The Frozen Pirate | Page 2

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 fair abeam, 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 Rosy, the master, bawled
to me to tell the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmast rigging.
But the Laughing Mary, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship 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 affray,
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 sparkled 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 bows on
to the forecastle. There was nothing to be done but secure the helm and
await the issue below, 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 Rosy; 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 Tyburn.
"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! naught less than a forty-foot
chuck-up could ha' ended in that souse, mates."
"A man can die but once," says Captain Rosy, "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 whisky, 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 alternations of its light put twenty different
meanings, one after another, into the settled dismal and rueful

expressions in the faces of my companions. We were clad in warm
clothes, and the steam rose from the damp in our coats and trousers like
vapour from wet straw. The drink mottled some of our faces, but the
spirituous 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