being swallowed up, or the coming together of the slopes in such a manner as to crush the ship, or the fall upon her of ice weighty enough to beat her flat; though perhaps this we least feared, for unless the storm changed the whole face of the cliffs, there was no ice in our neighbourhood to serve us in that way. But as the time slipped by and nothing worse happened than one sharp movement only in the vessel, following the heels of a great noise like a cannon discharged just outside; though this movement scared us nearly out of our senses, and held us in a manner dumbfounded for the rest of the day; I say, the time passing and nothing more terrifying than what I have related happening, we took heart and waited with some courage and patience for the gale to break, never doubting that we should find a wonderful change when we surveyed the scene from the heights.

We lived well, sparing ourselves in nothing that the vessel contained, the abundance rendering stint idle; the Frenchman cooked, for he was a better hand than I at that work, and provided several relishable sea-pies, cakes, and broths. As for liquor, there was enough on board to drown the pair of us twenty times over: wines of France, Spain, Portugal, very choice fine brandy, rum in plenty, such variety indeed as enabled us to brew a different kind of punch every day in the seven. But we were much more careful with the coal, and spared it to the utmost by burning the hammocks, bedding, and chests that lay in the forecastle; that is to say, we burnt these things by degrees, the stock being excessive, and by judiciously mixing them with coal and wood, they made good warming fires, and as tinder lasted long too.

We occupied one morning in thoroughly overhauling the forecastle for such articles of value as the sailors had dropped or forgotten in their flight; but found much less than I had expected from the sight of the money and other things on the deck. There was little in this way to be found in the cabins: I mean in the captain's cabin which I used, and the one next it that had been the mate's, for of course I did not search Mr. Tassard's berth. But though it was quite likely that the seamen had plundered these cabins before they left the ship, I was also sure that the Frenchman had made a clean sweep of what they had overlooked when he pretended to search for the keys of the treasure-chests; and this suspicion I seemed to find confirmed by the appearance of the captain's boxes. One of these boxes contained books, papers, a telescope, some nautical instruments, and the like. I looked at the books and the papers, in the hope of finding something to read; but they were written and printed in the Spanish tongue, and might have been Hebrew for all the good they were to me.

Our life was extraordinarily dismal and melancholy, how much so I am unable to express. It was just the same as living in a dungeon. There was no crevice for the daylight to shine through, and had there been we must have closed it to keep the cold out. Nothing could be imagined more gloomy to the spirits than the perpetual night of the schooner's interior. The furnace, it is true, would, when it flamed heartily, throw a brightness about it; but often it sank into redness that did but empurple the gloom. We burned but one candle at a time, and its light was very small, so that our time was spent chiefly in a sullen twilight. Added to all this was my dislike of my companion. He would half fuddle himself with liquor, and in that condition hiccup out twenty kinds of villainous yarns of piracy, murder, and bloodshed, boasting of the number of persons he had despatched, of his system of torturing prisoners to make them confess what they had concealed and where. He would drivel about his amours, of the style in which he lived when ashore, and the like; but whether reticence had grown into a habit too strong even for drink to break down, he never once gave me so much as a hint touching his youth and early life. He was completely a Frenchman in his vanity, and you would have thought him entirely odious and detestable for this excessive quality in him alone. Methinks I see him now, sitting before me, with one half of him reflecting the light of the furnace, his little eyes twinkling with a cruel merriment of wine, telling me a lying story of the adoration of a noble, queenly-looking captive for his person—some lovely Spanish court lady whom, with others, they had taken out of a small frigate bound to old Spain. To test her sincerity he offered to procure her liberty at the first opportunity that offered; but she wept, raved, tore her hair. No; without her Jules life would be unendurable; her husband, her country, her king, nay, even the allurements and sparkle of the court, had grown disgusting; and so on, and so on. And I think a monkey would have burst into laughter to see the bald-headed old satyr beat his bosom, flourish his arms, ogle, languish, and simper, all with a cut-throat expression, too, soften his voice, and act in short as if he was not telling me as big a lie as was ever related on shipboard.

It naturally rendered me very melancholy to reflect that I had restored this old villain to life, and I protest it was a continuous shock to such religious feelings as I had managed to preserve to reflect that what had been as good as nearly half a century of death had done nothing for this elderly rogue's morals. It entered my head once to believe that if I could succeed in getting him to believe he had lain frozen for eight-and-forty years, he might be seized with a fright (for he was a white-livered creature), and in some directions mend, and so come to a sense of the service I had done him, of which he appeared wholly insensible, and qualify me to rid my mind of the fears which I entertained concerning our association, should we manage to escape with the treasure. I said to him bluntly—not apropos (to use his own lingo) of anything we were talking about,—

"'Tis odd, Mr. Tassard, you should doubt my assurance that this is the year eighteen hundred and one."

He stared, grinned, and said, "Do you think so?"

"Well," said I, "perhaps it is not so odd after all; but you should suffer me to have as good an idea of the passage of time as yourself. You cannot tell me how long your stupor lasted."

"Two days if you like!" he interrupted vehemently. "Why more? Why longer than a day? How do you know that I had sunk into the condition in which you found me longer than an hour or two when you landed? How do you know, hey? How do you know?" and he snapped his fingers.