All the remaining hands of the ship's company were at work forward. A number of spare booms were stowed on top of the galley and had probably saved the long-boat from being crushed when the masts fell. The sailors had rigged up a triangle of booms with blocks and tackle dangling, and even as Mrs. Burke and I stood in the companion way, they broke into song as they hoisted a huge spar that was to serve as a mast. Their hearty chorus was frequently interrupted by sharp, eager shouts from Captain Burke or the boatswain Wall.

The break overhead thinned out yet and made more light. A strange dim dye of sulphur went sifting down to the horizon, and the sea in places worked against it dark as bottle glass. About two miles off some whales were blowing; their vast bulks showed in a black wet gleam amid the swell; but even then such was the blending of their curved forms with the confused running, that, but for their fountains, the eye had missed them.

We stood watching in the shelter of the companion way. The longer I looked, the stranger, the more forlorn, the more lamentable the scene showed, the more perilous and hopeless our situation seemed. What sort of cloths were they going to spread upon such a height of boom as they were chorusing at? I thought of the spacious concavities which had risen to the stars, and to the blue heavens of our voyage, those symmetric breasts of lustrous canvas which, when trimmed, snatched an impulse for our clipper keel, from the antagonism of the head wind itself; I saw the ship robed in the beauty of her sails, lifting her star-saluting royals to the very path of the flying scud with jibs and staysails yearning from bowsprit and jibboom towards some deeper ocean solitude past the horizon; and then I looked at the naked boom the men were hoisting at the triangle or shears.

'Oh, that cannot help us,' I cried; 'what does Captain Burke intend?'

'Even if it should fail as a mast,' Mrs. Burke answered, 'it will be useful as a flag-post. Why, this hull lies so flat without spars a ship might pass three or four miles off and not see us.'

Here the captain looked round and spied our heads. With a note of his old cheerfulness he called out:

'Many a good prize has been navigated out of an ocean battle-field under leaner sticks than that, and added to the Royal Navy after tasselling Jack's pocket-handkerchief with dollars.'

This he seemed to say as much for the men as for me. He then approached and asked me how I did; and told me not to look too long at the wreck.

'Keep up your heart, miss,' said he. 'We'll have you out of this in good time. Mary, don't let her stand here dwelling upon this scene. Why, it was a nightmare even to my seasoned eyes when it first came out of the dawn.'

'Is that mast meant to carry a sail?' said I.

'When we fix it and stay it we'll set something square upon it, certainly. There'll be room for a bit of fore and aft canvas between the head of it and the bowsprit end. Then let the wind blow south with God's blessing, or east or west will do, to edge us north. We need but steerage way, after which there'll be nothing to do but keep warm till all's well. Take her below, Mary. Look at her face! She'll wither here.'

The hours of daylight were so few that the night was upon the rolling hull before the seamen had done more than lash the jury-mast to the stump with a stay or two for support. And with the darkness of the night there came along a black Cape Horn snow squall, like a dust storm in its blinding power, with a thunder of wind in it, and so much more afterwards that by five o'clock as high a sea was running as that of the preceding day.

The crew came into the cabin for shelter, and cooked their own supper as before. They ate and then went to the stove, and afterwards Captain Burke and his wife and myself sat down to some cold food and a cup of hot coffee. Mr. Owen came to the door of his berth, but seeing the captain at table at once retired, closing the door upon himself. The captain took no notice. His good spirits were gone again. He drank some coffee, but scarcely tasted food. His posture was one of gloomy despondency as he sat at table, and he rarely lifted his eyes save to dart a glance now and again at the sailors, which put it into my head to think that more worked as causes for his dejection than the new fierce gale and our awful situation. His wife often furtively looked towards him but never ventured to address him, no, not even to ask him if he would eat.

Well, just such another evening and night as had passed happened with us now. From time to time one or another would go on deck and come below and report the night a flying blackness. On the boatswain returning from one of these errands of observation the captain said:

'Does it clear at all?'

'Still as thick as muck, sir.'

'Any smell of ice about?'

'No, sir.'

I wondered to hear them talk of smelling ice in a snow storm as thick as froth, and said to the captain:

'Is ice to be smelt?'

He looked at me as though he had no mind to answer, to be even civil, then said sharply, 'Yes.'

My poor old nurse bristled like an angry hen at this behaviour, though she was still afraid of the mood upon him, yet being determined that I should get all the comfort possible out of any information the men could give, she turned upon the boatswain, whose bulky, oilskinned figure swung on frock-shaped leggings beside the stove, and said:

'Did you ever smell ice, Mr. Wall?'

He looked doubtfully at the captain, and answered awkwardly, 'Yes mum, scores of times.'

The captain rose and went on deck. At the same moment Mr. Owen came out of his berth. It might have been that through some crevice in the cabin bulkhead he was able to observe the captain's movements.

'What sort of smell has ice?' I asked, for I could think of no thing but icebergs, of the helplessness of our hull, of our being swung by these giant seas against a berg, and I wanted to hear how sailors tell that ice is near without seeing it.

'It's the extra coldness that makes the smell. Tain't no smell in the or'nary meaning,' said the boatswain after a pause. 'The first time I ever learnt that a man could smell ice in a breeze full of frost and snow was in my first voyage in these parts. We was running off the Horn, not so low as this here, in a smother o' flakes, nothen visible of the ship from the wheel but her mainmast. I and another was steering the ship, the mate comes rushing aft and sings out to the captain who was walking abreast of the wheel, "I smell ice, sir." They both took a sniff, and I could see by their way of snuffing they both smelt it plain. They looked into the driving smother to starboard and then to port, and then all on a sudden a man on the fok'sle cries out, "Ice right ahead." "Hard aport!" sings out the capt'n, and out it jumped, big as a church, right on the bow. Smelt it myself then.'

A low growl of laughter ran amongst the men, and several looked as though they too had yarns to spin.

I scarcely slept that night. The cold was terrible, and there were the noises of the sea and the gale, and the heart-maddening rolling and plunging. Yet, wonderful to relate, next morning, exactly as on the day before, a dead calm was in the air, and the swollen hills of swell ran in liquid lead in a confused shouldering. I went on deck with Mrs. Burke at about twelve, and watched the men completing the captain's toy-like affair of jury-mast. They had set a jib upon the bowsprit, and were now bending a sail to a yard which was to be hoisted to the head of the jury-mast. The lean stick was so abundantly stayed that it looked like the inside of an umbrella. The rolls of the hull were dangerous and very fierce; it was impossible to walk the deck. This morning they had got a fire in the galley, which had been roughly repaired. The brown smoke floated straight up out of the swaying chimney, and, trifling as that detail of colour and life was, yet somehow it brought back to the poor old hull something of her old spirit and look. No farmyard sounds came from forward; no grunt from the long-boat, no cackle nor crow from the hencoop; all the live-stock had been frozen or drowned during the first night of the gale, when the masts went.

I saw those glancings of ice on the horizon which I had taken notice of yesterday; they hung in the same quarters, and flamed at the same distance against the dark sky with a fairy, star-like brightness. I turned my eyes in every direction for a sail.

'Don't ships ever come this way?' I asked.

'Oh, yes, many,' answered Mrs. Burke.

'What sort of ships?'

'Whalers chiefly, Edward says.'

'Suppose one should come; what will Captain Burke do?'

'Ask her to tow us.'

'If the master declines? This is a big, helpless vessel for another ship to tow in such seas as run here. And what would a ship do with us in tow should we meet with such weather as blew last night or the night before?'

She made no answer.

'Surely Captain Burke will transfer us all.'

'He'll not leave this vessel,' said she. 'It is not only that he has himself an uninsured venture in her, his obtaining further employment might depend upon his carrying the "Lady Emma" into safety. And if it can be done, it ought to,' she added, with a flat, peering, anxious look around the sea.

Presently all was ready with the sail. The seamen raised a song, and, to a steady, shearing noise of ropes in sheaves, with a frequent chorus that swept like a shout of hope into the bitter, motionless atmosphere, the yard slowly ascended the jury-mast. It was like a huge lug-sail in form and fittings. Tauten it as they would, the breast hollowed and rounded with such blows as of a cudgel, and such claps as of musketry, that the boom sprang and buckled like a willow in a breeze; the sail was therefore lowered until wind came to steady it.

It put a weariness as of rheumatism into the body to stand long, and when we saw the sail hoisted we went below.

Mr. Owen was sitting beside the stove; he rose on our descending, and went on deck to look around, then, after a brief halt in the shelter of the companion-way returned, and sat him down at the table with the fingers of his right hand buried in his right bush of hair, his whole bearing abjectly disconsolate. Presently, looking at Mrs. Burke, he exclaimed:

'Is that single pole on the forecastle all the mast the captain means to navigate this ship with?'

'I do not know. My husband will be glad to tell you, I am sure,' answered Mrs. Burke.

He gave a ghastly sarcastic smile, that instantly vanished in his former expression of sullen, resentful grief and dismay, showing, as a man might, who is under a sudden tragic surprise, which enrages him also. He looked down, shaking his head softly, and drumming, then started as if he would walk, but the jerk and tumble of the deck was too strong. I began to fear for the poor man's mind.

Mrs. Burke told me the men would get dinner in the forecastle that day—there, or in the galley. They did not come to the cabin. The only man of them who arrived was the steward. He clothed the table, and made us a tolerable show of dinner. I beg to recall to your memory the many delicacies my father had laid in for me.

It was about half-past one, I think, and about the time when the steward was done with the table, when the companion doors were opened, and the captain came below. The lamp burned brightly: indeed, it made most of the light we had. The skylight was, perhaps, half a foot thick with frozen snow; the companion doors were kept closed to exclude the cold; and little light came through the cabin windows, which the hull dipped with pendulum-like monotony into the thunder shadow of the swollen brine. Yet by the lamp-light we saw very clearly, and I observed that the captain's face was lighted up with some life and hope. I thought a sail was in sight, and started, expecting to hear him say so.

'There's some luck for us in this devil's own ocean after all,' said he, swinging his figure towards us, eagerly watched by Mr. Owen, who was on his feet leaning upon the table, and staring with head moving as the captain moved.

'What is it?' cried his wife hysterically.

'Why,' said he, 'there's a breeze sprung up out of the south'ard: I've been watching the ship; there's drag enough in the rag we've got upon her to give her way. And so, Miss Otway, be easy, now that we're heading for the sun afresh, with a man at the wheel and a little scope of wake astern of us.'

'Anything better than lying like a log,' cried Mrs. Burke, with a short swallow in her speech. 'I had hoped from your face there was a ship in sight.'

'And so did I,' I exclaimed.

Mr. Owen sat down suddenly, and again buried his hand in his hair.

'But this is as good as a ship being in sight,' cried the captain irritable on a sudden. 'I want to blow north where ships are to be fallen in with, and we're something to see now, with a thirty foot hoist of canvas on top ten foot of freeboard; whereas, before—but let's get something to eat.'

We seated ourselves. Mr. Owen took a corner chair and spoke not a word for some time, till at last, on the captain saying that if he fell in with a vessel he would offer handsome sums for a tow, the doctor said abruptly:

'To where?'

The captain eyed him with an unfeeling pause of contempt, and then answered:

'That would not rest with you, sir.'

'I must request you to transfer me, if we fall in with a ship,' said Mr. Owen.

'I shall be happy,' said the captain, nervous and convulsive with temper, 'at least—you've got to remember the object you're here for.' He looked at me. 'Miss Otway is not likely to accompany you, and you'll be no gentleman if you desert her.'

'Miss Otway will accompany me if you give her an opportunity of leaving this wreck,' said Mr. Owen.

'This is no wreck, sir,' said the captain in a low-level voice of menace, stooping his head and looking at the doctor under crooked eyebrows.

Mr. Owen muttered that he intended to save his life if he could, and Miss Otway's too if he was allowed—the rest he mumbled: after ceasing to articulate his lips moved; then, with a sudden impassioned motion of despair and horror, he sprang from his chair and disappeared in his berth, having barely taken three bites.

'I fear his intellects have become disordered,' said Mrs. Burke.

'He'd like to drive me out of the ship. The lily liver would have me abandon a craft that's as staunch as the newest line-of-battle ship afloat. What would it signify to him that I left a couple of thousand pounds of my hard earnings to go to the bottom here, so long as his dingy skinful of bones and bobs of curls were safely landed?' exclaimed the captain in a low-pitched deliberate speech, that trembled nevertheless with emotion and temper.

His wife gave me a look as though she would entreat me not to talk to him. Now and again he lifted up his eyes to a tell-tale compass that hung exactly over his chair; almost as regular as the beat of a clock was the plunge of the ship from right to left, from left to right. The blinding green sense of one side and then the other of the cabin portholes, and a loud yearning thunder of water washing past.

After a little the captain went to his cabin. I said I would like to see the ship under sail, and when we had clothed ourselves for the deck Mrs. Burke and I went to the companion-steps.

A seaman, clad in oilskins and swathed about the neck till he showed nothing of his face but a pair of eyes, stood at the wheel. Some delicate stars and darts of snow were falling, but they did not cloud the view. The square of white canvas was stretched by a fresh following breeze of bitter coldness, beyond frost itself: the sea was feathering upon the swell, and a number of grey and white petrels skimmed the flashes as they moulded their flight to the wind-furrowed rounds. The white sail looked like a wild and sickly light when the hull swung it athwart the soot over the horizon, but there could be no doubt that the vessel was in motion. We durst not leave the holding place of the companion-hood to look over the taffrail or side, but you saw she had steerage way by the manner in which the fellow twirled the wheel.

A group of seamen with their hands deep buried, some of them sea-booted fisherman-like to their knees, trudged the white frozen deck opposite the galley. It was wonderful to see them keep their feet; the rumbling hum of their strong, lungs stole aft against the wind; they swayed in earnest talk, and minded us not when they faced our way, again and again staring round at the sea as though for a sail.

Now we had not been looking about us above five minutes when, happening to glance aft past the helmsman, I saw the ocean not above half a mile distant, white as milk, the forestretch of it was about two miles long; how wide it went back I could not say, nor could I guess what it was; there was no snow nor any particular blackness of cloud over it, nor uncommon wildness of flight in the vapour overhanging us. Before I could call Mrs. Burke's attention to the wonder, the seaman at the helm turned and spied it, and instantly roared out in a voice that swept past the ear like the wind of something heavy swiftly flying.

'Why,' cried Mrs. Burke—but the rest of the sentence was clipped sheer off her lips in a yell of squall, a very hurricane blast; the air was dark with spray, in the midst of which I just caught sight of the jury-mast and sail disappearing—not abruptly, but in a dissolving way, as a snowflake dies on water. The whole thing went in the shriek of the blast, with a single report and a snowstorm of flying tatters; the next instant Mrs. Burke was dragging me down the companion-steps and we both got into the cabin dazed, frozen to the marrow, as much confounded and terrified by that sudden meteoric shock and blast of wind, with its burthen of white brine and its noise of fierce yells and whistlings, as though we had scarcely escaped with our lives.

The captain heard, or guessed what had happened; he rushed from his berth on to the deck, but the squall pinned him in the companion-way for a minute, and he stood struggling as though some man had taken him by the throat. In five minutes, however, the furious outburst was spent or had flown ahead; I could tell that by glancing at the cabin windows whenever they lifted clear. The steward came below to trim the lamp. Mrs. Burke asked him what was doing on deck. He answered, nothing, and told us what we knew, that the jury-mast and sail had blown over the bows.

It was now to be felt by the distressful, horrid, jerky motion, that the hull had taken up her old situation in the trough.

'What has happened?' said Mr. Owen, coming out of his berth.

Mrs. Burke told him. He groaned, and sat down close beside the stove, folding his arms tightly, and said:

'What is to become of us? This is distracting. I am prepared to meet my Maker, but it is the suspense—it is the suspense—it is the having to wait for death that crazes.'

'I am surprised at you,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, drawing herself up. 'How, as a man, can you talk so before this young lady? As for me, I don't mind what you say; I am the wife of a sailor, and it's not in you to improve my spirits or make me despair. But you have no right to forget yourself as a man before Miss Otway.'

He slapped his knee violently, crying out, 'Poor as I am, I would give five hundred pounds had I never heard of your husband or his ship.'

The poor woman looked at him with her flat eyes and curled her lip, then gave me an expressive glance when he arose and began to move about the cabin, holding on and looking at the windows to left and right as they soared blind with the foam dazzle.

It was dark as midnight on deck before the captain came below, and yet it may not have been three o'clock. He approached the fire and stood before it, his wife and myself sitting on either hand of him. He seemed to steadfastly regard Mr. Owen, who was on a locker at the after end of the cabin, but did not offer to speak. Presently his wife said:

'Are the mast and sail lost for good, Edward?'

'Ay.'

'What was the whiteness that swept them away?'

'What but a squall? This is a great ocean, and mark our luck; there were thousands of miles of water for that squall to sweep over on either hand of us, but Old Stormy bestrode it, and, scenting us, made for the hull.'

'There are other booms to rig up a mast with.'

'So there are,' he answered, speaking quietly, with his eyes fixed upon the form of the doctor as though he addressed him. 'There are other spars, but there's not another crew to do the work.'

His wife gave a start at this and looked up at him with a passion of anxiety, putting her hand upon his arm.

'The men have as good as told me,' said he, 'through the bo'sun, that there's nothing to be done with jury-masts. They're willing to try their hands to-morrow on another—to oblige me—but they'd rather get my permission to prepare the long-boat for leaving the ship so as to give chase to a sail if one should show too far off to speak us: failing that, then to take advantage of a smooth in the weather and to make for the northward in an open boat—in this sea—the idiots!'

'But something must be done,' shouted Mr. Owen from his corner. 'The ship will go to pieces if she's to be left to knock about in this hollow sea.'

Captain Burke took no more notice than had the doctor's voice been the creaking of a bulkhead.

It was quieter on that than on the preceding night. The wind, we learnt, was a scanty breeze out of the south; here and there the vapour had thinned, and a pale star shivered in the openings: our drift that day had lifted some northward point of ice, and the dim faintness of it was visible on the port beam, as the helpless hull lay; that was all the ice to be seen, and it was far enough off to keep us easy. A large black swell was flowing north and south, but the folds were wide and regular and the motion of the hull was almost easy upon it. These matters about that scene of night outside I got from the captain and steward.

The sailors remained forward. I understood they managed very well now they could keep the galley fire going. Once during this evening I asked Captain Burke, when he came below for a glass of hot grog and biscuit, why he did not burn a signal fire.

'And risk setting the hull in a blaze?' said he, 'with the chance of there being nothing within five hundred miles of us.'

'It might bring help, Edward,' said his wife.

He flung from us in a passion. It was a bad sign with him now, that the merest nothings, such as my question, put him into a rage. He swallowed his glass of grog and returned on deck, and when half-way up the companion ladder he paused to shout back, 'No use in making a flare unless there's something to signal to,' and then stepped into the blackness outside.

It was fine weather next day—fine for that part of the world, I mean; glimpses of watery blue, betwixt curtains of ashy yellow and brown vapour, some slanting pencils of dull sulphur in the north, striking the line of the horizon out of a long ragged edge of cloud. The wind was west, fresh enough to flash plumes of spray out of the running wrinkles; there was the head of an iceberg away north to the right of the weak shower of sunshine. This was all to be seen—saving always the hull with her deck of frozen snow, and her catheads barbed with ice, and her lines of rails bristling with daggers and small arms of frozen dew and brine—when I looked through the companion hatch after leaving my cabin.

Whilst Mrs. Burke, Mr. Owen and myself breakfasted, we heard the people on deck busy with another jury-mast. The captain's voice rang out again in loud eager shouts. Mrs. Burke sent the steward up to beg her husband come below and breakfast whilst the coffee was hot; he sent answer that he could not leave; but even whilst the steward was delivering the captain's reply, a long strange hallo was delivered by one of the men; the sounds of bustle ceased; in a minute or two we heard a rush of feet; Mr. Owen jumped from his chair and ran up the ladder, whence, after he had paused to stare round, he shouted down in a voice of ecstasy:—

'A sail, Mrs. Burke! There's a ship in sight, Miss Otway!'

I screamed with a sudden impulse of delight; I could no more have arrested that cry than have stopped the hull from rolling; then, swiftly as my legs would carry me and my arms would work, I gained my berth and attired myself for the deck, and rushed up reckless of foothold.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME

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