The Frozen Pirate by William Clark Russell

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  THE FROZEN PIRATE.

  BY W. CLARK RUSSELL

  AUTHOR OF "THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR," "THE LADY MAUD," "A SAILOR'SSWEETHEART," ETC., ETC.

  PH[OE]NIX PUBLISHING CO.,NEW YORK.

  CONTENTS.

  I. The Storm

  II. The Iceberg

  III. I Lose My Companions

  IV. I Quit the Wreck

  V. I Sight a White Coast

  VI. An Island of Ice

  VII. I am Startled by a Discovery

  VIII. The Frozen Schooner

  IX. I Lose my Boat

  X. Another Startling Discovery

  XI. I Make Further Discoveries

  XII. A Lonely Night

  XIII. I Explore the Hold and Forecastle

  XIV. An Extraordinary Occurrence

  XV. The Pirate's Story

  XVI. I Hear of a Great Treasure

  XVII. The Treasure

  XVIII. We Talk over our Situation

  XIX. We Take a View of the Ice

  XX. A Merry Evening

  XXI. We Explore the Mines

  XXII. A Change Comes Over the Frenchman

  XXIII. The Ice Breaks Away

  XXIV. The Frenchman Dies

  XXV. The Schooner Frees Herself

  XXVI. I am Troubled by Thoughts of the Treasure

  XXVII. I Encounter a Whaler

  XXVIII. I Strike a Bargain with the Yankee

  XXIX. I Value the Lading

  XXX. Our Progress to the Channel

  XXXI. The End

  Postscript

  THE FROZEN PIRATE.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE STORM.

  The _Laughing Mary_ was a light ship, as sailors term a vessel thatstands high upon the water, having discharged her cargo at Callao, fromwhich port we were proceeding in ballast to Cape Town, South Africa,there to call for orders. Our run to within a few parallels of thelatitude of the Horn had been extremely pleasant; the proverbialmildness of the Pacific Ocean was in the mellow sweetness of the windand in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced swell; but scarce hadwe passed the height of forty-nine degrees when the weather grew sullenand dark, a heavy bank of clouds of a livid hue rose in the north-east,and the wind came and went in small guns, the gusts venting themselvesin dreary moans, insomuch that our oldest hands confessed they had neverheard blasts more portentous.

  The gale came on with some lightning and several claps of thunder andheavy rain. Though it was but two o'clock in the afternoon, the air wasso dusky that the men had to feel for the ropes; and when the first ofthe tempest stormed down upon us the appearance of the sea wasuncommonly terrible, being swept and mangled into boiling froth in thenorth-east quarter, whilst all about us and in the south-west it lay ina sort of swollen huddle of shadows, glooming into the darkness of thesky without offering the smallest glimpse of the horizon.

  In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down tothe close-reefed main-topsail; yet, though we were dead before theoutfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed ofsmoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the bows like ascattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind. Thebursting of the topsail was like the explosion of a large cannon. In abreath the brig was smothered with froth torn up in huge clouds, andhurled over and ahead of her in vast quivering bodies that filled thewind with a dismal twilight of their own, in which nothing was visiblebut their terrific speeding. Through these slinging, soft, and singingmasses of spume drove the rain in horizontal steel-like lines, whichgleamed in the lightning stroke as though indeed they were barbedweapons of bright metal, darted by armies of invisible spirits ravingout their war cries as they chased us.

  The storm made a loud thunder in the sky, and this tremendous utterancedominated without subduing the many screaming, hissing, shrieking, andhooting noises raised in the rigging and about the decks, and the wild,seething, weltering sound of the sea, maddened by the gale andstruggling in its enormous passion under the first choking and iron gripof the hurricane's hand.

  I had used the ocean for above ten years, but never had I encounteredanything suddener or fiercer in the form of weather than this. Thoughthe wind blew from the tropics it was as cruel in bitterness as frost.Yet there was neither snow nor hail, only rain that seemed to pass likea knife through the head if you showed your face to it for a second. Itwas necessary to bring the brig to the wind before the sea rose. Thehelm was put down, and without a rag of canvas on her she came round;but when she brought the hurricane fair abeam, I thought it was all overwith us. She lay down to it until her bulwarks were under water, and thesheer-poles in the rigging above the rail hidden.

  In this posture she hung so long that Captain Rosy, the master, bawledto me to tell the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmast rigging.But the _Laughing Mary_, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship andlightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through ourseizing a small tarpaulin in the weather main shrouds, she erected hermasts afresh, like some sentient creature pricking its ears for theaffray, and with that showed herself game and made indifferently goodweather of it.

  But though the first rage of the storm was terrible enough, itsfierceness did not come to its height till about one o'clock in themiddle watch. Long before then the sea had grown mountainous, and thedance of our eggshell of a brig upon it was sickening and affrighting.The heads of the Andean peaks of black water looked tall enough tobrush the lowering soot of the heavens with the blue and yellowphosphoric fires which sparkled ghastly amid the bursting froth. Bodiesof foam flew like the flashings of pale sheet-lightning through ourrigging and over us, and a dreadful roaring of mighty surges in madcareer, and battling as they ran, rose out of the sea to deepen yet thethunderous bellowing of the hurricane on high.

  No man could show himself on deck and preserve his life. Between therails it was waist high, and this water, converted by the motions of thebrig into a wild torrent, had its volume perpetually maintained byton-loads of sea falling in dull and pounding crashes over the bows onto the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm andawait the issue below, for, if we were to be drowned, it would make amore easy foundering to go down dry and warm in the cabin, than toperish half-frozen and already nearly strangled by the bitter cold andflooded tempest on deck.

  There was Captain Rosy; there was myself, by name Paul Rodney, mate ofthe brig; and there were the remaining seven of a crew, including thecarpenter. We sat in the cabin, one of us from time to time clawing hisway up the ladder to peer through the companion, and we looked at oneanother with the melancholy of malefactors waiting to be called fromtheir cells for the last jaunt to Tyburn.

  "May God have mercy upon us!" cries the carpenter. "There must be anearthquake inside this storm. Something more than wind is going to themaking of these seas. Hear that, now! naught less than a forty-footchuck-up could ha' ended in that souse, mates."

  "A man can die but once," says Captain Rosy, "and he'll not perish thequicker for looking at his end with a stout heart;" and with that he puthis hand into the locker on which he had been sitting and pulled out ajar of whisky, which, after putting his lips to it and keeping themglued there whilst you could have counted twenty, he handed to me, andso it went round, coming back to him empty.

  I often have the sight of that cabin in my mind's eye; and it was notlong afterwards that it would visit me as such a vision of comfort, Iwould with a grateful hea
rt have accepted it with tenfold darkerconditions of danger, had it been possible to exchange my situation forit. A lantern hung from a beam, and swung violently to the rolling andpitching of the brig. The alternations of its light put twenty differentmeanings, one after another, into the settled dismal and ruefulexpressions in the faces of my companions. We were clad in warm clothes,and the steam rose from the damp in our coats and trousers like vapourfrom wet straw. The drink mottled some of our faces, but the spirituoustincture only imparted a quality of irony to the melancholy of ourvisages, as if our mournfulness were not wholly sincere, when, Godknows, our hearts were taken up with counting the minutes when we shouldfind ourselves bursting for want of breath under water.

  Thus it continued till daybreak, all which time we strove to encourageone another as best we could, sometimes with words, sometimes withputting the bottle about. It was impossible for any of us at any momentto show more than our noses above the companion; and even at that youneeded the utmost caution, for the decks being full of water, it wasnecessary to await the lurch of the vessel before moving the slide orcover to the companion, else you stood to drown the cabin.

  Being exceedingly anxious, for the brig lay unwatched, I looked forth onone occasion longer than the others chose to venture, and beheld themost extravagant scene of raging commotion it could enter the brain ofman to imagine. The night was as black as the bottom of a well; but theprodigious swelling and flinging of white waters hove a faintness uponthe air that was in its way a dim light, by which it was just possibleto distinguish the reeling masts to the height of the tops, and toobserve the figure of the brig springing black and trembling out of thehead of a surge that had broken over and smothered her as in a cauldron,and to note the shapes of the nearer liquid acclivities as they boredown upon our weather bow, catching the brig fair under the bluff, andso sloping her that she seemed to stand end on, and so heeling her thatthe sea would wash to the height of the main hatch. Indeed, had she beenloaded, and therefore deep, she could not have lived an hour in thathollow and frightful ocean; but having nothing in her but ballast shewas like a bladder, and swung up the surges and blew away to leewardlike an empty cask.

  When the dawn broke something of its midnight fury went out of the gale.The carpenter made shift to sound the well, and to our greatsatisfaction found but little water, only as much as we had a right tosuppose she would take in above. But it was impossible to stand at thepumps, so we returned to the cabin and brewed some cold punch and didwhat we could to keep our spirits hearty. By noon the wind had weakenedyet, but the sea still ran very heavily, and the sky was uncommonlythick with piles of dusky, yellowish, hurrying clouds; and though wecould fairly reckon upon our position, the atmosphere was so nipping itwas difficult to persuade ourselves that Cape Horn was not close aboard.

  We could now work the pumps, and a short spell freed the brig. We got upa new main-topsail and bent it, and, setting the reefed foresail, putthe vessel before the wind, and away she ran, chased by the swollenseas. Thus we continued till by dead reckoning we calculated that wewere about thirty leagues south of the parallel of the Horn, and inlongitude eighty-seven degrees west. We then boarded our larboard tacksand brought the brig as close to the wind as it was proper to lay herfor a progress that should not be wholly leeway; but four hours after wehad handled the braces the gale, that had not veered two points since itfirst came on to blow, stormed up again into its first fury; and themorning of the 1st of July, _anno_ 1801, found the _Laughing Mary_passionately labouring in the midst of an enraged Cape Horn sea, herjibboom and fore top-gallant mast gone, her ballast shifted, so that herposture even in a calm would have exhibited her with her starboardchannels under, and her decks swept by enormous surges, which, fetchingher larboard bilge dreadful blows, thundered in mighty green masses overher.