Most of the Esquimaux had gone away to catch salmon, and on hunting expeditions, but a few remained; and though they expressed great regret at our misfortune, they seemed glad that we had less chance of leaving them.
Andrew was the only one among us who was calm. “Come, my lads,” he said, “there’s no use looking at what’s happened without trying to set matters to rights again. If we stand here all day without putting our hand to the work, we shall not get the craft on an even keel.”
His taunting words aroused us to exertion; and it was proposed to get the vessel up by driving wedges of ice under her bilge, and since the cradle could be of no further use, to build a way for her to the water, or to where the ice might be thin enough to allow us to break it, so as to form a channel for her to float through.
We laboured away very hard; but our want of scientific knowledge made us despair of accomplishing the task. The first day we did nothing—the next we set to work again, but performed little of the proposed work.
“It’s of no use, I see,” grumbled David. “We may as well make up our minds to spend the rest of our days here.”
While he was speaking, and all hands were standing doing nothing, I happened to turn my eyes to the northward, and there I saw what appeared to me a high land, covered with towers, and houses, and church-steeples, with trees and rocks on either side. Under the land, however, appeared a thin line of water, and dividing it a broad gap, as it were the mouth of some wide river or fiord; but what most attracted my attention was an inverted ship, which appeared above it under all sail.
I at once guessed that this extraordinary appearance was caused by refraction; but the figure of the ship puzzled me. It was so perfect in every respect, that I was convinced that it could not be an ocular illusion, and that there must be some real ship, and that this was her reflection in the clouds. I pointed her out to my companions; and when they saw that all the objects were continually changing and that she remained the same, they were of the same opinion. We therefore resolved to watch, and to get the boat ready to shove off to her should a ship appear; at the same time the great uncertainty of what might really be the case prevented us from feeling any exuberance of joy. It was already late in the day, but none of us could sleep, so eager were we to keep a look-out for the strange ship.
Hour after hour passed away, and still no vessel appeared to relieve our anxiety. Some of the men at length grew weary of watching, and threw themselves on their beds to sleep.
“It was, after all, to my mind but a fancy,” exclaimed Terence, entering the hut with a discontented air. “The figure we saw in the sky was very like a ship, I own; but still I’d bet anything it was no ship at all.”
Andrew and I still held that it was a ship.