 CHAPTER 1 THE STORM The Laughing Mary was a light ship, a sailor's term of vessel that stands high up on the water, having discharged her cargo at Kalao, from which port we were proceeding in ballast to Cape Town, South Africa, there to call for orders. Our run, too, within a few parallels of the latitude of the Horn, had been extremely pleasant. The proverbial mildness of the Pacific Ocean was in the mellow sweetness of the wind and in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced swell. But scarce had we passed the height of forty-nine degrees, when the weather grew sullen and dark, a heavy bank of clouds of a livid hue rose in the northeast, and the wind came and went in small guns, the gusts venting themselves in dreary moans in so much that our oldest hands confessed they had never heard blast more portentious. The gale came on with some lightning and several claps of thunder and heavy rain. Though it was but two o'clock in the afternoon, the air was so dusky that the men had to feel for the ropes, and when the first of the tempest stormed down upon us, the appearance of the sea was uncommonly terrible, being swept and mangled into boiling froth in the northeast quarter. While stall about us, and in the southwest, it lay in a sort of swollen huddle of shadows, glooming into the darkness of the sky without offering the smallest glimpse of the horizon. In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down to the close-reap main top-sail. Yet, though we were dead before the outfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed of smoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the boughs like a scattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind. The bursting of the top-sail was like the explosion of a large cannon. In a breath the brig was smothered with froth torn up in huge clouds, and hurled over and ahead of her in vast, quivering bodies that filled the wind with a dismal twilight of their own, in which nothing was visible but their terrific speeding. Through these slinging, soft, and singing masses of spume drove the rain and horizontal steel-like lines, which gleamed in the lightning-stroke as though indeed they were barbed weapons of bright metal darted by armies of invisible spirits raving out their war cries as they chased us. The storm made a loud thunder in the sky, and this tremendous utterance dominated without subduing the many screaming, hissing, shrieking, and hooting noises raised in the rigging and about the decks, and the wild, seething, weltering sound of the sea, maddened by the gale and struggling in its enormous passion under the first choking and iron grip of the hurricane's hand. I had used the ocean for above ten years, but never had I encountered anything suddener or fiercer in the form of weather than this. Though the 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 like a knife through the head if you showed your face to it for a second. It was necessary to bring the brig to the wind before the sea rose. The helm was put down, and without a rag of canvas on her she came round. But when she brought the hurricane fairer beam, I thought it was all over with us. She lay down to it until her bulwarks were under water, and the sheer poles in the rigging above the rail hidden. In this posture she hung so long that Captain Rosie, the master, bawled to me to tell the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmost rigging. But the laughing merry, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship and lightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through our seizing a small tarpaulin in the weather-main shrouds, she erected her masts afresh like some sentient creature pricking its ears for the effray, and with that showed herself game and made indifferently good weather of it. But though the first rage of the storm was terrible enough, its fierceness did not come to its height till about one o'clock in the middle watch. Long before then the sea had grown mountainous, and the dance of our eggshell of a brig upon it was sickening and affrighting. The heads of the Andean peaks of black water looked tall enough to brush the lowering soot of the heavens with the blue and yellow phosphoric fires, which sparked ghastly amid the bursting froth. Bodies of foam flew like the flashings of pale sheet lightning through our rigging and over us, and a dreadful roaring of mighty surges in mad career, and battling as they ran rose out of the sea to deepen yet the thunderous bellowing of the hurricane on high. No man could show himself on deck and preserve his life. Between the rails it was waist high, and this water, converted by the motions of the brig into a wild torrent, had its volume perpetually maintained by ton loads of sea falling in dull and pounding crashes over the boughs onto the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm and await the issue bellow, for, if we were to be drowned, it would make a more easy foundering to go down dry and warm in the cabin than to perish half-frozen and already nearly strangled by the bitter cold and flooded tempest on deck. There was Captain Rosie, there was myself, by name Paul Rodney, mate of the brig, and there were the remaining seven of a crew including the carpenter. We sat in the cabin, one of us from time to time clawing his way up the ladder to peer through the companion, and we looked at one another with the melancholy of malefactors waiting to be called from their cells for the last jaunt to tiburn. May God have mercy upon us, cries the carpenter. There must be an earthquake inside this storm. Something more than wind is going to the making of these seas. Hear that now! Not less than a forty-foot chuck-up could have ended in that, south, mates. A man can die but once, says Captain Rosie, and he'll not perish the quicker for looking at his end with a stout heart. And with that he put his hand into the locker on which he had been sitting, and pulled out a jar of whiskey, which after putting his lips to it and keeping them glued there whilst you could have counted twenty, he handed to me, and so it went round coming back to him empty. I often have the sight of that cabin in my mind's eye, and it was not long afterwards that it would visit me as such a vision of comfort I would with a grateful heart have accepted it with tenfold darker conditions of danger had it been possible to exchange my situation for it. A lantern hung from a beam and swung violently to the rolling and pitching of the brig. The alterations of its light put twenty different meanings, one after another, into the settled dismal and rueful expressions in the faces of my companions. We reclad in warm clothes, and the steam rose from the damp in our coats and trousers like vapor from wet straw. The drink modelled some of our faces, but the spiritist tincture only imparted a quality of irony to the melancholy of our visages, as if our mournfulness were not wholly sincere, when God knows our hearts were taken up with counting the minutes when we should find our self-bursting for one of breath under water. Thus it continued till daybreak, all which time we strove to encourage one another as best we could, sometimes with words, sometimes with putting the bottle about. It was impossible for any of us at any moment to show more than our noses above the companion, and even at that you needed the utmost caution. For the decks being full of water it was necessary to await the lurch of the vessel before moving the slide or cover to the companion else you stood to drown the cabin. Being exceedingly anxious, for the briglay unwatched, I looked forth on one occasion longer than the others chose to venture, and beheld the most extravagant scene of raging commotion it could enter the brain of man to imagine. The night was as black as the bottom of a well, but the prodigious swelling and flinging of white water's hove of faintness upon the air that was in its way a dim light, by which it was just possible to distinguish the reeling mass to the height of the tops, and to observe the figure of the brigs bringing black and trembling out of the head of a surge that had broken over and smothered her as in a cauldron, and to note the shapes of the nearer liquid aclivities as they bore down upon our weather-bow, catching the brig fair under the bluff, and so sloping her that she seemed to stand end-on, and so healing her that the sea would wash to the height of the main hatch. Indeed had she been loaded and therefore deep she could not have lived an hour in that hollow and frightful ocean, but having nothing in her but ballast she was like a bladder, and swung up the surges and blew away to leeward like 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 great satisfaction found but little water, only as much as we had a right to suppose she would take in above. But it was impossible to stand at the pumps, so we returned to the cabin and brood some cold punch, and did what we could to keep our spirits hearty. By noon the wind had weakened yet, but the sea still ran very heavily, and the sky was uncommonly thick with piles of dusky yellowish, hurrying clouds, and though we could fairly reckon upon our position, the atmosphere was so nipping it was 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 up a new main topsoil and bent it, and, setting the reefed foresail, put the vessel before the wind in a way she ran chased by the swollen seas. Thus we continued, till by dead reckoning we calculated that we were about thirty leagues south of the parallel of the horn, and in longitude eighty-seven degrees west. We then boarded our larbored tax, and brought the brig as close to the wind as it was proper to lay her for a progress that should not be wholly leeway. But four hours after we had handled the braces, the gale that had not veered two points since it first came on to blow, stormed up again into its first fury. And the morning of the first of July, Anyo, 1801, found the laughing merry passionately laboring in the midst of an enraged Cape Horn Sea. Her jivam and four-top gallant mast gone. Her ballast shifted, so that her posture, even in a calm, would have exhibited her with her starboard channels under, and her deck swept by enormous surges, which, fetching her larbored bilge dreadful blows, thundered in mighty green masses over her. CHAPTER II The Iceberg The loss of the spars I have named was no great matter, nor were we to be intimidated by such weather as was to be expected off Cape Horn. For what sailor entering this icy and temptuous tract of waters but knows that here he must expect to find nature in her most violent moods, crueler and more unrecognable than a madwoman, who one moment looks with a silent, sinister sulleness upon you, and the next is shrieking with devilish laughter as she makes as if to spring upon you. But there was an inveteracy in the gale which had driven us down to this part that bore heavily upon our spirits. It was impossible to trim the ballast. We dared not veer so as to bring the ship on the other tack. And the slope of the decks added to the fierce wild motions of the fabric made our situation as unendurable as that of one who should be confined in a cask and sent rolling downhill. It was impossible to light a fire, and we could not therefore address our food or obtain a warm drink. The cold was beyond language severe. The rigging was glazed with ice, and great pendants of the silvery brilliance of crystal hung from the yards, both sprit and catheds, willest the sails were frozen to the hardness of granite, and lay-like sheets of iron rolled up in gaskets of steel. We had no means of drying our clothes, nor were we able so to move as by exercise we might keep ourselves warm. Never once did the sun shine to give us the encouragement of his glorious beam. Hour after hour found us amid the same distracting scene. The tall, olive-colored seas hurling out their rage in foam as they roared towards us in ranges of dissolving cliffs, the wind screaming and whistling through our gray and frozen rigging, the water washing in floods about our decks, with the ends of the running gear snaking about in the torrent, and the livestock lying drowned in stiff in their coup and pen near the caboose. With helm lashed in yards pointed to the wind thus we lay, thus we drifted, steadily trending with the scent of each giant surge further and deeper into the icy regions of the southwest, helpless, foreboding, disconsolate. It was the night of the fourth day of the month. The crew were forward in the forecastle, and I knew not if any man was on deck saving myself. In truth there was no place in which a watch could be kept. If it were not in the companion hatch. Such was the violence with which the seas broke over the brig, that it was at the risk of his life a man crawled the distance betwixt the forecastle on the quarter-deck. It had been as thick as mud all day, and now upon this flying gloom of haze, sleet, and spray, had descended the blackness of the night. I stood in the companion as in a sentry box, with my eyes just above the cover. Nothing was to be seen but sheets of ghostly white water sweeping up the blackness of the vessel's lee, or breaking and boiling to windward. It was sheer blind chaos to the sight, and you might have supposed that the brig was in the midst of some enormous vaporous turmoil, so elusive and indefinable were the shadows of the storm tormented night, one block of blackness melting into another, with sometimes an extraordinary faintness of light speeding along the dark sky, like to the dim reflection of a lantern, flinging its radiance from afar, which no doubt must have been the reflection of some particular bright and extensive bed of foam upon a suity belly on high, hanging, lower than the other clouds. I say you might have thought yourself in the midst of some hellish conflict of vapor, but for the substantial thunder of the surges upon the vessel, and the shriek of the slung masses of water flying like cannonballs between the masts. After a long and eager look round into the obscurity, semi-lucent with froth, I went below for a mouthful of spirits and a bite of supper, the hour being eight bells in the second dog watch, as we say, that is, eight o'clock in the evening. The captain and the carpenter were in the cabin. Upon the swing tray over the table were a piece of corned beef, some biscuit and a bottle of hollands. Nothing to be seen, I suppose, Rodney, says the captain. Nothing, I answered, she looks well up, and that's all that can be said. I've been hooved to underbare poles more than once in my time, said the carpenter, but never through so long a stretch. I doubt if you'll find many vessels to look up to it as this here laughing merry does. The loss of the hamper forward will make her the more weatherly, says Captain Rosie, but we're in an ugly part of the globe. When bad sailors die, they're sent here, I reckon. The worst nautical sinner can't be hooved to long off the horn without coming out of it with a purred soul. He must start afresh to deserve further punishment. Well, here's a breeze that can't go on blowing much longer, cries the carpenter. The place it comes from must give out soon, unless a new trade winds got fixed into a whole gale for this here ocean. What salting do you allow our drift will be giving us, Captain? I asked, munching a piece of beef. All four mile an hour, he answered, if this goes on I shall look to make some discoveries. The Antarctic circle won't be far off presently, and since you're a scholar, Rodney, I'll leave you to describe what's inside of it. Though boil me if I don't have the naming of the tallest land for DSC, I have a mind to be known after I'm dead, and there's nothing like your signature on a mountain to be remembered by. He grinned and put his hand out for the bottle, and after a pool passed it to the carpenter. I guessed by his dracosity that he had already been making somewhat free, for although I love a bold face put upon a difficulty, ours was a situation in which only a tipsy man could find food for merriment. At this instant we were startled by a wild and fearful shout on deck. It sounded high above the sweeping and seething of the wind and the hissing of the lashed waters, and it penetrated the planks with a note that gave it an inexpressible character of anguish. A man washed overboard, followed the carpenter, springing to his feet. No, cried I. For my younger and shrewder ear had caught a note in the cry that persuaded me it was not as the carpenter said, and in an instant the three of us jumped up the ladder and gained the deck. The moment I was in the gale, the same affrighted cry rang down along the wind from some man forward. For God's sake tumble up before we are upon it. What do you see? I roared, sending my voice, trumpet fashion, through my hands, for as to my own and the sight of Captain Rosie and the carpenter, why it was like being struck blind to come on a sudden out of the lighted cabin into the black night. Any reply that might have been attempted was choked out by the dive of the brig's head into a sea, which furiously flooded her forecastle and came washing aft like milk in the darkness till it was up to our knees. See there? Suddenly roared the carpenter. Where, man, where? bawled the captain. But in this brief time my sight had grown used to the night, and I saw the object before the carpenter could answer. It lay on our lee-beam. But how far off no man could have told in that black thickness? It stood against the darkness and hung out a dim complexion of light, or rather of pallidness, that was not light, not to be described by the pen. It was like a small hill of snow and looked as snow does or the foam of the sea in darkness, and it came and went with our soaring and sinking. Ice, I shouted to the captain. I see it, he answered, in a voice that satisfied me the consternation he was under had settled the fumes of the spirits out of his head. We must drive her clear at all risks. There was no need to call the men, to the second cry that had been raised, by one among them who had come out of the forecastle and seen the burg. They had tumbled up as sailors will when they jumped for their lives, and now they came staggering, splashing, crawling aft to us, for the lamp in the cabin made a sheen in the companion hatch, and they could see us as we stood there. Men, cried Captain Rosie, yonder's a gravestone for our carcasses if we are not lively, cast the helm adrift, we steered by a tiller. Two hands stand by it, forward some of thee, and loose the stay for sale, and show the head of it. The fellows hung in the wind, I could not wonder. The bowsprit had been sprung, when the jib-m was wrenched from the cap by the fall of the top gallant mast. It still had to bear the weight of the heavy spritz sail-yard, and the drag of the stay-sail might carry the spar overboard with the men upon it. Yet it was our best chance, the one sail most speedily released and hoisted, the one that would pay the brig's head off quickest, and the only fragment that promised to stand. Jump, roared the captains, in a passion of hurry. Great thunder, tis close aboard! You'll leave me no sea-room for veering if you delay an instant. Follow me who will, I cried out, and others stand by ready to hoist away. Thus speaking, for there seemed to my mind a sure promise of death and hesitation at this supreme moment, then in twenty such risk as laying out on the bowsprit signified, I made for the lee of the weather-bowl works, and blindly hauled myself forward by such pins and gear as came to my hands. A man might spend his life on the ocean and never have to deal with such a passage as this. It was not the bitter cold only, though perhaps of its full fierceness the wildness of my feelings did not suffer me to be sensible. It was the pouring of volumes of water upon me from over the rail, often tumbling upon my head with such weight as nearly to beat the breath out of my body, and sink me to the deck. It was the frenzy excited in me by the tremendous obligation of dispatch and my retardment by the washing seas, the violent motions of the brig, the encumbrance of gear and deck furniture adrift and sweeping here and there, and the sense that the vessel might be grinding her bows against the iceberg before I should be able to reach the bowsprit. All this it was that filled me with the kind of madness, by sheer force of which alone I was enabled to reach the forecastle, for had I gone to my duty coldly without agitation of spirits, my heart must have failed me before I had measured half the length of the brig. I got onto the bowsprit, nearly stifled by the showering of the seas, holding an open knife between my teeth, half dazed by the prodigious motion of the light brig, which at this extreme end of her was to be felt to the full height of its extravagance, at every plunge I expected to be buried, and every moment I was prepared to be torn from my hold. It was a fearful time, the falling off of the brig into the trowel, and never was I in a hollower and more swelling sea. Her falling off, I say, in the act of veering, might end us out of hand by the rolling of a surge over us big enough to crush the vessel down fathoms out of sight, and then there was that horrible heap of faint whiteness leaping out of the dense blackness of the sky, gathering a more visible sharpness of outline with every liquid heave that forked as high into the flying night, with shrieking rigging and boiling decks. Commending myself to God, for I was now to let go with my hands, I pulled the knife from my teeth, and feeling for the gaskets or lines which bound the sail to the spar, I cut and hacked as fast as I could ply my arms, and a flash, the gale whipping into a liberated fold of the canvas, blew the whole sail out. The bow sprit reeled and quivered under me. I danced off it with incredible dispatch, shouting to the men to hoist away. The head of the stay sail mounted in thunder, and the slatting of its folds and the threshing of its sheet was like the rattling of heavy field pieces whisked at full gallop over a stony road. High enough, I bawled, guessing it enough was shown, for I could not see, get a drag upon the sheet lads, and then aft with you for your lives. Scarce had I left forth my breath in this cry when I heard the blast as if a gun, and knew by that the sail was gone. An instant after wash came a mountainous sea shear over the weather bulwarks fair betwixt the force and main rigging. But happily, standing near the force shrouds, I was holding on with both hands to the top sail halyards, whilst calling to the men, so that being under the rail, which broke the blow of the sea, and holding on to, no mischief befell me. Only that for about twenty seconds I stood in the horrible fury and smother of frothing water, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, with every faculty in me so numbed and dulled by the wet cold and horror of our situation, that I knew not whether in that space of time I was in the least degree sensible of what had happened or what might befall. The water leaving the deck I rallied, though half-drowned, and staggered aft, and found the helm deserted, nor could I see any signs of my companions. I rushed to the tiller, and putting my whole weight and force to it, drove it up to windward, and secured it by a turn of its own rope. For ice or no ice, and for the moment I was so blinded by the wet that I could not see the burg, my madness now was to get the burg before the sea, and out of the trow, advised by every instinct in me that such another surge is that which had rolled over her, must send her to the bottom in less time than it would take a man to cry, oh God. A figure came out of the blackness on the lee side of the deck. Who is that? said he. It was Captain Rosie. I answered. What? Rodney. Alive? cried he. I think I have been struck insensible. Two more figures came crawling aft, then two more. They were the carpenter and three seamen. I cried out. Who was at the helm when that sea was shipped? A man answered, me, Thomas Dobbling. Where's your mate? I asked. And it seemed to me that I was the only man who had his senses full just then. He was washed forward along with me, he replied. Now a fifth man joined us, but before I could question him as to the others, the captain with a scream like an epileptics cry shrieked, it's all over with us, we are upon it. I looked and perceived the iceberg to be within a musket shot. Once it was clear that it had been closer to us when first sighted, then the blackness of the night would suffer us to distinguish. In a time like this at sea, events throng so fast they come in a heap, and even if the intelligence was not confounded by the uproar and peril, if indeed it were as placid in any time of perfect security, it could not possibly take note of one tenth that happens. I confess that, for my part, I was very nearly paralyzed by the nearness of the iceberg, and by the cry of the captain, and by the perception that there was nothing to be done. That which I best recollect is the appearance of the massive ice lying solidly, like a little island upon the seas which roared in creaming waters about it. Every blow of the black and arching surge was reverberated in an adult hollow tremble back to the ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body was not taller than our mast heads, yet it showed like a mountain hanging over us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep pacific hollow, leaving us staring upwards out of the instant stagnation of the trough with lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes. It put a kind of film of faint light outside the lines of its own shape, and this served to magnify it, and it showed spectrally in the darkness as though it reflected some visionary light that came neither from the sea nor the sky. These points I recollect, likewise the maddening and maddened motion of our vessel sliding towards it down one midnight declivity to another. All other features were swallowed up in the agony of the time. One monstrous swing the brig gave, like to some doomed creatures last delirious struggle. The bowsprit caught the ice and snapped with the noise of a great tree crackling in fire. I could hear the masts breaking overhead. The crash and blows of spars and yards torn down and striking the hull. Above all, the grating of the vessel. That was now head onto the sea and swept by the billows, broadside on, along the sharp and murderous projections. Two monster seas tumbled over the bows, floated me off my legs and dashed me against the tiller to which I clung. I heard no cries. I regained my feet clinging with a death grip to the tiller and seeing no one near me tried to holla to know if any man were living but could not make my voice sound. The fearful grating noise ceased on a sudden and the faintness of the berg loomed upon the starboard bow. We had been hurled clear of it and were too leeward, but what was our condition? I tried to shout again but to no purpose, and was in the act of quitting the tiller to go forward when I was struck over the brow by something from aloft, a block, as I believe, and fell senseless upon the deck. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of the Frozen Pirate This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Barbara Dirksen The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell Chapter 3 I Lose My Companions I lay for a long while insensible, and that I should have recovered my mind instead of dying in that swoon I must ever account as the greatest wonder of a life that has not been wanting in the marvellous. I had no sooner sat up than all that had happened and my present situation instantly came to me. My hair was stiff with ice. There was no more feeling in my hands than had they been of stone. My clothes weighed upon me like a suit of armour, so inflexibly hard were they frozen. Yet I got upon my legs and found that I could stand and walk, and that life flowed warm in my veins, for all that I had been lying motionless for an hour or more, laved by water that would have become ice had it been still. It was intensely dark, the binocle lamp was extinguished, and the light in the cabin burned too dimly to throw the faintest colour upon the hatchway. One thing I quickly noticed that the gale had broken and blew no more than a fresh breeze. The sea still ran very high, but though every surge continued to hurl its head of snow and the heavens to resemble ink from contrast with the passage, as it seemed, close under them of these pallid bodies, there was less spite in its wash, less fury in its blow. The multitudinous roaring of the heaving blackness had sobered into a hardened sullen growling, a sound as of thunder among mountains heard in a valley. The brig pitched and rolled heavily. Much of the buoyancy of her earlier dance was gone out of her. Nevertheless, I could not persuade myself that this sluggishness was altogether due to the water she had taken in. It was wonderful, however, that she should still be afloat. No man could have heard the rending and grating of her side against the ice without supposing that every plank in it was being torn out. Finding that I had the use of my voice I hallowed as loudly as I could, but no human note responded. Three or four times I shouted, giving some of the people their names, but in vain. Father of mercy, I thought, would has come to pass. Is it possible that all my companions have been washed overboard? Certainly five men at least were living before we followed the ice. And again I cried out, Is there any one alive? Looking wildly along the black decks, and putting so much force into my voice with the consternation that the thought of my being alone raised in me, that I had liked to have burst a blood vessel. My loneliness was more terrible to me than any other condition of my situation. It was dreadful to be standing, nearly dead with cold, in utter darkness, upon the flooded decks of a hull wallowing miserably amid the black hollows and eager foaming peaks of the laboring sea, convinced that she was slowly filling, and that at any moment she might go down with me. It was dreadful, I say, to be thus placed, and to feel that I was in the heart of the rudest, most desolate space of sea in the world, into which the commerce of the earth dispatched but few ships all the year round. But no feature of my lamentable situation so affrighted me, so worked upon the passions of my mind as my loneliness. Oh, for one companion, even one only, to make me an echo for mine own speech. Nay, God himself, the merciful father of all, even he seemed not. The blackness lay like a pall upon the deep, and upon my soul. Misery and horror were within that shadow, and beyond it nothing that my spirit could look up to. I stood for some moments as one stunned, and then my manhood, trained to some purpose by the usage of the sea, reasserted itself. And maybe I also got some slender comfort from observing that, dull and heavy, as was the motion of the brig, there was yet the buoyancy of vitality in her manner of mounting the seas, and that, after all, her case might not be so desperate as was threatened by the way in which she had been torn and precipitated past the iceberg. At moments when she plunged the whiteness of the water creaming upon the surges on either hand, throughout a phantom light of sufficient power, to enable me to see that the forward part of the brig was littered with wreckage, which served to a certain extent as a breakwater by preventing the seas, which washed onto the forecastle from cascading with their former violence aft, also that the whole length of the main and top masts lay upon the larboard rail and over the side, held in that position by the gear attached to them. This was all that I could distinguish, and of this only the most elusive glimpse was to be had. Feeling as though the very marrow in my bones were frozen, I crawled to the companion and, pulling open the door, descended. The lamp in the companion burnt faintly. There was a clock fixed to a beam over the table. My eyes directly sought it and found the time twenty minutes after ten. This signified that I had ten or eleven hours of darkness before me. I took down the lamp, trimmed it, and went to the lazarette hatch at the after-end of the cabin. Here were kept the stores for the crew. I lifted the hatch and listened, and could hear the water in the hold, gurgling and rushing with every lift of the brig's boughs, and I could not question from the volume of water which the sound indicated that the vessel was steadily taking it in, but not rapidly. I swallowed half a panic in of the Hollands for the sake of the warmth and life of the draft, and entering my cabin put on thick dry stockings, first chafing my feet till I felt the blood in them, and I then, with the seamen's dispatch, shifted the rest of my apparel, and could not express how greatly I was comforted by the change, though the jacket and trousers I put on were still damp with the soaking of previous days. To render myself as waterproof as possible, for it was the wet clothes against the skin that made the cold so cruel, I took from the captain's cabin a stout cloak and threw it over me, enveloping my head which I had cased in a warm fur cap with the hood of it, and thus equipped, I lighted a small hand lantern that was used on dark nights for heaving the log, that is, for showing how the sand runs in the glass, and carried it on deck. The lantern made this scene a dead, grave-like black outside its little circle of illumination. Nevertheless, its rays suffered me to guess at the picture of ruin the deck's offered. The main mast was snapped three or four feet above the deck, and the stump of it showed as jagged and barbed as a wild beast's teeth. But I now noticed that the weight of the hamper, being on the larboard side, balanced the list the vessel took from her shifted ballast, and that she floated on a level keel with her boughs fair at the sea, whence I concluded that a sort of sea anchor had been formed ahead of her by the wreckage, and that it held her in that posture, otherwise she must certainly have fallen into the trough. I moved with extreme caution, casting the lantern light before me, sometimes starting at a sound that resembled a groan, then stopping to steady myself during some particular wild leap of the hull, until, coming abreast of the main hatch, the rays of the lanterns struck upon a man's body, which, on my bringing the flame to his face, proved to be Captain Rosie. There was a wound over his right brow, and as if that had not sufficed to slay him, the fall of the masts had in some wonderful manner whipped a rope several times round his body, binding his arms and encircling his throat so tightly that no executioner could have gone more artistically to work to pinion and choke a man. Under a mass of rigging in the larboard scuppers lay two bodies, as I could just faintly discern. It was impossible to put the lantern close enough to either one of them to distinguish his face, nor had I the strength, even if I had possessed the weapons to extricate them, for they lay under a whole body of shrouds, complicated by a mass of other year, against which leaned a portion of the caboose. I viewed them long enough to satisfy my mind that they were dead, and then, with a heart of lead, turned away. I crossed to the starboard side where the deck was comparatively clear and found the body of a seaman named Abraham Wise near the forehatch. This man had probably been stunned and drowned by the sea that filled the deck after I loosed the stay sail. These were all of our people that I could find. The others, I supposed, had been washed by the water or knocked by the falling spars overboard. I returned to the quarter-deck and sat down in the companion-way for the shelter of it and to think. No language that I have command of could put before you the horror that possessed me as I sat meditating upon my situation and recalling the faces of the dead. The wind was rapidly falling and with it the sea, but the motion of the brig continued very heavy, a large swell having been set running by the long, fierce gale that was gone. And there being no uproar of tempest in the sky to confound the senses, I could hear a hundred harsh and melancholy groaning and straining sounds rising from the hull, with now and again a mighty blow as from some spar or lump of ice alongside, weighty enough you would have supposed to stave the ship. But though the Laughing Mary was not a new vessel, she was one of the stoutest of her kind ever launched, built mainly of oak and put together by an honest artificer. Nevertheless, her continuing to float in her miserably torn and mangled condition was so great a miracle that, spite of my poor shipmates having perished and my own state being as hopeless as the sky was starless, I could not but consider that God's hand was very visible in this business. I will not pretend to remember how I passed the hours till the dawn came. I recollect of frequently stepping below to lift the hatch of the lazarette, to judge by the sound of the quantity of water in the vessel. The she was filling I knew well, yet not leaking so rapidly, but that had our crew been preserved, we might easily have kept her free, and made shift to rig up jury masts and haul us as best we could out of these desolate parallels. There was, however, nothing to be done till the day broke. I had noticed the jolly boat bottom up near the starboard gangway, and so far as I could make out by throwing the dull lantern light upon her, she was sound, but I could not have launched her without seeing what I was doing, and even had I managed this, she stood to be swamped and I to be drowned. And in sober truth so horrible was the prospect of going adrift in her without preparing for the adventure with oars, sail, mast, provisions, and water, most of which, by the lamp light only, were not to become at amid the hideous muddle of wreckage, that sooner than face it I was perfectly satisfied to take my chance of the hulk sinking with me in her before the sun rose. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of the frozen pirate This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Barbara Dirksen The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell Chapter 4 I Quit the Wreck The east grew pale and gray at last. The sea rolled black as the night from it with a rounded smooth-backed swell. The wind was spent. Only a small air still from the northeast stirred. There were a few stars dying out in the dark west. The atmosphere was clear and when the sun rose I knew he would turn the sable-pall overhead into blueness. The hull lay very deep. I had at one time during the black hours struck into a mournful calculation and reckoned that the brig would float some two or three hours after sunrise. But when the glorious beam flashed out at last and transformed the ashen hue of dawn into a cerulean brilliance and a deep of rolling sapphire I started with sudden terror to observe how close the covering board sat upon the water and how the head of every swell ran past as high as the bulwark rail. Yet for a few moments I stood contemplating the scene of ruin. It was visible now to its most trifling detail. The form asked was gone smooth off the deck. It lay over the starboard bow and the top mast floated ahead of the hull held by the gear. Many feet of bulwarks were crushed level. The pumps had vanished. The caboose was gone. A complete nautical ruin I had never viewed. One extraordinary stroke I quickly detected. The jolly boat had lain stowed in the long boat. It was thus we carried those boats, the little one lying snugly enough in the other. The sea that had flooded our decks had floated the jolly boat out of the long boat and swept it bottom up to the gangway where it lay as though God's mercy designed it should be preserved for my use. For not long after it had been floated out the brig struck the berg, the masts fell and there lay the long boat crushed into staves. The signal and surprising intervention filled my heart with thankfulness though my spirit sank again at the sight of my poor drowned shipmates. But unless I had a mind to join them it was necessary I should speedily bestar myself. So after a minute's reflection I whipped out my knife and cutting a couple of blocks away from the raffle on deck I rove a line through them and so made a tackle by the help of which I turned the jolly boat over. I then with a hand spike prized her nose to the gangway secured a bunch of rope on either side her to act as fenders or buffers when she should be launched and lying alongside. Ran her midway out by the tackle and attaching a line to a ring bolt in her bow shoved her over the side and she fell with a splash shipping scarce a hat full of water. I found her mast and sail. The sail furled to the mast as it was used to lie in her close against the stump of the main mast but though I sought with all the diligence that hurry would permit for her rudder I nowhere sought but I met with an oar that had belonged to the other boat and this with the mast and sail I dropped into her the swell lifting her up to my hand when the blue fold swung past. My next business was to victual her. I ran to the cabin but the lazarette was full of water and none of the provisions in it to become at. I there upon ransacked the cabin and found a whole Dutch cheese a piece of raw pork half a ham eight or ten biscuits some candles a tinderbox several lemons a little bag of flour and thirteen bottles of beer. These things I rolled up in a cloth and placed them in the boat then took from the captain's locker four jars of spirits two of which I emptied that I might fill them with fresh water. I also took with me from the captain's cabin a small boat compass. The heavy sluggish sodden movement of the hull advised me to make haste. She was now barely lifting to the swell that came brimming in broad liquid blue brows to her stem. It seemed as though another ton of water would sink her and if the swell fell over her bows and filled the decks down she would go. I had a small parcel of guineas in my chest and was about to fetch this money when a sort of staggering sensation in the upwards slide of the hull gave me a fright and watching my chance I jumped into the boat and cast the line that held her adrift. The sun was an hour above the horizon the sea a deep blue heaving very slowly though you felt the weight of the mighty ocean in every fold and eastwards the shoulder of the swell catching the glorious reflection of the sun hurled the splendor along till all that quarter of the sea looked to be a mass of leaping dazzle. Upon the eastern sea line lay a range of white clouds compact as the chalk cliffs of Dover threads crescents feather shapes of vapor of the daintiest sort shot with pearly luster floated overhead very high It was in truth a fair and pleasant morning of an icy coldness indeed but the air being dry its shrewdness was endureable yet it was a brightness to me with anguish by obliging me to reflect how it would have been with us had it dawn yesterday instead of today my companions would have been alive and yonder sinking ruined fabric a trim ship capable of bearing us stoutly into warm seas and to our homes at last I threw the oar over the stern of the boat to keep her near to the brig not so much because I desired to see the last of her as because of the shrinking of my soul within me from the thought of heading in my loneliness into those prodigious leagues of ocean which lay stretched under the sky whilst the hull floated she was something to hold on to so to say something for the eye amid the vastness of water to rest upon something to take out of the insufferable feeling of solitude the poisonous sting of conviction but her end was at hand I had risen to step the boat's mast and was standing and grasping it whilst I directed a slow look round the horizon in God knows what vain hope of beholding a sail when my eye coming to the brig I observed that she was sinking she went down very slowly there was a horrible gurgling sound of water rushing into her and her main deck blew up with a loud clap or blast of noise I could follow the line of her bulwarks fluctuating and waving in the clear dark blue when she was some feet under a number of whirlpools spun round over her but the slowness of her foundering was solemnly marked by the gradual descent of the ruins of masts and yards which were attached to the hull by the rigging and which she dragged down with her on a sudden when the last fragment of mast had disappeared and when the hollows of the whirlpools were flattening to the level surface of the sea up rose a body with a sort of leap it was the sailor that had lain round on the starboard side of the forward deck being frozen stiff he rose in the posture in which he had expired that is with his arms extended so that when he jumped to the surface he came with his hands lifted up to heaven and thus he stayed a minute sustained by the eddies which also revolved him the shock occasioned by this melancholy object was so great it came near to causing me to swoon he sank when the water ceased to twist him and I was unspeakingly thankful to see him vanish for his posture had all the horror of a spectral appeal and such was the state of my mind that imagination might quickly have worked the apparition had it lingered into an instrument for the unsettling of my reason I rose from the seat onto which I had sunk and loose the sail and hauling the sheet aft put the oar over the stern and brought the little craft's head to an easterly course the draft of air was extremely weak and scarce furnished impulse enough to the sail to raise a bubble alongside the boat was about fifteen feet long she would be but a small boat for summer pleasuring in English July lake waters yet here was I in her in the heart of a vast ocean many leagues south and west of the stormiest most inhospitable point of land in the world with distances before me almost infinite for such a boat as this to measure ere I could heave a civilized coast or a habitable island into view at the start I had a mind to steer northwest and blow as the wind would suffer into the south sea where perchance I might meet a whaler or a south seaman from New Holland but my heart sank at the prospect of the leagues of water which rolled between me and the islands and the western American seaboard indeed I understood that my only hope of deliverance lay in being picked up and that though by heading east I should be clinging to the stormy parts I was more likely to meet with a ship hereabouts than by sailing into the great desolation of the northwest the burden of my loneliness weighed down upon me so crushingly that I cannot but consider my senses must have been somewhat dulled by suffering for they had been active to their old accustomed height I am persuaded my heart must have broken and that I should have died of grief faintly as the wind blew it speedily wafted me out of sight of the floating relics of the wreck and then all was bare, bald, swelling sea an imperiled sky darkening in lagoons of azure down to the soft mountainous masses of white vapor lying like the coast of a continent on the larboard horizon but one living thing there was besides myself a grey-breasted albatross of a princely width of pinion I had not observed it till the hull went down and then lifting my eyes within voluntary sympathy in the direction pointed to by the upraised arms of the sailor I observed the great royal bird hanging like a shape of marble directly over the frothing eddies it was as though the spirit of the deep had taken form in the substance of the noblest of all the fowls of its dominions and poised on tremorless wings was surveying with the cold curiosity of an intelligence empty of human emotion the destruction of one of those fabrics whose unequal contests and repeated triumphs had provoked its haughty surprise the bird quitted the spot of the wreck after a while and followed me its eyes had the sparkling blood red gleam of rubies it was as silent as a phantom and with arched neck and motionless plumes seemed to watch me with an earnestness that presently grew insufferable so far from finding any comfort of companionship in the creature me thought if I did not speedily break from the motionless posture in which it rested on its seat of air and removed its piercing gaze it would end in crazing me I felt a sudden rage and jumping up shouted and shook my fist at it this frightened the thing it uttered a strange salt cry the very note of a gust of wind splitting upon a rope flopped its wings and after a turn or two sailed away into the north I watched it till its figure melted into the blue atmosphere and then sank trembling into the stern sheets of the boat End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of the Frozen Pirate This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Barbara Dirksen The Frozen Pirate by W. Clark Russell Chapter 5 I sight a white coast Four days did I pass in that little open boat The first day was fine till sunset It then blew fresh from the northwest and I was obliged to keep the boat before the wind The next day was dark and turbulent with heavy falls of snow and a high swell from the north and the wind a small gale On the third day the sun shone and it was a fair day but horribly cold and I saw two icebergs like clouds upon the far western sea line There followed a cruel night of clouded skies sleet and snow and a very troubled sea and then broke the fourth day as softly brilliant as an English Mayday but cold, great God how cold! Thus might I epitomize this passage and I do so to spare you the weariness of a relation of uneventful suffering In those four days I mainly ran before the wind and in this way drove many leagues south though whenever a chance offered I hauled my sheet for the east I know not, I am sure, how the boat lived I might pretend it was due to my clever management I do not say I had no share in my own preservation but to God belongs all the praise In the blackness of the first night the sea boiled all about me The boat leapt into hollows in which the sail slapped the mast One look behind me at the high dark curl of the oncoming surge had so affrighted me that I never durst turned my head again lest the sight should deprive me of the nerve to hold the oar with which I steered I sat as squarely as the task of steering would suffer trusting that if a sea should tumble over the stern my back would serve as a breakwater and save the boat from being swamped The whole sail was on her and I could not help myself for it would have been certain death to quit the steering oar for an instant It was this that saved me perhaps for the boat blew along with such prodigious speed running to the height of a sea as though she meant to dart from that eminence into the air that the slope of each following surge swung like a pendulum under her and though her sail was becalmed in the trough her momentum was so great that she was speeding up the aclivity and catching the whole weight of the wind afresh before there was time for her to lose way I was nearly dead with cold and misery when the morning came but the sparkling sun in the blue sky cheered me and as wind and sea fell with the roaring of the orb I was enabled to flatten aft the sheet and let the boat steer herself whilst I beat my arms about for warmth and broke my fast When I look back I wonder that I should have taken any pains to live that it is possible for the human mind at any period of its existence to be absolutely hopeless I do not believe but I can very honestly say that when I gazed round upon the enormous sea I was in and considered the size of my boat the quantity of my provisions and my distance even if I was heading that way from the nearest point of land I was not sensible of the faintest stirring of hope and viewed myself as a dead man no bird came near me once I spied the back of a great black fish about a quarter of a mile off the wetness of it caught the sunshine and reflected it like a mirror of polished steel and the flash was so brilliant it might have passed for a bed of white fire floating on the blue heavings but nothing more that was living did I meet and such was the vastness of the sea over which my little keel glided in the midst of which I sat abandoned by the angels that for utter loneliness I might have been the very last of the human race when the third night came down with sullen blasts sweeping into a steady storming of wind that swung a strong melancholy howl through the gloom it found me so weak with cold watching in anxiety and the want of space wherein to rid my limbs of the painful cramp which weighted them with an insupportable leaden sensation that I had barely power to control the boat with the oar I pineed for sleep one hour of slumber wood I felt give me a new life but I durst not close my eyes the boat was sweeping through the dark and seething seas and her course had to be that of an arrow or she would capsize and be smothered in a breath maybe I felt something delirious for I had many strange and frightful fancies indeed I doubt not was the spirit of madness that is certainly tonical when small which furnished strength enough to my arm to steer with it was like the action of a powerful cordial in my blood and the very horrors it fed my brain with were an animation to my physical qualities the gale became a voice it cried out my name and every shout of it past my ear had the sound of the word despair I witnessed the forms of huge phantoms flying over the boat I watched the beating of their giant wings of shadow and heard the thunder of their laughter as they fled ahead leaving scores of like monstrous shapes to follow there was a faint lightning of phosphor in the creaming heads of the ebb and surges and my sick imagination twisted that pallid complexion into the dim reflection of the lamps of illuminated pavilions at the bottom of the sea mystic palaces of green marble radiant cities in the measureless kingdoms of the ocean gods I had a fancy of roofs of pearl below turrets of milk white coral pavements of rainbow luster like to the shootings and dartings of the hues of shells inclined and trembled to the sun I thought I could behold the movements of shapes as indeterminable as the forms which swarm in dreams human brows crowned with gold the cold round emerald eyes of fish the creamy breasts of women large outlines slowly floating upwards making a deeper blackness upon the blackness like the dye of the electric storm upon the velvet bosom of midnight often I would shrink from side to side starting from a fancied apparition leaping into terrible being out of some hurling block of liquid obscurity once a light shone upon the masthead at any other time I should have known this to be a st. Elmo's fire a corpusant the igneous fatuous of the deep and hailed it with a seaman's faith in its promise of gentle weather but to my distempered fancy it was a lantern hung up by a spirit hand I traced the dusky curve of an arm and observed the busy twitching of visionary fingers by the rays of the ghostly light the outline of a large face of a bland and sorrowful expression pallid as any foam flake whirling past came into the sphere of those graveyard rays I shrieked and shut my eyes and when I looked again the light was gone long before daybreak I was exhausted mercifully the wind was scant the stars shone very gloriously on high sparkled the cross of the southern world a benign influence seemed to steal into me out of its silver shining the craze fell from me and I wept shortly afterwards worn out by three days and nights of suffering I fell into a deep sleep and when I awoke my eyes opened right upon the blinding sun this was the morning of the fourth day I was without a watch by the height of the sun I reckoned the hour to be ten I threw a languid glance at the compass and found the boat's head pointing northwest she fell off and came to being without governance and was scarcely sailing therefore the wind was west a very light breeze just enough to put a bright twinkling into the long smooth folds of the wide and weighty swell that was rolling up from the northeast I tried to stand but was so benumbed that many minutes passed before I had the use of my legs brightly as the sun shone there was no more warmth in his light than you would find in a moonbeam on a frosty night and the bite in the air was like the pang of ice itself pressed against the cheek my right hand suffered most I had fallen asleep clasping the loom of the steering-or and when I awoke my fingers still gripped it so that on withdrawing them they remained curved like talons and I believed I had lost their use and even reckoned they would snap off and so set up a mortification till by much diligent rubbing I grew sensible of a small glow which, increasing, ended in rendering the joint supple I stood up to take a view of the horizon and the first sight that met my eye forced to cry from me extending the whole length of the southwest seaboard lay what I took to be a line of white coast melting at either extremity into the blue airy distance even at the low elevation of the boat my eye seemed to measure 30 miles of it it was not white as chalk is there was something of a crystalline complexion upon the face of its solidity it was too far off to enable me to remark its outline yet on straining my sight the atmosphere being very exquisitely clear I thought I could distinguish the projections of peaks of rounded slopes and aerial angularities in places which, in the refractive lens of the air, looked with their hue of glassy azure like the loom of high land behind the coastal line the notion that it was ice came into my head after the first prospect of it and then I returned to my earlier belief that it was land me thought if it were ice it must be the borderland of the Antarctic circle the limits of the unfrozen ocean for it was incredible that so mighty a body could signify less than the capes and terraces of a continent of ice glazing the circumference of the pole for leagues and leagues but then I also knew that, though first the brig and then my boat had been for days steadily blown south, I was still to the north of the south Shetland parallels and many degrees therefore removed from the polar barrier hence I concluded that what I saw was land and that the peculiar crystal shining of it was caused by the snow that covered it but what land some large island that had been missed by the explorers and left uncharted I put a picture of the map of this part of the world before my mind's eye and fell to an earnest consideration of it but could recollect of no land hereabouts unless indeed we had been wildly wrong in our reckoning aboard the brig and I in the boat had been driven four or five times the distance I had calculated things not to be entertained yet even as a mere break in the frightful and enduring continuity of the sea line even as something that was not sea nor sky nor the cold silent and mocking illusion of clouds it took a character of blessedness in my eyes my gaze hung upon it joyously and my heart swelled with a new impulse of life in my breast it would be strange I thought if on approaching it something to promise me deliverance from this dreadful situation did not offer itself some whaler or traitor at anchor signs of habitation and the presence of men nay even a single hut to serve as a refuge from the pitiless cold the stormy waters the black lonely delirious watches of the night till help should heave into view with the white canvas of a ship I put the boat's head before the wind and steered with one hand whilst I got some breakfast with the other I thanked God for the brightness of the day and for the sight of that strange white line of land that went in glimmering blobs of faintness to the trembling horizon where the southern end of it died out the swell rose full and brimming ahead rolling in sapphire hills out of the northeast as I have said once I inferred that the extremity of the land did not extend very much further than I could see it otherwise there could not have been so much weight of water as I found in the heaving the breeze blew lightly and was the weaker for my running before it but the little line of froth that slipped past either side the boat gave me to know that the speed would not be less than four miles in the hour and as I reckoned the land to be but a few leagues distant I calculated upon being ashore some little while before sundown in this way two hours passed by this time the features of the coast were tolerably distinct yet I was puzzled there was a peculiar sheen all about the irregular skyline a kind of pearly whitening as it were of the heavens beyond like to the effect produced by the rising of a very delicate soft mist melting from a mountain's brow into the air this dismayed me still I cried to myself it must be land all that weightness is snow and the luminous tinge above it is the reflection of the glaring sunshine thrown upwards from the dazzle it cannot be ice tis too mighty a barrier surely no single iceberg ever reached to the prodigious proportions of that coast and it cannot be an assemblage of bergs for there is no break it is leagues of solid conformation oh yes it is land sure enough some island whose tops and seabird are covered with snow but what of that it may be populated all the same are the northern kingdoms of europe bear of life because of the winter rigors and then thought to myself if that island have natives I would rather encounter them as the savages of an ice-bound country than as the inhabitants of a land of sunshine and spices and radiant vegetation for it is the den zions of the most gloriously fair ocean seats in the world who are man-eaters not the patagonian giant though he be nor the blubber-fed anatomies of the ice climbs thus I sought to reassure and comfort myself meanwhile my boat sailed quietly along running up and down the smooth and fomeless hills of water very buoyantly and the sun slided into the northwest sky and darted a reddening beam upon the coast towards which I steered end of chapter five chapter six of the frozen pirate by w clark russell this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox.org recording by barbara dirksen the frozen pirate by w clark russell chapter six an island of ice I had to approach the coast within two miles before I could satisfy my mind of its nature and then all doubt left me it was ice a mighty crescent of it as was now in a measure gatherable floating upon the dark blue waters like the new moon upon the field of the sky for a great while I had struggled with my misgivings so tyrannically will hope lord it even over conviction itself until it was impossible for me to any longer mistake and then when I knew it to be ice I asked myself what other thing I expected it should prove seeing that this ocean had been plentifully navigated since cook's time and no land discovered where I was and I called myself a fool and cursed the hope that had cheated me and in short gave way to a violent outburst of passion and was indeed so wild with grief and rage that had my ecstasy been but a very little greater I must have jumped overboard so great was my loathing of life then and the horror the sight of the ice filled me with indeed you cannot conceive how shocking to me was the appearance of that great gleaming length of white desolation on the deck of a stout ship sailing safely past it I should have found the scene magnificent I doubt not for the sun being low with westering Sean Redley and the range of ice stood in a kind of gold atmosphere which gave an extraordinary richness to the shadowings of its rocks and peaks and a particular fullness of mellow whiteness to its lustrous parts softening the dazzle into an airy tenderness of brightness so that the whole mass shone out with the blandness visible in a glorious star but its main beauty lay in those features by which I knew it to be ice I mean in a vast surprising variety of forms such as steeples towers columns pyramids runes as it might be of temples grotesque shapes as of mighty statues left unfinished by the hands of Titans domes as of cathedrals castellated heights fragments of ramparts and the like these features lay in groups as if veritably the line of coast were dotted with gatherings of royal mansions and remains of imperial magnificence all of white marble yet with a glassy tincture as though the material owned something of a parian quality I had to come within two miles as I have said before these elegancies broke upon me so deceptively did their delicacy of outlines mingle with the dark blue softness beyond in places the coast ran up to a height of two or three hundred feet in others its slope down to 20 feet for some miles it was like the face of a cliff a sheer abrupt with scarce a scar upon its front staring with a wild bald look over the frosty beautiful blue of that afternoon sea here and there it projected a forefoot some white and massive rock upon which the swell of the ocean burst in thunder and flew to almost the height of the cliff in a very great and glorious fury of foam in other parts where I suspected a sort of beach there was the silver tremble of surf but in the main the heave coming out of the northeast the folds swept the base of the ice without froth I say again beheld in the red sunshine that line of ice resembling a coast of marble defining the liquid junction of the swelling folds of sapphire below and the moist violet of the eastern sky beyond and over it crowned at points with delicate imitations of princely habitations would have offered a noble and magnificent spectacle to a mind at ease but to my eyes its enchantments were killed by the horror I felt it was a lonely hideous waste rendered the more shocking by the consideration that the whole vast range was formed of blocks of frozen water which warmth would dissolve that it was a country as solid as rock and as unsubstantial as a cloud to be shunned by the mariner as though it was death's own pavilion the estate and mansion of the grizzly specter and creating round about it as supreme a desolation and loneliness of ocean as that which reigned in its own white stillness though I held the boat's head for it I was at a loss in so much confusion of mind that I knew not what to do I did not doubt by the character of the swell that its limits in the northeast extended only to the sensible horizon in other words that its extremity there would not be above five miles distant though to what latitude its southern arm did curve was not to be conjectured should I steer north and seek to go clear of it somehow the presence of this similitude of land made the sea appear as enormous as space itself whilst it was all clear horizon the immensity of the deep was in a measure limited to the vision by its sincher but this ice line gave the eye something to measure with and when I looked at those leagues of frozen shore my spirit sank into deepest ejection at the thought of the vastness of the waters in whose heart I floated in my little boat however I resolved at last to land if landing was possible I could stretch my limbs recruit myself by exercise and might even make shift to obtain a night's rest I stood in desperate need of sleep but there was no repose to be had in the boat I durst not lie down in her if nature overcame me and I fell asleep in a sitting posture I might wait to find the boat capsized and myself drowning this consideration resolved me and by the time being within half a mile of the coast I ran my eye carefully along it to observe a safe nook for my boat to enter and myself to land in though for a great distance as I have said the front of the cliff and where it was highest to was a sheer fall coming like the side of a house to the water that part of the island towards which my boat's head was pointed sloped down and continued in a low shore with hummocks of ice upon it at irregular intervals to where it died out in the northeast I now saw that this part had a broken appearance as if it had been violently rent from a mainland of ice also to my approach many ledges projecting into the sea stole into view there were ravines and gorges and almost on a line with the boat's head was an assemblage of those delicate glass-like counterfeits of spires towers and the like of which I have spoken standing just beyond a brow whose declivity fell very easily to the water to make you see the picture as I have it in my mind would be beyond my art it is not in the pen not in the brush either I should think to convey even a tolerable portraiture of the ruggedness the ferry grouping the shelves hollows craigs terraces precipices and beach of this kingdom of ice where its frontal line broke away from the smooth face of the tall reaches and ran with a plowed scarred and serrated countenance northwards very happily I had insensibly steered for perhaps the safest spot that I could have lighted on this was formed of a large projection of rock standing a slant so that the swell rolled past it without breaking the rock made a sort of cove towards which I sailed in full confidence that the water there would be smooth nor was I deceived for I saw that the rock acted as a breakwater whose stilling influence was felt a good way beyond it I therefore steered for the starboard of this rock and when I was within it found the heave of the seed dwindled to a scarce perceptible undulation whereupon I lowered my sail and standing to the ore sculled the boat to a low lump of ice onto which I stepped my first business was to secure the boat this I did by inserting the mast into a deep thin crevice in the ice and making the painter fast to it as to a pole the sun was now very low and would soon be gone the cold was extreme yet I did not suffer from it as in the boat there is a quality in snow which it would be ridiculous to speak of as warmth yet as you may observe after a heavy fall ashore on top of a black frost it seems to have a power of blunting the sharp edge of the cold and the snow on this shore of ice being very abundant though frozen as hard as the ice itself appeared to mitigate the intolerable rigor I had languished under upon the water in the brig and afterwards this might also be owing to the dryness of the cold having secured the boat I beat my hands heartily upon my breast and fell to pacing a little level of ice whilst I considered what I should do the coast I cannot but speak of this frozen territory as land went in a gentle slope behind me to the height of about 30 feet the ground was greatly broken with rocks and boulders and sharp points whence I suspected many fissures in which the snow might not be so hard but that I might sink deep enough to be smothered I saw no cave nor hollow that I could make a bedroom of and the improved circulation of my blood giving me spirits enough to resolve quickly I made up my mind to use my boat as a bed so I went to work I took the ore and jammed it into such another crevice as the mast stood in and to it I secured the boat by another line this moored her very safely there was as good promise of a fair quiet night as I might count upon in these treacherous latitudes the haven in which the boat lay was sheltered and the water almost still and this I reckoned would hold whilst the breeze hung northerly and the swell rolled from the northeast I spread the sail over the seats which served as beams for the support of this little ceiling of canvas and enough of it remained to supply me with a pillow and to cover my legs I fell to this work whilst there was light and when I had prepared my habitation I took a bottle of ale and a handful of victuals ashore and made my supper walking briskly whilst I ate and drank I caught myself sometimes looking yearningly towards the brow of the slope as though from that eminence I should gain an extensive prospect of the sea and perhaps behold a ship but I wanted the courage to climb chiefly because I was afraid of tumbling into a hole and miserably perishing and likewise because I shrank from the idea of being overtaken up there by the darkness there was a kind of companionship in the boat the support of which I should lose if I left her the going of the sun was attended by so much glory that the whole weight of my situation and the pressure of my solitude did not come upon me until his light was gone the swell ran a thwart his mirroring in lines of molten gold the sky was a sheet of scarlet fire where he was paling zenith word into an ardent orange the splendor tipped the frozen coast with points of ruby flame which sparkled and throbbed like sentinel beacons along the white and silent range the low thunder of far off hills of water bursting against the projections rolled sulkily down the weak wind just beyond the edge of the slope about a third of a mile to the north of my little haven stood an assemblage of exquisitely airy outlines configurations such as I have described their crystalline nature stole out to the lustrous coloring of the glowing west and they had the appearance of tinted glass of several dyes of red the delicate fibers being deep of hue the stouter ones pale and never did the highest moon of human invention reached to anything more glorious and dainty more sweetly simulative of the arts of a fairy like imagination than yonder clusters of icy fabrics fashioned as it entered my head to conceive as pavilions by the hands of the spirits of the frozen world and guilt and painted by the beams of the setting sun but all this wild and unreal beauty melted away to the oncoming of the dusk and when the sun was gone and the twilight had put a new quality of bleakness into the air when the sea rolled in a welter of dark shadows one somber fold shouldering another a very swarming of restless giant phantoms when the shining of the stars low in the unfathomable obscurity of the north and south quarters gave to the ocean in those directions a frightful immensity of surface making you feel as though you viewed the scene from the center of the firmament and were gazing down on the spangled slopes of infinity oh then it was that the full spirit of the solitude of this pale and silent seat of ice took possession of me i found a meaning i had not before caught in the complaining murmur of the night breeze blowing in the small gusts along the rocky shore and in the deep organ-like tremulous hum of the swell thundering miles distant on the northward pointing cliffs this was a note i had missed whilst the sun shone perhaps my senses were sharpened by the darkness it mingled with the booming of the bursts of water on this side of the range and gave me to know that the northward extremity of the island did not extend so far as i had supposed from my view of it in the boat yet i could also suppose that the beat of the swell formed a mighty canyoning capable of making itself heard afar and the ice being resonant with many smooth if not polished tracts upon it readily transmitted the sound yes though the cause of it lay as far off as the horizon i will not say that my loneliness frightened me but it subdued my heart with a weight as if it were something sensible and filled me with a sort of consternation that was full of awe the moon was up but the rocks hid the side of the sea she rode over and her face was not to be viewed from where i was until she had marched two-thirds of her path to the meridian the coast ran away on either hand in cold motionless blocks of pallor which further on fell by deception of the sheen of the stars into a kind of twisting and snaking glimmer and you followed it into an extraordinarily elusive faintness that was neither light nor color in the liquid bloom long after the site had outrun the visibility of the range at intervals i was startled by sounds sometimes sullen like a muffled subterranean explosion sometimes sharp like a quick splintering of an iron hard substance these noises i presently gathered were made by the ice stretching and cracking in 50 different directions the mass was so vast and substantial you could not but think of it as a country with its foot resting upon the bed of the sea twas a folly of my nerves no doubt yet it added to my consternation to reflect that this solid territory reverberating the repelled blows of the ocean swell was as much afloat as my boat and so much less actual than my boat that could it be towed a few degrees further north it would melt into pouring waters and vanish as utterly as its little cities of columns steeples and minarets as a wreath of steam upon the air this gave a spirit like character to it in my dismayed inquiring eyes which was greatly increased by the vagueness it took from the dusk it was such a scene me thought as the souls of semen drowned in these seas might flock to and haunt the white and icy spell upon it brought in familiar things the stars looking down upon me over the edge of the cliffs were like the eyes of shapes easy to fashion out of the darkness kneeling up there and peering at the human intruder who was pacing his narrow floor of ice for warmth the deceit of the shadows proportioned the blanched ruggedness of the cliff's face on the north side into heads and bodies of monsters i beheld a giant from his waist up leaning his cheek upon his arm a great cross with the burlesque figure as of a friar kneeling near it a mighty helmet with a white plume curled the shadowy confirmation of a huge couchant beast with a hundred other such unsubstantial prodigies had the moon shone in the west i dare say i should have witnessed a score more such things for the snow was like white paper on which the clear black shadows of the ice rocks could not but have cast the likeness of many startling fantasies i sought to calm my mind by considering my position and to divert my thoughts from the star rot apparitions of the broken slopes i asked myself what should be my plans what my chance for delivering myself from this unparalleled situation at this distance of time i cannot precisely tell how long the provisions i had brought from the foundered brig were calculated to last me but i am sure i have not a week's supply this then made it plain that my business was not to linger here but to push into the ocean of fresh as speedily as possible for to my mind nothing in life was clearer than that my only chance lay in my falling in with the ship yet how did my heart sink when i reflected upon the mighty breast of sea in which i was forlornly to seek for sucker my eyes went to the squab black outline of the boat and the littleness of her sent a shutter through me it is true she had nobly carried me through some fierce weather yet at the expense of many leagues of southern of a deeper penetration into the solitary wilds of the polar waters however i was sensible that i was depressed melancholy and under a continued consternation something of which the morning sun might dissipate so that i should be able to take a hardier view of my woeful plight so after a good look seawords and at the heavens to satisfy myself on the subject of the weather and after a careful inspection of the moorings of the boat i entered her feeling very sure that if a sea set in from the west or south and tumbled her the motion would quickly arouse me and getting under the roof of sail with my legs along the bottom and my back against the stem which i had bolstered with the slack of the canvas i commended myself to god folded my arms and went to sleep end of chapter six recording by barbara dirksen www dot lala lime dot blog spot dot com chapter seven of the frozen pirate this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox dot org recording by barbara dirksen the frozen pirate by w clark russell chapter seven i am startled by a discovery in this uneasy posture despite the intense cold i continued to sleep soundly during the greater part of the night i was awakened by a horrid dream of some giant shape stalking down the slope of ice to season devour me and sat up trembling with horror that was not a little increased by my inability to recollect myself and by my therefore conceiving the canvas that covered me to be the groping of the ogre's hand over my face i pushed the sail away and stood up but had instantly to sit again my legs being terribly cramped a drink of spirits helped me my blood presently flowed with briskness the moon was in the west she hung large red and distorted and shed no light save her reflection that waved in the sea under her like several lengths of undulating red hot wire my haven was still very tranquil the boat lay calm but there was a deeper tone in the booming sound of the distant surf and a more menacing note in the echoing of the blows of the swell along this side of the coast once i concluded that despite the fairness of the weather the heave of the deep had will stay slept gathered a greater weight which might signify stormy winds not very many leagues away the pale stare of the heights of ice at that red and shapeless disc was shocking oh i cried aloud as i had once cried before but for one even but for one companion to speak to i had no mind to lie down again the cold indeed was cruelly sharp and the smoke sped from my mouth with every breath as though i held a tobacco pipe betwixt my teeth i got upon the ice and stepped about it quickly darting searching glances into the gloom to left and right of the setting moon but all lay bare bleak and black i pulled off my stout gloves with the hope of getting my fingers to tingle by handling the snow but it was frozen so hard i could not scrape up with my nails as much as a half dozen of flakes would make what i got i dissolved in my mouth and found it brackish however i suspected it would be sweeter and perhaps not so stonely frozen higher up where there was less chance of the salt spray mingling with it and i resolved when light came to fill my empty beer bottles as with salt or pounded sugar for use hereafter that is if it should prove sweet as to melting it i had indeed a tinder box and the means of obtaining fire but no fuel it seemed as if the night had only just descended so tardy was the dawn outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swell swept past in a gurgling bubbling drowning sound dismal and ghastly as though in truth some such ogre as the monster i had dreamt of lay suffocating there i welcomed the cold coloring of the east as if it had been a ship and watched the stars dying and the frozen shore darkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it against which the outline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink the rising of the sun gave me fresh life the ice flashed out of its slatish hue into a radiant white and the ocean changed into a rich blue that seemed as violet under the paler azure of the heavens but i could now see that the swell was heavier than i had suspected from the echo of its remote roaring in the north it ran steadily out of the north east this was miserable to see for the line of its running was directly my course and if i committed myself to it in that little boat the impulse of the long and swinging folds could not but set me steadily southwards unless a breeze sprang up in that quarter to blow me towards the sun there was a small current of air stirring a mere trickle of wind from the northwest i had made up my mind to climb as high as i could taking the ore with me to serve as a pole that i might view the ice in the ocean roundabout and form a judgment of the weather by the aspect of the sky of which only the western part was visible from my low strand but first i must break my fast i remember bitterly lamenting the lack of means to make a fire that i might obtain a warm meal and a hot drink and dry my gloves coat and breeches to which the damp of the salt clung tenaciously had this ice been land though the most desolate gloomy repulsive spot in the world i had surely found something that would burn i sat in the boat to eat and whilst thus occupied pondered over this great field of ice and wondered how so mighty a burg should travel in such compacted bulk so far north that is so far north from the seat of its creation now leisurely and curiously observing it it seemed to me that the north part of it from much about the spot where my boat lay was formed of a chain of icebergs knitted one to another in a consolidated range of irregular low steeps the beautiful appearances of spires towers and the like seemed as if they had been formed by an upheaval as of an earthquake of splinters and bodies of the frozen stuff for so far as it was possible for me to see from the low shore wherever these radiant and lovely figures were assembled i noticed great rents spacious chasms narrow and tortuous ravines certain appearances however caused me to suspect that this island was steadily decaying and that large as it was it had been many times faster when it broke away from the continent about the pole naturally as it progressed northwards it would dissolve and the cracking and thunderous noises i had heard in the night sounds very audible now when i gave them my attention sometimes a hollow distant rumbling as of some great body dislodged and set rolling far off sometimes an inward roaring crack or blast of noise like the report of a cannon fired deep down advised me that the work of dissolution was perpetually progressing and that this prodigious island which appeared to barricade the horizon might in a few months be dwindled into half a score of rapidly dissolving bergs my slender repast ended i pulled the ore out of the crevice and found it would make me a good pole to probe my way with and support myself by up the slope the boat was now held by the mast which i shook and found very firm i put an empty beer bottle in my pocket meaning to see if i could fill it if the snow above was sweet enough to be well tasted and then with a final look at the boat i started the slope was extremely craggy blocks of ice lay about some on top of the others like the stones of which the pyramids are built the white glare of the snow caused these stones at a little distance to appear flat that is by merging them into and blending them with the soft brilliance of the background and i had sometimes to warily walk 50 or 60 paces round these blocks to come at a part of the slope that was smooth i speedily found however that there was no danger of my being buried by stepping into a hollow full of snow for the same hardness was everywhere the snow whether one or 20 feet deep offering as solid a surface as the bare ice this encouraged me to step out and i began to move with some spirit the exercise was as good as a fire and before i was halfway up i was as warm as i had ever been in my life i had come to fetch a breath and was moving on a fresh when having taken not half a dozen steps i spied the figure of a man he was in a sitting posture his back against a rock that had concealed him his head was bowed and his knees drawn up to a level with his chin and his naked hands were clasped upon his legs his attitude was that of a person lost in thought very easy and calm i stopped as if i had been shot through the heart had it been a bear or a sea lion or any creature which my mind could instantly have associated with this white and stirless desolation i might have been startled indeed but no such amazement could have possessed me as i now felt it never entered into my head to doubt that he was alive so natural was his attitude as of one lost in a mood of tender melancholy i stood staring at him myself motionless for some minutes to greatly astonished and thunderstruck to note more than that he was a man then i looked about me to see if he had companions or for some signs of a habitation but the ice was everywhere naked i fixed my eyes on him again his hair was above a foot long black as ink and the blacker maybe for the contrast of the snow his beard and mustachios which were also of this raven hue fell to his girdle he wore a great yellow flapping hat such as was in fashion among the spaniards and buccaneers of the south sea but over his ears for the warmth of the protection were squares of flannel secured by a very fine red silk hanker chief knotted under his beard and this with his hair and pale cheeks and black shaggy eyebrows gave him a terrible and ghastly appearance from his shoulders hung a rich thick cloak lined with red and the legs to the height of the knees were encased in large boots i continued surveying him with my heart beating fast every instant i expected to see him turn his head and start to behold me my emotions were too tumultuous to analyze yet i believe i was more frightened than gladdened by the sight of a fellow creature though not long before i had sighed bitterly for someone to speak to i looked around again prepared to find another one like him taking stock of me from behind a rock and then ventured to approach him by a few steps the better to see him he had certainly a frightful face it was not only the length of his coal black hair and beard it was the hue of his skin a greenish ashen color an unspeakably hideous complexion sharpened on the one hand by the red hanker chief over his ears and on the other by the dazzle of the snow then again there was the extreme strangeness of his costume i coughed loudly holding my pole in readiness for whatever might befall but he did not stir i then hallowed and was answered by the echoes of my own voice among the rocks his stillness persuaded me he was in one of those deep slumbers which fall upon a man in frozen places for i could not persuade myself he was dead so living was his posture this will not do i thought so i went close to him and peered into his face his eyes were fixed they resembled glass painted as eyes the colors faded he had a broad belt round his waist and the hilt of a kind of cutlass peeped from under his cloak otherwise he was unarmed i thought he breathed and seemed to see a movement in his breast and i took him by the shoulder but in the hurry of my feelings i exerted more strength than i was sensible of i pushed him with the violence of sudden trepidation my hand slipped off his shoulder and he fell on his side exactly as a statue would preserving his posture as though like a statue he had been chiseled out of marble or stone i started back frightened by his fall in which my fears found a sort of life but it was soon clear to me his rigidity was that of a man frozen to death his very hair and beard stood stiff as before as though they were some exquisite counterfeit in ebony perfectly satisfied that he was dead i stepped round to the other side of him and set him up as i had found him he was as heavy as if he had been alive and when i put his back to the rock his posture was exactly as it had been that of one deeply meditating who had this man been in life how had he fallen into this pass how long had he been dead there seated as i saw him these were speculations not to be resolved by conjecture on looking at the rock against which he leaned and observing its curvature it seemed to me that it had formed part of a cave or of some large deep hole of ice and this i was sure must have been the case for it is certain that had this body remained long and sheltered it must have been hidden by the snow i concluded then that the unhappy man had been cast away upon this ice whilst it was under bleaker heights than these parallels and that he had crawled into a hollow and perished in that melancholic sitting posture but in what year had his fate come upon him i had made several voyages into distant places in my time and seen a great variety of people but i had never met any man habited as that body he had the appearance of a spanish or french cut throat of the middle of last century and of earlier times yet for it may be known to you that the buccaneers of the spanish main and the south sea were great lovers of finery they had a strange theatric taste in their choice of costumes which as you will suppose they had abundant opportunities for gratifying out of the many rich and glittering wardrobes that fell into their hands and this man i say with his large fine hat handsome cloken boots coupled with the villainous cast of his countenance and the frightful appearance his long hair gave him rendered him to my notions the completest figure that could be imagined of one of those rogues who earned their living as pirates thinking i might find something on his person to acquaint me with his story or that would furnish me with some idea of the date of his being cast away i pulled his cloak aside and searched his pockets his legs were thickly cased in two or three pairs of breeches the outer pair being of a dark green cloth he also wore a handsome red waist coat laced and a stout coat of some kind of freeze in his coat pocket i found a silver tobacco box a small glass flask fitted with a silver band and half full of an amber colored liquor hard froze and in his waistcoat pocket a gold watch shaped like an apple the back curiously chased an inlaid with jewels of several kinds forming a small letter m the hands pointed to twenty minutes after three a key of a strange shape and a number of seals trinkets and the lake were attached to the watch these things together with a knife a key a thick plain silver ring and some spanish pieces in gold and silver were what i found on this man there was nothing to tell me who he was or how long he had been on the island the searching him was the most disagreeable job i ever undertook in my life his iron-like rigidity made him seem to resist me and the swaying of his back against the rock to the motions of my hand was so full of life that twice i quitted him frightened by it on touching his naked hand by accident i discovered that the flesh of it moved upon the bones as you pull a glove off and on i had had enough of him and walked away feeling sick if he had companions and they were like him i did not want to see them unless it was that i might satisfy my curiosity as to the time they had been here i determined however on my way back to take his cloak which would make me a comfortable rug in the boat and also the watch flask and tobacco box for if i was drowned they could go but to the bottom of the sea which was their certain destination if i left them in his pockets and if i came off with them then the money they would bring me must somewhat lighten the loss of my clothes and property in the brig i pushed onwards stepping warily and probing cautiously at every step and earnestly peering about me for after such a sight as that dead man i was never to know what new wonder i might stumble upon about a quarter of a mile on my left that is on my left whilst i kept my face to the slope there was the appearance of a ravine not discernible from where the boat lay when i was within twenty feet of the summit of the cliff the eclivity continuing gentle to the very brow but much broken as i have said i noticed this hollow and more particularly a small collection of ice forms not nearly so large as the other groups of this kind but most dainty and lovely nevertheless they showed as the heads of trees might to my ascent and when i had got a little higher i observed that they were formed upon the hither side of the hollow as though the convulsion which had wrought that chasm had tossed up those exquisite caprices of ice however i was too eager to view the prospect from the top of the cliff to suffer my admiration to detain me in a few minutes i had gained the brow and clambering onto a mass of rock i sent my gaze around end of chapter seven recording by barbara dirksen