“In the afternoon we buried the body of the dead, nameless seaman; nameless, because it seemed that the other was incapable of relating his story; pain and famine had paralyzed the tongue in his mouth. The captain read the service; his manner was so subdued, his whole demeanour expressed him as so affected, that you would have supposed he was burying some dear friend or near relative. I had often attended a burial service at sea, but never one more impressive than this. All the desolation of the mighty deep seemed to have centred, as in a very spirit, in the lifeless body that lay stitched in a hammock in the gangway.
“When the body was overboard the captain walked to the boat we had hoisted in, and stood with his first look of amazement and grief, musing upon, or rather staring at the name Prairie Chief painted in the stern-sheets. He then went to his cabin. When he again made his appearance some time afterwards he was extraordinarily reserved and gloomy. Throughout the watches he would ask if the man was better. I do not recollect that he addressed another word to me than that question.
“Next forenoon, some time about eight bells, the man was sufficiently recovered to come aft. I stood beside Captain Huddersfield, sextant in hand, whilst he talked to him. He said his name was James Dickens, and that he had been an able seaman aboard the barque Prairie Chief. The ship was from London bound to Sydney. South of the Cape they met with very heavy weather from the northward, which hove them to and drove them south; it was so thick the captain could not get an observation. The wind slackened and the captain made sail, defying the thickness; he was impatient and had already made a long passage, and was resolved, happen what might, to ‘ratch’ north for a clear sky. In the middle of the day, when the smother upon the sea was so thick that the flying-jibboom end was out of sight from the wheel, a loud and fearful cry of ‘Ice right ahead!’ rang from the forecastle. The wheel was revolved, every spoke, with the fury of despair, by the helmsman; but the ship’s time was come, and there was nothing in seamanship to manœuvre her clear of her fate. She telescoped into the ice and went to pieces.
“This, Dickens said, had happened about ten days before we fell in with the boat. The disaster was not so frightfully sudden but that there was time for some to escape. A number of people, said the man, got upon the ice. Amongst them were the captain, his wife, and a female passenger. Dickens particularly noticed these people, that is, the commander and the two women. He and three others drifted away in a boat. The barque went to pieces aloft when she struck; he was sure that none others saving himself and the three men escaped in the boats. It was in the middle of the day when the ship ran into the berg, and the darkness happened so quickly after the disaster that he was unable to tell much of what followed. Two of his companions died whilst they were adrift and their bodies were dropped overboard.
“Whilst Dickens told his story I watched the captain. His features were knitted into an expression of consternation, yet he never once interrupted the man. When the sailor had made an end of his story, Huddersfield said, in a slow level voice—
“‘Was your commander Captain Smalley?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘Was one of the female passengers Mrs. Huddersfield?’
“‘It was her name, sir.’
“The captain turned his eyes upon me and cried, with a sudden wild toss of his hands that somehow gave an extraordinary pathos to his words and looks, ‘She is my wife!’