The Honour of the Flag

by William Clark Russell

We thoroughly overhauled this interior, spending some time in looking about us, for Sweers' fear of beholding something affrighting vanished when he found himself in a plain ship's cabin, with nothing more terrible to behold than the ship's furniture of a whaleman's living-room of near half a century old. There were three sleeping-berths, and these we explored, but met with nothing that in any way hinted at the story of the ship. It was impossible to tell, indeed, which had been the captain's cabin. All three berths were filled alike with lockers, hammocks, wash-stands, and so forth; and two of them were lighted by dirty little scuttles in the ship's side; but the third lay athwartships, and all the light that it received came from the cabin through its open door.

I don't know how long we were occupied in hunting these cabins for any sort of papers which would enable Captain Funnel to make out the story of the barque. We were too eager and curious and interested to heed the passage of time. There were harpoons and muskets racked in the state cabin, some wearing apparel in the berths, a few books on nautical subjects, but without the owners' names in them, and there was a bundle of what proved to be bear's skins stowed away in the corner of the berth that was without a scuttle. A door led to a couple of bulkheaded compartments in the fore part of the state cabin, and Sweers was in the act of advancing to it when he cried out:

"By the tunder of heaven, what is dot?" losing his customary hold of the English tongue in the excitement of the moment.

"The ice is melting and discharging in Niagara Falls upon the whaler's deck!" I cried, after listening a moment to the noise of a downpour that rang through the cabin in a hollow thunder.

We rushed on deck. A furious squall was blowing, but the air was becalmed where the vessel lay by the high cliffs of ice, and the rain of the squall fell almost up and down in a very sheet of water, intermingled with hailstones as big as the eggs of a thrush. The whole scene of the ocean was a swirling, revolving smother, as though the sky was full of steam, and the screech of the wind, as it fled off the edge of the dead white heights which sheltered us, pierced the ear like the whistlings of a thousand locomotives.

There was nothing to be seen of the schooner: but that was trifling for the moment compared to this: there was nothing to be seen of the boat! The furious discharge of the squall would increase her weight by half filling her with water; the slashing wet of the rain would also render the icy slope up which we had hauled her as slippery as a sheet for skaters; a single shock or blast of wind might suffice to start her. Be this as it will, she had launched herself—she was gone! We strained our sight, but no faintest blotch of shadow could we distinguish amid the white water rushing smoothly off from the base of the berg, and streaming into the pallid shadow of the squall where you saw the sea clear of the ice beginning to work with true Atlantic spite.

"Crate Cott!" cried Sweers, "what's to be done? There was no appearance of a squall when we landed here. It drove up abaft this berg, and it may have been hidden from the schooner herself by the ice."

We crouched in the companion-way for shelter, not doubting that the squall would speedily pass, and that the schooner, which we naturally supposed lay close to the berg hove-to, would, the instant the weather cleared, send a boat to take us off. But the squall, instead of abating, gradually rose into half a gale of wind—a wet dark gale that shrouded the sea with flying spume and rain to within a musket-shot of the iceberg, whilst the sky was no more than a weeping, pouring shadow coming and going as it were with a lightening and darkening of it by masses of headlong torn vapour. Some of the ragged pinnacles of the cliffs of ice seemed to pierce that wild dark, flying sky of storm as it swept before the gale close down over our heads.

We could not bring our minds to realise that we were to be left aboard this ice-stranded whaler all night, and perhaps all next day, and for heaven alone knows how much longer for the matter of that; and it was not until the darkness of the evening had drawn down, coming along early with the howling gloom of the storm-shrouded ocean, without so much as a rusty tinge of hectic to tell us where the West lay, that we abandoned our idle task of staring at the sea, and made up our minds to go through with the night as best we could.

And first of all we entered the galley, and by the aid of such dim light as still lived we contrived to catch sight of a tin lamp with a spout to it dangling over the coppers. There was a wick in the spout, but one might swear that the lamp hadn't been used for months and months.