"I see that," said the captain.
"She's got a pretty strong list," continued the mate, talking with the glass at his eye; "her topgallantmasts are struck, but her topmasts are standing."
"I tell you what it is," said the captain, after a pause, likewise speaking whilst he gazed through his telescope, "that ship's come down somewhere from out of the North Pole. She never could have struck the ice and gone ashore as we see her there. She's been locked up; then the piece she's on broke away and made sail to the south. I've fallen in with bergs with live polar bears on them in my time."
"What is she—a whaler?" said Mr. Sweers. "She's got a lumbersome look about the bulwarks, as though she wasn't short of cranes; but I can't make out any boats, and there's no appearance of life aboard her."
"Let her go off a point," said the captain to the fellow at the wheel. "Mr. Sweers, she'll be worth looking at," he continued, slowly directing his gaze round the sea-line, as though considering the weather. 'You've heard of Sir John Franklin?'
"Have I heard?" said the mate, with a Dutch shrug.
"It's the duty of every English sailor," said the captain, "to keep his weather eye lifting whenever he smells ice north of the equator; for who's to tell what relics of the Franklin expedition he may not light on? And how are we to know," continued he, again directing his glass at the berg, "that yonder vessel may not have taken part in that expedition?"
"There's a reward going," said Mr. Sweers, "for the man who can discover anything about Sir John Franklin and his party."
The captain grinned and quickly grew grave.
We drew slowly towards the iceberg, at which I gazed with some degree of disappointment; for, never before having beheld ice in a great mass like the heap that was yonder, I had expected to see something admirable and magnificent, an island of glass, full of fiery sparklings and ruby and emerald beams, a shape of crystal cut by the hand of King Frost into a hundred inimitable devices. Instead of which, the island of ice, on which lay the hull of the ship, was of a dead, unpolished whiteness, abrupt at the extremities, about a hundred and twenty feet tall at its loftiest point, not more picturesque than a rock covered with snow, and interesting only to my mind because of the distance it had measured, and because of the fancies it raised in one of the white, silent, and stirless principalities from which it had floated into these parts.