The Frozen Pirate | Page 7

take a man to cry "O God!"
A figure came out of the blackness on the lee side of the deck.
"Who is that?" said he. It was Captain Rosy.
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 Jobling."
"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 epileptic's cry, shrieked, "It's
all over with us! We are upon it!"
I looked and perceived the iceberg to be within a musket-shot, whence
it was clear that it had been closer to us when first sighted than 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 were not confounded by the uproar and peril, if indeed it
were as placid as 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 mass of 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 a dull hollow tremble back to the
ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body was not taller
than our mastheads, 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's 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 creature's 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
on to 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 holloa, 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 to 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 brows by something from aloft--a block, as

I believe--and fell senseless upon the deck.
CHAPTER III.
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