The Frozen Pirate | Page 4

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 dress 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, bowsprit, and catheads, whilst 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-coloured seas hurling out their rage in foam as they roared
towards us in ranges of dissolving cliffs; the wind screaming and
whistling through our grey 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 live stock lying drowned and stiff in their coops
and pen near the caboose.
With helm lashed and yards pointed to the wind thus we lay, thus we
drifted, steadily trending with the send of each giant surge further and
deeper into the icy regions of the south-west, 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 and 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 on 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 illusive 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 lanthorn flinging its radiance
from afar, which no doubt must have been the reflection of some
particular bright and extensive bed of foam upon a sooty belly on high,
hanging lower than the other clouds. I say, you might have thought
yourself in the midst of some hellish conflict of vapour but for the
substantial thunder of the surges upon the vessel and the shriek of the
slung masses of water flying like cannon balls 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 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 hove to under bare 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 Mary does."
"The loss of hamper forward will make her the more weatherly," says
Captain Rosy. "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 hove
to long off the Horn without coming out of it with a purged 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 wind's got fixed into a whole gale for this here ocean."
"What southing do you allow our drift will be giving us, captain?" I
asked, munching a piece of beef.
"All four mile an