JACK MANLY.

BY JAMES GRANT

Price 2s. each, Fancy Boards.

THE ROMANCE OF WAR.
THE AIDE-DE-CAMP.
THE SCOTTISH CAVALIERS.
BOTHWELL.
JANE SETON; OR, THE KING'S ADVOCATE.
PHILIP ROLLO.
LEGENDS OF THE BLACK WATCH.
MARY OF LORRAINE.
OLIVER ELLIS; OR, THE FUSILIERS.
LUCY ARDEN; OR, HOLLYWOOD HALL.
FRANK HILTON; OR, THE QUEEN'S OWN.
THE YELLOW FRIGATE.
HARRY OGILVIE; OR, THE BLACK DRAGOONS.
ARTHUR BLANE.
LAURA EVERINGHAM; OR, THE HIGHLANDERS OF GLENORA.
THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD.
LETTY HYDE'S LOVERS.
THE CAVALIERS OF FORTUNE.
SECOND TO NONE.
THE CONSTABLE OF FRANCE.
THE PHANTOM REGIMENT.
THE GIRL HE MARRIED.
FIRST LOVE AND LAST LOVE.
DICK RODNEY.
THE WHITE COCKADE.
THE KING'S OWN BORDERERS.
LADY WEDDERBURN'S WISH.
ONLY AN ENSIGN.
JACK MANLY.
THE ADVENTURES OF ROB ROY.
THE QUEEN'S CADET.

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS.
THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE.

JACK MANLY;

His Adventures by Sea and Land.

by

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF
"THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "OLIVER ELLIS,"
ETC. ETC.

LONDON:
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS,
THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE.
NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET.

LONDON:
RAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I. [WHY I WENT TO SEA]
II. [ADVENTURE IN A CASK]
III. [THE NARROWS OF ST. JOHN]
IV. [THE BRIG "LEDA"]
V. [KIDD THE PIRATE]
VI. [THE "BLACK SCHOONER"]
VII. [THE CHASE]
VIII. [OUR REVENGE SCHEMED]
IX. [OUR REVENGE EXECUTED]
X. [THE SEAL-FISHERS]
XI. [COMBAT WITH A SEA-HORSE]
XII. [ON AN ICEBEEG]
XIII. [ON THE ICEBERG—THE MASSACRE AT HIERRO]
XIV. [ESCAPE FROM THE ICEBERG]
XV. [UNDER WEIGH ONCE MORE]
XVI. [BESET WITHOUT HOPE]
XVII. [THE DEATH-SHIP]
XVIII. [LEAVES FROM THE LOG]
XIX. [THE GRAVES ON THE STARBOARD BOW]
XX. [ADRIFT ON THE DEAD FLOE]
XXI. [CAPE FAREWELL]
XXII. [THE MUSK-OX]
XXIII. [THE FOUR BEARS]
XXIV. [WOLMAR FYNBÖE]
XXV. [ADIEU TO THE REGION OF ICE]
XXVI. [A SHARK]
XXVII. [THE FATAL VOYAGE OF THE HEER VAN ESTELL]
XXVIII. [THE FATAL VOYAGE—HOW THEY CAST LOTS]
XXIX. [ADVENTURE WITH A WHALE]
XXX. [LOSS OF THE "LEDA"]
XXXI. [THE CRY]
XXXII. [THE TWELFTH DAY]
XXXIII. [WHAT FOLLOWED]
XXXIV. [THE SAILOR'S POST-OFFICE]
XXXV. [MS. LEGEND OF EL CABO DOS TORMENTOS]
XXXVI. [LEGEND CONTINUED—THE CATASTROPHE]
XXXVII. [LEGEND CONCLUDED—THE SEQUEL]
XXXVIII. [WE LAND IN AFRICA]
XXXIX. [THE KING OF THE SNAKE RIVER]
XL. [THE GABON CLIFF]
XLI. [HOW THE CAPTAIN PERISHED]
XLII. [AMOO]
XLIII. [THE RESCUE OF HIS CHILD]
XLIV. [THE GRATITUDE OF HIS WIFE]
XLV. [FLIGHT]
XLVI. [FLIGHT CONTINUED]
XLVII. [THE WOOD OF THE DEVIL]
XLVIII. [RETAKEN]
XLIX. [THE CARAVAN]
L. [WE REACH THE CAPITAL]
LI. [AN OLD FRIEND IN A NEW PLACE]
LII. [HARTLY'S STORY]
LIII. [THE FEMALE GUARDS]
LIV. [ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE AGAIN]
LV. [THE FORMOSA]
LVI. [A PERILOUS JOURNEY]
LVII. [PURSUIT AGAIN—CONCLUSION]

JACK MANLY.

CHAPTER I.
WHY I WENT TO SEA.

It was the evening of the sixteenth of March.

Exactly six months had elapsed since I left my father's snug villa at Peckham, with its walls shrouded by roses and honeysuckle; and now I found myself two thousand three hundred miles distant from it, in his agent's counting-room, in the dreary little town of St. John, in Newfoundland, writing in a huge ledger, and blowing my fingers from time to time, for snow more than ten feet deep covered all the desolate country, and the shipping in the harbour was imbedded in ice at least three feet in thickness; while the thermometer, at which I glanced pretty often, informed me that the mercury had sunk twelve degrees below the freezing point.

While busily engrossing quintals of salted fish, by the thousand, barrels of Hamburg meal and Irish pork, chests of bohea, bales of shingles, kegs of gunpowder, caplin nets, anchors and cables, and Indian corn from the United States, with all the heterogeneous mass of everything which usually fill the stores of a wealthy merchant in that terra nova, I thought of the noisy world of London, from which I had been banished, or, as tutors and guardians phrased it, "sent to learn something of my father's business—i.e., practically to begin life as he had begun it;" and so I sighed impatiently over my monotonous task, while melting the congealed ink, from time to time, on the birchwood fire, and reverting to what March is in England, where we may watch the bursting of the new buds and early flowers; where the birds are heard in every sprouting hedge and tree, and as we inhale the fresh breeze of the morning, a new and unknown delight makes our pulses quicken and a glow of tenderness fill the heart—for then we see and feel, as some one says, "what we have seen and felt only in childhood and spring."

"Belay this scribbling business, Jack," said a hearty voice in my ear; "come, ship on board my brig, and have a cruise with me in the North Sea. I shall have all my hands aboard to-morrow."

I looked up, threw away my pen, closed the gigantic ledger with a significant bang, and shook the hand of the speaker, who was my old friend and schoolfellow, Bob Hartly, whose face was as red as the keen frost of an American winter evening could make it, albeit he was buttoned to the throat in a thick, rough Flushing coat, and wore a cap with fur ear-covers tied under his chin—a monk-like hood much worn in these northern regions during the season of snow.

"I don't think your cruise after seals and blubber will be a very lively affair, Bob," said I, rubbing my hands at the stove, on which he was knocking the ashes of his long Havannah.

"Lively! if it is not more lively than this quill-driving work, may I never see London Bridge again, or take,

'Instead of pistol or a dagger, a
Desperate leap down the falls of Niagara!'"

"I am sick of this Cimmerian region!" said I, stamping with vexation at his jocular mood, when contrasted to my own surly one.

"Cimmerian—ugh! that phrase reminds me of school-times, and how we used to blunder through Homer together, for he drew all his images of Pluto and Pandemonium from the dismal country of the Cimmerii. By Jove! I could give you a stave yet from Virgil or Ovid, hand over hand, on the same subject; but that would be paying Her Majesty's colony a poor compliment."

"Well, Bob, I am sick of this place, in which evil fate, or rather bad luck, has buried me alive—this frozen little town of wood and tar, without outlet by sea or land in winter, without amusement, and, at this time, seemingly without life."

"It forms a contrast to London, certainly," said Hartly, assisting himself, uninvited, to the contents of a case-bottle of Hollands which stood near; "but there is a mint of money to be made in it."

"The first English folks who came here were reduced to such straits, we are told, that they killed and ate each other; and those who returned were such skeletons that their wives and mothers did not know them."

Hartly laughed loudly, and said—

"But that was in the time of King Henry VIII., and people don't eat each other here now. But to resume what we were talking about——"

"Old Uriah Skrew, my father's agent, and I are on the worst terms; he keeps a constant watch over me. I go from my desk to bed, and from bed to my desk—so passes my existence."

"Why not slip your cable and run, then?"

"Skrew being a partner in the firm," I continued, warming at the idea of my own rights and fancied wrongs, "cares for nothing but making money from the riches of the sea, and thinks only of cargoes of fish to be bartered in Lent, at Cadiz, for fruit and wine, oil, seals, and blubber; and really in this cold season——"

"Ah, but summer is coming," interrupted Bob, drily.

"Summer! How is the year divided here?"

"Into nine months of winter and three of bad weather."

"A pleasant prospect! If I were once again at Peckham——"

"Well, Jack, I have a grudge at old Uriah Skrew, for, like a swab, he played me a scurvy trick about a cargo I had consigned to your father and him, from Cadiz, last year—a trick by which I lost all my profit and tonnage.

"Likely enough; this ledger is Uriah's bible—and his God——"

"Is gold! So I care not a jot if, for the mere sake of provoking him, I lend you a hand to give him the slip, for a few months at least. Ship with me to-morrow—as a volunteer, passenger, or whatever you please."

"I shall," said I, throwing my pen resolutely into the fire.

"Your hand on it! I like this. Get your warmest toggery sent on board; you'll need it all, I can tell you! I can give you a long gun, and bag for powder and slugs; and then, with a bowie-knife in your belt, a seal-skin cap with long flaps, and a stout pea-jacket, you will make as smart a seal fisher as ever sailed through the Narrows! By this time to-morrow you may be forty miles from your ledger, running through the North Sea with a flowing sheet. By Jove, I know a jolly old Esquimau who lives at Cape Desolation under an old whaleboat. He will be delighted to make your acquaintance, and give you a feed of sea weed and blubber that will make your mouth water, though we eat it when the mercury is frozen in the bulb."

This cheerful prospect of Arctic hospitality might have persuaded me to remain where I was, but soured by the treatment I experienced from Mr. Skrew, who misrepresented my conduct and habits to my family at home, and tired of the monotony of his counting-room, I looked forward with eagerness to an anticipated escape.

How little could I foresee the consequences of my impatience, folly, and wayward desire for rambling! Ere a month was past, I had repented in bitterness my boyish repugnance for steady application and industrious habits.

My friend, Robert Hartly, who was eight years my senior, was master and owner of the Leda, a smart brig of two hundred and fifty tons register—a craft in which he had invested all his savings. Last year he had lost a wife and two children, whom he tenderly loved; he had come to St. John from Cadiz, missed a freight and been frozen-in, and now, with all a sailor's restlessness and dread of being idle, even for a month or two, he had resolved to sail for the spring seal fishery, as a change of scene, and a trip which he hoped would not prove unprofitable, as his vessel was one of a class far superior to those which usually venture into the region of ice, being well found, well manned, coppered to the bends, and, in short, the perfection of a British merchant brig.

"By the bye," said he, "talking of powder and slugs, we may need both, for other purposes than shooting seals."

"How?" I asked.

"I mean if we came athwart the Black Schooner which has been prowling and plundering about the coast for the last six weeks."

"Are there more news of her?"

"No; but here is a placard given to all shipmasters yesterday," said he, unfolding a paper surmounted by the royal arms, and running in the name of "His Excellency the Governor and Commander-in-Chief over the Island of Newfoundland and its Dependencies," offering 5001. to the crew of any ship that would capture "the vessel known as the Black Schooner," &c. "She is a queer craft," continued Hartly, "and said to be a slaver, bankrupt, and out of business; though Paul Reeves, my mate, maintains that she is the Adventure galley. which sailed from London in the time of King William III., and that her crew are the ghosts of Kidd and his pirates; but ghosts don't steal beef and drink brandy."

Hartly's father had been in the navy; thus he had received a good and thorough nautical education, but early in life had been left to work his way in the world; so he made the watery portion thereof his home and means of livelihood. He was a handsome, hardy, and cheerful young fellow, and the beau idéal of a thorough British seaman.

On the third finger of his left hand he wore a curious ring of base metal, graven with runes of strange figures. This was the gift of an old woman to whom he had rendered some service when in Iceland, and who had promised, that while he wore it, he could never be drowned; consequently Hartly was too much imbued with the superstition of his profession to part with it for a moment.

"But how am I to elude old Skrew, and get on board," said I, after we had concluded all our arrangements, over a glass of hot brandy-punch, in Bob's lodgings in Water-street.

"True—the brig lies frozen-in at the end of his wharf, the hatches are all locked, and the hands ashore."

"If he sees me on board, there will be an end of our project, for I have no wish to quarrel with him in an unseemly manner; but merely to 'levant' quietly, leaving a letter to announce where I am gone, and when I may, perhaps, return."

"All right—I have it! I'll send an empty cask to Skrew's store to-morrow. Paul Reeves, the mate, and Hammer, the carpenter, will head you up in it, and so you may be brought on board unknown to all save them—ay, under the very nose of old Uriah. Will that suit you?"

"Delightfully!" said I, clapping my hands. The whole affair had the appearance of an adventure, and though there were a hundred ways by which I might have joined the brig, when the cutting-out of the sealing fleet took place next day, like a young schoolboy—for in some respects I was little more—I accepted the strange proposal of going on board in a cask, and retired to bed, to dream of adventures on the high seas; for being young, healthy, and active, I could always have pleasant dreams without studying the art of procuring them—an art on which Dr. Franklin wrote so learnedly in the last century.

CHAPTER II.
ADVENTURE IN A CASK.

On the next day (17th of March), when the fleet of adventurers departs for the spring seal fishery, the little seaport town of St. John's presents an unusual aspect of bustle and gaiety. On that anniversary, at least one hundred vessels, having on board three thousand seamen, batmen, and gunners, sail to seek their fortune in the ice-fields; but on the day I am about to describe, the number of craft and their crews far exceeded this.

The day was clear and sunny, not a speck of cloud was in the sky, whose immensity of blue made the eye almost ache, while the intense brilliance of the snow, which covered the hills and the whole scenery, made them seem to vibrate in the sunshine, and caused a species of blindness, especially on entering any apartment, however large or well-lighted; for after being out of doors in that season and region for an hour or so, a house usually seems totally dark for a time.

For some days previous there had been that species of drizzle which is termed locally "a silver thaw," thus, all the houses of the town, the roofs, walls, and chimneys; the trees, the shipping in the frozen harbour, every mast, yard, and inch of standing or running rigging, were thickly coated with clear ice, which sparkled like prisms in the sunshine, making them seem as if formed of transparent crystal. Then, there was a glittering in the frosty atmosphere, as if it was composed of minute particles, while the intensity of the cold made one feel as if a coarse file were being roughly applied to one's nose or cheekbones on facing the west, the point whence the wind came over the vast and snow-covered tracts of untrodden and unexplored country which stretch away for three hundred miles towards the Red Indian Lake and the Bay of Exploits.

The keepers of stores and shops—who in St. John are usually dressed like seamen, in round jackets and glazed hats—with all idlers, were pouring through every avenue and thoroughfare, and spreading over the harbour. All the ships displayed their colours, and the sound of music, as bands perambulated the ice, rang upon the clear and ambient air, mingled with the musical jingle of the sleigh bells, as the more wealthy folks, muffled and shawled to the nose, galloped their horses with arrow-like speed from side to side of the harbour.

The latter and the town (but especially the grog-shops) were crowded by the seal fishermen, who had come in from all parts of the coast, and bore bundles of clothing slung over their backs, each having his carefully selected club wherewith to smite the young seals on the head, and also to be used as a gaff or ice-hook. Many of these men were also armed with long sealing-guns, which are twice the size and weight of an ordinary musket, and resemble the huge, unwieldy gingals of the East Indians, having flintlocks of a clumsy fashion.

They are generally loaded with coarse-grained powder and pieces of lead, termed slugs, to shoot the old seals, who frequently prove refractory, and dangerous when defending their young.

Those fishers who are thus armed as gunners rank before the mere clubmen, and receive a small remuneration, or are remitted some of the "berth money" which is usually paid to the storekeeper or merchant who equips the vessel for the ice; "the outfitting," says one who is well-informed on these matters, "being always defrayed by the receipt of one-half the cargo of seals, the other half going to adventurers, with these and other deductions for extra supplies." But, as Captain Hartly fitted out his own vessel and shipped his own crew, gunners, and batmen at stipulated salaries, he expected to reap the whole profits of the expedition.

In addition to the project I had in view, I was particularly anxious to witness the gaiety of this the only and yearly colonial gala day—the shipping of the crews, (who always proceed in procession along the ice,) with the cutting-out and departure of the sealers; but old Mr. Uriah Skrew, with his clean-shaven face and small cunning eyes, was in the counting-room betimes, and piled work upon me thick and fast, to anticipate any application for a day's leave.

"May I not go out for an hour, sir, and see what is going on in the harbour?" I asked, gently.

"No, sir," he replied, sharply; "such nonsense only leads to idleness—idleness to dissipation, and dissipation to ruin! That is the sliding-scale, young man——"

"Oh! my good sir, you are too severe."

"Severe! Mr. Jack Manly!——"

"Well, sir?"

"I have always been kind and indulgent to you."

"Kind—hum."

"Yes; more kind and indulgent than your father, my worthy partner, wishes—and more than he would be."

"Query?"

"What do you mean by 'query'?" he demanded in a bullying tone, for he intensely disliked me, fearing that I should soon be admitted into the firm.

"Because I have my doubts on the subject, and your refusal to grant me leave to-day confirms my opinion of you, Mr. Skrew."

"Very well; enough of this, not a word more, or by the first ship for Europe I will write what you'll wish had not been written. Not a word more."

"I am mute as a fish."

"Engross these papers—but, first, go to the store on the wharf, and tell the keeper to speak with me; and look sharp!"

I put on my cap and left the counting-room, feeling assured that many a day would elapse ere I stood within it again, as I caught a glimpse of Paul Reeves, mate of the Leda, and two seamen, loitering outside; but near the window, wherein stood my desk, under the leaf of which I deposited a letter addressed to Mr. Skrew, informing him, in the parlance of Bob Hartly, that "I had slipped my cable and gone to sea."

"Captain Hartly's friend, sir?" said the mate, touching his hat, and winking knowingly.

"Yes."

"All right, sir! here is the cask, step in, and Tom Hammer, our carpenter, and his mate, will head you up in it comfortably in less than a minute."

"No one is near?" said I, anxiously glancing round the courtyard.

"Not a soul, sir: in you go, on with the head, Tom, and be quick, for the ice channel is cutting fast to the fairway; the jib and foretopsail are loose, and the lashings all but cast off."

The counting-room of Messrs. Manly and Skrew stood within a courtyard, which was entered by a gateway from Water-street; and from this court—which was formed by four large wooden stores, all pitched, tarred, and now coated with snow and ice—a path led down to the wharf, at the end of which, as at the end of all the others that jutted into the harbour, a mercantile flag was displayed from a mast. In this court were piles of old barrels, hampers, boxes, an anchor, a spare topmast or so, half buried under the usual white mantle, on which a flock of poor little snowbirds were hopping and twittering drearily.

"Do you feel snug, sir?" inquired Paul Reeves, through the bunghole.

"Yes; but please to lose no time in getting me through the crowd on the wharf, and on board the Leda" I replied, in a somewhat imploring tone of voice; for the cask, though a roomy one, was the reverse of comfortable, and already I longed to stretch myself.

"The Leda lies just outside the Bristol clipper."

"She that was overhauled and plundered, and had three of her crew shot by the Black Schooner?"

"Yes, sir," replied Reeves, as the two seamen hoisted up the cask; and I soon became aware by the clamour around me that I was being conveyed down to the wharf, where Mr. Skrew, in a full suit of Petersham and sables, was walking to and fro till his sledge arrived.

"Hallo, what have you fellows got in the cask?" he demanded as I was borne past him.

"Some of the captain's stores, sir," replied Reeves.

"His grandmother's best featherbed," added the carpenter.

"Very good," said Uriah, as I was deposited almost on his gouty toes.

Men often stumbled against my cask, and swore at it or pushed it aside. Once a fellow seated himself on it, and kicked with his heels till I was nearly deranged, and the impulse to scare him by a shout became almost irrepressible. For a time, I dreaded that it might be tumbled off the wharf into the sludge and broken ice alongside!

Ere long the wharf was cleared; I heard the clanking of the gates, as the keeper, by order of Mr. Skrew, locked them, doubtless to exclude me therefrom on this great gala day; and then followed the jangling of bells, as he stepped into his sledge, and departed upon the ice. Thus I was left to my own reflections on the solitary wharf.

Before this, a great commotion had taken place at the extremity thereof, as the Bristol clipper by some mismanagement ran foul of the Leda, and the usual volleys of threats, oaths, and orders incident to such collisions in harbour were exchanged from the decks and rigging of both vessels, while, by using boat-hooks aloft and fenders below, the crew strove to keep the rigging clear and the hulls apart.

Amid this unexpected hurly-burly, I was forgotten in my cask!

The wharf stood near the western extremity of the town, which lies along the basin of the harbour. The sounds in my vicinity seemed all to die away, as the crowd along the shore and upon the ice followed the ships, which in succession were warped along their ice-channels into the fairway, and each was greeted by a tremendous cheer as the sails fell, their head canvas filled, and they broke into blue water; but hours seemed to elapse, without a person coming near the horrible cask in which I was imprisoned, and the agonies I endured are beyond description!

The sense of oppression and of being cramped amounted to intense bodily torture; thus a perspiration alternately burning hot and icy cold burst over me. The interior of this now detested prison seemed hot as a furnace; yet there was in my soul a deadly fear of perishing by cold, as I should assuredly do, if left all night on the locked wharf, in such a climate, with the thermometer at twelve degrees below the freezing point!

How fruitlessly I repented me of the silly project of thus escaping, and alternately longed to be back again in Skrew's snug counting-room, or on board the departing brig—of being anywhere, instead of being thus "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd," and forgotten. A terror of being conveyed on board, and left, perhaps, in the hold—left undiscovered till dead of suffocation, gave me wild energy; madly I strove to kick or beat out the head of the cask; but my legs were powerless, as if suffering from paralysis, for my aching knees were wedged under my chin, and I might as well have attempted to escape from a block of adamant.

Faintness and delirium were fast coming over me! I screamed like a madman; but my hoarse voice was lost in the hollow of the cask. Though a perspiration bathed all my aching limbs, my tongue clove to my palate, and soon became hot and dry. Starry lights seemed to flash and dance before me in the darkness; my brain reeled; then I gasped, as sense and pulsation ebbed together, and after enduring three hours (as I afterwards learned) of such agony as those who were confined in the stone chests of the Venetians, or in the iron cages which Louis XI. placed in the Bastille, alone could have known—I fainted.

CHAPTER III.
THE NARROWS OF ST. JOHN.

On recovering, I found myself in the cabin of the Leda, with Captain Hartly hanging over me, and chafing my hands and temples, in anxiety and solicitude, with hartshorn and vinegar; for being a kind-hearted fellow, he was seriously alarmed.

In these friendly offices he was ably assisted by Cuffy Snowball, his black cook, who burned several grey goose-quills under my nose, and who brought me a rummer full of brandy-punch steaming hot from the galley. On swallowing this, which they forced me to do at two draughts, I became considerably revived and invigorated.

"Why did you leave me there, Hartly—it might have been, to die?" I asked, reproachfully.

"I did not leave you, my dear boy, at least not a moment longer than we could help," he replied. "It cost us no small trouble to get clear of that lubberly barque. I wish the Black Schooner had sunk her, when athwart her hawse! We had to clap on all hands to warping into the fairway, and once there, we had to keep constantly forging a-head, as other craft were crowding into the channel astern of us."

"Then I was pretty near being left till the wharf-keeper came next morning. My heaven! I should have been stiff enough by that time!"

"I sent Paul Reeves and Hans Peterkin to bring off the cask on a sledge, and you may imagine the fright we were in on finding you cramped up and lifeless as a pickled herring!"

"Oh, Hartly," said I, "the torture I endured was frightful! I now repent of my undertaking, and wish myself back again."

"Repent—bah! It has been a stupidly managed job, but it is over now, and there is an end of it. Take another sip of the hot brandy-and-water, and come on deck; we are abreast of the Crow's Nest now, and in ten minutes more will be in blue water; then hurrah for the ice-fields!"

I followed him on deck, and found that we were, as he said, abreast of a high sugar-loaf shaped rock, crowned by a little battery named the Crow's Nest, and that around us a very exciting scene was passing.

The Leda was now in the fairway, or main channel, which was formed through the ice in the centre of the harbour, and into which there were cut more than fifty canals, or connecting links, along which the sealing ships were being warped from the various wharves at which they had been fitted out. All were gaily decked with their owners' private colours, and had their courses, or lower sails, cast loose, and were accompanied by crowds, who were conversing, laughing, and expressing their hopes of a successful fishery to the crews, whose voices rang cheerily as they tripped round the capstan or wrenched at the windlass, till they came abreast of the kedge anchor which was wedged in the ice; and then it was torn up, and carried off a-head towards the Narrows. when the cheering, warping, and tripping began anew.

Thousands of persons, many of them on skates, covered all the glassy expanse of the frozen harbour, which from some points of view appears land-locked, so closely do the mountains of rock converge at its entrance; and hundreds of sledges (Mr. Uriah Skrew's among the number), with round Russian bells at their horses' collars, or on the circular iron rod above their ears, with the drivers muffled in furs, swept to and fro; while bands of music playing the air invariable on this occasion, "St. Patrick's Day," marched alongside of the departing fleet.

Flags of every fashion—square, triangular, and swallow-tailed—were streaming everywhere; on the mastheads of the shipping, on the black-tarred mercantile stores, and on the dwellings of their owners—a passion for a display of bunting being one of the peculiarities of this our most northern colony in America.

The aspect of its capital, which covers the northern slope of the harbour, is rather pretty, though the country beyond is nearly as wild and as dreary as when, in the words of Hakluyt—"in the yeere of our Lord 1497, John Cabot a Venetian, and his son Sebastian, with an English fleet from Bristol, discovered that land which no man had before attempted, on 24th June, about five of the clocke, early in the morning. That island which lieth out before the land, he called of St. John, as I think, because it was discovered upon the day of John the Baptist."

During the brief summer, this harbour, the entrance of which is so narrow that two ships can scarcely pass in the dangerously deep mid-channel, is smooth as a mill-pond, and presents a lively scene, for there the smart Clyde-built clipper, the dark and battered Sunderland collier brig, the smart Yankee liner, with her gaudy stars and stripes, her snowy decks, and gear so taut; the Pomeranian, with her grass-green hull and fur-capped crew; the Dutch galliot, all brown varnish, and shaped like a half cheese, or like the old craft that bore the Crusaders to Palestine; the huge ship of Blackwall, redolent of guano, all blistered, rusted, and turned yellow by the sun of the fiery south; the sharp Spanish brig, which had run her cargo of slaves in South Carolina and escaped here, to go quietly home, with her brass nines hidden in the hold, and with fish in Lent for the pious at Cadiz or Oporto—during the brief season of summer, I say, all these had been here; but now when a snowy mantle covered the land, and black ice locked the harbour, its basin or bosom presented a very different scene.

Floundering through sludge and water, a thousand of those men who are England's real pioneers in the Far West—Irish emigrants—in long boots, were cutting the thick ice with ponderous saws, and pushing the blocks under the solid mass on either side, to form a fairway or clear channel for the shipping; and this channel, though at least twenty feet broad, would certainly be frozen hard and fast ere morning dawned.

On this occasion there passed out with us, as I have elsewhere stated, more than one hundred sail of sealing craft. There were brigs, brigantines, and schooners, ranging from fifty to two hundred and fifty tons, all following each other through the fairway, warping ahead, till beyond the Chain Rock, where they got into open water.

Many of the smaller craft are miserably adapted for the dangers they have to encounter, and thus are frequently crushed or lost in the ice by being swept off among the floes and fields to the far north, from whence they never return. Some, I have observed, had only a box lined with fire-brick placed on edge, lashed aft the foremast, for a caboose, and an iron cauldron on three legs placed therein for boiling the wretched mess of old salt pork and doughballs which form the daily food of the crew, who, with such apparatus, would be unable to cook anything in foul weather or a heavy sea.

The wind was southerly for a time, but gradually veered a little to the west as we neared the harbour mouth. After passing the Chain Rock, where a cable of Cyclopean aspect, that now lies a mass of rust thereon, was wont in times of war and alarm to be stretched across to the Pancake Rock to secure the harbour at night, we found ourselves in the deep water. With a loud cheer we brought the kedge anchor and hawser on board. Paul Reeves took the wheel; we sheeted home the foresail and gib, let fall the fore and main topsails, and brought the starboard tacks on board when we were clear of the Signal Hill, and the Dead Man's Bay—a dreary inlet of the sea—lay on our quarter.

This hill is a stern and precipitous mountain of sandstone and slate-rock, nearly six hundred feet in height, with batteries that rise over each other in tiers, to the highest, which is named "The Queen's." Opposite, towers an equally abrupt mountain of similar height and aspect, having at its base a little promontory defended by Fort Amherst.

The slender gut between is named the Narrows of St. John.

The breeze came more and more round upon our quarter as we ran past Signal Hill, ploughing through a somewhat heavy surf; past the Sugar Loaf, and a little creek where, in the clear summer sea, I have seen the guns of an ancient and forgotten wreck lying like black dots on the smooth white sand many fathoms below; for in these regions, when a brilliant sun shines upon the ocean, its waters become transparent to a wondrous depth; thus giant corals, dusky weeds, and the snow-white bones of mighty fish,

"With the rainbow hues of the sea-trees' bloom,"

may be seen distinctly at the depth of a hundred and fifty feet from the surface.

There, too, I have seen the bright yellow sea anemone, with its long fibrous leaves, that close and shrink into the rocks from view when touched.

Cape St. Francis, one of the eastern promontories of Avalon, was soon upon our beam; Cape Spear light had sunk into the waves astern, and night was coming down upon the wintry sea, when we hauled up a point or two to the north and west, and stood right away to the icy regions of the North; and that night merrily at supper we sang in the cabin—

"'Twas in the year of 'sixty-one,
Of March the seventeenth day,
That our gallant ship her anchor weighed
And to the North seas bore away,
Brave boys," &c.

CHAPTER IV
THE BRIG "LEDA."

We had twenty-four hands on board; twelve of these were landsmen, being gunners and batmen, half agriculturists and half fishermen, who, at times, in summer, left their families to till the scanty soil, while they fished in open boats among the countless creeks and bays which indent the peninsula of Avalon; and now in winter, when all out-of-door operations were suspended, and the land was buried under fourteen feet of frozen snow—and when the sea, even to the distance of two hundred miles, would soon be bound with ice, they became seal-fishers; and, like others, had shipped in the little fleet which, on St. Patrick's Day, always departed from this Iro-American isle for the stormy seas that lash the Labrador.

All these men were Irish and oft at sea; I have heard the poor fellows, when seated under the leech of the foresail, with the icy spray flying over them to leeward, singing the sweet or merry songs they had learned at their mothers' knee, in the brave old land they were fated never to see again—for the story of our crew is a sad one!

We had a negro, who was our cook (of course), Cuffy Snowball—I never heard him named otherwise; and his adventures had been somewhat singular.

Cuffy had been a warrior of Congo, and dwelt in a hut on the banks of the Zaire, where, by dint of "his spear and shaggy shield," he had amassed a wealth of baskets, gourds, carved calibashes, and wooden spoons from cowards who could not defend them. He could tell, with great simplicity, innumerable stories of his combats with other tribes, and with lions, leopards, buffaloes, crocodiles, and hippopotami; and in evidence of his prowess, he wore on his left arm a bracelet formed entirely of lions' teeth—which form a kind of "Order of Valour" in Congo. He had been very happy in his wigwam, till the daughter of a Chenoo or chief—a beautiful damsel, with her teeth painted blue and the bone of a shark through her nose—espied him one day, and desired to have him for her husband, as it is the right of these ladies to do.

The chosen, of whom she becomes absolute mistress and proprietress, dare not refuse, so poor Cuffy was married to the Chenoo; there were great rejoicings, and three prisoners of war were devoured at the marriage-feast.

But his sable fair one tired of him in a short time, and by certain artful means decoyed him one evening to the mouth of the Zaire, and there sold him into slavery.

The slave-ship was wrecked; but Cuffy got ashore on the island of Jamaica, where he was very much surprised to see some of his countrymen, dressed and armed like white men, in coats of a red colour, with light blue trousers; so he enlisted as a soldier in one of her Majesty's West India Regiments.

Ere long Cuffy was made a corporal; and though he ground his sharp teeth now and then when thinking of his wigwam in Congo, and the treacherous Chenoo his wife, he was very happy, for he had plenty of rice, yams, and sangaree, and as a corporal, carried his black snub nose very high indeed!

From Jamaica his company was ordered to Trinidad, and the whole, a hundred in number, were shipped on board of a Yankee barque which had been freighted for the purpose. Her skipper, on seeing such a choice lot of tall and handsome young negroes, proposed to their captain (a reckless fellow, who was steeped to the lips in debt and all kinds of West Indian dissipation) to bear away for the Southern States of the Union, and there sell the whole as slaves. Singular as it may seem, the captain, who owed more money in Trinidad than he could ever hope to pay, accepted the proposal, and the soldiers of this company of H.M. West India Regiment, instead of garrisoning the isle where the "mother of the cocoa" blooms, were duly landed at Charleston in South Carolina, where they were all sold to the highest bidders. The skipper and captain put the money in their pockets, leaving the astonished lieutenant and ensign to get back to headquarters in Jamaica as they best could.

Cuffy's new master proved a severe one, and under his lash he often sighed for the rice, yams, and his quiet duty as sentinel under a sunshade, or the high authority he could wield as corporal over Scipio, Sambo, or Julius Cæsar, in the days when he was the white man's comrade; but one day Cuffy lost his temper, and gave his master a tap on the head with a sugar-hoe!

Then, without waiting to see whether or not he had killed him, he fled into the woods—crossed the Savannah river, and getting on board a British vessel became a sailor, and within one year thereafter, was shipped, as cook, on board the Leda.

The rest of our crew were all steady and hardy men, and Paul Reeves, the senior mate, was the model of an English sailor.

The wind had changed during the night; thus, when next day dawned, we were still in sight of Cape St. Francis—a snow-covered headland, which shone white and drearily, as the sun came up from the blue sea.

Hartly expressed some impatience at our progress as we trod to and fro aft the mainmast in the clear, cold, bracing air of the morning, while the odour of a hot breakfast, which Cuffy was preparing, came in whiffs from the galley.

"Never mind," said I; "the wind will soon change again—I can see by the clouds there are contrary currents overhead; and when once among the ice, we shall have great fun!"

"Fun! I don't know much about that," said Hartly, who, like every seaman, was put in a sulky mood by a foul wind.

"We shall have perils to encounter!"

"Perils may be fun to one so young as you, Jack," said Hartly, pausing thoughtfully; "however, in our trade, I have ever found that peril and profit go together. Think over all we have read of what Parry, Ross, Scoresby, Franklin, and Kane underwent in those regions of ice and snow; and I do not remember the word fun occurring once in their narratives."

"Well," said I, abashed by his monitory tone, "we shall have excitement, at all events."

"Both excitement and danger, I grant you," said he, as we resumed the usual quarter-deck step and trod to and fro again: "it is a well-paying speculation, a sealing expedition; and, by Jove! it would need to be so to compensate poor fellows for all they undergo in such a rigorous season, and in such seas as those which sweep round the frozen rocks and shores of Newfoundland and the drearier Labrador in the blustering month of March. Some crews are frozen in, far at sea, for months and months, till all perish of starvation; others are lost in detached parties on the ice-fields, in fogs, and are never found again. Some are swept out to sea on broken floes, or fall through holes in the ice, and are never more seen. Then the strongest ships are often crushed, as you would crush an egg upon an anvil, by the ice-fields, masses of which, perhaps a hundred miles in extent, are whirled, dashed, and split against each other by opposite currents, with a sound so frightful, that one might well imagine the last day was at hand, or that chaos had come again! Ah, we should have some profit, after encountering all that!"

"I should think so," said I while glancing at my watch, and reflecting that Mr. Uriah Skrew would, about this time, find the farewell letter I had left for him on my desk in the counting-room.

"But I do not say all this, Jack Manly, to cast you down," said Hartly, laughing; "for you will always be safe with me, as you know I never can be drowned, while wearing this ring."

"Do you really believe in it?" I inquired.

"Why, I don't know, Jack; but I should not like to lose it now: we sailors have strange fancies at times, but, with all our alleged superstition, are, I cannot help thinking, more religious than you landsmen. One who finds his daily bread upon the waters, and is for ever struggling with the wild elements by night and day, must at times think solemnly of the mighty Hand and Will that fashioned them out of thin air."

"But your ring?"

"She who gave it me was a strange old woman, whom we called Mother Jensdochter—a kind of Norna of the Fitful Head, who lived, or for aught I know, lives still, in a hut at the base of Mount Hecla, in Iceland. I was wrecked there, when on a voyage in the Princess, of Hull, bound for Archangel, five years ago. This witch occupied a regular Icelandic hut. It was built of wreck and drift wood, caulked with moss and earth, roofed with rafters of whale-ribs covered with turf, and having in the centre a hole for a chimney. Her bed was a mere box of seaweed, feathers, and down; but I seldom saw any house of a better kind in Iceland."

"Well?"

"She used to sell fair winds or foul, blessings or maledictions, as the matter might be, to the fishermen of the fiords. She would give, as the simple folks believed, a fair wind that would carry a craft as far as Cape Horn without lifting tack or sheet; or a curse that would sink the Royal Albert line-o'-battle ship, for a loaf of ground codfish, or a bottle of hockettle oil for the iron cruse that hung from her whalebone rafters; but she conceived a strong regard for me, because I had saved her miserable life in a snowstorm one night, and carried her in my arms—ugh! what a precious armful she was!—to her wigwam. She used to assure me that whenever there was a battle being fought anywhere in the world, the terrible mountain that overhung her dwelling vomited black ashes and stones; and then, as she sat at her door, with her long grey locks hanging over her fierce red eyes, she could see troops of infernal spirits carrying the souls of the damned, shrieking through the air, towards the flaming crater. The noise of the ice-floes dashed against the shore, she alleged to be the groans of others, who were doomed to endure excess of cold for eternity, even as those in Hecla were to endure excess of heat; and she had many other fancies wild enough to make a poor Jack Tar's hair stand up on end!

"Near her hut stood a conical knoll, covered with fine green grass, and thence named the Groenbierg. There, she asserted, by putting an ear to the ground, she could hear the large-headed gnomes and little bandy-legged dwarfs, who dwelt in it, busy at work, fashioning trinkets and curiously carved goblets—especially at Yule, where the clink of their tiny hammers rang like chime-bells on little anvils; and the puff of their bellows and forge could be heard, with the jingle of gold and silver coins, and opening and shutting of quaintly-carved and iron-bound treasure-chests, which they were shoving to and fro, and hiding in the bowels of the mountain. She fell asleep there one evening, and dreamed that the Grcenbierg opened, and there came forth a little man in a red cloak and pair of puffy breeches, with a white beard the entire length of his body (that is, about two feet,) and he bestowed this ring upon her, with a promise that whoever wore it was free from all danger hereafter. He then vanished into a mole-track on the hill-side. Mother Jensdochter awoke, and found the ring upon her finger, where it remained, until, in a burst of gratitude, she bestowed it on me, with the comfortable assurance (I give you the yarn, Jack, for what it is worth) that I 'could never be drowned while it remained on my finger.' Hans Peterkin—forward there!"

"Ay, ay, sir."

"Brace those foreyards sharper up; set the fore and main staysails and foretopmast staysail; and keep her a point or so further off the land.—And now, Jack, come below, for Cuffy has gone down with the bacon and coffee, piping hot, too."

Leaving Hans, the second mate, in charge of the deck, with orders to announce the slightest indication of a change of wind, we descended to breakfast with the appetites of hawks.

On this morning only two of our sealing companions were visible, and these were at the far horizon to the eastward; so as we were forced by change of wind to hug the land, we soon lost sight of them, and, ere noonday, were alone upon the sea.

CHAPTER V.
KIDD THE PIRATE.

We had scarcely lost sight of Cape St. Francis when the wind became light and variable, and one of those dense fogs peculiar to that region settled surely and slowly, densely and darkly, over land and sea. We shortened sail, and sent ahead the jolly-boat with four hands in her, to feel our way as it were; while Paul Reeves kept sounding ever and anon, for in that ocean of strong currents, with a slight wind from the eastward, and a shore of reefs and shoals upon our lee, every precaution was necessary.

The raw cold of a fog upon a wintry sea in that latitude of ice and snow must be felt to be understood. The clear bracing frost, however intense, may be endured; but this chill and murky dampness made one intensely miserable.

As we crept along, a strange sound reached us from time to time.

"What is that?" I asked.

"The voices of the penguins," replied Hartly—"the Baccalao birds. We are off that island; and their cries are as good as fog-guns to people situated as we are. See! the fog lights a bit; and now there is the land about two miles off, on the lee bow!"

As he spoke, the dense bank of vapour which shrouded sea, land, and sky, parted for a few minutes; a gleam of brilliant sunshine fell upon the rough and precipitous rocks of the wild and desert isle named Baccalao, which, in summer and winter, are alike ever whitened by a species of guano, deposited there by the auks or penguins, which we could see hovering above them in countless myriads, uttering shrill cries while they soared, wheeled, and flew hither and thither, as if to warn us of our danger in being so near those treacherous reefs, which are a source of terror to mariners. Their dangers are only seen, however, by the daring egg-gatherers, who come from the mainland in summer, and sling themselves by ropes from the summit of the cliff, to rifle the nests; although these poor birds are specially under the protection of Government, by a proclamation, being sea-marks, or danger-signals (as we found them) in foul or foggy weather.

With some interest I surveyed the stern cliffs of Baccalao, as they were the first land seen by Cabot, the Grand Pilot of England, after ploughing the mighty Atlantic in his little caravel; and he named them in his joy La Prima Vista, though a "vista" grim enough.

"The shore is dark, dreary, and sterile," said I to Hartly.

"Yes," said he, "but there are many strange stories of treasure being buried there by the pirates in old times."

"Do you see that deep chasm in the rocks in the north end of the isle?" said Paul Reeves, lowering his voice impressively as he pointed to the land.

"Yes, it seems quite black among the snow."

"That is not snow, but the deposit of the Baccalao birds," said the mate. "In the old buccaneering times, the pirates are said to have buried their treasure there; and a cask branded with the King's broad arrow, and the name Adventure, was once found in it. Now all the world knows that the Adventure was the ship of the famous Captain Kidd, who cheated King William out of the finest craft in the English navy."

"How?" said I.

"Let us hear," added Hartly.

"At a time when all the seas about the coasts of North and South America and the West India Islands were swarming with buccaneer craft, manned by desperadoes of every country, who made war upon all ships that sailed the ocean and were unable to resist them, the Government of King William III. selected a mariner of doubtful reputation, named Captain William Kidd, who volunteered to root out those sea-hawks, who persecuted the thrifty traders of New Amsterdam."

"King William acted on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief."

"Exactly so, Jack," said Hartly, "for Kidd, though ostensibly a merchant-mariner, was something of a smuggler, and had done a little in the way of picarooning. He was always heard of in out-of-the-way places, departing on voyages no one knew whither, and coming from places never heard of before. Then he was always followed by a crew of well-armed, black-muzzled, drinking, swearing, tearing fellows, who were as flush of money as if they had been at the overhauling of Havannah. But go a-head, Paul."

"Well," resumed the mate, "in 1695 Kidd sailed down Channel in the Adventure galley, of forty-four guns, with a royal pennant flying, duly commissioned by King William to fight all buccaneers, and his crew were all selected by himself. But Master Kidd was barely off the Lizard when he hauled down the King's pennant, hoisted the skull and crossbones, and bore away for the East Indies. He burned two towns in Madeira, and after plundering and sinking every craft he could overmatch, reached the entrance of the Red Sea, where he captured a Queda merchantman, the cargo of which lined the pockets of himself and his followers to their complete satisfaction.

"Queda is a town of Asia, situated on the western coast of the peninsula of Malacca; and so Kidd was cunning enough to attempt passing-off this capture as a crusade against the enemies of Christianity; but, unfortunately for him, the ship was commanded by a Scotchman, and people did not believe in crusaders under Orange William.

"A year or two after this, he was cruising off the American coast, and in dread of the King's ships, which were all on the look-out for him, he ran north as far as Newfoundland, and was alleged to have buried on its coast all the treasure amassed on his long and rambling voyage; but where, no one could exactly say, until the old barrel head, marked Adventure, and bearing the King's broad arrow, found in yonder cavern, seemed to indicate Baccalao as being the place. Moreover, he is known to have run up Conception Bay in quest of the gold and silver rocks which Frobisher and Sir Humphrey Gilbert averred were to be seen there."

"Rocks of gold and silver!" said I, incredulously.

"They are only the fire-stones of the Red Indians, and emit sparks when struck together," said Hartly.[*]

[*] They were the solid iron pyrites which deceived the early navigators who visited these barren shores. In the "List of H.M. Royal Navy for 1701," we find among the "fifth-rates, the Adventure, 120 men, 44 guns."

"His treasure," continued the mate, "if he had any, was never found; though he was, for Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, and Governor of New England, caught him one day in 1701, when swaggering about the streets of Boston, and sent him home to King William, who lost no time in hanging him. But he died as hard as he had lived, for the rope broke with his weight in Execution Dock, so he was reeved up again with a new one.

"He was hung in chains on the banks of the Thames, but his body disappeared in the night, and the sailors in London declared that he could neither be hanged nor chained, as he had a charmed life, having sold his poor soul to the devil. Be that as it may, on the same night, in 1701, my Lord Bellamont was found dead in his bed at Boston, and many affirmed that this event had some connexion with Kidd's mysterious disappearance from the gallows, as he was said to have been seen by some of his old shipmates near the dead Governor's house.

"Fishermen when jigging or trawling off Baccalao in the clear moonlight nights, often saw a solitary man sitting on the rocks at the mouth of yonder cavern, but his figure always seemed to melt away into the moonshine when any one approached; so a story went abroad that the island was haunted by the ghost of a drowned man. However, a stout fellow, named Tom Spiller, who was rather bolder than the rest, and who lived alone at Breakheart Point, where he had a little hut and stage for drying the fish he caught, went off to the island one night, when there was little cloud and a bright moon. The sea was calm, for there was but a puff of wind off the land from time to time.

"Tom Spiller was a brave and devil-may-care kind of fellow, whom I knew well, for he was an old man when I went to sea with him first as a boy, so I have often heard him tell the story without variation or leeway, or shaking out a new reef by way of a change.

"On approaching the island, he saw the solitary figure sitting on the rocks at the mouth of the deep black chasm, motionless, with his head resting, as it were, sorrowfully on the palm of his right hand, and his eyes fixed apparently on the sea that rippled to his feet, though it boiled and roared in white foam over the reefs that lay a few fathoms off outside.

"Tom steered his boat straight for the cave, and now, when the towering rocks of the desert isle were over his head, covered with thousands upon thousands of wild auks, screaming, whirling, and flapping their wings, as if to scare him away; when the deep black chasm in which the sea was gurgling and moaning yawned before him, and everything seemed so weird and wan in the pale moonlight, he did feel queer, and more so when the solitary man, instead of melting into thin air as usual, turned his white face towards him, and arose, just as he let go the halyards, lowered the brown flapping sail, and running his boat into the cave, adroitly noosed a rope over a large stone to moor her, and stepped ashore. Tom's heart was beating wildly and strangely, for he was determined to discover whether this figure, which he had so often seen from the sea, and which had so invariably eluded his brother fishermen, was man, ghost, or devil.

"He perceived that the stranger was clad in an old-fashioned dress, his coat having large metal buttons, broad pocket-flaps, and deep cuffs. He was ghastly pale, his glassy eyes glistened in the moonlight, and dark crimson blood was flowing from what appeared to be a pistol-shot in his left temple.

"'What seek you here?' he asked, in a voice so hollow that the terrified fisherman, who now repented sorely of his rashness, knew not whether the sound came from the spectre's white lips, from the depth of the dreary chasm, or from the sea. 'Speak,' continued the figure, with mournful earnestness; 'what seek you?'

"'To discover who and what you are,' said Tom.

"'May you never be what I was, or what I am,' replied the other, sadly.

"'But what are you?'

"'A restless spirit.'

"Tom's knees bent under him, for the pale eyes of that cold white visage seemed to pierce his soul.

"'A wretched spirit—left here by a fiend to guard his ill-gotten spoil—so begone, I charge you.'

"The fisherman shrank back on hearing these strange words, while the gloomy terrors of the scene—the screaming of the Baccalao birds that whirled in a cloud about him, the dashing of the waves upon the reef, and the mournful gurgle of the backwash within the vast cavern, with the weird glimpses of the moon as the white clouds sailed swiftly past her face—all combined to make this interview a dreadful one.

"Suddenly there was a sound of oars to seaward, the spirit seemed to become excited, and clasped his thin white hands.

"'See! see! he comes!' he exclaimed. 'Kidd the pirate! Kidd, my murderer! But he comes, blessed be God! to release me after a hundred years of restless watching and penance!'

"For you must know that this occurred, as Tom Spiller told me, in 1801.

"'Land ho!' cried a deep hoarse voice from the sea, while Spiller, overcome by terror, shrank behind a fragment of rock.

"'Hilloa!' answered the spirit, in nautical fashion.

"'Clouds and thunder! why the devil don't you show a light?' cried the strange voice, as a large barge full of men shot round a promontory, against which the waves were dashing in foam. On it came—on and on—at every stroke of the oars, till they were all triced up in true man-o'-war fashion as she sheered into the creek, and a man sprang on shore, uttering a tempest of oaths and maledictions.

"Tom Spiller now fancied that they were all dressed in the fashion of a hundred years ago, with deep square-skirted coats, long flowing perriwigs, and little three-cocked hats, and that all were pale, silent, and spectral; in short, it was a boat manned by unquiet spirits! Strangely enough, he felt less afraid of them all than of one, and continued to gaze at them like a person in a dream.

"The man who sprang ashore was a short, squat fellow of ferocious aspect; his battered visage was covered with cuts and patches of black plaster; a hellish spark glittered in each of his eyes. He wore a coarse perriwig with long curls, a three-cocked hat, an old-fashioned blue coat, covered with tarnished lace, and brass buttons; he had also a pair of brass-barrelled Spanish pistols, and a hanger sustained by a broad belt.

"Two ropes were knotted round his neck, which was bare, and pieces of rusty chain were dangling at his wrists and ankles. Then the marrow froze in the bones of Tom Spiller, for he knew that he looked upon William Kidd, the pirate, who had been twice hanged a hundred years before in Execution Dock.

"'Now, you canting, cowardly lubber, why the henckers didn't you hang out a light?' he bellowed in a hoarse voice.

"'I have been in the dark these hundred years,' replied the spirit, meekly.

"'Likely enough; seas and thunder! you were the faintest-hearted fellow in the Adventure.'

"'I suffered sorely at your hands since you captured the ship of Queda, of which I was captain, and made me a prisoner in yon galley.'

"'Bah!' thundered Kidd.

"'I have repented me of my sins in life,' said the spirit, mournfully.

"''Sblood and plunder!' shouted the other, with a diabolical laugh; 'I shot you through the head, as a canting Scotsman, on this night one hundred years ago, and buried you here—you know for what purpose.'

"'That my unquiet spirit might watch your buried treasure,' moaned the other.

"'Right,' chuckled the pirate; 'I shot you as I would have done my lord the Earl of Bellamont, though he was Governor of New England and Admiral of all the seas about it, for that long-snouted Dutch lubber, William of Orange, who sent him to lord it over the Yankees.'

"'I have waited and watched your treasure long, and now am anxious for the repose of the grave.'

"On hearing this, Kidd and his boat's crew laughed, and gnashed their teeth; but a few there were who wept and wailed heavily, and the sound of their lamentation was fearful as it mingled with the chafing of the surge.

"'I have some fine things stowed away here in Baccalao,' said Kidd; 'but I have some that are better still in the haunted Kaatskill Mountain, and at Tapaan Zee, up the Hudson.'

"The spirit-watcher groaned.

"'Since I saw you last, brother, I have been twice hanged and strung in chains on the banks of the Thames—ha! ha! at Gravesend Reach.'

"'Hanged!'

"'Yes, by all the devils in New Amsterdam!—HANGED! Hanged by order of him of pious, glorious, and immortal memory—by Orange Billy, who assassinated the De Witts in Holland, who murdered eighty men, women, and children in cold blood in Scotland; who abandoned his soldiers at Steinkirk; who boiled and burned women alive in London for coining a few brass halfpence; and who departed this life amid the prayers of canting hypocrites and lawn-sleeved parasites, on the 8th day of March, 1701! He roasts now, for some of his pranks, I can tell you! But heave a-head, brother! we must ship our cargo, and be off to-night for Cape Cod at New Amsterdam (or New York, as the folks call it now-a-days), ere the moon wanes or the tide falls. Where is the plunder?'

"The sad spirit-watcher pointed to a place which seemed to have opened in the rocky cavern; and there Tom Spiller could see, by the beams of the moon, heaps of gold and silver vessels, sparkling jewels and trinkets, with veritable pyramids of gold and silver coins of every nation and of every size, piled up in confusion.

"Bewildered by this sight, he permitted rather too much of his figure to be seen; for suddenly a yell of rage came from the spectre boat's crew; and Kidd, drawing one of the long brass pistols from his broad buff girdle, uttered a dreadful oath—

"'A spy!' he exclaimed; 'take that and perish!'

"He fired full at the head of Tom, who felt the ball pass through his brain like a red-hot arrow, and he sank upon the rocks—where he found himself lying stiff enough when he awoke next morning, and saw the Baccalao birds wheeling about in the sunshine."

"So the whole affair was only a dream!" said I.

"I cannot say," replied Reeves; "for strangely enough, an old Spanish pistol, with a strong smell of powder about it, and 'W. K.' on the butt, was lying on the rocks by his side. Tom lost no time, you may be assured, in jumping into his boat, and clapping on all sail to leave the island astern; but after that night the spirit was seen no more at the mouth of the cavern, for Kidd had come to release him, or to take away his treasure."

"And Tom Spiller?"

"Forsook his hut at Breakheart Point, and went to sea for many years: he felt unhappy, for the parsons say that folks always are so who have conversed with ghosts; but his mind dwelt for ever on the treasure in the cavern, and he never ceased to spin yarns about it, and express hopes that some, if not all that he saw, might yet remain. He returned to Breakheart Point about twenty years ago, an old and white-haired man; and one night, accompanied by three men armed with picks and shovels, sailed in search of the treasure; but they never reached the island, for a tempest came on and drove their boat to the northward. He tried to fetch Ragged Harbour, but was blown right across Conception Bay for more than thirty miles, and was drowned at La Cabo Bueno Vista, on a rock called, to this hour, Spiller's Point.

"As for Captain Kidd, he has never been seen since, though some folks hereabout say he commands the Black Schooner, which has overhauled so many of our merchantmen and escaped the Queen's cruisers. So that is my yarn, Mr. Manly."

"Steady, Paul, steady," said Hartly; "the fog has concealed your haunted island again."

"Steady it is, sir; but we had better take a pull at these larboard tacks, otherwise we may not be able to clear the three rocks that lie to the northward of Baccalao; and I think we can hear the breakers already!"

CHAPTER VI.
THE BLACK SCHOONER.

Long ere the mate's story was concluded, the dense fog—chilly, white, and drenching—had shrouded the dreary isle of Baccalao, and the voices of the penguins alone indicated its locality; but they became fainter, until we lost the sound altogether as we ran further to the north.

Now a furious snow-storm came on; thick and fast the white flakes fell ceaselessly aslant through a dark-grey sky upon the winter sea (for in that region there is no spring), covering the rigging, the decks, and storm-jackets of the watch, who shrank to leeward, while the wind, which blew keenly from the N.N.E., and thermometer, which had sunk very low, made me begin to reflect that there were more unpleasant places in the world than the counting-room of Mr. Uriah Skrew.

This snow-storm continued for three or four days, during which the whole seamanship of Hartly, Reeves, and Hans Peterkin was required to prevent the Leda being driven upon a lee shore. By chart and soundings they were constantly at work, to keep her off a land which was veiled in obscurity, for the wind was dead and strong against us; and frequently through the blinding snow, and grey hazy drift to leeward, we could hear the sullen booming of breakers, as they rolled in foam that froze upon the granite rocks and islets about Cape Freels.

This foul weather lasted for several days, and weary of beating fruitlessly to windward, when the storm abated, and the sky became again blue and serene, we found ourselves under easy sail, at the rate of four knots an hour or so, passing the Twillingate Isles, which lie between the Bay of Exploits and the vast Bay of Notre Dame. They were covered with snow, and are desolate, bleak, and little known, as on that part of the coast there are only about one hundred and fifty inhabitants—poor people—who, after fishing for cod and salmon in summer, quit their wigwams in winter to live in the sheltered woods, or sail south towards St. John. And now we began to get ready our boats and guns, and with telescopes to sweep the snow-clad shore for seals, and the open sea for ice-floes.

It was about the hour of six; the sun had just set, and the western sky was all a-blaze with fiery-coloured light, which tinged with roseate hues the waves that rolled upon the bleak and snow-clad shore. Captain Hartly took the wheel, and Reeves stood anxiously close by the binnacle, for we had to weather a long, sharp, and lofty promontory which abutted like a wall of rock into the ocean, and round which there eddied a swift and dangerous current. The wind, though now off the land, was too light to enable us to make headway against the stream.

On the brig we had but little "way," and a general exclamation of satisfaction rose from the hitherto silent crew, when the Leda shaved—as they phrased it—past the promontory, and we saw a deep cove of blue water opening beyond it; but lo!

There lay at anchor a schooner—a long, low, sharply prowed and rakish-like craft—with her hull painted black as jet could be, and with a number of rough-looking fellows crowding along her gunwale. We were not three hundred yards apart.

"Reeves, take the wheel," cried Hartly, in an excited voice. "The glass, Cuffy, the spy-glass!" he added with sharp energy, snatching from the hands of Snowball the telescope which usually hung on two hooks in the companion; "a row of ugly dogs they are that man her. By Heaven, she is the Black Schooner!"

"The Black Schooner!" we all exclaimed with something of dismay in our varying tones; and I felt, that with Paul Reeves's grim legend about Captain Kidd fresh in our memory, we had some cause for alarm in meeting with this robber ship upon those solitary seas.

"Are you sure, Hartly?" I asked.

"Not a doubt of it! see, Reeves—she is a two-topsail schooner!"

"What does that mean?" said I.

"A brig without tops, in fact."

A kind of growling cheer, mingled with wild and insolent halloing, rose from her crew on beholding us suddenly come round the abrupt promontory, from the brow of which a fringe of gigantic icicles overhung the sea. A commotion was instantly observable on deck; a man in authority sprang up the companion-ladder, and we heard him in a loud and clear voice ordering sail to be instantly made on the schooner as we altered our course.

"Man the windlass-bars—up anchor—rouse it to the catheads with a will, my boys! Shake out everything fore and aft—every stitch that will draw. Stand by the jib and flying-jib halliards," he shouted.

After a pause, during which we heard the clanking of the windlass pauls, as her anchor was started, and would soon be a-cockbill, and dangling by its ring, we heard his voice again.

"Up with the jib and flying-jib now—sheets to starboard! Heave and away—presto! my Jack Spaniards. Stand by topgallant and topsail sheets and halliards. Bear a hand, you French devils! Well done, my Kentucky rowdies!"

In less than three minutes the swelling of the jib and other head-sails, as well as the motion of the schooner when her bows fell round, proved that she was under weigh. These orders, which were obeyed with skilful alacrity, seemed to indicate alike the mixed character of her crew and the hostility of their intentions.

"Ready a gun there forward! sheet home and hoist away, topsails and topgallant sails!"

This alarming order, uttered in a loud voice, rang distinctly upon the clear frosty air, and, on the other hand, Captain Hartly was not slow in his preparations to avoid her.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "this is the very craft we have heard so much about, and for the capture of which the Governor offers 500l. I have no wish to be caught by these fellows—see, they are shaking out a couple of reefs in her fore and aft mainsail already! Hands make all sail—Reeves, set everything that will draw—square away the after yards."

"Ay, ay, sir," said Reeves, jumping about and setting all the men to the yards, braces, and halliards; "port the smallest bit—keep her full—so—steady!"

"Maldito los Inglesos renegades!" ("Curse the English runaways!") cried a Spaniard, shaking his clenched hands at us over her starboard bow.

"Caramba!" cried another.

"Sangbleu!" added a Frenchman, "stop hare—lie to—or it vill be ze vorser for you."

"Will it, you rascally thief!" shouted Hartly, as his eyes flashed and his cheek glowed with excitement: "Manly, look alive, my lad! load all the double-barrelled rifles in the cabin. Snowball, get up the kegs of powder and slugs. We shall not be overhauled by a pirate without having a skirmish first."

"Luckily for us the wind is off the land, and it freshens too," said Reeves: "we shall beat her when running before the wind; but she would come up with us hand over hand on a taut bowline. It was on a wind she overtook the Bristol clipper."

In the red glow of the winter sunset, we saw the foam flying on each side of her sharp bows as the breeze freshened, and she rolled heavily from side to side; while the Leda, being square-rigged, had a greater spread of canvas, and caught more of the wind: thus, notwithstanding that our dangerous pursuer was built for sailing fast, as Paul Reeves foretold, she was no match for us, when running right before the wind.

Our crew, half of whom were only poor seal-fishers, became very much excited; but inspired by the example of Hartly, Reeves, and myself, they proceeded to load all the sealing guns and muskets, lest the schooner might lower her boats to overtake us and attempt to board.

The stern and confident order to get "ready a gun," was repeated more than once before we got beyond hearing; but as no gun was ever fired, we believed this to be a mere bravado to frighten us into shortening sail, till she might run alongside and board us, when a ruinous scene of plunder, if not of bloodshed, would be sure to ensue.

"She sails with the speed of an arrow," said I, while carefully loading and capping my rifle.

"This Black Schooner was one of the craft employed in protecting the French fishery of Miquelon, on the south side of the island," said Hartly; "but her crew mutinied, shipped some runaways of all countries and colours, and turned slavers. These rascals have committed several outrages hereabouts by sea and land, but have always escaped our cruisers, as she alternately shows a British, French, and Yankee ensign, and runs all kinds of paint-strokes along her bends."

On, on, we bore; and on, on, she came after us, with the still freshening breeze, the foam flying before her bows and ours; but ere long we were evidently half a mile apart.

She was a handsome clipper-like craft of about two hundred tons' burthen, coppered to the bends; her lower masts were long and heavy, so as to carry fore and aft sails of immense spread upon a wind, with a square sail, top and topgallant sail aloft.

"Massa Hartly—Massa Captain—look out!" exclaimed Cuffy Snowball, who had armed himself with a musket, and stood in soldier-fashion at "the ready," grinning over the taffrail at the rolling schooner.

"Look out for what?" said Hans Peterkin.

"Something make you all look white as de debbil."

"What do you mean by white," asked the carpenter, "when we all know the devil is black?"

"In my country him white, sare," replied Cuffy, angrily.

"Then," said Hartly, to keep up the spirits of his crew by jesting, "what colour do you think he is, Cuffy?"

"I tink him blue," replied the prudent negro; and then he added with a yell, "dere come something will make you look blue too, Massa!"

As he spoke, a puff of white smoke rose from the bow of the Black Schooner; the report of a musket rang in the air, and a conical rifle-ball whistled past the ear of Hartly, and sank with a heavy thud into the mainmast.

CHAPTER VII.
THE CHASE.

Cuffy Snowball fired his musket at our pursuer, whether with or without effect we know not; but, in reply, a confused discharge of firearms followed, and the balls pattered among the rigging, and knocked little splinters from our spars and gunwale.

"Now, my lads," said Hartly, "let fly at her with everything you have—sealing-guns and rifles!"

This order was executed with alacrity. We had four good rifles and ten long-barrelled and wide-muzzled sealing-guns, each of which sent ten or twelve slugs of lead whirring through the air at every discharge, and we blazed away right valiantly at the crowd of rascals in the schooner's bows; but so great was the distance between us, that I am certain our fire fell harmlessly into the sea—the rifle shots alone could have told with effect.

On first deliberately levelling my rifle (a fine Enfield, presented to me by my father on leaving Peckham) at a man in the starboard bow of the pirate, a strange sensation came over me!

I lowered my weapon and paused; but a shot that struck one of the davits at which the stern-boat hung, removed my momentary, and at that unpleasant crisis most unnecessary scruple.

I levelled again—fired and reloaded, and without considering whether or not I had killed a man, continued to pepper away with all the coolness and precision of Cuffy Snowball, the ex-corporal of H.M. West India Regiment.

"Run up our ensign, and let her rascally crew see it while there is light," said Hartly. "Paul Reeves, rig out the lower studding-sail booms forward, and bring aft those two carronades and the small anchor, to trim her more by the stern. Tom Hammer, see to this!"

"Ay, ay, sir," was the ready response.

The orders were promptly obeyed. The small anchor and two little guns, for which we unfortunately had only powder for signals, were brought aft; the sharp bows of the Leda thus rode more easily over the water. The lower studding-sails were rapidly spread and hoisted up; and then we flew through the darkening sea till its water seemed to smoke alongside, and bubbled in snowy froth under the counter, leaving a long white wake, like that of a steamer, astern.

Closely in this long wake followed our pursuer, with deadly pertinacity.

It is impossible to convey in words any idea of the excitement of this chase—this flight and pursuit—this race of rivalry, of life and death! The daring ruffians who manned the schooner had committed several murders and robberies on sea and land. They had overhauled and rifled several merchant ships, carrying off compasses, charts, provisions, watches, money, and everything of value: thus, to have undergone such a ransacking at their hands—even if our lives were spared—would effectually have marred our expedition for that year.

They were evidently well armed, for their rifle-balls flew thick and fast about us. The cracking report, and the pingeing sound of the conical shot that followed every red flash which broke over the sharp bows of the schooner, added considerably to our anxiety to escape, and to our exasperation at being thus molested on the high seas, and within two hundred miles of where we had left one of her Majesty's sloops of war in the harbour of St. John, but frozen in, unfortunately.

Though these missiles struck the brig's stern and rigging incessantly, we had only one man hit—an Irish seal-fisher, who had left a wife and family at Dead Man's Bay, to try his fortune with us in the North. A ball pierced his shoulder, smashing the collar-bone; and the poor fellow sank on the deck with a shrill cry of agony. A lad named Ridly had his cheek grazed by another shot.

The dusk was fast increasing; but the red flush of the winter sunset yet lingered in the western sky; the snow-clad islets that stud the Bay of Exploits had assumed a dark purple hue, and the sea through which we were careering, northwest, towards the Bay of Notre Dame, wore a deep and sombre blue.

Clearly defined against the dusky and ruddy sky, we could see the pursuing schooner, her tall slender spars swaying from side to side, with every stitch of snow-white canvas spread upon them; and she tore through the waves like a giant bird, swimming in the wake of dead water that ran like a long path astern of us.

We had everything set aloft and alow; to her very trucks the Leda was covered with swelling canvas, and she was a beautiful sight! The keen and anxious eyes of Hartly, who was at the wheel, scanned ever and anon the taut cordage, the bending masts, and then he would cast a fierce glance astern.

"We are leaving her fast, sir," said Paul Reeves, confidently; "in another hour we shall be far enough apart to feel comfortable."

"Bravo, my little Leda!" responded my friend; "she is trimmed and masted to perfection! You see, Jack, how a square-rigged craft has the advantage over even a sharp little serpent with a floating sheet, like that rascally schooner!"

Her crew still continued to blaze at us with their rifles; but ere long the bullets fell far short, for we were now more than a thousand yards apart, and with cheers of derision we continued to surge through the darkening ocean.

"If we had only possessed a few round-shot, we might have knocked some of their sticks away with these two useless carronades," said Hartly, as he now relinquished the wheel to Hans Peterkin, his second mate, and ordered glasses of grog to be served all round. "Corporal Cuffy, do you think you could have knocked her mainboom away, when the sea is so smooth?"

"Like to knock all him brains out!" replied the Congo-man with a savage grin; for, inspired by some of his old African instincts, Snowball was the only person on board who regretted that we had not enjoyed a hand-to-hand conflict with these outlaws.

But now the darkness of the descending night, together with the gathering clouds and haze, concealed the schooner from us.

We extinguished all lights on board, and ere long when a red spark about seven miles astern indicated that she was still tracking us, Hartly took in his studding-sails, reduced the canvas on the brig, brought his larboard tacks on board, and bore up for Cape St. John, the boundary of the French shore, to land our wounded man, who was suffering great agony from his compound fracture, and with whom, as we had no medical officer, it would have been impossible to pursue our voyage.

This rencontre, chase, and escape, formed a staple topic for conversation to all on board, and till the night was far advanced no one thought of turning in.

When day broke we found ourselves close in shore, on the northern side of the great Bay of Notre Dame, with Cape St. John bearing about three miles off on our lee bow. We swept the sea with our glasses, but not a sail was visible in the offing, nor all along the snow-clad coast. Save Cuffy Snowball, all expressed their satisfaction at this; but we were not yet entirely done with our sable acquaintance, the Black Schooner.

CHAPTER VIII.
OUR REVENGE SCHEMED.

We came to anchor, handed our topsails, but merely hauled up our courses, so as to be ready for sea at a moment's notice. We were in a little sheltered cove, abreast of a small village of wooden huts, surrounded by fences that were buried deep in the frozen snow.

These huts, like all others in this wild terra nova, were built of fir-poles with the bark on, braced or pegged closely together, and having chimneys of rough stone built without mortar. Bark and sods formed the roofs, and all the crevices were carefully caulked with moss and mud.

There, in a wretched and dreary region, dwelt—and, I presume, still dwell—a little Irish colony of fifty or sixty poor souls, who fished for cod in summer and seals in winter, each family herding together for warmth in the same apartment with their pigs, fowls, and the shaggy dogs which dragged in harness the stunted trees that formed their fuel, and which were cut in the adjacent bush—the desolate place which once formed the summer hunting-grounds of the extinct Red men of the island.

Our anchoring in the cove was a great event—the entire population came forth to gaze and their dogs to bark at us.

Though Newfoundland is larger than England and Wales together, it is indented by broad bays of deep water, which run for forty or fifty miles into the interior, and are but little known. On some of these solitary shores are little stations of Europeans, such as this we visited, so remote from all intercourse, and so secluded, that their reckoning of time has become confused as to days, months, and even years; thus Sunday is frequently held by them in the middle of a week.

To the care of these pioneers, or squatters, we consigned our wounded man. By the intensity of the frost mortification had commenced, so the poor fellow died a few days after being landed.

We had scarcely conveyed him ashore, when a man arrived from the bush with a large tree, which he had cut down, and which his dogs had dragged easily over the snow (after it was denuded of its bark and branches) in the usual manner, by having their traces secured to his hatchet, which was wedged in the broad end of the log. He informed us that a schooner—by his description, our identical Black Schooner—was then at anchor under the lee of the Gull Island, about five miles distant; and added that the poor French people at La Scie complained bitterly of the rifling they had undergone at the hands of her crew, which consisted of forty well-armed desperadoes, of all nations, but principally English and Frenchmen.

Here was startling intelligence!

"Only five miles distant, say you?" reiterated Hartly.

"Yes, sir; and you may see Gull Island from the mouth of our cove here."

"You are sure she is a schooner?"

"Yes, with masts raking well aft."

"All black in the hull, with slender spars and double topsails?"

"Sure as I now spake to yer honour," replied our informant, who was an Irish fisherman and squatter; "her crew have let go both anchors to make all snug, and gone in a gang to enjoy themselves, or rob—which you plaze—I suppose it's all one to them, at La Scie; bad luck to them, and may the devil fly away with them all!"

"Are they all gone?"

"All except six rapparees, whom I could count from the bush where I was hiding."

"Six—left as a deck-watch, I suppose?"

"Just so; yer honour's right again."

"How long have you lived here?" I inquired, for his brogue was as strong as if he had only left his native Kerry yesterday.

"I have lived here, plaze yer honor, five-and-forty years this last St. Patrick's Day, and have niver had an hour's illness, glory be to God!"

"Five-and-forty years!" I reiterated, with a shudder, while surveying the snow-clad wilderness amid which the wigwams stood.

"How far is La Scie from the Gull Island?" said Hartly, after a pause.

"Six miles, capthin."

"Then by Heaven I'll burn her to the water-edge, or sink her at her anchors!" exclaimed Hartly, who, with all the rapidity of his nature, at once conceived and prepared to execute a very daring scheme.

While the quarter-boat was got ready, and four oars, with as many rifles loaded and capped, and a case of ammunition, were put into her, Hartly, with Paul Reeves, proceeded in the most simple and methodical manner to prepare their apparatus for burning the piratical schooner.

He took a common ship-bucket, and secured an iron ring to the iron handle, for a purpose to be afterwards explained. He filled this bucket with pieces of rope and spun-yarn, well steeped in tar and grease, mixing them with rosin and gunpowder. They were nearly three hours in getting these combustibles prepared to their complete satisfaction; and so impatient were they to put their scheme in execution, that they would scarcely wait until dusk to make the attempt. But the moment the sun set, Hartly issued orders to Paul Reeves and Hans Peterkin to heave short on the anchor to get it apeak, to cast loose the topsails, and prepare the jib for hoisting; and while he started along the coast in the quarter-boat, to follow him under easy sail, keeping pretty well to windward of Gull Island, and out of sight of the schooner. If the night became obscure, on hearing the report of a rifle a blue light was to be burned on board the Leda, to indicate her whereabouts.

While Paul Reeves got the brig under weigh, and, favoured by a very light breeze, crept slowly out of the cove, Bob Hartly, with Hammer the carpenter, Cuffy Snowball, and I, started in the sharp little quarter-boat, and aided by a current which there runs north to Cape St. John, pulled swiftly along the shore towards Gull Island, which lies beyond the extremity of the headland.

CHAPTER IX.
OUR REVENGE EXECUTED.

The evening, as it deepened into night, was calm and beautiful: as yet the moon had not risen, but the sky was clear, with an intensity and purity of blue that can only be found in the icy north, and studded by ten thousand sparkling stars. Some of these were so bright as almost to cast our shadows on the smooth water as we stretched to our oars, and swept along the snow-white coast.

The latter being nearly destitute of inhabitants, after we left the cove was voiceless, silent, and desolate. Not a light was visible, and no sounds broke the stillness save the booming of the surf on the rocks of Cape St. John, our own hard breathing, and the clatter of the oars in the rowlocks. Then (as that is a species of noise which the water conveys to a vast distance) we proceeded to muffle them by our handkerchiefs, and once more we stretched out vigorously.

Notwithstanding the intensity of the cold, so invigorating was the exercise of rowing, and so full were our minds of excitement and of our project for destroying the pirate schooner, that we all felt in a glow of heat, and almost uttered a shout when, after pulling about three miles, on clearing the bluff Cape of St. John, on the flinty brow of which the spray was frozen white as it was dashed up by the sea, we saw the steep rocks of Gull Island; and at anchor, half a mile to leeward of it, the dark hull and tall spars of the Black Schooner!

The increasing light at one part of the horizon showed that the moon would shortly be up, so we pulled with might and main to get close under the lee of the island, and out of the long brilliant track the Queen of Night would shortly send across the rippling ocean.

"I might have brought an auger and bored a hole or two in her sheathing under water, and so have scuttled her quietly at her anchors," said the carpenter.

"But that boring would have kept us alongside too long," said Hartly; "and the rascals might have got some of their plunder out before she went down; moreover, your auger would have made too much noise. But, hush! we are seen—two fellows are looking over her side!"

"All her boats are gone," said I.

"Yes, to La Scie, except one at the stern."

"They are hailing us, sir," said Hammer.

"Hush! I'll weather the ruffians yet," said Hartly.

We spoke in whispers, while our hearts beat like lightning, as we knew not the issue of our attempt, or the moment we might be fired on from her deck. The schooner rode with both her anchors out, to make sure of her holding-ground in case a squall came suddenly on. Her canvas was neatly handed, her fore and aft foresail and boom mainsail were tightly brailed up, and her topgallant yards sent down.

Though black and sombre, with nothing light about her save her copper, which shone brightly as burnished gold in the clear and starlit sea, she was a beautiful little vessel; and Hartly almost sighed on thinking that he was about to destroy instead of capturing her.

"She is a lovely craft!" said he, "sharp at the bows as a needle below the water-line, clear at the counter, and coppered to the bends. What a glorious yacht she would make!"

"In sheering alongside, take care, sir, they don't scuttle us—by a cold shot, or a large stone," said Hammer.

"Well," replied Hartly, "my friend the Greenland witch said I should never drown; but that does not prevent me from being shot, or hung from the schooner's topsail yard."

As we pulled round across her bows to starboard, keeping pretty well off, we were hailed again.

"Boat—boat ahoy! what are you?"

"Fishermen," replied Hartly.

"From where?"

"La Scie, where all your fellows are enjoying themselves."

"Got any feesh?" asked a Frenchman.

"No—not at this season."

"Any zeels?"

"Seals—no."

"Then prenez-garde, messieurs."

"Which means, in plain English, sheer off, d—n your eyes!" growled the first speaker; but by this time we were close under her starboard counter.

"Sheer off, or it may be the worse for you!"

"What the devil are you lubbers about under the counter?" exclaimed another; "Baptiste, hand me a musket——"

"We have dropped an oar, and our boat has run foul of yours," replied Hartly; adding, in a whisper, "The gimlet, carpenter—quick, the gimlet!"

In less time than I have taken to write these last half-dozen lines, Hartly had screwed the long gimlet into the vessel's side, under her counter, and hooked on the bucket, through the iron ring which he had secured to its handle, and there it hung close to the rudder and stern-post. By the swift application of a single lucifer-match he fired the touch-paper that was to light the carefully-prepared combustibles, the gathering flame of which shot upward from the bucket, and began at once to lick and flicker on the newly-painted planking of the schooner.

"Shove off, and give way—for your lives, give way!" said Hartly, in a hoarse whisper.

"Cut away stern-boat—let hims all burn—agh! agh!" grinned Cuffy, who, by a slash of the knife which hung at his neck, cut adrift the boat which was moored astern. We had not intended thus to destroy the retreat of the wretches on board, but the African was merciless to his enemies, and we had no time to repair his severity.

"Give way," shouted Hartly, as soon as we were clear of her; "clap on dry nippers! By Jove! those lads of the knife and pistol will never come athwart the hawse of the Leda again!"

We had not pulled ten strokes from her, ere a flame seemed to play on the water beneath her counter!

It spread rapidly between the rudder and sternpost, burning through outer and inner sheathing; penetrating the rudder-case, and reaching the cabin, which was unoccupied, as all the crew were ashore save the six already mentioned, whom we saw loitering amidships. One was provided with a musket, which no doubt he would have discharged at us, had we lingered another moment alongside.

Suddenly they raised a shout; then we saw them rush aft, when they immediately discovered the vessel to be on fire, and that their only boat was adrift!

He with the musket took a long aim at us, and fired; but as we were now three hundred yards from the schooner, and our boat was alternately rising and falling on the long rolling swell that heaved between Gull Island and Cape St. John, his shot fell far from us.

By this time the schooner was hopelessly on fire; her whole quarter-deck, stern, and cabin, forward to the mainmast, were sheeted with red and roaring flame. It spread along the deck; it leaped up the well-greased masts like a fiery corkscrew, round the tarred rigging and over the handed canvas, till everything was in a blaze; the great fore and aft sails fell from their brails like fiery curtains; then we saw her two tall, slender spars, the long boom of her mainsail, her towering gaffs and topsail yards, all swaying to-and-fro, as the decks fell in and the shrouds sank smouldering into the sea. Then everything went to cinders fore and aft—aloft and alow!

A lurid glare that outshone the light of the rising moon, overspread the calm blue sea, casting a ruddy glow upon our faces as we paused upon our oars, close to the island, where the weird illumination scared all the sea-birds; thus we heard the shrill scream of the wagel or great grey gull, as he rose with booming wings and flew to seek the darker waters of the offing or the frozen bluffs of Cape St. John, on which the thundering breakers as they reared their heads, gleamed in the double light of red and silver, like showers of diamonds and rubies.

"Jack—see how she burns!" said Hartly: "there goes her mainmast crash into the sea—and now the foremast, a mass of whizzing sparks, with all its top-hamper! Pull for the island, till the brig comes abreast of it;" and then cheerily he sang—

"Haul away, pull away, pull, jolly boys!
At the mercy of fortune we go,
We're in for it now, and 'tis all folly, boys,
To be faint or downhearted, yeho!"

By this time the schooner was a mass of fire, and burnt down nearly to her bends. Through the flames we could see the blackened stumps of her timber-heads, standing in a row from stem to stern. Suddenly there was an explosion, and a mighty column of red and blue sparks and burning brands shot into mid air, arching over in every direction as they fell hissing into the sea.

A quantity of powder had exploded on board!

Just at that moment we beached our boat upon Gull Island, and ascended the rocks in haste to view the result of our handiwork.

A great cloud of smoke was now settling over her, as the flames approached the water; and beyond this cloud we could see a little boat with some men in it, pulling in the direction of Cape St. John. Hartly was pleased on seeing this; for although he had resolved to destroy the schooner, his heart reproached him for leaving six of the pirates to perish in her. One, no doubt, had swum after their drifting boat, and brought her alongside in time to save his five shipmates; and then we laughed on thinking how cold his swim would be in the wintry waves, and of the baffled rage of the ruffians at La Scie, left there without a vessel or any means of escape from a desolate fishing-station, which in a week or two more would have, perhaps, three hundred miles of field-ice between it and the sea.

A faint hurrah now came from seaward. We turned, and saw the smart and saucy Leda with her foresail backed flat to the mast, and her maintopsail full and swelling—her straight sharp hull, and her taut rigging, in all its details, clearly and distinctly defined against the vast silver disc of the moon, which seemed to linger as it rose from the flat horizon of the distant offing. There was no need of showing lights on board the brig, as we could see each other distinctly, and also the burning pirate. No flame rose from her now; but a vast black pall of smoke enveloped all her hull.

From the centre of this, there came a sound like a deep sob, as she filled and went down. Then when the smoky pall arose and melted into thin air, not a vestige could be seen of the Black Schooner!

"And now, my lads, away for the brig," said Captain Hartly, as we descended from the highest part of the island to reach our boat, passing through deep snow, among thickets of dwarf firs and great juniper trees—over rocks covered with savin and frozen furze, where, in the short season of summer, the wild Indian tea called wisha-capucoa grew plentifully, and where the beaver and the musk-rat had their holes.

As we floundered down to the creek, a yell from Cuffy Snowball, who was behind, startled us all. A wild cariboo deer had rushed past him. How it came on the island puzzled us, for usually in winter these animals seek the forests of the interior, till the sun of the brief summer melts the snow, and enables them to browse on the scanty herbage of the barrens, as the cleared patches of moorland are named by the squatters.

"If the Governor adheres to his proclamation, this night's work adds five hundred pounds to our profits," said Hartly, as the crew received us with hearty cheers; the headsails were filled, and we at once stood off the shore.

Next morning, when day broke, we could see by our glasses a band of men assembled on the snow-covered summit of Cape St. John.

These were evidently the outwitted crew of the schooner; so, hoisting the ensign at our gaff-peak, Paul Reeves dipped it to them thrice, ironically bidding them farewell, as we stood away to the eastward to make up for the time we had lost in being driven, by their attack and pursuit, so far out of the course our captain first intended to steer.

CHAPTER X.
THE SEAL-FISHERS.

Some days after this event, we saw the dark blue of the sea flecked at the horizon by white spots. These increased in size as we approached, and proved to be the floes, or detached portions of a vast field of ice, coming down from Davis' Straits, and with them came masses of strange sea-weed, uprooted from the bottom of the ocean, as some writers aver, by the mighty tusk of the male narwhal when searching for food.

We were soon amid the floes, and after passing through them, Paul Reeves from the fore-crosstrees announced that he could discern the field of ice, extending along the whole line of the horizon; and we soon became sensible of its vicinity by a very perceptible increase of the cold, which ere long became almost unbearable. But our seal-fishers prepared with alacrity for the great work of our little expedition, by getting up their wooden clubs, their long sealing-guns, and shot-pouches; their knives, sledges, and rue-raddies or collar-ropes, by which to drag the loads of skins to the brig, as they might have to pursue and slaughter the seals for some miles from where she would anchor by the outer edge of the ice. The inner, Hartly knew by his observations, partly rested on Wolf Island, off the coast of Labrador.

On the detached floes, we saw a few seals like black dots; but on the ice nearing the brig they always disappeared.

"There they go, souse into the water, tail up for old Greenland!" said Hans Peterkin. "Now, Cuffy, get your fiddle in order."

"A fiddle!" said I; "for what?"

"That you shall soon see, Jack," said Hartly. "Paul Reeves, get ready a gang with the ice-anchor and cable!"

As we neared the scene of our operations, we passed ten or twelve gigantic icebergs, the bases of which were merged deep in the icy sea. Solemnly still, and intensely cold and pure they seem, to those who first behold these voiceless floating mountains, so terrible in their form and whiteness, the shades of which are blue.

By a telescope, I perceived that some of them bore masses of gravel, frozen mud, and even enormous boulder-stones, torn from the shore—but from what shore?

From unknown and untrodden lands beyond the Arctic Circle—shores where, perhaps, the last of Franklin's fated crew are lying unburied save by the eternal snow; and while I gazed on these floating islands, so awful in their aspect and solitude and so mysterious in their formation, there came to memory the oft-quoted words of the Psalmist, how "they who go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters, see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep."

No small care, skill, and seamanship were requisite to avoid those perilous "wonders;" but erelong we were close to the mighty field of ice which covered all the ocean to the far horizon—a white and desolate expanse, like a snow-covered moorland—varied only by the incessant hummocks, as those ridges of broken ice formed by the collision of ice-fields, are named; or by the wavy outline or sharp spiral pinnacles of bergs which were wedged in the floating mass, and seemed to form the crags and mountains of this white and desolate world of ice and snow.

We considered it singular, that up to this time we had not seen a single ship bent on the same errand, either of those which sailed with us on St. Patrick's Day through the Narrows of St. John, or any of the steam sealers which leave the northern ports of Scotland about the same season of the year.

Now the quarter-boat was lowered, and Paul Reeves with her crew took off the cable and ice-anchor, which is formed like a pick-axe; the courses were hauled up, the fore and aft mainsail brailed, the topsails and topgallant sails handed, and we warped close to the ice-field, fairly coming to anchor alongside its edge, just as we might have warped close to a quay or wharf.

This was about ten in the morning of the 25th of March, and after receiving a glass of stiff rum-grog per man, the whole of our seal-fishers "landed," as they phrased it, on the ice, with all their apparatus, including Cuffy with his violin; and, after, three hearty hurrahs for Captain Hartly, proceeded in quest of their prey, scores of which were seen dotting the white ice-scape (if I may so term it) within the distance of a mile from the brig.

Seals of every species live or consort in droves along those desolate shores where the bergs and ice-fields float; and they are often found basking in the rays of the sun. Thus, when falling asleep they easily become a prey, though, when reposing, the seal is cunning enough to open its large black eyes from time to time, to see whether all is quiet around it. The female produces two or three at a litter, and feeds them for a fortnight or so on the shore where she has brought them forth, suckling them in a position nearly upright, till the fattened cubs depart to see the Arctic world upon the ice-floes, and are old enough to search the waves for food.

Armed with my double-barrelled rifle and a sheathed knife that dangled at my shot-belt, and well prepared to encounter the cold by a suit of the warmest clothing (Flushing lined with English blanket), I set out alone in quest of adventures, feeling a strange emotion of mingled alarm and delight on finding myself afoot upon that frozen sea. The intense purity and rarity of the atmosphere carried the voices of our scattered men to a vast distance. I could hear Cuffy vigorously scraping a hornpipe on his violin half a mile off; and thus won by the lyre of our sable Orpheus, the seals with their hairy paws (usually known as flippers), their round black heads, soft gleaming eyes, and spotted skins, from which the brine was dripping, began to appear in herds from subtle holes in the ice—holes through which I was frequently in terror of vanishing from mortal ken; and as these strange amphibious animals rolled upon the field, turning up their full round bellies, which reminded me of those of gorged swine, I could see their bodies steaming in the frosty sunshine, for being warm-blooded they emit at times a vapour.

Seated on a sledge, under the lee of a hummock, Cuffy played vigorously; but how his black fingers could handle his instrument in such an atmosphere was beyond my comprehension, for though the glare of the noonday sun, as he shone through a cloudless sky, was almost blinding, the degree of cold was indescribable. Ere long Snowball had a numerous auditory, for music allures and fascinates these animals, as it does many others; we are told how

"Rude Heiskar's seal through surges dark,
Will long pursue the minstrel's bark;"

but the moment our treacherous musician replaced his violin in its canvas bag, an appalling scene of butchery began.

The batmen rushed about as if a frenzy had seized them, striking the seals on their round bullet-like heads, knocking them over, stunned and motionless. Others followed, with long sharp knives, by five slashes of which the expert hunter will denude the largest cub of his smooth glossy skin, to which the thick white fat adheres, and after being thus denuded, on more than one occasion I have seen the miserable animal, bared to its slender ribs, when stung, as it were, by the intense frost reaching its vitals, revive for a minute, and make efforts to crawl along the ice, or drop into the sea!

The whole ice-field, which a moment before had been so white in its spotless and untrodden purity, now, within the radius of a mile, presented the aspect of a battle-field, strewn with gashed carcases and heaps of bloody skins that were steaming in the sunshine. Cuffy seemed in his element—in his glory! Flourishing his long knife, he uttered yells as if every seal he stripped had been the Chenoo wife who sold him into slavery, or the Yankee taskmaster whose whip had skinned him more than once.

This wholesale butchery sickened me.

The attachment of the mother-seal to her offspring is very great; and here I saw a great hooded one carrying off a little wounded cub in her mouth toward the edge of the ice-field, where they dropped into the sea, escaping Cuffy, who pursued them. There are times when the mother turns fiercely with tusks and claws upon the destroyers of her young, and then the long gun with its charge of slugs is brought into action; for on the old seals (Buffon avers that some of them live for more than a hundred years) the sturdiest batman's arm would swing the knotted club in vain. The membrane of the hooded seal can be drawn over the nose, and inflated, so as to protect the head like a helmet of gutta-percha.

Leaving our people engaged in the work of slaughter, halloing, shouting, and encouraging each other, as they threw their bloody and greasy spoil upon little sledges, to be dragged by ropes alongside the brig, I proceeded over the hummocks in search of—I scarcely knew what.

Our men seldom fired their guns, as shot destroys the skin, which, after the cargo is brought into port, has the fat or blubber carefully removed and placed in the great wooden tanks or vats of the oil-merchant; while the pelts are cleaned, spread, and, after having layers of coarse salt placed between them, are packed in bales for transport to other countries.

CHAPTER XI.
COMBAT WITH A SEA-HORSE.

We continued to fish, or rather to hunt, the seals here with considerable success, warping the brig from day to day along the outer edge of the ice, between which and her side we placed strong and soft fenders; and the satisfaction of Hartly and his crew increased in proportion as the piles of pelt and blubber replaced in the hold the stone ballast which we had brought from the island of Newfoundland.

I had shot a few refractory seals, but one evening, when the atmosphere was singularly clear, I rambled far along the ice-field, floundering and scrambling among the hummocks, in the hope of finding worthier game. I was accompanied by one of the crew, a smart and intelligent lad from North Shields, named Ridly, who was armed only with an ice-gaff.

One who has been among the countless waves and ridges of a frozen sea can alone have an idea of the toil of travelling, even for a mile, on an ice-field.

But on this vast floating waste we failed to discern anything worth powder and shot, and so, worn with our fruitless and desultory hunt, after wandering about for an hour or two, we turned our steps towards the brig, which still lay at anchor by the edge of the field, about three miles off, and the masts and yards of which formed the chief and sole feature in the flat and dreary prospect.

The sun had set, but there was a dusky red flush in the sky which marked the place of his declension; and now the ice began to assume the cold green tints of salt water when frozen, as the shadows of night stole over the sky from the eastward like a crape mantle, and one by one the stars came out in the deep blue dome above us.

Sliding, toiling, and scrambling on, we were endeavouring to reach the brig, when suddenly Ridly and I uttered a mutual exclamation of alarm, paused, and shrunk back.

In our front we heard an astounding roar, as of an earthquake, and lo! between us and the brig—between us and our friends, our home upon the waters—there yawned a mighty fissure of zigzag form, that ran east and west, and was about fifteen or twenty feet wide, as the ice-field split under the influence of some atmospheric change!

We stood and gazed blankly into each other's faces on beholding this terrible barrier to our progression, and fearing that the ice might yawn as suddenly under our feet.

"Separated from all succour from the ship—alone upon the ice, and with night coming on, what will become of us?" said I, thinking aloud.

"God only knows, sir," responded my companion; "but we must endeavour to reach the brig somehow."

"There goes a lantern up to her mainmast-head," said I, as a light was hoisted swiftly by the ensign halliards.

"The captain is showing a signal to indicate her whereabouts. He has heard the noise of the splitting ice."

"If a fog should come on!" said I.

"Don't think of it, sir," said my companion, hastily; "the night is as clear as if day were overhead. So let us find the end of this crack; it cannot be very far off."

We proceeded westward for more than a mile, being compelled to make many detours to avoid falling into the water among the ragged floes or pieces of ice that lay along the margin of this zigzag fissure; but, as it extended far away beyond the range of our vision, and seemed to widen, we were compelled after long consideration, and suffering great anxiety, to retrace our steps and proceed eastward, in the hope of gaining the east end of it, or at least of discovering a place so narrow that we might leap across without the danger of immersion, which, in such a season and at such an hour, would have been fatal, as our entire clothing would in an instant have become a casing of ice.

To favour our efforts the moon now rose, ascending slowly from the edge of the vast plain of ice, and notwithstanding the peril of our situation, her beauty filled me with a glow of pleasure and hope.

Far over that waste—so wide, so desolate, and mysterious—fell her flood of silver light, so bright in its intensity, and redoubled by reflection from the snow. It glittered on every rounded hummock and splintered berg, and formed strange fantastic figures in their cold green shadows, elsewhere making prisms that seemed like fairy crystals, or gemwork of rubies, emeralds, and silver. Clouds of fleecy whiteness came up with her from the sea, and as she waded among them, I recalled the words of Sir Walter Scott:—

"There is something peculiarly pleasing to the imagination in contemplating the Queen of Night when she is wading, as the expression is, among the vapours which she has not the power to dispel, and which on their side are unable entirely to quench her lustre. It is the striking image of patient virtue calmly pursuing her path through good report and bad report, having that excellence in herself which ought to command all admiration; but bedimmed in the eyes of the world by suffering, by misfortune, and by calumny."

While I felt something of the poetry of our situation and the beauty of the night, my more practical and prosaic companion was sensible only of the danger we ran, and after a minute reconnaissance, assured me, with an exclamation of joy, that the split in the ice was narrowing.

We were then four miles from the brig, the crew of which had sent more lanterns aloft, and ever and anon burned a brilliant red or blue light, for Cuffy Snowball was a great pyrotechnist.

"What is that?" said I, as a strange sound reached us.

"I cannot tell," replied my comrade, as he toiled on, supporting himself with his ice-gaff; "I never heard it before, and don't like it at all, sir. I wish we were on board," he added, shuddering alike with cold and superstitious fear, as the sound came again and again from among the hummocks, and it was as weird and mournful to the ear as their aspect was to the eye.

It was a strange mooing, and gradually swelled into a bellowing as we proceeded; thus it evidently came from the throat of a large animal—but what species of animal could it be in such a place?

We were not left long in doubt, for on the centre of a narrow isthmus of ice, over which lay our way to the ship, as the fissure beyond it opened wider than elsewhere, sat a huge, dark monster of the deep, in which, on approaching it, I recognised (from pictures I had seen) a sea-horse, or walrus, which the reader must remember is not a seal, but a ferocious animal that can defend itself and frequently destroys its assailants, and this one manifested not the slightest intention of making way for us.

He was fearfully pre-Adamite, or antediluvian, in his proportions, being fully twenty feet in length, and having a pair of tusks thirty inches long protruding from the mass of quill-like bristles which covered (like a thick moustache and whiskers) his upper lips and cheeks. Grimly and ferociously he regarded us with his deep-set eyes, which glittered in the moonlight amid the square mass of his elephantine visage, and on beholding us, his hollow mooing turned into a species of grunting bark.

Finding that he obstinately barred our way, and, moreover, seemed inclined to attack us, I levelled my rifle full at his grizzly front and fired, while Ridly rashly and fatally charged him in the smoke with his ice-gaff, which was armed with a sharp pike.

My ball had pierced his great sloping shoulder, pricking him as a pin might have done, and serving only to incense him, for his bark changed to a mighty roar, and when the smoke cleared away, I saw poor Ridly, who had fallen, lying under one of his gigantic fore-flippers. The foam of rage was frothing on the bristles of the sea-horse, and with his two enormous tusks, which stood upward through them like two crooked sabre-blades, he was alternately rending the limbs and body of his assailant and then great fragments of ice, which he dashed into the water on each side of him.

Ridly had only power to utter a faint cry, when he expired.

Appalled by this sudden and terrible catastrophe, I reloaded my rifle, and full of mingled rage and fear—a combination which made me no longer feel the intensity of the cold—I fired again and again at the horrid front of the walrus; but every shot seemed only to redouble his wrath, and he continued to rend to pieces the clothes and body of Ridly, till in less than five minutes the ice around him was covered by the blood of his victim and that which gushed from his own wounds. Ridly's left leg he wrenched completely off, and cast into the sea.

Rolling about in his wrath, and in his lubberly efforts to reach me, he at last fell into the water; I then rushed across the narrow isthmus where my poor companion lay. As I did so, the walrus made many ineffectual efforts to reach me, grasping the ice with his forepaws, or dashing his vast shoulders madly against it, while he plunged and bellowed and covered all the water in the chasm around him with mingled blood and foam, and, in his impotent fury, tore great blocks off the ice by the tusks of his lower jaw.

I fired ten shots into his body, point blank, without his strength or wrath appearing to diminish in the least.

On perceiving this, a species of superstitious dread came over me, and turning away, I hastened towards the brig, which, as I have stated, lay about four miles distant, leaving my walrus to flounder, bellow, and drown in the moonlight.

Anxiety to reach the vessel, lest I might be overcome by fatigue, or that fatal drowsiness caused at times by intense cold, made me strain every energy; and thus in a much shorter time than could have deemed possible, considering the alternately rough or slippery and laborious nature of the ice-field to be traversed, I found myself among the carcasses of our slaughtered seals, and within hail of the Leda.

Furnished with ice-gaffs, a bottle of rum, a sledge, and plenty of blankets, so as to be prepared for any emergency, Captain Hartly, with Hans Peterkin and ten of the crew, met me, just as I was sinking with fatigue, half sleepy and half delirious with cold. Thus a considerable time elapsed ere I could relate the story of my adventure and our shipmate's death.

They had heard the roar of the splitting ice, and knew why we were wandering so long and so deviously among the hummocks, but the sound of firing puzzled them extremely; and thus, while Paul Reeves with a gang was hoisting out the jolly-boat upon a sledge, to have it launched in the chasm for our conveyance across, Hartly had come on in advance, and he met me just in time, for in ten minutes more I must have perished of fatigue and cold!

On returning next morning to collect poor Ridly's remains and commit them to the deep, we found his great destroyer dead, but floating by the margin of the ice, to which he was literally anchored, or hooked, by his two longest tusks.

By this, and the affair with the Black Schooner, we had lost two of our crew.

CHAPTER XII.
ON AN ICEBERG.

Soon after this, in a dark and howling night, we were blown from our moorings, and forced to run before the wind, with our topmasts struck, and only our jib and a close-reefed foresail set, as we were in the dangerous vicinity of innumerable broken floes, or masses detached from the field-ice: the decks were so slippery that one could scarcely keep afoot; and amid the arrowy sleet and snow that rendered all so murky and obscure around us, and which stung the face like showers of sharp needles, we were hurried on, expecting every moment a collision which would stave our bows or snap the masts by the board.

We were repeatedly frost-bitten in the ears, nose, or hands; but snow scraped up in the scuppers and promptly applied, soon brought a hot glow in the benumbed member, and proved our best, indeed our only remedy.

All who could cultivate beards had permitted them to grow in Crimean luxuriance, as any attempt at soapsudding in those latitudes produced a coating of ice in a moment.

Surging on through blinding drift and pitchy darkness, amid the howling of the fierce tempest, the Leda went bravely! Her spars and cordage straining and groaning, her timbers creaking, while wave after wave broke over her decks and hardy crew, each leaving its legacy of ice upon everything. From time to time we were conscious of a rude shock, or a furious scraping sound, as she grazed upon the passing floes; and now, to add to the gloomy horrors of that tempestuous night, Paul Reeves, who was keeping an anxious look-out forward, shouted back through his trumpet—

"Icebergs ahead! Hard to port, or we are foul of one!"

"Hard to port," echoed the two men at the wheel; sharply it revolved, and in a moment we swept under the frowning cliff of a stupendous iceberg, the cold white mass of which was discernible through the gloom, as the arm of the mainyard grazed it!

We passed on and it vanished in the darkness astern.

"Thank Heaven!"

"Thank God!"

"A narrow escape!"

Such were the muttered exclamations of our half-frozen crew; but at that instant an icy sea broke over us, and two men were swept into a watery grave, without the possibility of our rendering them the least assistance.

A minute had scarcely elapsed before we were sensible of a fierce concussion; the masts reeled and the icicles fell in a shower as they were shaken from our stiffened top-hamper. Then the brig's head was tilted up and her stern correspondingly depressed; but still impelled by the fury of the wind, she continued to advance upwards and out of the water, as if she was being steamed up a landing-slip, or into a dry dock.

"We are ashore—beached!" said some one, beholding this phenomenon.

"We are foul of an iceberg," exclaimed Hartly, while the brig continued slowly to ascend till little more than the sternpost and counter were in the water; then she heeled over to port and remained there, wedged, with her jib-boom broken off at the cap, and dangling in the jib-guys, her canvas bellying out so furiously that we thought the masts would be carried away before the benumbed fingers of the seamen could get it handed.

In a trice the Leda was under bare poles, while around us the tempestuous wind was bellowing, the surf was roaring, and vast blocks of ice, many tons in weight, were crashing against each other, adding to the dread horrors of this bewildering catastrophe!

It is impossible to depict the dismay of all on board, when finding the vessel in this situation—high and dry upon a berg; for, influenced by the storm, by the wind, or the slight additional weight of the brig and her cargo, we felt the monstrous mass on which we were wedged, oscillating and gradually heeling forward ahead; thus the stern of the Leda was raised until her hull remained in the air horizontally, just as she usually sat in the water.

In blank horror we endured the gloomy hours of that northern night, amid the drift, the sleet, and a darkness so dense that we could in no way discover our real position, or how to extricate ourselves from it.

One fact, we were alarmingly alive to. It was this:—The sea no longer dashed against the hull of our vessel, which lay on her side, well careened over to port; and though we could hear the roaring of the waves, amid the oppressive gloom that enveloped us, we could no longer see them.

As day broke the tempest gradually lulled, and the sleet, the snow, and wind passed away together. Then the increasing light enabled us to see the perils of our situation.

We were nearly eighty feet above the ocean, on the flat, table-like summit of a mighty iceberg; which, though it had presented a sloping face up which we had run last night before the furious wind and sea, had now changed its position by heeling over, as icebergs always do, from time to time, when their base in the ocean becomes honeycombed and decayed.*

* Her Majesty's steam ship Intrepid, when commanded by Captain Cator, was similarly carried bodily up the face of a berg, and left high and dry in air, without injury.

The sky was clear now to the horizon; the icefield on which we had pursued our hunting so successfully was no longer visible; but about half a mile distant lay the island of floating ice we had escaped last night; and around for miles, far as the eye could reach, the sea, still perturbed by the past storm, was flecked by white floes, the ruins probably of a third berg, which had been shattered by the waves or by being dashed against others.

Both these icebergs were several miles in circumference. The summit of ours was flat as a bowling-green; but that portion on which the brig rested was soft, pulpy, and rotten by its long immersion in the sea.

The other had many spiral pinnacles, some of them being several hundred feet in height; and, save for the peril in which we were situated, I could have admired the sublimity of that cold and silent mass—so dazzlingly white when the beams of the rising sun fell on it, so indigo-blue in its shadows—for it resembled a fairy isle, which had steep hills, deep valleys, and chasms all fashioned of alabaster; while around its base was a thick fringe of frozen foam of snowy brilliance.

While we were gazing upon it that morning, one of its loftiest pinnacles, with a mighty crash, fell thundering into the sea.

The Leda was soon frozen into the bed she had ploughed by her keel in the ice; and how to get her launched again, how to descend from our perilous eminence, were the questions we asked of each other, and which no one could answer.

The summit of the berg was nearly a mile in circumference, and, as I have said, was more than eighty feet from the water. This we ascertained as a fact, though there was no small peril in venturing from the ship upon its surface, which was so glassy and smooth that in some places the lightest among us would have slipped off, as if shot by a catapulta, into the sea below.

Council and deliberation availed us nothing. Even Hartly, Reeves, and Hans, with all their united skill, foresight, and seamanship, found their invention fail in suggesting any means of release.

"There is nothing for it but to wait the event," said Hartly, after a long and solemn council.

"But suppose that we waited a month, captain," asked Reeves, gloomily, "where would our provisions be?—where our fresh water?"

"We may be driven south into warmer latitudes where the bergs melt rapidly in the sunshine."

"But we may be drifted north into latitudes where the bergs freeze harder, and where ice may close around us for ever," said Hans Peterkin.

"Or," said one of the seamen, who all crowded anxiously to this conference, which we held around the capstan-head, "the berg may capsize, and what will become of us then?"

"Hold hard, my lads," exclaimed Hartly, "hold hard, and be stout of heart and cheery. Remember that however miserable we may deem ourselves, there is one Blessed Eye upon us—the eye of a kind, good God," he added, uncovering his head reverently to the bitter frost, "One who will never forget the poor sailor, if he is true to himself. Think of the 'sweet little cherub that sits up aloft,' as the song says, and rail not at fate, for fate guides man neither at home nor abroad, at sea or on shore. Put all your trust aloft, my boys, and hold on by poor Jack's best bower anchor!"

This harangue was exactly suited to his hearers. We tried to feel hopeful and trusting, and to have patience. But we longed very much, nevertheless, to be free of the iceberg, and to have the blue sea dashing alongside once more.

CHAPTER XIII.
ON THE ICEBERG—THE MASSACRE AT HIERRO.

In this appalling situation we remained for ten days before any alteration in the position either of the brig or of the two icebergs was perceptible.

We missed our lost companions sorely, for the death of a shipmate in his hammock, or by falling overboard, makes a great impression on the secluded survivors at sea. His watery grave is in itself a fearful mystery, the depth of which we cannot realize or fathom. No stone or mound marks the place where he lies; he is hurled, as it were, soul and body into eternity, and blotted out of existence like the bubbles that break round the place where he sinks.

During these ten days Hartly was indefatigable in his efforts to keep his crew employed, and their spirits from depression. Lest provisions might become scarce, and our water fall short, he had portions of the seals, the hideous paws especially, cleaned, prepared, and pickled, while the snow and ice which adhered to the rigging was boiled down, and added to our supply of fresh water. To save our fuel, the fire for these purposes was fed with the fat of the seals, and the blubber (so long as it lasted) of the gigantic walrus I had slain.

The seal "flippers," hairy and bloody, like the claws of a baboon hewn off at the wrist, made a very cannibal-like repast when fricasseed. Remembering how I had shuddered on seeing such repulsive carrion sold at a penny per bunch in the streets of St. John, I could scarcely digest such a meal; though Cuffy Snowball, when he made them into sea-pies, rolled his eyes and grinned from ear to ear while declaring his handiwork "de berry best dish in de 'varsal creation!"

Our rigging was carefully inspected and prepared for any emergency, as if we expected to make sail on the brig at a moment's notice; but how was she ever to reach her natural element again?

On this subject, though we were wearied of it, conjecture became utterly lost!

Still, like a brave fellow, Hartly left nothing unsaid or undone to keep up our hopes, though his own sank at times. Save the watch on deck, he nightly assembled all hands in the cabin for companionship and also for warmth. There he sang songs, (while Cuffy accompanied him on the violin,) and told stories, or read aloud, and spoke again and again to the poor crest-fallen seal-fishers (who thought only of their wives and families) of their profits on the voyage, and the reward they would receive from the Governor of Newfoundland for destroying the obnoxious Black Schooner; and of that affair he drew up a statement, to be attested by all on board.

His example was invaluable, for he had somehow acquired the greatest influence over all his crew. "It is pleasing to see a family, a farm, or establishment of any kind (says Lorimer, in his "Letters to a Young Merchant-Mariner") when, from long servitude, the assistants and domestics are considered as humble friends or distant relations; and independently of the kind feelings thereby occasioned and cherished, all seems to prosper with them. Such a state of things is by no means unfrequent in this happy country, Britain; and I see no good reason why the same attachment to the master and to each other, should not be more frequent on shipboard; indeed, considering the dangers they are continually sharing, one is almost surprised that they can separate so readily. How to obtain a kind but powerful influence over, and a devoted attachment from, a crew, is a secret worth our deep consideration;" and Robert Hartly eminently possessed this secret, which, in the desperation of our circumstances, proved a priceless gift to him and to us.

Every night one story or yarn produced others, and so the time passed on, and peril was half forgotten.

Most of these narratives were gloomy enough, however. They told of ships whose crews were all poisoned save one man, by partaking of a mysterious fish, or whose crews turned pirates, and slaughtered all who opposed them; or of men who were marooned on lonely isles, and left to perish miserably.

Hans Peterkin, an Orkneyman, could tell us of queer shadowy craft, manned by spectres, demons, and evil spirits, who displayed lights to lure vessels ashore on Cape Wrath and the rocks of Ultima Thule, like the wreckers of Cornwall and Brittany.

Then Paul Reeves matched them by a curious tale of an enchanted island in the Indian Seas, on which the lights of churches and houses could be seen at night, and where the tolling of bells and the song of vespers could be heard, with many other sounds; but lo! as the ship approached, the isle would seem to recede till it sank into the sea and reappeared astern!

Then Tom Hammer, the carpenter, gave us a yarn of an ice-cliff in Hudson's Bay that long overhung a whaler he was once serving in. One day the cliff was changed in form, for a mighty piece had fallen from it into the sea; and wonderful to relate, there was seen a man's figure among the ice—a man imbedded up there a hundred feet above the sea. Telescopes were at once in requisition, and they made out that he was frozen—dead—hard and fast; but by his dress—a red doublet, trunk-hose, and a long black beard—they supposed he was some ancient mariner; and some there were on board who vowed he was no other than the famous voyager Hendrick Hudson, who discovered the bay, and was marooned by his mutinous crew in 1610.

But one night, when we were all nestling close together, muffled in our pea-jackets, and smoking, to promote warmth, a narration of Hartly's far exceeded all that preceded it in interest, being a veritable occurrence, and by its barbarity singular.

"My grandfather," said he, "as thoroughbred an old salt as ever faced a stiff topsail breeze, was skipper of the Dublin, a smart little ship of three hundred and fifty tons, pierced for twelve six-pounders, being a letter of marque that fought her own way when the way upon the high seas was somewhat more perilous than it is now.

"About the autumn of the year 1784—now a long time ago, my lads—she was chartered as an emigrant ship for Canada, and sailed from the Mersey with one hundred and eighty poor folks, half of whom were women and children, going to seek their bread in another laud; and a troublesome voyage the old gentleman had with them, for foul weather came on; many of his spars were knocked away, and then a heavy sickness broke out among the emigrants. Their little ones died daily and were hove overboard, till those whose children survived became wild with fear and apprehension that theirs would follow next; and, to make matters worse, there was no doctor on board; for this was in 1784, as I told you, and the lives of the poor were not worth much to any one, save themselves, in those old times.

"Well, my grandfather was a soft-hearted old fellow, and his heart bled for the poor people. His sick bay was crammed, and the sailmaker's needle was never idle, but made one little shroud after another till the man's heart sickened of the dreary task. So, when foul weather mastered the Dublin, and blew her out of her course, the old gentleman put his helm a-lee and bore up for the Canaries, which were once called the Fortunate Isles, and came in sight of Hierro, the most westerly of these islands, on the 6th December, 1784. He had his ensign flying; but knowing well what slippery devils the Spaniards are, and that the Dublin had rather a man-o'-war cut in her spars and bends, he hoisted a white flag at his foremast head, and so came peacefully to anchor about sunrise.

"The morning was beautiful; the shore was desolate, but fertile and green. The poor emigrants were mad with joy at the sight of land, and in an hour or two he set them all ashore, about a hundred in number, on the smooth sandy beach. Many of them were women with infants in their arms or at their skirts—men supporting their young wives or old parents; and new life and health seemed returning to them as they rambled on the sunny shore, or drank of the pure springs that gushed from the rocks, and as they pulled the green leaves and aromatic flowers, or the broad plantain leaves which always flourish best near the sea.

"Meanwhile, my grandfather had triced up his portlids, and a gang with buckets and swabs were busy cleaning, airing, and fumigating every place fore and aft, ere the live cargo were shipped again at night, when an unforeseen catastrophe took place——"

"A catastrophe!" said I; "the ship was blown out to sea?"

"Not at all," said Hartly, refilling his pipe.

"What then?"

"His poor people were all dead ere nightfall."

"Murdered?"

"Aye, in cold blood, as you shall hear. They were all enjoying themselves—the children were playing, gambolling and tumbling over each other in heaps on the warm sands; the women were busy washing, dressing and arranging each other's hair; the men smoking their pipes, and talking, perhaps regretfully, of that jolly old England they had left for ever and, it might be hopefully, of the new shores they were bound for, when a long line of bright bayonets that glittered ominously in the sunshine, appeared suddenly upon the steep rocks which completely enclosed the sandy cove, and three companies of lubberly Spanish militia commanded by Don Juan Briez de Calderon, encircled them on all sides, save towards the sea, where the Dublin lay at anchor about three-quarters of a mile off. The reason of this military display I shall explain.

"False rumours of a plague said to be raging in Europe had reached these isles, and filled the selfish and superstitious Spanish colonists with such alarm, that Señor the Governor, fearing, or pretending to fear, the strangers might bring it among them, instantly convened la Mesa del Consejo—his council-board, as they call it in their lingo—and quietly proposed to cut off all these voyagers root and branch!

"Some of the councillors vigorously opposed a course so revolting, and pled the cause of the poor Inglesos, the rights of religion and humanity, and called upon Don Juan to remember the honour of the king he represented, and that he was the lineal descendant of that adventurous Don Diego de Hierro, of Old Castile, who had captured the island in the days of Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Arragon, bestowing in memory thereof his own illustrious name upon it, and so forth.

"Señor Don Juan did not reply, but knit his fierce black brows, lighted a cigar, and puffed away with true Castilian imperturbability.

"'Señor el Gobernador,' urged a venerable Spanish friar, 'these poor people who have landed on our shores, after a long voyage apparently, we know not from whence, have been forced hither, as our mariners aver, by those recent storms which have swept over the Canary Isles——'

"'What is all this to me?' growled Don Juan.

"'Simply, Señor, that it will be alike cruel and unjust to inflict the penalty of death upon them all for this.'

"'Padre, they have transgressed the laws of Hierro,' thundered the Governor.

"'Laws temporarily made by yourself—laws with which they can in no way be acquainted. If they have sickness among them, let us send tents and supplies; but guard the avenues to the ground we may allot them, until they are all re-embarked with their wives and little ones. I will myself go among them,' continued the old friar, warming in his merciful advocacy, 'and say that you will graciously afford them succour, until the orders of the most illustrious señor, our Governor-General at Teneriffe, can be obtained.'

"'Silencio!' thundered Don Juan, and rudely threw the remains of his cigar in the old man's face; 'order out our troops—we shall march instantly and exterminate these dangerous vermin!'

"The drums were beat, and the militia, three hundred strong, with the valiant Don Juan at their head, marched to where the poor visitors, ignorant of the horrors that were impending, were still amusing themselves upon the beach. Some were gathering the brilliant shells, flowers, and leaves; others were filling little kegs and jars with the pure spring water that poured over the ledges of rock. The women were sitting in groups, with their children gambolling about them; others were gazing sadly on the evening sea, as if calculating the number of miles that lay between them and their old home; or the miles they had yet to traverse ere they found a new one amid the forests of the western world.

"To gather them all together, the villanous Briez de Calderon procured an empty sugar puncheon, and tossed it over the summit of the cliffs on which his men were posted. From thence, with a loud noise, it rolled to the beach below. Curiosity made all the loiterers rush towards it, as many of them thought it contained food, clothes, or other necessaries for them. The men gave a hurrah, and waved their hats in hearty English jollity to the crafty Spaniards, and gathered with the women and children around the puncheon.

"'Fire!' cried Don Juan.

"Savage as they were, the Spaniards paused a moment; but Don Juan was the first to fire a musket, and observing that his men were still reluctant, he knocked one down with the butt-end, and threatened the rest with death if they disobeyed him.

"'Fire!' he shouted again, and then on the unsuspecting crowd there was poured the concentrated volley of these three hundred miscreants; thus, in ten minutes the dreadful massacre was complete. On the beach all were lying dead and drenched in blood—husband and wife, parent and child—all save one woman, who, with her infant, concealed herself in the rocks, and her husband, who, with a ball lodged in his arm, sprang into the sea and endeavoured to swim to the ship.

"Failing in this, faint with loss of blood, weary and despairing, he turned about and sought the shore, where he was hewn to pieces by sabres as he clung to a seaweedy rock. On beholding this dreadful sight, his poor wife, who was concealed in a cleft of the cliffs not far off, uttered a shriek of dismay, which drew the murderers, now flushed with blood, towards her.

"She was soon dragged out, and with his own dagger Don Juan stabbed her to the heart, and then killed the child, which he tossed into the sea beside its father!

"Paralysed by rage and astonishment, my grandfather and his crew saw all this from the deck of the Dublin. They could see the red musketry flashing from the rocks, filling all the little cove with slaughtered corpses and smoke. They could hear the shrieks that were borne over the water on the evening wind; and after a time, when all was still, they could see the beach strewn with dead bodies, and in possession of the Spaniards, who were stripping them, and who brought up field-pieces to fire on the Dublin.

"He hoisted his anchor and bore away; but on coming abreast of the capital with British colours flying above the Spanish ensign reversed, he pitched a few shot into it from his carronades, sunk three craft at their anchors, with all their crews on board, and then bore away for England, and there was an end of it. We were at peace with Spain; but I never heard that satisfaction was given, or the atrocity revenged. That is my yarn, lads."*

* The papers of the time fully corroborate Hartly's story. "The news of this barbarity," says the Annual Register for 1785, "has been received at Teneriffe by all ranks of people with the deepest concern and regret, and by none more than the Governor-General, who deplores it extremely. He could not at first give credit to it; but was at last convinced of the fatal truth, by letters from the wretch Briez de Calderon himself. Exasperated to the highest pitch, he has given a commission to an officer of rank to go over to Hierro to take cognizance of this tragical affair,"—of which we hear no more.

CHAPTER XIV.
ESCAPE FROM THE ICEBEBG.

Though our apprehensions were great, our chief sufferings were from cold in that lofty and listless situation; yet our dread of impending dangers was so keen, our hope of a change so great, that even the oldest seamen on board never turned into their berths or bunks at night but with their clothes on, "to be ready," as they said, "to turn up with all standing at a moment's notice."

Hartly, who was rather scientific and was wont to expatiate upon the theory of storms, and so forth, endeavoured to account for the intensity of the frost, which I deemed a somewhat unnecessary illustration to us who were on the summit of an iceberg.

"The thermometer—" he would begin.

"Ugh! don't speak of the thermometer, Bob," said I, one day, when trembling in every fibre, as we endeavoured to tread to and fro on the sloping deck. "It is so cold now, that the atmosphere can never be colder!"

"So you think; but wait until—"

"When?"

"—we are a few degrees further north, perhaps in the centre of an ice-field, and then you will know what cold is! But the degree of it depends upon the power of the wind, after passing over snow-covered wastes, rather than the actual state of the mercury;—that was all I was about to remark."

I was too miserable to thank him for the information, but said:

"I do not think our vicinity to that other atrocious iceberg adds to the pleasantness of our temperature."

"Of course not—but see," he added, raising his voice, "by Heaven, it is oscillating!"

Just as he spoke, the cold, glistening, and splintered peaks of the mighty berg seemed to topple over and sink into the sea, as it reversed with a stunning roar—its former base coming upward, and imparting an entirely new form to it.

All on board stood gazing at this reversal, which is a common occurrence with icebergs; but it filled us with a horror of what our fate would be should a similar capsize occur with us, for now the berg on which we were wedged heaved and surged in the foaming eddy made by the other.

"Icebergs have usually nine times as much of them below water as appears above it," said I.

"Yes, and at that ratio, if this one of ours reversed, we should find ourselves in a moment somewhere about six hundred and forty feet below the surface of the sea," replied Hartly, with a grim smile.

"Ay," added Paul Reeves, "and our poor little Leda would be adhering, keel upmost and trucks down, like a barnacle at the bottom of this vast floating island."

On the tenth day of our imprisonment, as I have elsewhere said, after rain had been falling all night in such torrents that we had battened all the hatches fore and aft, on day breaking, we found a very perceptible alteration in the position of the brig. From careening over to port, she had gradually righted, and now rested fairly on her keel, with her masts upright. The summit of the berg had again become soft and pulpy on its surface, and the Leda seemed to sink lower by her own weight every minute, while the ice on each side sloped upward, leaving her in a kind of valley; and so rapidly did this state of matters go on, that in four hours the sides were nearly eight feet above our deck, and suggested a new terror, that they might collapse—close over, and freeze us in more hopelessly than ever.

As the rain abated, the berg began palpably to oscillate, that portion of it which lay under the brig's head, however, became depressed, and then the rainwater and sludge that had collected in the valley where we lay, poured over its icy brow like a cataract, and we heard it thundering, as it fell into the sea below.

"She moves—the brig moves! she forges ahead!" exclaimed Hartly, in an excited voice, as the berg careened over more and more, and we all stood pale, breathless, speechless, and rooted to the deck, expecting a capsize that would bury her masts downward in the sea.

This change of position continued to progress, but very slowly.

There were about sixteen feet of ice from the cutwater of the Leda to the edge of the berg, and about forty from her stern-post to the edge in the other direction.

"If this depression forward continues slowly," said Hartly, "we shall be floating in the blue in two hours, my lads; clear away two hawsers, an ice-anchor, and kedge. Stand by with the capstan-bars, cast loose the jib and foretopsail, to lift her head a bit, if the wind serves when she slips off, and then stand by the braces to sheet home!"

These orders recalled us to life, for they filled us with hope, and inspired us with activity.

Led by Hartly, Hans Peterkin and two other adventurous fellows named Abbot clambered along the soft ice astern, and fixed there a kedge with our strongest hawser, which was to be eased gently off the capstan, as the brig continued to forge downward and a-head, for her motion was a double one. It was perilous work for these four brave men, as the rain had rendered the face of the berg slippery as wetted glass; but Hartly was full of inherent courage, and in the excitement of the moment forgot all his superstition about his ring, the gift of the reputed witch Jensdochter.

He was scarcely on board again, ere the depression continued so rapidly that the entire hull of the brig lay at an angle of forty-five degrees from the line of the water below—her bows being yet twenty feet distant from it.

This was a momentous crisis for us all!

A deathlike stillness was every where on board; on our pale lips, as we grasped the shrouds or belaying pins to preserve our footing; on the mighty isle of ice, from the shelving summit of which we were about to be precipitated; and from the lonely sea below, there came no sound; at least, we heard only its wavelets rippling against the cold, glistening, and glacial sides of our prison.

Slowly the brig moved, as if to protract that time of agonizing suspense. Every man compressed his lips and stifled his breathing. We seemed to speak our thoughts in silent and expressive glances, for all had the certainty now that in three minutes more, we should be floating on the free waters of the ocean, or foundered and sunk, headforemost, far beneath them.

Foot by foot she forged ahead, as the berg continued to heel over, and ere long our bowsprit projected in the air over the edge, and then the bows, headboards, and cutwater! The angle at which the Leda lay was fearful; we could no longer work the capstan; I clasped it with my arms, and shut my eyes. Then a heavy sob seemed to escape from me, as Reeves, by one slash with a sharp axe on the taffrail, parted the stern warp, which recoiled with a crack like a coach-whip. Then followed a rushing sound—a mighty plunge, and the waves dashed in foam on each side of us, as the Leda shot off the berg, and went souse, bows foremost into the sea; but rising up again, and shaking all the spray off her, as a duck would have done.

There was a deep silence after the shock and escape of this launch, and all seemed to await the signal to utter a hearty hurrah of joy and thankfulness for our miraculous preservation. Ere long it burst forth, but Hartly cut it short by his orders to sheet home the jib and foretopsail, to set the foresail, fore and aft mainsail and maintopsail.

Rapidly he was obeyed, and just as the Leda fell off, and bore away from the dangerous vicinity of the ice-island, it capsized, as its companion had done, and with a roar, as if defrauded of its prey.

CHAPTER XV
UNDER WEIGH ONCE MORE.

The chainbobstay under the bowsprit was snapped, our rudder was split and its pintles were started, but these defects were soon repaired by the carpenter; and next day, at noon, Hartly and Reeves on comparing their observations, discovered that, unknown to ourselves, we had drifted nearly one hundred miles towards the western coast of Greenland, so a look-out was kept for the field-ice, as they were anxious to complete their interrupted seal-fishing, to haul up for St. John's, and then freight for Europe in the spring.

Poor fellows! ...

We seemed to have returned to life once more. Again we were dashing through the blue sea with a free sheet, with the white canvas bellying full upon the breeze; again, on waking in the morning, the first familiar sounds that met the ear were the decks undergoing their customary ablutions, by bucket and swab, and the rasping holystones; Cuffy singing some Congo melody as he lighted the cabin fire, the wind whistling through the rigging, the patter of the reef-points on the bosom of the swollen sails, the dashing of the spray over the sharp black bows, the occasional order issued on deck, the clatter of the rudder in its case, and the bubble of the water as it frothed past under the counter.

All these spoke of our wonted life of activity, and of the Leda being under canvas.

In a day or two we descried the slender white line of an ice-field, stretching for miles along the horizon towards the north, and approached it under easy sail, as the fields usually drift southward at this season. By the appearance of the ice and the state of the thermometer, we concluded this to be a much larger field than that from which we had been blown by the gale of wind.

While Reeves got ready the ice-hooks, sledges, warps, and gangs of seal-hunters, with their bats, guns, and other apparatus, Hartly and I were treading to and fro talking of various matters. I can remember that he was relating to me, how, in his last voyage with the Leda up the Mediterranean, St. Elmo's blue and phosphorescent light had enveloped fully three feet of her masts below the trucks, to the great terror of Cuffy Snowball, and others who were ignorant of the cause of that phenomenon, which lasted nearly an hour. He was proceeding with his narration, when Tom Hammer, who was repairing something aloft, hailed the watch.

"Deck—ahoy!"

"Hallo?" responded Hans Peterkin.

"There is a craft wedged in the ice, sir."

"Where away?"

"About twenty miles off."

"How does she bear?"

"On our lee bow."

"And what do you make her out to be?"

Hammer stood on the main-crosstrees, with his left arm embracing the mast, and through his telescope took a long and steady glance with a somewhat perplexed air at this vessel, which we could not see from the deck.

"She is a brig with her topgallant masts struck."

"Indeed!"

"No," stammered the carpenter.

"What then?"

"A ship with all her canvas unbent."

"Unbent! that is strange," said Hartly, shading his eyes, and peering away to leeward.

"No—now, sir, she looks like a brigantine, or hermaphrodite brig, with her yards topped up in different ways."

"Do you wish your nightcap sent up to you, Tom?" said the mate, drily; "look again, perhaps she is the Flying Dutchman."

"Or the ghost of the Black Schooner," said one.

"Or a whale," added another.

But on nearing the edge of the ice-field—so close that we sent off the mate in the jolly boat with the warps, and handed our canvas, preparatory to resuming the war against the seals—we could all see the vessel which Hammer had discerned, lying among the ice about fifteen miles off, and various were the discussions on board as to her rig and nation. Even our oldest seamen were puzzled. Her hull was scarcely visible, so high were the hummocks around her. She had two masts, but her spars were, as Tom said, topped up in various ways and at various angles, and seemed covered by long-accumulated ice and snow, from which we augured that she had been long beset.

We hoisted our colours and displayed the private signal of Messrs. Manly and Skrew, but received no response, by which we supposed that she had been deserted by her crew, or that her signal halliards had given way.

Some averred stoutly that they could distinguish a flag flying at her gaff peak; others that she had no gaff peak whatever, but had one man seated in her fore rigging. Hartly ridiculed these fancies, saying that the intensity of the cold, and the dazzling glare of the sun shining on a sea covered by white ice, bewildered the vision of most men; and so, full of vague conjectures as to what our neighbours might be, we saw the sun set and night close in upon us.

Next morning another large field of ice was discovered on our larboard quarter, closing in upon us with considerable rapidity. It extended along the offing for twelve or fourteen miles, and increased to the eye as it was borne towards us by an under-current.

Hartly conjectured it had drifted down Hudson's Strait from the Bay, and to avoid being beset like the unfortunate craft we had been observing, he brought off the ice-anchor and made sail on the brig, steering due west and keeping her close hauled with his starboard tacks on board; but the field of ice we endeavoured to leave kept close alongside, as if it sailed or floated with us, which I have no doubt it did.

Thus both fields verged towards each other rapidly, one before the wind, the other before a current; and so, ere sunset, we were closely wedged in a frozen sea—BESET, amid a wilderness of pack-ice, of bergs, and hummocks, which extended, as far as the eye could discern from the main-crosstrees, in every direction, and probably far beyond the horizon.

Though this predicament was not without great peril, still it was preferable by many degrees to our last situation; for here we could pursue the object of our expedition, and hoped to have our cargo complete, the hatches battened down, and all ready for our return to Newfoundland when the ice broke up, amid the warmer water of more southern latitudes, towards which we expected the field, like others, would be borne by the currents.

Alas! how little did we then foresee how long we and our desolate neighbour, whose disordered aspect and bare spars made her resemble a withered bush or bunch of reeds at the horizon, were to remain in sight of each other.

CHAPTER XVI.
BESET WITHOUT HOPE.

I cared little about the slaughter of the seals,—indeed, I rather disliked it—and for several days my attention was excited solely by the vessel which was beset so far from us.

My imagination drew many painful scenes. I endeavoured to picture how long she had been there—weeks, months, it might be years!

Where was she from? What had she been—a ship, brig, or schooner? for by the confusion of her rigging, and the distance at which she lay from us, there was a difficulty in discovering this, even by by our most powerful glasses, or whether the smoke ever rose from her galley funnel.

How many of her crew were alive, or had she a crew at all? If so, what were their sufferings—if abandoned, amid that world of ice, whither had they gone, and where had their perilous journey ended? On Greenland, on the Labrador, or in the grave?

These queries were for ever recurring to me, and that old beset ship—I had made up my mind that she was old—was the first object to which my eyes turned when coming on deck in the morning, and the last at night. Fogs—the dense fogs of the Arctic seas—came on and shrouded us for days, till one's lungs almost filled with icy vapour, and the pulses of the heart seemed to freeze. The wind blew a gale at times, but the ice remained fast as adamant around us; but when the obscurity passed away, there lay the beset ship in the dim distance, wearing the same lifeless aspect as ever, so dreary and forlorn amid that waste of cold white glistening ice, with its endless vistas of hummocks and splintered bergs.

We became somewhat alarmed on discovering by observations that instead of drifting into southern latitudes, where the ice-fields are usually broken into floes, and a ship becomes free to shape her course in any direction, we were being borne almost due west, and with considerable rapidity. By this the temperature remained nearly the same, and our besetting, like that of our unfortunate neighbour, became a permanence, and would probably continue so, unless we weathered Cape Farewell, of which Hartly had some doubts at that season.

We had now reached the first week of April, and could only look forward to the early days of May, when the field-ice breaks up, and from the unknown seas and inlets of the north, floats southward in masses so mighty, that a girdle of ice, sometimes two hundred miles in breadth, environs the coasts of Newfoundland and the Labrador.

Ere long we became sensible of a tremendous pressure upon the sides of the brig, a pressure so great that her timbers in some places became distorted, and Hartly was seriously alarmed lest she might be crushed and destroyed.

This unwonted pressure rendered us very anxious, and inspired many with dread.

One night when it was greater than usual, I was on deck, and from thence ascended into the main-rigging a little way to contemplate the snow-covered scene—so vast, so silent, and so terrible in its beauty!

Spreading far as the eye could reach—far beyond the old deserted ship, for such we deemed her now—lay the hummocks in uncounted myriads, ascending here and there into bergs and mountains, so impressive in their cold purity, so solemnizing in their silence and monotony, their spiral peaks glistening and vitreous against the blue immensity of the sky—an accumulation of ice and snow that would seem to have lasted since the will and hand of God had first separated the land from the water, and marked the limits of both.

While lost in reverie, and surveying this scene, a strange sound, like that which might be caused by the rending of a vast rock asunder, fell upon my ear; then there was a shock which made every fibre in my body tingle. A mighty power below us seemed to be hoisting the brig out of the ice, while her masts and hull began to sway to and fro.

"Aloft, lads—all hands aloft!" cried Hartly; "we are about to be crushed—God help us! for all is over with us now!"

All our men rushed into the rigging on hearing this terrible announcement, and at the same moment there was another crashing shock, and lo! about a league from us, there ascended slowly and vertically into the air, a sheet or wall of ice, perhaps twenty feet thick, nearly a hundred feet in height, and several miles in length!

Erect it stood for some moments, like a giant rampart, and then broke into fragments, and as the field collapsed below, these fell with a roar as if heaven and earth were coming together.

How many millions of tons might have been in that erected mass no man could conceive, but the thunder of their fall, as they crashed and glittered in the moonlight, caused one's soul to shrink with awe and wonder at the grandeur and sublimity of such a scene.

The ice around us cracked and rent in every direction, but though there was a vibration, a seeming heaving of the icebound sea, the brig settled down again into her bed, and we were only relieved of that intense pressure which had threatened us with immediate destruction.

"We are saved—for this time," said Hartly.

"Have the currents caused this?" I inquired.

"Partly: and the east edge of the ice-field has crashed upon a western shore."

"Greenland?" suggested Paul Reeves.

"Of course."

"Then we are to the north of Cape Farewell!"

I gazed wistfully towards the east. Hartly saw the glance, and smiled.

"You wish to snuff the land," said he; "but whether the land on which this mass of ice that imprisons us and our neighbour—a floating mass perhaps as large as Ireland—be just below the horizon, or two hundred miles distant, I have no means of ascertaining until I make a correct observation at noon."

The morrow came duly, and at twelve o'clock, Hartly, on consulting the sun and his chart, declared that we were at least one hundred and seventy miles due westward of Cape Farewell, on the coast of Greenland. We had thus drifted before the wind many hundred miles with the ice. The cold had now rendered the action of our compasses sluggish; but, situated as we were, that was of little consequence.

Our anxiety increased as our provisions diminished; we were placed upon a scanty allowance; symptoms of scurvy became visible among our seal-fishers; and how shall I find words to describe the intensity of the cold?

As we huddled together in the cabin at night, the ice actually came down the funnel of the stove, and formed a little arch above the fire. Our breath froze on our beards and whiskers, and on the blankets of our beds. The barrels of salted junk had to be dashed to pieces ere the food could be separated from the brine and staves. Stiff grog froze as hard as our beer; and every day a smoky haze rose from the sea, and freezing as it rose, when blown about by the wind, seemed to scrape the very skin off one's face. This frost-rime frequently enveloped us like a dense fog for days, and when it cleared, the wearied eye had no object to rest on but the everlasting ice and the old ship in the dreary distance.

Chancing to stumble one day against the anchor, my bare hand touched the fluke, and a portion of skin adhered to it as if it had been hot iron.

We hunted diligently for seals, as they formed our staple food, when cooked on a fire of blazing blubber. The flesh of the cub, especially the heart and liver, when hashed, and well seasoned with pepper, was not unacceptable to appetites sharpened by the northern blast that came from the Arctic circle.

The middle of April came and passed away without a change, save that the sun shone with a brilliance which somewhat alleviated the cold. One day, at noon, I saw Hartly form a piece of pure fresh-water ice from the scuttle-bucket into a lens, through which he concentrated the rays of the sun as through a burning-glass, and thus igniting little puffs of powder on the capstan-head, to the great astonishment of our seamen, and the terror of Cuffy, who began to consider him a species of Obi man.

So day followed day of captivity!

Seal-hunting and idling over, we would assemble, and sit for hour after hour, crouching close together for warmth, around our little fire, watching the glowing embers and the upward sparks; often in dreamy silence, mentally wondering where, when, and how this monotony, misery, and suffering were to end!

At times each almost fancied himself the last man in the world—and certainly we were the last men to be envied. Then terrible sensations crept over us, and horror filled our souls—the horror of being the last survivor, when famine and death came together among us.

As a relief from this intolerable monotony, a party of us resolved to visit the other ship. All were anxious to go; but Hartly said we could never know the moment when the ice would partially break up; thus half the crew at least must remain with him for the safety of the whole.

Furnished with a sledge, on which we placed a supply of such provisions as the Leda could afford, a small breaker, or gang-cask of stiff grog, hatchets, guns, a compass, plenty of blankets, and tobacco, so as to be ready for any emergency or detention, twelve men—Paul Reeves, Hans Peterkin, Tom Hammer, Cuffy, and myself inclusive—departed one bright morning about an hour after dawn, resolved to overhaul the stranger, and if we found her deserted, to cut away her masts, and drag them to the brig for fuel, though she lay now at least fifteen miles distant.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE DEATH-SHIP.

Inured though we were to the cold, we felt the toil and peril very great when traversing the ice for fifteen miles; but fortunately the day was clear, and not a speck of cloud appeared upon the blue immensity of the sky.

The crew of the Leda cheered us from time to time until we were at some distance, when they hoisted a red flag at the mainmast-head; but in the hollows between the hummocks and vast blocks of ice which were jammed and piled upon each other by the recent concussion and compression of the field, we lost sight of both ships at times, and could only discover them while surmounting some of the frozen ridges.

We toiled bravely, anxious to attain the object of our journey ere night came on, as we were assured of quarter on board, whatever might be the circumstances of this strange-looking craft, the attention of whose crew our colours by day, and our lanterns by night, had totally failed to attract.

Fifteen miles over an ice-field—especially such an ice-field as that which inclosed us, rent by chasms in some places, and piled in giant blocks elsewhere—were equal to the toil of traversing forty miles on land; thus about two P.M., we found ourselves only eight miles from the Leda, but rapidly gaining on the hull of the strange craft, which seemed to rise out of the ice as we approached, and the aspect of which puzzled us more than ever. We halted for a brief space; then each man partook of a biscuit and piece of seal's flesh boiled, a ration of rum, and in ten minutes more we pushed on again, four dragging our sledge, laden with stores, by shoulder-belts made for the purpose, and relieved by other four at every two miles or so.

Our expedition was not without several dangers. Fog might come on and conceal both ships from us; a blinding storm of snow might have the same effect, and pile its drifts above our corpses for ever. The ice-field might break up, and separate us from our ship so long that when our slender stock of necessaries was expended, we should infallibly perish. Each man among us thought of these possible and terrible contingencies as the distance increased between us and the Leda—our home amid the icy waste—but none spoke of them then; all sang cheerily, and pushed on to overhaul the strange craft; thus about five in the afternoon we found ourselves alongside, and all paused to survey her with deep and undefinable emotions of awe in our breasts, for she had evidently been long deserted, and now wore a most chilling and desolate aspect.

She was an old-fashioned pink-built barque, of about six hundred tons, with bulging ribs and bluff bows; broad and clumsy in the counter and deep in the bends—all fenced about with iron bands; she looked like a whaler of George the Second's time, for, with a fiddle head, she had the remains of a jack-staff and spritsail yard upon her bowsprit. Her hull and spars were thickly coated with ice.

Her fore and main topmasts were gone; her mizen was broken off at the crosstrees, and hung, truck downward, in its gear.

The topping-lifts and braces of the yards had long since given way, and tatters of them swung mournfully on the wind. Many of the yards had dropped from their slings, and lay athwart the deck or among the ice alongside, where the gales had tossed them.

Her ironwork was red and corroded; almost every vestige of paint and tar had long since disappeared, as if she had been scraped by the ice; beaten, battered, and washed by Arctic storms, American fogs, and Greenland showers of sleet and rain, for many, many years must have elapsed since the keel of this old craft had last been in blue water, and first been frozen in the treacherous ice; years of drifting to and fro in the far and frozen regions of the north, where perchance not even the eye of the Esquimaux had seen her.

We seemed all to read and know her history instinctively at a glance; but her crew—what had their fate been?

Inspired by a strange emotion, we hung back, while gazing at her, as she stood like a silent ruin, or the ghost of a ship in the frosty sunshine of the April evening; but no man attempted to board her, till Paul Reeves, taking a hatchet from the sledge, exclaimed,

"Come on, shipmates—we'll overhaul her!" and proceeded at once to mount from the ice into her mainchains. As he grasped the starboard shrouds about the upper dead-eyes, the whole gave way from their rotten cat-harpings and crashed about him, with a shower of the ice that had coated them for years.

"By Jove! lads, 'twas not yesterday this craft left the rigger's hands!" said he, as we clambered after him, and at length stood upon her deck, which was coated about two feet deep with hard frozen snow, on the pure whiteness of which no foot-track was visible.

Sailors are ever superstitious; but theirs is an honest and reverential superstition, very different from that of the landsman; thus in breathless silence our party paused upon her deck, as if it had been the lid of a huge coffin.

"Go on—go on!" said several; yet no man moved, for there was a deathlike silence in and around her.

Her main-hatch was battened down; but we could see that the companion aft and the fore-hatch were partly open. Her long-boat was turned keel upmost on deck, aft the foremast; and by other indications it had doubtless formed a species of round-house. Various large white bones, fragments of broken casks, coils of old bleached ropes, and rusty harpoons were strewn about, and served to indicate that she had been a whale-ship.

Urged by curiosity, I proceeded towards her cabin, my eleven shipmates following closely at my heels.

The skylight was covered with snow; yet through a broken pane I could perceive the figures of men below: then I turned to descend into her dark, gloomy, and slimy cabin, on entering which I beheld a wondrous scene of horror, such as can never be forgotten by me, nor was it by those who accompanied me.

The red glow of the sun, now setting beyond the distant waste of ice, shone from the west through her two square stern windows, pouring athwart her cabin a sombre and dusky light. Its sides were covered by a damp mould, which was green and thick as moss. Nearly three feet of snow, which had drifted down the companion-hatch, was lying upon its floor; half buried among it and huddled close together in a corner, lay the bodies of three emaciated men, with fur caps tied under their wasted jaws.

A blue and ghastly hand that hung over one of the cabin berths announced that a dead man lay there; and seated at the table was another, whose arms, head, and back were half covered by the snow, that had drifted over him after he had sunk into the sleep of death. His coat was old in fashion, with large brass buttons and square pocket-flaps. Amid the snow that covered the table, and amid which his face was hidden, there appeared the necks of one or two square case-bottles—empty.

A quill was also standing amid the snow, and seemed to indicate that the dead man had been writing, for it was still in the pewter inkhorn, and near it stood a lamp, used by him probably to keep his ink from freezing. Close by appeared the corner of a book, which I drew with difficulty from amid the frozen snow, and then impelled by a horror, of that cold dark floating grave, like frightened schoolboys we rushed up the cabin-stairs, and regained the deck, just as the last segment of the sun's red disc went down beyond the frozen sea.

We stood in a group near the mouldering mainmast, gazing at each other awe-struck, for we had looked on the faces of men who had been dead for years—how many, we knew not.

"There is something moving in the forehold!" exclaimed Tom Hammer, the carpenter, while his teeth chattered alike with cold and fear.

"Something?" I reiterated.

"Ay, sir, and alive, too! Do you hear that?" added old Hans Peterkin, in terror.

It was a strange, croaking sound; and then, as we approached the half-open hatch of the forehold, we heard the flapping of large wings.

Though almost paralysed by hearing such an unwonted sound in such a place, one of our seal-fishers fired his gun in his confusion. I crept forward and peeped fearfully down, but could not distinguish anything amid the gloom below.

Then we heard another croak, which sounded so loud and so dreadful to our over-strained organs of hearing that it nearly made us all scamper over the side; when suddenly two giant ravens, who had doubtless long made the empty wreck their home, rose through the fore-hatchway on their black booming pinions, and soaring high into the clear air, winged their way directly to the east, and so swiftly that they soon disappeared.

"The land lies where they are flying to," said Reeves.

"And it is not far off, as their presence here would indicate," added a seaman.

This idea encouraged us all very much, as we forgot that they might have floated with the ice-field for years. We were about to descend into the forehold, but on lifting the other half of the decayed hatch, we found the frozen remains of a man hanging there by the neck, and half devoured by those obscene birds. A capstan-bar had been placed athwart the combing, and to this he had suspended himself by a well-greased rope.

Was this unfortunate the last survivor, who, in desperation, had thus awfully ended his misery?

His situation seemed to say so.

CHAPTER XVIII.
LEAVES FROM THE LOG.

We repaired to our sledge alongside, and dragging it a little way from the deserted barque, took a ration of grog (of which we stood much in need), and then I proceeded to examine the volume we had brought away. It proved to be the mouldered fragments of a log-book or diary kept by the mate—doubtless the dead man, who was seated on the stern locker, and whose body was reclining on the snow-covered cabin table.

From this book we could glean that she was the Royal Bounty, a Peterhead whaler, which had been beset in the ice off Cape Desolation in 1801, and that one by one all her crew had perished of cold, hunger, and despair!

The thick and crystalline coat of ice which covered every portion of the ship, from her tops to her chain-plates—a coat that had never melted or been disturbed—had protected her rigging, spars, and hull from the natural progress of decay; so let none suppose it marvellous that in a region or atmosphere of eternal snow, bodies are also thus preserved; for frequently the remains of elephants and mammoths which lived before the flood, and of pre-Adamite monsters, are found buried in the Arctic ice, unchanged, undecayed, and entire.

At the mouth of the Lena, in Siberia—a river which traverses the vast and uninhabited plains of Asiatic Russia—there was discovered, in 1805, a mammoth entire, with the hair on its skin four inches long, and all of a reddish-black; and so frequently are similar discoveries made along the shores of the Frozen Sea, that the poor Russians believe that race of animals to be still extant in their country, but existing like moles which dwell underground, and cannot endure the light of day; and their exhumation from the ice is ever deemed a forerunner of calamity, as it is said that all who see them die soon after. But to resume.

The book was much mouldered and decayed; only a few entries here and there could be traced, as its leaves, now soft and pulpy, perished in our fingers when we attempted to turn them over. A few passages ran thus:—

"March 3rd, 1801; a brisk breeze from the S.W. The Faroe Isles bearing about twenty miles off on our starboard quarter.

"At 7 P.M., took in the topgallant sails, and all fore and aft canvas ........ set the ........

"April 4, 8 P.M. Set more canvas—out reefs—set foretopmast and maintopgallant studdingsails. Ice-floes a head. Compasses not working well. The captain ordered ........, and Cairns ........

"9 P.M. Land ahead—supposed to be Cape Farewell. Weather squally. Beset by an ice-field in a strong current running N. and by E. Took in everything fore and aft—sent down the topgallantyards, and brought the masts on deck ........"

After a successful whale fishing in latitude 76°-77°, they had been again, or were still, beset.

"1st May, 1801; hoisted a garland of false flowers, made by our wives and sweethearts at home in Scotland, between the fore and mainmast........"

Then followed days and weeks, to the effect that they were still beset. These memoranda were in the handwriting of various persons, and were frequently mingled with earnest prayers for release. Then scurvy appears to have broken out among them, and disease was quickly followed by death.

"1802. Birnie from Buchan-ness, off duty, unwell—Birnie's teeth fell out of his head. Willie Cairns from Southhouse Head, off duty, unwell. Poor Birnie died, and was buried in the ice, where the others lie, half a mile off, on the starboard bow. God rest them!

"May 6th. Jobson ill with scurvy and blindness—Cairns died, and was buried beside Birnie ........."

Many leaves totally illegible followed, till we deciphered a passage like this—

"1802, 4th Dec. The captain died in his berth this day at 8 A.M., and we are too weak to move him. Smith, Arthur, and the cook are dead, or dying of hunger on the cabin floor! We have now been beset two years and twenty-one days. In that time twenty-four men have died out of a crew of nine-and-twenty—no hope! no mercy! My God! where is all this to end? We sailed upon a Friday, and this ........"

I shut the book abruptly, for I could perceive in the twilight a blank horror stealing over the pale features of my companions as we stood beside that old vessel—a frozen tomb; and favoured by the light of the rising moon, we proceeded to regain the Leda, with all the speed we could exert; for to some it appeared as if our future fate was fearfully foreshadowed in the story of this old doomed whale-ship. Half a mile distant, on her starboard bow, an ice-coated pole was visible. It seemed to indicate where her dead were buried.

Hans Peterkin and three others strapped the collar-ropes over their shoulders for the first "spell," and proceeded briskly in front with our sledge of blankets, &c. The rest followed in silence, and only turned from time to time to cast a backward glance at the old whaler, whose decaying spars, coated with ice, glimmered darkly against the starry sky. The moon arose in her full northern splendour—clear, glorious, and wondrous! The sharp summits of the bergs (the ice-mountains that rose from the plains of ice) gleamed and glittered like mighty prisms, or spires, pyramids, and obelisks of crystal and spar.

After all we had seen, the dead, the awful stillness of the frozen sea—that snow-clad plain, "the silence of which seemed to come from afar and to go afar," impressed us with deep and solemn emotions. Thus, for several miles we trod gloomily on, equally desirous of reaching the Leda and of leaving far behind the scene of gloom I have described.

The spirits of our party were sorely depressed; but Paul Reeves and I did everything in our power, by cheerfulness and anecdotes, to divert the gloomy current of their ideas; though poor Paul was not without fears that a day might come when he would be inserting in the log of the Leda, entries similar to those I have quoted from the mouldering volume we had brought away.

"We have found a ship of the dead," said he, "but that is nothing! What think you, shipmates, of a whole city full?"

"A city full!" reiterated our men.

"Not exactly a city like London—but a city, nevertheless."

"And where was this?" asked Hans, doubtfully.

"I read of it in a book—a real printed book—when I was in South Carolina. There was one Lionel Wafer, an English surgeon, who, having nobody to physic at home, took a voyage with the old buccaneers to the South Seas. Well, on one occasion, his craft was cruising off Vermijo, at the mouth of the Red River, in Peru. It was a wild and solitary place; but he went ashore with a boat's crew, and travelled four miles up the stream in quest of adventures; and there, from the margin of a fine sandy bay, a plain spread inland as wide as this ice-field, all covered with the ruins of streets, built of mighty blocks of stone carved with wonderful sculptures, like those of the Egyptians—only more terrible and quaint; and among these crumbling streets and mansions were thousands of graves half open, with the dead bodies of men, women, and little children in them, all mummified and light as cork, for they had been dead two hundred years or more.

"His men were terrified, and fled back to their boat; but on the way they met an old Indian, who related that, in the days of his forefathers, this arid plain had once been fruitful and green as the greenest savannah, and the country so populous, that a fish of the Red River could have been passed through the land from hand to hand, till it was laid at the foot of the throne of the Inca (that was their king, shipmates); but the cruel, murdering Spaniards came, with their guns and bloodhounds, and laid siege to the capital city. Its defence was long and desperate; and rather than yield, the inhabitants slew themselves, and buried each other in the sand, till there was only one man left, and he drowned himself in the Red River.

"In after years the stormy winds had blown the dry sand aside, and there the grim Mexicans lay in thousands—the women with the pearls of Vermijo at their ears and round their necks, their little children, their distaffs and hand-mills by their sides, and their long black hair filled with coins and precious stones. There, too, lay the warriors, with their flint axes and broken spears, and the war-paint yet traceable on their mummies. Lionel Wafer brought away the body of a child, but the buccaneers would not admit it on board lest it might bring a plague or a curse upon them; so he threw it into the Rio Grande."

This yarn produced others equally lively, of course; but while conversing we got over the dreary waste of hummocks more rapidly, and some time after midnight were welcomed on board the Leda, where those whom we had left were burning with curiosity to learn the result of our expedition.

The impression of all we had seen was so vivid, that a horror lest the same fate should befal us, made our men suggest and revolve every rash plan for release.

The flight of the two ravens eastward indicated that land could not be far off. Hans Peterkin, a hardy Orcadian, who was suffering from scurvy, proposed that if matters grew more desperate, we should travel over the field, taking with us the longboat upon sledge-runners. Some urged that we should bore through the ice with canvas set, while gangs went ahead blasting it up with gunpowder.

"Bore and blast through ice twenty feet thick, for a hundred miles, perhaps!" said Hartly, with sorrowful irony.

But scurvy continued to increase among us; and on the eighth day after our visit to the ship one of our crew died, and was buried in the ice; while the brig was thrown in mourning, her colours half-mast, her running-gear cast in loose bights, and her yards topped up variously.

After his funeral, which had a most depressing effect upon us all, I remarked to Hartly, that either by a strange coincidence or by an irresistible fatality, we had interred him half a mile distant on the starboard bow, exactly as the crew of the old whaler had interred their dead!

CHAPTER XIX.
THE GRAVES ON THE STARBOARD BOW.

The last of our stone ballast had long since been thrown overboard on the ice, and was replaced by seal skins. We had now a valuable cargo, over which the hatches were barred and battened; but Hartly's hopes for an honest profit on his adventurous expedition were forgotten, or merged in the overwhelming desire for freedom and the safety of our lives and of the brig.

Already five deaths were recorded in her log; and Hartly vowed that if ever again her bows cut blue water, he would never more tempt Dame Fortune in the region of ice.

By this time our monotonous detention had so far exceeded every expectation and contingency; that our beer, rum, and other spirits, our salted beef, preserved meats, and lime-juice were consumed; and though our biscuits were doled out in very small rations indeed, grim starvation was before us, or food composed of seal and blubber alone; so scurvy in its worst forms assailed us all more or less. Our strongest seamen were the first who sank under it: their complexions became yellow, with swollen gums, loosened teeth, and fetid breath. These symptoms were accompanied by a difficulty in respiring, which, on the least exertion being made, amounted almost to suffocation.

Two of our gunners died one evening within an hour of each other. We wrapped them in blankets, and buried them quickly, under cloud of night, lest the survivors might be affected by the scene.

Hartly, Hans Peterkin, Cuffy, and I performed this melancholy office, when we had no lamp but the twinkling stars and the sharp streamers of the northern lights, shooting upward from the icebergs that edged the plain, over which the wind blew keen and bitingly.

Grim seemed the pale faces of the dead in that wavering gloom, as we lowered them into their last home, heaped the ice above them, and returned to the Leda, leaving them to sleep the sleep of death among their shipmates half a mile distant on her starboard bow.

And now with each day there sank a deeper horror over us—the horror that, like the old whaler at the horizon, the Leda was a ship foredoomed! Yet, like her, we had not sailed upon a Friday.

We were without a surgeon; but Hartly was a skilful fellow, and by administering such simples as we possessed, he endeavoured to ameliorate the condition of his suffering crew.

Common potatoes he washed, cut into thin slices, and gave raw to some, for the cure of their swollen and bleeding gums—usually a sovereign remedy in this case. To others he gave decoctions of tamarinds, scraped from an old gallipot, and boiled with cream of tartar; or a ship biscuit pounded into a panada, and sweetened with sugar; or gargles made of honey of roses and elixir of vitriol; but, ere long, even these remedies failed us; and we had Reeves, Hans Peterkin, and more than half our remaining crew, unable to raise their heads or hands, sick and despairing.

The miserable Esquimaux, by scraping the snow from their native rocks, can find coarse berries, sorrel, and cresses, with which to correct their blubber food; but in that world of ice we had no such boon accorded us.

Armed with our rifles and knives, I set forth with two of our healthiest men, Dick and James Abbot, two brothers, in search of a few fresh seals, as they had learned to shun our locality, and had ceased to venture through their holes in the ice for some time past.

We left the brig about two o'clock, P.M.

On this day the wind was blowing hard, the white scud was flying fast through the blue sky, and for the first time we felt a heaving motion in the ice, which warned us instinctively not to venture far from the Leda. After a ramble of three hours, we had only shot one seal and knocked two cubs on the head with our rifle-butts, when we sat down on a hummock to rest, at the distance of two miles or so from our ice-bound home.

"I wonder much how the masts of that old craft the Bounty have stood these many years?" said Dick Abbot, breaking a long silence.

"The coating of ice has saved them, as it has preserved everything on board—from decay, at least," replied his brother.

"Always thinking of that ship," said I, with an air of annoyance. "Come, let us talk of something more cheerful. You know that she—but where is she?" I added, as we swept the horizon in vain for her—the sole object on which our eyes had rested for so many dreary weeks.

"Sunk, by Jove! or can her old spars have gone by the board at last?" exclaimed James Abbot, starting up.

In great excitement we clambered to the summit of a mass of ice, and looked around us. Not a vestige of the old barque could be seen, but dense clouds that came heavily up from the north were overspreading the sky, against the blue of which her crystal-coated spars had so long been visible.

"We shall have foul weather," said Dick Abbot.

"And so they seem to think, sir, aboard the brig," added his brother: "see—they've run the ensign up to the gaff peak as a signal for us to return, Mr. Manly."

"But our three seals——"

"We must leave them where they are—that big hummock will mark where they lie till to-morrow."

"James is right, sir," said Dick Abbot; "let us get back to the brig as fast as we can."

"She is two miles distant, at least," said I.

"The sky darkens fast; and see—see!" he added, with wild joy expressed in all his features, his eyes, and voice; "the captain expects something—they've cast loose the courses, and are hoisting the topsailyards—THE ICE IS BREAKING UP!"

These words made every pulse quicken, and as if in corroboration of his surmise, we felt the field on which we trod agitated by convulsive throes, and these increased as the fierce and darkening blast, armed with showers of hailstones large as peas, that fell aslant the cold grey sky, deepened the atmosphere around us. Madly we toiled, scrambled, and rolled—fell, rose, and fell again—shouted and cheered to each other, as we surmounted the endless succession of glassy hummocks and snowy hollows to reach the Leda; but the gloom increased so fast, that in less than half an hour we could no longer distinguish where she lay.

We did not feel cold—our brains seemed on fire, our bloodshot eyes were wild and eager in expression, as we toiled on and on—but where was the brig?

A misty veil of hail and snow—an atmosphere dark as the twilight of the Scandinavian gods—enveloped us like a curtain. We paused at times in our desperation, and uttered a simultaneous hallo; but no voice replied, no sound responded, save the hiss of the hailstones as they showered on the hard hummocks. Then we heard from time to time a stunning crash, as the field was rent asunder into floes, that were surged and driven against each other with such force as the waves of an irresistible sea can alone exert.

To us this crisis was, as I have said, maddening. We tossed away our rifles, shot-belts, knives, bats, and everything that might impede our progress, and toiled in wild despair in search of the Leda—but alas, alas! the Leda was nowhere to be seen!

"Can we have passed her?" we asked repeatedly.

To return was to acknowledge still more that we were at fault.

Left upon the breaking ice, with night deepening, and a tempest, perhaps, coming on together; the ice-field rending into floes, and the Leda, when last seen, with her topsails loose for sea, and now we knew not where, but assuredly not within call of our united voices, which the envious wind, the very spirit of the wintry storm, swept from our trembling lips, as if in mockery of efforts and struggles so feeble as those of man when contending with the warring elements of God,—how terrible was our situation!

Inspired either by the activity of youth, or a greater dread of perishing, I left my companions some twenty yards behind me. In this race for life and death poor Dick Abbot was failing, and his younger brother was loth to leave him a single pace behind.

"Mr. Manly," I heard him cry, "take time, please; do you see anything yet, sir—of the brig, I mean?" "Not a vestige," said I, turning to wait until they joined me.

The ice was bursting in every direction, and the waves seemed to boil through the yawning rents in snowy foam; vast pieces, like bergs, arose from the water, and were dashed against each other, to sink into the deep, to arise, and then be dashed together again. Add to this the darkness of the gathering night, the roar of the biting wind, and the dense murkiness caused by the hail as it swept through that mighty waste, and the reader may have an idea of the scene when I paused and looked back for my two companions.

At that moment the ice heaved beneath my feet, I was thrown forward on my face and almost stunned. There was a terrific splitting sound as the field around us broke into a thousand floes: I found myself separated from my two friends, upon a piece of ice about half a mile square, and borne away with it, despairing and alone, into the mist and darkness of the stormy night.

CHAPTER XX.
ADRIFT ON THE DEAD FLOE.

All was obscurity around me—a chaos of tumbling waves, of crashing ice and hissing hail.

I shouted wildly, fiercely, as the dying or despairing alone may shout.

A faint response seemed to come through the drift and the hail that was sowing the ice and pathless sea; but it might have been fancy, or my own cry tossed back by the mocking wind. And now from time to time I was covered by the icy spoondrift, as the water which the wind sweeps from the wave-tops is named by seamen.

For a time I felt the impossibility of realizing the actual horrors of such a situation, and murmured repeatedly—

"Oh, this cannot be reality; if so, it must soon come to an end, and I shall be dead!"

The floe on which I sat surged and rolled heavily, as it was rasped, dashed against others, and whirled round in the eddies they made. On its slippery surface I was driven hither and thither, even when seated; and at last, on finding myself among some large stones which were frozen into the snow, and which I knew to be a portion of the brig's ballast, I shuddered with instinctive dread when discovering that I was adrift on that portion of the ice in which our dead were buried, and which had lain on her starboard bow. Thus I learned that at the moment of my separation from the Abbots, I had been within half a mile of the Leda.

There was agony in this now useless conviction!

"Am I to find a grave here, after all?" was my thought.

If I could live till dawn, the crew of the Leda (if she, too, survived the night) might see and save me; but who could live on an ice-floe through so many freezing hours?

After a time the wind lulled, the hail ceased, the clouds were divided in heaven, and a star or two shone in its blue vault. The ice-blocks ceased to crash against the floe, thus its motion became steadier, and under the lee of a hummock, I endeavoured to keep myself as warm as my upper garments, which were entirely composed of seal-skins, would enable me.

The moon was rising, and its fitful light added to the chaotic terrors of the scene around me. To be alone—alone upon a floe at midnight, with the open sea rolling around me! All seemed over with me now. I felt that my sufferings could not last long, as I should certainly pass away in the heavy slumber of those who perish by exhaustion and intensity of cold. In spite of this horrible thought, I gradually became torpid.

I had been, perhaps, an hour in this situation, when I seemed suddenly to start to life, as a bank of vapour close by parted like a crape curtain, and the moonbeams fell upon the white canvas of a vessel. She was a brig—she was the Leda, under weigh, and distant from the floe not more than one hundred yards!

She was under sail, with her foreyards aback to deaden her way, as she was rasping along a lee of ice-floes and brash, as the smaller fragments are technically named. The weather had now become so calm, that her canvas, which glittered white as snow in the moonshine, was almost, as the sailors say, asleep, there being just sufficient wind to keep it from waking.

I endeavoured to shout, but my tongue was paralysed as if in a nightmare; sobs only came from my heart, and I thought all sense would leave me, as the brig, like a spectre, came slowly gliding past. Again and again I endeavoured to hail her, but in vain.

I rushed to the edge of the floe, at the risk of slipping off it into the sea. Then a faint shout reached my ear, and made my heart throb with joy. Those on deck could not hear my voice, but they had seen my figure in the moonlight; and in a few minutes I beheld a boat shoved off from her, and heard the cheerful voice of old Hans Peterkin, crying with his Orkney patois—

"Quick, my lads—lay out on your oars!" as they pulled through the rack and drift towards me.

I was soon dragged on board the boat, and on reaching the deck of the Leda, fainted, after all I had undergone, and the joy of escaping a death so terrible. The last sounds I remember were the voice of Hartly welcoming me, and the jarring of the yards and braces, as the foreyards were filled, and the brig payed off bravely before the gentle breeze.

Of my unfortunate companions, no trace was ever seen!

CHAPTER XXI.
CAPE FAREWELL.

For three days our course was encumbered by masses of broken ice, which seemed to crowd upon and follow us; thus the brig was constantly being put about or thrown in the wind, backing and filling to avoid the large floes and calves, as those treacherous pieces of sunken or detached ice which suddenly rush to the surface are named. To avoid the lesser floes, we had often to carry a warp to a large one, and track along its side. The cheerful voice of Hartly might always be heard encouraging the faint and weary on these occasions.

"Now, my lads—tally on! bowse away upon the guess-warp!"

"Hurrah!" the men would answer, as they pulled together vigorously.

"Once more we are afloat, Jack," said he to me, on the third morning. "I began to fear we should berth all our ship's company in the ice that lay on the starboard bow; but now we may sit cosily in the cabin, as of yore, and learn how her head lies by the tell-tale compass that swings in the skylight."

Again at sea, our sick recovered as if by a miracle; but still many antidotes against scurvy were requisite before we could haul up for the long voyage that lay between us and St. John. I caught a few fish, and they formed a delicious change for Cuffy's fricasees of odious blubber, served up half cold in a greasy mess-kid.

Once more there was a reckoning to keep. For a few cloudy days we had merely kept a dead one, by log and compass; but on making a solar observation, Hartly and Reeves found that they were many hundred miles eastward of where they expected to be; and this was a circumstance over which they had no control.

It is well-known that a current which comes down Davis' Straits eddies round the east coast of Greenland. By this we had been borne towards its western shore with great rapidity.

In 1818, the Anne, of Poole, when beset by an ice-field, was thus drifted at the rate of two hundred and twenty miles per day!

Early on the morning of the fourth day, the sea was pretty clear of floes; but a dense and dusky fog-bank came down like a curtain, and seemed to float upon the water, about twenty miles from us. We had suffered considerably in our besetting, and by concussions among the floes; so, as the morning was calm and sunny, Hartly had all hands at work, tarring, painting, and repairing our various damages. A spare jib-boom was shipped, and it was soon taut with its heel-rope and jib-guys; our rudder was finally repaired, and two new staysails were being bent, when there was a cry of "land" from aloft.

"Land in sight!" shouted Hans Peterkin, who was out on the arm of the fore-topgallant yard, repairing something.

"Lad!—where?" asked Hartly, snatching his telescope from the companion.

"On the lee quarter, sir."

"You must have deuced good eyes, Hans," said the captain, sweeping along the fog-bank with his glass; "for nothing like land can I see!"

"The bank is rising, sir," replied the Orcadian, as he sat jauntily astride his lofty perch, and pointed to the east. "I see either an island or headland."

Even while he spoke, the dense mountain of vapour, behind which the morning sun was shining, rose slowly from the surface of the sea, and with the naked eye we could see, at the far horizon, a low dark streak, that ended in a bluff or promontory Hartly sharply closed his telescope.

"Luff, Paul—keep your luff," said he; "lie closer to the wind, while I prick off our place on the chart." He hurried below; but soon returned, saying, "That is either Cape Farewell, or I am bewitched."

"Off the coast of Greenland?" said I.

"No, on the coast of Greenland," he replied, laughing. "And now, as the ice and current have driven us so near it in spite of our teeth, we may as well stand in for the shore, and get some fresh provisions, before bearing up for Newfoundland."

A careful examination of the chart proved that we had drifted, or been driven (in our endeavours to avoid the floes) to latitude 59° 48' North, and were in longitude 43° 54' West of Greenwich, consequently, the land we saw was undoubtedly Cape Farewell, a lofty promontory which forms the most southern extremity of Greenland.

With considerable satisfaction we stood in towards the shore, in the hope of obtaining supplies from some of the Moravian settlements.

About four hours after, some of the natives who were fishing came about us in their strange boats, which are made of whalebone covered with seal-skin, and shaped like a weaver's shuttle, so that they may be rowed any way.

By sunset we were close upon the land, and came to anchor several miles north of the cape in a little cove of Nennortalik, or the Isle of Bears, where, as Reeves said jestingly, we had no groundage to pay for letting go our cable; and there the wondering population of the little Moravian colony received us with acclamation. The canvas was handed and most of the crew were allowed to go on shore, with instructions to return with as much scurvy-grass as they could collect; for with this herb, like Baffin, the voyager of old, Hartly proposed to brew scurvy-beer for his patients.

CHAPTER XXII.
THE MUSK-OX.

Rejoicing that we trod on firm land once more, Paul Reeves, Hans Peterkin, and I set off to shoot on the great Island of Sermesoak, which is divided from the mainland of Greenland by the Fin Whale Strait, while Hartly arranged with the Danish resident at the village for such supplies of fresh food as a place so poor could afford.

Leaving the Isle of Bears, we ran our boat into a creek called Cunninghame's Haven, from John Cunninghame, a Scotsman, who was Admiral of Denmark, and who, on his return from Davis' Straits, in 1605, appeared off Greenland with three ships, and carried away some of the natives, whom he presented to Christian IV., together with a chain weighing twenty-six ounces, formed of fine silver, found by him among the rocks at a place still named Cunninghame's Fiord.

With all our anxiety to add to the fresh provisions on board, we were not without a desire to encounter some of the bears with which one always associates the name of Greenland; and ere twenty-four hours elapsed, I was certainly gratified to the fullest extent in that way.

The people of Sermesoak were then in consternation, owing to the depredations of a fierce herd of Bruins which had crossed the strait from the mainland, and devoured many of their children, dogs, and reindeer.

These bears are as revengeful and subtle as they are savage. "Some years ago," says a traveller, "the crew of a boat belonging to a ship in the whale-fishery shot at a bear and wounded it. The animal immediately uttered the most dreadful howl, and ran along the ice towards the boat. Before he reached it a second shot hit him; this, however, served but to increase his fury. He presently swam to the boat, and in attempting to get on board, placed one of his fore-feet on the gunnel; but a sailor, having a hatchet in his hand, cut it off. The animal still continued to swim after them, till they arrived at the ship; several shots were fired at him which took effect, but on reaching the ship he ascended to the deck; and the crew having fled into the shrouds, he was actually pursuing them thither when a shot laid him lifeless on the deck."

Allured by the odour of the seal oil, they had surrounded and broken into the dwellings of the natives in herds, and devoured them in their beds; and numerous stories of these terrible raids were told to Hans (who knew something of the language) by the people of Sermesoak, as we set out on our expedition.

We shot several white hares, and consigned them to a large canvas bag which Hans had slung over his shoulder. In our sporting ardour we penetrated several miles into the country, and in making a détour to beat up for nobler game, I lost my companions among the furze-covered rocks of a ravine. Dusk was coming on, and, wearied with halloing, I sat down to look around me. I was quite alone and in a strange place, but more safe and comfortable in every way than when I was alone on the ice-floe. Though in a foreign and barbarous country, this reflection set my mind completely at ease.

A wild and dreary scene lay around me.

Mountains piled on mountains of stern rock rose on every side, covered with snow unmarked by footstep, track, or road. No trees were growing there and no verdure was visible, save some patches of short grass and moss where the wind had torn the snow from the rocky surface. It seemed as if the icy breath of the Northern Sea, when it swept through the Fin Whale Strait, destroyed all vegetable nature; and as for the flowers of spring, one might as well have looked for them on an iceberg.

Why that country was named the Greenland, Heaven only knows!

In 1610, Jonas Pool, a whaling captain, called it King James' Newland, from James VI. of Scotland; but that name was soon forgotten.

Above me impended a bluff of sullen aspect, the rifts of which formed the eyrie of myriads of white sea-gulls and birds like the great Solan goose of the Scottish isles; and these were whirring, screaming, and booming on their broad pinions, as they came home from the shore.

As the shadows deepened, even these sounds ceased, and nothing met the ear but the croak of a lonely raven which sat on a granite boulder.

Far away in distance, down below me, stretched the headlands which jutted into the deep blue waters of the Whale Strait—starting up in fantastic pinnacles and precipitous ridges, like the towers and turrets of crumbling castles. These walls of rock were black and sombre, though their summits were crowned by eternal snow.

From the mountains the sleet and melting snows of ages have long since washed away every grain of earth; hence, no verdure can spring there, and their rugged fronts present the most harsh and singular outlines. The higher ridges are rendered inaccessible by glaciers; and when the snows melt from their gloomy lichened fronts, long and silvery runnels, that seem like threads in the distance, trickle down the precipices; then winter comes again, converting these runnels into ice, which splits and rends the hardest rock to fragments, that roll with the sound of thunder down the steep glaciers into the valleys below.

Leaning on my gun, I was surveying this wild and dreary scene, and careless alike of the cold and the coming night, was lost in reverie, when a sound aroused me, and on looking up, I saw close by an animal of strange form, such as I had never seen before, even in a menagerie.

It was larger than a pony, but had singularly short limbs, which were almost entirely concealed by the long dark hair that covered all its body, and reached nearly to the ground. It had a short tail, and large crooked horns of powerful aspect, with a mass of hair like a horse's mane hanging beard-wise under its throat.

A very strange sensation comes over one on beholding an unknown animal for the first time, and on this musk-ox—for such it was—approaching, with its large projecting eyes glaring, and while shaking those formidable horns, by which it can encounter and slay the bear and walrus, astonishment soon gave place to alarm, and I regretted more than ever the absence of my two comrades.

The ox was only a pistol-shot distant, so, with my heart beating quickly—as I knew not what the sequel might be—I levelled my gun, and fired full at its head. The animal uttered a bellowing roar, bounded furiously forward, and fell motionless on its side.

The ball had pierced its brain.

With a thousand echoes, the report of my gun rang among the hills of rock, peak after peak seeming to catch the sound and toss it from one to the other, until it died away on the wind that blew through the Fin Whale Strait.

I was not without hope that the sound might reach Reeves and Hans Peterkin, and guide them towards me; but I hoped in vain.

The ox I had slain was one of the largest of the Musk species, and might have weighed, perhaps, seven hundredweight. It would, I knew, prove a most acceptable addition to our scanty stores on board the Leda; moreover, I was not a little vain of having slain, by a single ball, an animal so large and so little known by Europeans; but how to get it conveyed to the brig, or how to guide any of our crew to the spot where it lay, were puzzling queries.

I observed that at the distance of a hundred yards from it, there rose a steep and rugged rock, cleft into three singular peaks, so lofty as to be visible from a great distance. Conceiving this to be a sufficient landmark, I reloaded my gun, and resolved, if possible, to discover Cunninghame's Haven, where our boat lay. Without a track, a road, or native to guide me, I toiled over the steep and rugged mountains, and through ravines and hollows half filled with drifted snow, steering my way by the stars in that direction which I conceived might lead me to our boat.

To enhance the wildness and gloomy grandeur of the scenery, there now came a wondrous and fan-shaped light over all the clear cold blue of the northern sky—a glorious Aurora Borealis. This light, sent by Heaven to cheer the lone denizens of that frozen wilderness, spread a rich and wavering glow over all the northern firmament, playing in streaks or lines that alternately faded away, and resumed their dazzling brilliance. These alternations fill with awe the simple Greenlander, who calls them the Merry Dancers, and who deems,

"By the streamers that shoot so bright,
The spirits are riding the Northern light."

At times, the whole sky seemed a blaze of diamond-like light, tinged with rainbow hues, and in front of these, the stern rocks, crags, and mountains stood forth in sharp black outline. Ever and anon, an electrical meteor shot athwart the sky, leaving, as these falling stars always do, a train of momentary light.

Frequently the long streamers played across this luminous white radiance as if a mighty fan were being opened and shut, or like the spokes of some revolving wheel whose axle was at the Pole. Then a burst of glory would open in the zenith, and for a moment every feature in the desolate landscape and the far-stretching vista of the Whale Strait between its walls of rocks would be distinctly visible.

Alone in that sterile solitude, I gazed upon the Aurora with emotions of mingled awe and wonder, turning again and again to the north, as I stumbled over rocks and frozen snow piles in my efforts to discover a path that led to Cunninghame's Haven; so the result was this—that after more than an hour of toil, I found that I had been proceeding in a circle, and came back to the place from whence I had set out, the bluff with the three pinnacles, at the foot of which my musk-ox was lying; but there a very singular scene presented itself, for my property had already been converted into a banquet by two denizens of the wilderness.

CHAPTER XXIII.
THE FOUR BEARS.

On first approaching, I imagined that a heap of snow had fallen from the upper rocks on the dead ox, and advanced so close that I was only twenty paces from it before discovering in my supposed snow-heap two enormous white bears who were rending the body asunder with their giant claws as one might rend a chicken, and were devouring it with all the gusto of an appetite whetted by the frosty air.

To add to my dismay at this unexpected rencontre, I perceived close by, some portions of a human body, half-devoured—red, raw, and appalling!

A horror came over me, suggesting that this victim might be either Paul Reeves or Hans Peterkin; and it was not until some time after, that I was assured, by fragments of the dress which remained, that the unfortunate was a Greenlander, whom they had crushed to death and dragged away. Pausing in their banquet, these savage brutes, which were of enormous size, uttered a hoarse growl, and while their black nostrils seemed to snuff the breeze, their deep-set eyes surveyed me ominously.

My gun had but a single barrel, thus if I killed one bear I might fall a prey to the other before there was time to reload; and if my first shot missed, my fate would be sealed by both, as they were certain to crush and devour me between them!

Turning, I fairly fled up the rocks towards the three pinnacles, pursued by the bears, whose progress was slow, as they were evidently gorged by their double repast on the dead man and the musk-ox.

Twice I stumbled in my flight, and fell heavily on my hands and face. My breath came thickly and fast, and my long seal-skin boots and overalls, which were strapped up to a waistbelt, greatly incommoded me; but love of life and dread of a horrible death are sharp incentives to exertion and activity; thus I struggled to gain a cleft in the rocks, from whence I might turn and shoot down these unwieldy monsters at vantage and at leisure, while they trotted laboriously after me, uttering a succession of deep and menacing growls.

I had left them nearly fifty yards behind, while clambering up the slope, terrified every instant lest by slipping on the ice-covered rocks I might roll down under their very paws. Already I was within twenty feet of the cleft, beyond which the dazzling gleam of the Aurora played, when a hoarser growl saluted my ears; and there—there—above me in the cleft—in the very haven I was toiling to reach, appeared a huge brown bear, squatted on his hams, licking his great red lips, and quietly waiting my approach!

Bewildered by this new enemy, taken in front and rear, for a moment I remained irresolute, with my rifle cocked, but not knowing which to shoot before I met the rest with my weapon clubbed; and now to add still more to my dismay and peril, a fourth bear appeared, advancing from another point!

The monster in the cleft above me, now began to utter hoarse and savage roars, in anticipation of my destruction, which seemed certain; for those northern bears are so cruel and rapacious, that the female secludes her cubs (of which she never has more than two at a litter) from the male, lest he should devour them during the first month of their blindness. I leave the reader to judge of my emotion on finding my single self opposed to four such antagonists; for the white Greenland bears are double the size of those melancholy looking brown brutes whom one may see dancing in the streets at home, being generally about twelve feet long.

I was blindly desperate, yet my heart did not entirely fail; and I felt forcibly "how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed we do, and weaves its iron tissue of necessity."

Clambering up the flinty face of the rocks to elude the three, finding footing where, under circumstances less exciting, I might have found none, I ascended resolutely towards the bear which stood in the cleft snuffing the air, roaring, and showing his glistening teeth. Already his hot and fetid breath began to taint the air about me. I was within six feet of him, when, taking an aim there was no doubt would be true, I fired, and the conical ball pierced deeply into his vast chest.

Maddened by pain, Bruin made a wild bound at me, but missed his mark, as I crouched low; so he rolled, dead I suppose, to the bottom of the rocks, in his progress tumbling over one of those which were in pursuit of me. Springing into the cleft he had so lately occupied, I hastened to reload, and defend my position, for only one brute at a time could assail me, unless there were, as I feared, others among the rocks in my rear.

Now what were my emotions on discovering that in my exertions, while struggling up the rocks, the strap of my shot-belt had given way, and that I had lost it, with all my ammunition!

A wild perplexity filled my heart, and a cold perspiration burst over my temples; but at that moment of desperation a happy thought occurred to me.

Remembering that I had a long clasp-knife, which opened and shut with a spring, I applied it in bayonet-fashion to my rifle, and with my handkerchief lashed it hard and fast to the muzzle and ramrod head. This was barely accomplished, when one of the bears had its fore-paws on the edge of the rock whereon I stood, and by the light of the stars I could see his fierce red eyes, his long white teeth, and enormous claws, while burying my impromptu bayonet thrice in his great broad breast, and then the blood flowed darkly over his pure white coat. The wounds were not deep enough to kill him at once, so uttering roar after roar, the infuriated bear scraped away with his hind feet, making vigorous but ineffectual efforts to reach me, till by a furious kick I drove one of his paws off the ledge of rock. The other relaxed immediately, and then Bruin rolled like a great featherbed to the bottom, about thirty feet below, where he moved no more.

But in a moment a second bear took his place. Emotion almost exhausted me; but in my confusion when charging him, fortunately my knife was thrust into his right eye. He uttered a hideous cry, between a bellow of rage and a moan of agony, and fell down the rocks—also dead!

The weapon had evidently penetrated to the brain, and killed him.

A wild and joyous glow now filled my heart. It was a triumphant emotion, a lust for destruction and revenge, after the terror I had endured; and I believe that had a whole army of bears appeared, I should, without fear, have encountered them—one by one.

Uttering a "hurrah" just as the fourth bear arrived at my feet, I was about to charge him as I had done the others when—oh, terror!—the knotting of my handkerchief gave way, and the knife dropped from the muzzle of my gun, and fell to the bottom of the rocks.

Clubbing the weapon, I rained a torrent of blows upon the great head of this new assailant, which seemed the largest and most ferocious of them all, as he probably had neither partaken of the poor Greenlander or of that most unlucky musk-ox, the slaying of which had no doubt brought me into this perilous predicament; but my blows fell on his fur-covered skull as harmlessly as they would have fallen on a bale of cotton.

Furiously I struck with butt and barrel at his broad black nose and great round paws, the deadly claws of which grasped the rock with the tenacity of iron hooks. Bruin uttered neither roar nor other sound, but concentrating all his energies, drew up his hams, made a vigorous spring, and in a moment I was dashed to the ground—his hot and horrible breath was in my nostrils and on my face, while his weight pressed me down as he prepared to hug or crush me to death. But now a gun-shot rang between the rocks of the deep chasm, and I found myself suddenly freed. Pierced through the heart by a single well-aimed ball, the bear rolled over me dead, a quivering mass of flesh and fur!

So severely was I stunned by the shock of Bruin's attack, and so confused by the whole combat, that some minutes elapsed before I had sufficient strength or breath to thank my preserver, to whom I might as well have spoken in Greek or Choctaw, as he proved to be a poor Greenlander who had never heard a word of English before.

CHAPTER XXIV.
WOLMAR FYNBÖE.

After various efforts to make ourselves mutually understood, he said something in a kind of jargon which resembled German, and as I had learned that language at home for commercial rather than literary purposes, we contrived to converse, though not with great fluency, using grimaces and signs when words failed us, which was a circumstance of frequent occurrence.

He informed me that he had been searching for a friend who came forth to hunt for a musk-ox, which had been seen in their district, and who he feared had fallen a victim to its horns or the bear's paws.

"I shot the musk-ox," said I; "and as for your friend, I fear your surmises are only too correct, for the half-devoured remains of a dead man are lying at the foot of these rocks just now."

He hurried to the base of the precipice, where I was too exhausted to follow him, and by the sounds of rage and lamentation which preceded his return, I was assured that his friend or kinsman had been the victim of these rapacious brutes. This comforted me, however, with the conviction that the remains were neither those of Paul Reeves nor old Peterkin, our second mate.

But, meantime, where were they?

The Greenlander rejoined me, with my shot-belt and gory knife, which he found among the rocks. He thanked me for so amply avenging his friend's death on his destroyers, and proceeded at once to calculate the value of the four skins and eight hams of the bears. He invited me to his house, which he said was not far off, adding that his name was Wolmar Fynböe; that he was a merchant who exported to Europe seal-skins, the horns of the sea-unicorn, whalebone, and blubber; bartering these, and the skins of blue and white foxes, hares, and bears, for knives and guns, shot, tobacco, barley, beer and brandy, &c.; that he had once been as far as Kiobenhaven,[*] but did not like the manners of the kablunaet (foreigners), who were but half men when compared to the Greenlanders; for national vanity is a great characteristic of these poor people, as it is of many others even less civilized.

[*] Copenhagen.

Like the Lapps, he wore a long pelisse of untanned reindeer skin, having a hood like a friar's cowl attached thereto, and buttons of walrus teeth. His hose, boots, and breeches, which were all in one, were of the same material, but decorated at the sides by bunches of thongs and tufts of white bearskin. Thus, but for his fair complexion, he might have passed very well for an Esquimau of the Labrador coast.

I gladly committed myself to his guidance.

We soon reached his house, a dwelling of singular aspect, built on the slope of a snow-covered hill which overlooked the Fin Whale Strait, on the waters of which the rays of the northern Aurora were still playing with wondrous beauty; and from thence he dispatched some of his men to bring home the remains of his friend, the dead bears, and the head of the musk-ox.

We were received at the door by an old servant, a woman of fearful aspect, also dressed in skins; but these were adorned by stripes of red and blue leather to indicate her sex. She was aged, and being of "the old school"—for there is one there, even in Greenland—she was tattooed as completely as if she had been a denizen of Nootka Sound. Aloft in her hand, which resembled a crow's talons, she held a lamp to light us into an inner apartment, where Wolmar Fynböe introduced me to his daughters, two girls dressed in skins; but these were neatly adorned with variously-coloured leather, especially about the moccassins which encased their trim legs. Their dresses were cut low at the neck, either to reveal its whiteness (for females have vanity even in that region of ice), or to display their under garments, which were formed of the skins of little birds, ingeniously preserved, sewn together, and worn with the soft feathers next the skin.

Wolmar Fynböe was the tallest man in Greenland, yet he measured only five feet; and though deemed handsome, he had all the peculiarities of his race—to wit, a paunchy figure, a broad flat visage, of a brown brick-dust colour; small eyes, thick lips, and coal-black locks, that waved upon his shoulders like those of a gnome. Nevertheless, his daughters Grethe and Alfa had rather regular features, clear complexions, and long brown hair, their mother having been a woman of Iceland.

They were preparing a supper of grod (Danish), a species of food made of oats or barley, and eaten with butter and milk, when their father's entrance with a stranger—a being more seldom seen than mermaids and gnomes, by common report—startled them so much, that some time elapsed before they could resume their occupation, and swing upon the fire the great pot-stone kettle containing the aforesaid grod with my assistance—in proffering which I won the hearts of all, politeness to females being rather a rarity on the shore of the Fin Whale Strait.

The large fire burned brightly and cheerily, being composed of drift-wood; for upon that barren coast, in addition to the stranded wrecks of Scottish and Russian whalers, are found at times the spoil of the Great Gulf Stream, the palmettoes of South America, and, covered with weeds and barnacles, the vast logs that whilome cast the shadows of their foliage on the lovely Bay of Honduras. By this strange current the spoils of Virginia and Carolina are also cast on the shores of Iceland, and by it the main-mast of H.M.S. Tilbury, which was burned in Jamaica, was thrown upon the western coast of Scotland.

After having fed so long upon the spoils of the ice—the odds and ends of seals and blubber—I made a veritable banquet with the worthy merchant and his two daughters. Then we had the luxury of hot brandy-and-water thereafter—the Ganymede who served us being, ugh! the old tattooed woman.

I have mentioned that the mansion of Weimar Fynböe presented a curious aspect, but this arose from the circumstance of its being (as he informed me) built from the remains of an old whale-ship of large dimensions, which had been cast away in the Fin Whale Strait about one hundred and fifty years ago. Her ribs and timbers formed the roof and uprights of the walls; on these the outer and inner sheathing were bolted or pegged anew, and filled-in between with moss and turf. The lockers in which her cabin stores had been placed were our seats, the beds were her berths; the room of the fur-clad Grethe and Alfa was merely separated from ours by an old bulkhead, in the centre of which a cabin door was hinged. The four stern-windows were framed into the wall, a luxury, a piece of splendour, in Greenland, where the casements are usually formed of the entrails of seals and dolphins dried, and neatly stitched together. Some faded charts were nailed on the wall as pictures. An old musket or two, and a pinchbeck watch, were nearly all that now remained of the spoil found in the ship, which had been deserted by her crew; but from none of these relics could her name or country be discerned, though I supposed her to have been English from the circumstance of a Bible and little book in that language having been found in her by the grandfather of Wolmar Fynböe, who built his house from her materials.

The "little book" Wolmar showed me. It was a curious black-letter pamphlet, printed at London in the time of Charles II., and in Dutch types. I took a particular fancy for it, as it contained the relation of a perilous voyage performed by a ship which belonged to the Seven United Provinces.

Wolmar Fynböe offered to barter it for the horns of the musk-ox; but I assured him that he was welcome alike to the entire head, the bears' skins, and hams to boot. To this he agreed at once, conceiving, probably, that one who parted so readily with spoil did not deserve to possess any; so I retired with my literary acquisition (the contents of which I shall give to the reader elsewhere), begging Wolmar Fynböe to have me summoned betimes in the morning, as I was most anxious to reach Cunninghame's Haven, and rejoin my friends on board the Leda.

CHAPTER XXV.
ADIEU TO THE REGION OF ICE.

Next morning I was up early, my bed not being exactly so luxurious as I could have wished; and there was about everything that overpowering odour of blubber which pervades a Greenland household. For breakfast, Grethe brought in a gaily-painted Muscovite bowl, full of warm milk, and a hot barley-cake, made by Alfa. Her father soon after brought my gun, cleaned and oiled; and then bidding adieu in rather symbolical language to his daughters, we set forth into the clear, cold atmosphere of the young May morning—for we were now in what is deemed in kindlier climes the second month of summer—but as yet no sun was visible.

Far away in distance stretched the Fin Whale Strait, towards Kalla Fiord, which opens into the Icy Sea; its broken scenery, its splintered crags, its lofty bluffs and pinnacles, exhibiting the most singular combinations of light and shadow in the yellow blaze of the yet unrisen sun. The summits seemed tipped with fire, while the bases which rose sheer from the still, deep waters of the waveless strait were dark and sombre as ebony.

Waveless it truly was, save where broken by the knoblike head of a blackfin-whale, as he swam against the wind, and blew clouds of water into the air.

As we proceeded, I could perceive that Wolmar Fynböe, though merry and good-humoured, like all Greenlanders was deeply imbued with superstitions dark and gloomy as those of the Scandinavian Edda. Leaning on his hunting-spear, he pointed to a rock in the strait, saying that his mother's sister Alfa (from whom he named his youngest daughter) was wont to see a handsome young merman seated thereon, every time she came to the beach to gather shell-fish or dry nets.

"A merman!" I reiterated, believing that I had not heard him correctly.

"A merman," continued Fynböe, emphatically. "His curling beard was green, and his features, like those of the Innuit (Greenlanders), were as soft and pleasing as his manner was mild and persuasive. He took her by the hand, and after their fourth meeting led her under the sea, where she lived with him at the bottom of the Fin Whale Strait for a great many years, and never grew less beautiful, though she frequently pined for the dwelling of her mother, whom at times she could behold from the windows of her watery home, every summer when the ice-floes floated out to sea, and the young whales came to play about the headlands in the sunny waves.

"One summer came, but the old woman appeared no more on the slope of the hill; and then Alfa knew that her sorrowing mother had gone to the Island of the Dead.

"Alfa dwelt with the merman, till one night as he was sporting about in the moonbeams amid the waters of the strait, Grön Jette, the wild huntsman, who once in every year comes over the sea at midnight out of Denmark, slew him by a blow of his lance, as he sped with his yelling hounds and fierce black horses over land and ocean towards the north, where the bright streamers were dancing.

"The spell was thus broken; and the young girl found herself turned suddenly into an old woman, seated on the same rock where, twenty years before, the merman had wooed and won her; but now seven well-grown children with fish-tails, and hair that was half green like her husband's and half golden like her own, were swimming about in the flood before her, weeping for her return. So, to rejoin them, she plunged in and was drowned—for the spell of the merman's presence was no longer around her. Next day I found her body floating in the strait, and by a string of crystals round her neck, knew her to be the sister my mother had lost twenty years before. We bore her to the Island of the Dead; and as we use no coffins, like the red-haired Danes, we heaped up stones to hide her from view; but a bear swam off from Sermesoak, tore our gathered heap asunder, and devoured her!"

Wolmar Fynböe rehearsed this strange story with the utmost good faith; for he was simple enough to believe that Torngarsück, the God of Greenland—a spirit which, though no larger than one's thumb, at times assumes the form of a gigantic white bear—dwelt at the bottom of the Whale Strait, with his wife the Demon of Evil, guarded by droves of narwhals and ferocious seals, and surrounded by vast lamps filled with train-oil, in which the sea-birds swam by night.

With many a strange story of witches, and conflicts with whales, walruses, and with devils that sailed through the air and changed themselves into snowdrifts to overwhelm belated hunters, he beguiled the way, until we reached Cunninghame's Haven, where I found Paul Reeves and Hans Peterkin awaiting me in considerable anxiety, and irresolute whether to put off for the Bear Isle and report to Hartly that I had been lost, or to return once more in search of me.

I now gave the honest Greenlander two crown pieces, as neck amulets for each of his daughters (among whose descendants they may become heirlooms for ages), and bidding him farewell, we stepped into our boat, which was well stocked with game—a large white bear, a pile of hares, and several brace of birds shot by the two mates. Then we shoved off to join the Leda, and Wolmar Fynböe, ever and anon pausing to look after us, slowly ascended the cliffs, assisted by his harpoon-shaped hunting spear, and at last disappeared on the path to his half-barbarous and wholly secluded home.

In two hours after, we reached the Leda, which had her courses loose, a signal for sea. Our quota of provisions proved a very acceptable addition to those obtained by Hartly from the Danish resident.

"Bravo, Jack!" said he, as we hoisted the bear on board, "our victualling department is complete now, and if this wind holds we shall weigh an hour before sunset."

"But the victualling—of what does it consist?"

"The dainties—the luxuries of Greenland!"

"Indeed," said I, doubtfully.

"In exchange for a few hundred seal-skins, and some kegs of rancid blubber, we have got pickled bear's flesh, bull-heads, gulls and belugas, salmon-trout, and reindeer tongues, hares and partridges in pickle, with a few tubs of whortleberries, preserved in oil. We shall have the white bear in the cabin to ourselves."

"Why?"

"Sailors won't eat white bear hams?"

"But why?"

"They assert that the flesh makes their hair grey. We have also a cask of sorrel preserved in blubber."

"Ugh! of course; but for what purpose?"

"As a preservative against scurvy. And now up blue-peter, man the windlass, and heave short on the anchor!"

We sailed an hour before sunset; and ere the pale white moon rose from the sea, the jagged pinnacles of Sermesoak and the stormy bluff of Cape Farewell were melting into the brilliant sky astern, while our sailors sang cheerily as they hoisted the working anchor on board, unbent the chain-cable and stowed it in the tier. The month being May we had the light of the sun nearly all night, though in the daytime he only rises thirty-three degrees above the horizon.

However, we lit our binnacle lamps when he set, the sails were trimmed for a south-west course, and now we fairly bore away into the mighty ocean, and bade adieu for ever to the REGION OF ICE.

CHAPTER XXVI.
A SHARK.

For the fourth time during our rambling voyage, the Leda was again free and under sail upon the blue and boundless sea.

I cannot describe the emotions of joy with which, after our recent long imprisonment amid the waste of ice we gazed upon its buoyant ripples shining in the sun of May. Its broad vast bosom of resplendent blue—a blue so indicative of immensity—that spread far away beyond the dim horizon, flecked with tiny floes of ice, seemed as the mirror wherein we could trace the future.

It was freedom, it was the high road to our homes, to sunshine and the genial south. Everything was set that would draw—royals, flying jib, and studding-sails, as we bore on with a breeze, which, though keen, cold, and cutting, enabled us soon to leave the clime of frost and suffering, bears and icebergs far astern.

On the second day we passed a ship waterlogged and dismasted, battered, and abandoned. Her boats, bulwarks, and everything had been swept from her decks. We bore down upon her, but there was no sign of life on board, so we hauled our wind again and left her to drift, where she would no doubt prove a prize, on the sterile coast of Greenland.

One day a shark followed us with singular pertinacity, eluding every shot we fired at his black dorsal fin from our rifles and sealing guns, till Hans Peterkin, who was skilful in the use of the harpoon, evidently wounded the monster by a well-directed blow over our stern quarter, after which our enemy disappeared. Old Hans exulted considerably in his victory, but awoke that night in the midst of a frightful dream, and alarmed all his shipmates by crying out that a shark was devouring him.

"Take care, Hans," grumbled Tom Hammer, as he turned in his hammock, annoyed on being roused from a sound sleep, "don't be falling overboard, for it is my belief that Jack Shark is in the dead water astern yet, looking out for his revenge."

This passed as a joke at the time, but next day it had a singular sequel.

We were almost becalmed. From being light and variable, the wind had nearly died away. The sea was smooth as if oil covered all its surface; the listless canvas hung asleep, or flapped heavily as the masts swayed to and fro, the reef points pattering, as the Leda rolled lazily on the long glassy ridges that swelled up and shone in the meridian sun.

Amid the general apathy which such a state of matters produces on board of a ship, we were roused by the cry of "a dolphin alongside;" and though these fish are generally met in droves, when the waves are breaking and the wind blowing fresh, one was seen rising and sinking, as if sporting in the sunshine.

Immediately Hans appeared on the bowsprit, armed with his Orkney harpoon, a long spear pointed with barbed iron. Rapidly he bent the line to the foreganger of his weapon, and grasping it, with a handful of slack in his right hand, he slid under the bowsprit, and along the martingale stays which are stretched taut to the end of the jib-boom. Clasping the vertical spar of the martingale with his left arm, he took a steady aim at the dolphin, and launched his harpoon with all his strength.

The stroke was followed by a shout from the crew, who crowded into the bows and forerigging, for poor Hans had overstruck himself, and after swinging violently round the martingale, fell into the sea, missing the dolphin, which instantly disappeared.

"My dream—oh, my dream!" cried old Hans in terror, as he rose floundering and sputtering to the surface.

Then came the appalling cry of "A shark! a shark!" and in the very place where the dolphin sank, the short crooked fin of this great monster of the deep was seen making straight towards Hans, who, though an expert swimmer, a hard-a-weather salt, accustomed to all the hardships and terrors of Ultima Thule and his native Orcades, was struggling wildly for life, having got entangled in the slack line of his harpoon.

"Captain Hartly—man overboard! a rope—a rope!"

"Cut away the life-buoy!"

"Lower away the stern-boat!"

Such were the cries on every hand, while the current soon swept Peterkin past the brig, till he was nearly fifty yards astern.

Old Hans uttered a cry of despair, echoed by a groan from all, and sank!

Regardless of the shark, which was then double the distance of Hans from us, Hartly, who had rushed on deck at the first alarm, with the rapidity of thought, threw off his coat, knotted a line round his waist, lowered himself into the mainchains, and joining the palms of his hands together in the cut-water fashion of a diver, urging the while his agile body by a sharp push from the chain-plate, sprang into the sea, and vanished amid the ripples. Then in half minute or less he reappeared with Hans, whose grey locks he grasped firmly, as he cast upward a glance of mingled hope and terror—hope of aid from his crew, and terror of the monster, which was shooting towards them; for though the ring of Mother Jensdochter was to save him from drowning, the good dame omitted all mention of sea-lawyers.

"Down with the stern-boat!" cried Reeves.

In a moment the falls were cast loose and the boat was lowered from the davits, manned, and shoved off with a rapidity which nothing but the discipline of the crew and their love for Hartly could have ensured! Save those in the boat, all held their breath—all were paralysed by the scene, and our complete inability to aid or to protect our friends. However, the splashing of the half-drowned Hans somewhat scared the monster, and kept him off.

The boat soon reached the spot; they were drawn on board, and just in time, for the shark's nose was close to Hans' heels, while a hearty hurrah greeted him and his gallant preserver.

Ere the boat was again dangling at the stern davits, the shark, which had now recovered his surprise and the alarm Hans' splashing had occasioned him, was seen darting furiously to and fro in search of a victim; and but for the celerity of our boat's crew, one or other must have perished in his horrible jaws. Though the shark has rarely the power to bite a man in two, he can strip the flesh from his body in such a manner, that death is sure to follow.

The wind freshened after this, and the ship's course was resumed; but as night came on, the studdingsails and royals were taken in. Hans appeared in very low spirits after his recent adventure, so Hartly excused him from deck duty for that night. Then, as we sat over our grog in the cabin, the deck being in charge of Tom Hammer, Hartly said—

"By the bye, Jack, you said something of finding an old printed yarn about a shipwreck in Skipper Fynböe's house in Greenland."

"Yes—a queer old story it seems."

"Let us have it, then; read it aloud. Cuffy, trim the lamps; bring another case-bottle from the locker, and shut the cabin door. Pass word for Mr. Reeves and Hans Peterkin to step down—Mr. Manly is about to spin us a yarn."

I soon produced my little story-book, of which (as it was an authentic narrative) I shall give the exact title; though I prefer to rehearse the contents in my own manner, as the language and spelling of its author are somewhat quaint and antiquated.

It was called "The Wonderfull and Tragical! Relation of a Voyage from the Indies, printed at the Black Raven, in Duck Lane, A.D. 1684."

The substance thereof was as follows.

CHAPTER XXVII.
THE FATAL VOYAGE OF THE HEER VAN ESTELL.

It was in the month of August, 1670, that the barque De Ruyter, bearing the flag of the Seven United Provinces (then under their High Mightinesses the States General) and named after Michael Adrian de Ruyter, Admiral of Holland—the same valiant mariner who beat the English, burned Chatham, and bombarded Tilbury—left the port of Pernambuco, in Peru, for Rotterdam, tacking carefully to avoid the shoals and rocks which made the Portuguese of old name it the "Mouth of Hell"—Inferno-bocca—hence its present corrupted name.

She was manned by Captain Koningsmarke and sixteen seamen; she carried four brass guns, and had her stern decorated by the lions, spotted sable and gules, which form the arms of Rotterdam. Her mate was an Englishman named Carpinger, a brave and skilful seaman.

As passengers, she had the Heer Van Estell, his wife Gudule, their two little children, Erasmus and Cornelius, with Dame Trüdchen, their faithful old nurse. The Heer was a native of the Low Countries, who, after a long residence in the Dutch colony at Brazil, had amassed a magnificent fortune, and risen to be a Director of the Company of the Great Indies, a dignity which no one could attain unless he vested twelve thousand guilders in the old stock. Now, having amassed all the wealth he deemed desirable, with his wife and children—little curly-haired Erasmus, whom he had named after the great philosopher of Rotterdam (towards whose statue in the Bürger-platz he gave a thousand rix-dollars), and chubby little Cornelius, whom he had named after Cornelius de Witt, who, with his brother, was so barbarously assassinated by William of Orange (and afterwards of England)—he was returning to his native city to spend his days in peace and quiet, with the three beings whom he loved most on earth.

The day was cloudless and clear, the wind was fair, but light, and while the bark, with all her canvas set, from her flying-jib to her spanker, and with the colours of the Seven Provinces flying at her gaff-peak, passed in safety the flat sandbanks of St. Antonio, and that long reef which receives the full force of the sea, and guards the town of Recife, the tall and portly Heer, with his beautiful wife and chubby little ones beside him, sat in a cushioned chair on the warm deck, enjoying a long pipe of tobacco with all the ease and complacency that became a wealthy Hollander and Director of the Great India Company.

Without any emotion, save joy that he was returning, he saw the hill of Olinda, the tall slender spires of the town, and the grim batteries of Cinco Pontas, melt in the distance astern, as the De Ruyter bore away into the Western Ocean.

For more than a month the voyage was delightful and prosperous; but adverse winds came anon, and storms too; and Captain Koningsmarke was blown out of his course; moreover, he lost his reckoning, as the sky remained obscured by clouds, and for weeks both quadrant and sextant were used in vain.

His anxiety and that of the Heer became great, for provisions were becoming scarce—so much so that, ere long, all on board received but a scanty allowance. Then Van Estell and Dame Gudule beheld with secret agony the roses fading from the cheeks of their children, their pretty faces becoming blanched, and their once round forms attenuated.

Week after week rolled anxiously, mournfully away!

Still the winds were adverse, and still the De Ruyter tacked and tacked again, like the fabled ship of Vanderdecken, but without meeting a craft that might assist them, till at last there fell a death-like calm upon the sea; and then, for many, many days under a hot sun, and in the breathless nights that followed, the helpless vessel lay like a log, with her blocks and cordage rattling, and her loose canvas flapping until it was frittered and frayed on the blistering yards and masts, while the sea chafed her rusting chain-plates and the pitch boiled from her planking—yet "she lay so that, for several weeks, they could scarcely tell whether they were forwarded a league's space."

And now a deadly pest broke out on board—a malignant fever, which covered its victims with livid blotches, like the spotted lions, gules and sable, on the ship's stern; and among those who perished were Koningsmarke, the captain, and eight of his crew. They were thrown overboard, and for days their bodies remained in sight, with fishes sporting about them, and obscene birds of the sea lighting on them, as they floated on its still and waveless surface.

Provisions were now dealt out more sparingly than ever. Strong men grew wan, and gaunt, and feeble; for as their strength failed and hope faded, so did their spirit die within them; and then even the most superstitious ceased to whistle for wind.

At last they were reduced to a half biscuit and single morsel of meat per day; the latter failed, and then the half biscuit; and now they looked grimly and terribly in each other's hollow visages and bloodshot eyes, while wondering what was to become of them, for although lines had long hung overboard, the sea had refused to yield them fish.

"To wait with hope is nothing, but to wait with DESPAIR is worse than death!"

So did the Heer Van Estell wait, and his wife Gudule—now no longer the beautiful Gudule, for she was wan, wasted, and sinking, having given her pittance of food for several days to sustain her little ones. All his wealth, all the riches acquired by years of prudence in the Indies, would the unhappy Van Estell have given gladly to purchase a single biscuit, to sustain for one day more the lives of those he loved so well.

At last little Erasmus and Cornelius died, passing away without pain or a murmur, having become of late too weak even to weep for food.

They passed away, and the Heer and his wife remained by the pretty corpses as if transformed to stone!

Four days passed after this—still no food—no hope—no wind in the air, no ship upon the sea!

Gudule could not consent to cast her dead children into its mighty depth; but anon she repented of it bitterly, for the eight seamen who remained, after a long conference on the forecastle, and frequently casting glances aft towards the cabin—glances like those of wolves—came in a body, and demanded that the dead children should be surrendered to them as food!

The entreaties and tears of the parents were vain. The Heer (now shorn of his strength) and his miserable helpmate were thrust into their cabin, while the wasted bodies of their children were borne away and laid on the drum of the capstan, where they were cut to pieces by the cook's knife, and then devoured raw. Hunger seemed to make the sailors insane, and able to overcome all aversion for food so unnatural; but whether it was that they ate immoderately, or that with satiety came a horror of their meal, I know not, but they were immediately assailed by a dreadful sickness, which left their bodies weaker than ever.

Gudule lay in a stupor on her bed, but the Heer loaded his pistols, though scarcely knowing for what purpose; and exerting all his strength, he contrived to burst open the cabin door and stagger on deck, when the crew, whom the hunger of another day assailed again, had just concluded the last of a second dreadful banquet—a banquet on his children!

On the capstan there lay the head of one. It had the fair curly locks of little Erasmus.

"Oh, madness and agony!" groaned the miserable Van Estell, as he took it in his tremulous hands, kissed it tenderly thrice, and slowly and solemnly dropped it into the glassy sea.

He could not weep—his hot dry eyes refused a tear, but groans burst from his overcharged breast and parched lips, and he swooned on the deck. There he lay, and so another day passed. When he recovered it was about the time of midnight, and a full round moon was shining on that now neglected ship of death and of despair.

The atmosphere was mild and warm.

The Heer stole into the cabin, and saw that his poor, sad, childless wife lay very still and motionless. Tremblingly he drew near, lest she might be dead; for then he had resolved to cast her and himself into the sea, lest her fair form might also be devoured by the madmen on deck. But she was in a soft sleep, dreaming, perhaps, that her lost little ones were alive, and seated by her side in a palm grove of Peru, listening to the voice of the campanero, or sweet bell-bird of Brazil. The deep slumber that follows long hours of mental and bodily suffering had fallen upon her.

The poor man wept and kissed her tenderly, but at that moment the mate, George Carpinger, entered, and roughly ordered him to come forward to the capstan head, where he and his comrades were deliberating on what was to be done next.

Heer Van Estell assured himself that his pistols were still in his pocket, that they were primed and loaded, and then he obeyed. As these nine men stood round the capstan, they resembled spectres rather than human beings, when the cold lustre of the moon fell on their pallid visages and bloodshot eyes that glared wildly from out their sunken sockets.

Eleven persons were still on board, namely, the Heer, his wife and servant, the mate, and seven seamen; it was evident that one must be sacrificed to prolong the existence of the rest, and mentally they resolved that whoever became the victim, should be cooked, lest the flesh might sicken them again......

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FATAL VOYAGE—HOW THEY CAST LOTS.

"I am aware," says the author of Antonina, "of the tendency in some readers to denounce truth itself as improbable, unless their own personal experience has borne witness to it." In this spirit, some may denounce the fatalities of the Heer's voyage as improbabilities, though the hideous circumstance of human beings in extremity of hunger destroying each other for food, has been too well and too terribly established in many instances—such as the wreck of the French frigate Medusa; when the British frigate Nautilus was lost on a solitary rock in the Mediterranean; during the famine on board the American ship Peggy; and on many other occasions.

But to resume our little quarto.

The mate conducted the Heer Van Estell to the capstan, where the starving seamen stood in a silent group, and then he informed him in a hoarse whisper—

"That unless they contrived a means of furnishing themselves with food, they must all die of starvation; it was impossible for them to subsist for another day. That there were eleven persons on board, and they had come to the resolution of determining by lot who should die that the rest might live."

"Eleven on board!" reiterated the Heer, faintly, for his poor wife Grudule was one of these.

"Eleven," added a seaman named Adrian Crudelius, with a wild glare in his eye; "if one dies, ten may live. Bring your wife on deck, sir; she must take her chance with the rest. There must be no distinction here."

"Nay," said George Carpinger, "we may excuse her presence, and so spare her some of this horror; but her husband shall draw for her."

"Sirs," replied the poor Heer, "I thank you. Even here she finds the privileges of her sex accorded her."

Then with tremulous hands the mate tore a sheet of paper into eleven pieces, and numbered them from one to eleven. He folded and placed them in his hat. It was then agreed that he who drew number one was to die, and that he who drew number two was to be the executioner. After shaking the fatal pieces of paper, amid a silence that was awful—the silence of horror—for food or want, death or life, were on the issue, every glassy eye was fixed, each nether jaw relaxed, while with hot and feverish hands that trembled, they drew forth their lots—the Heer taking two in succession. He opened them hastily, smote his forehead, uttered a wailing cry, and reeled against the capstan.

He had drawn numbers "one" and "two," so it was the lot of him to die, and by the hand of Grudule, or vice versâ!

The unhappy seamen had scarcely foreseen a chance so terrible as this. Carpinger urged that the wife should be spared, or that lots should be cast once more; but those who by risking their fate had escaped death, were loth to tempt it again, and with sullen murmurs declined. Propping himself against the capstan, the unfortunate Van Estell summoned all his energies, and thus addressed them:—

"My good companions in misery, you have seen our sorrow and despair for the loss of our dear little children; and though I know that death would be a relief and refuge to my poor Grudule, neither she nor I can perish by the other's hand. Thus I offer myself freely and willingly as the victim and sacrifice. When I am dead, I charge you—I pray you be kind unto her. Conduct her to her friends, her home, her country, and be assured that if ever you are happy enough to see the waters of the Maese, and the old spires of Rotterdam, she will have wealth enough to reward you all. May Heaven bless you! Gudule, farewell—my poor Gudule!"

At these words he drew a pistol from his pocket, shot himself through the head, and fell flat on the deck. Some appeared stunned by the whole affair, but two threw themselves upon the yet quivering body like wild animals, and sucked up the blood that oozed from it.

In the weird light of the moon, that bloody deck, that silent group and fallen corpse, presented an awful scene to Gudule Van Estell, who tottered from her cabin, being roused by the sound of the pistol; but now Carpinger the mate, Adrian Crudelius, and her old nurse, bore her back into the cabin, and fastened the door to prevent her seeing the dreadful scene that was sure to ensue, when the famished men, in their voracity and fury, almost tore the clothes from the body of the Heer, being rendered more mad than ever by the contents of a single case-bottle of Geneva which had been discovered. They hewed the body to pieces, cast its head into the sea, and again the horrible repast commenced—a repast which rendered two raving mad, for with loud yells they sprang overboard and disappeared.

All the rest became insane, save the mate and Adrian Crudelius, who endeavoured to control their extravagance. One proposed to scuttle the ship, or set her on fire, that all might perish together; another raved and blasphemed Heaven for withholding the wind; a third denounced the craft as being under a spell, and thus fixed to one part of the sea, from whence she would never stir till her timbers rotted and her planks opened; and all, save the mate, were unanimous that next time the wife of the Heer, upon whom one of the lots had fallen, should perish for their sustenance if a sail came not in sight.

That day passed as others had done; the glassy sea without a ripple, the hot sun overhead, the sails flapping against the masts; the banner of the Seven Provinces, inverted as a sign of distress, hanging listlessly downward from the gaff-peak; the sky without a cloud, the horizon without a sail, and the hearts of the cannibals on board the De Ruyter without hope!

Gudule Van Estell was still surviving. The kind mate had caught a couple of mice; these he gave to the nurse, who cooked them in secret for her mistress and herself. But now, towards evening, four of the crew, who were bereft of reason, approached her cabin door, and were attempting to force it open, for the purpose of dragging her to the capstan head, when George Carpinger, armed with a cutlass, rushed forward, and drove them back.

They soon procured arms, and howling like wild animals, attacked him, staggering the while like drunken men with weakness. Crudelius now joined the mate, and there ensued a conflict in which two were slain, and their bodies were cast overboard by the survivors, who were already so glutted by their horrible food as to have no desire for more.

By the noon of the next day, all had perished by exhaustion, save the mate and the Dame Van Estell.

Night was coming on, and the poor solitary seaman was sitting on the windlass in a species of stupor, when an unusual coolness in the atmosphere roused his attention, and, with a sailor's instinct, he felt the coming breeze.

First there came a gentle catspaw upon the darkening water, then a ripple, and now a whitening of the wave-tops at a distance. He stretched his tremulous hands towards them, and wept in joy!

Anon, clouds came banking up in dense masses to leeward, and rain—blessed rain! began to fall, while the wind of heaven blew the long neglected rigging out in bands, and filled the flapping sails.

A brace of lazy gulls suddenly appeared wheeling about; and a bird—a land bird—perched on the end of the studding-sail boom alongside.

The haggard eyes of Carpinger swept the horizon, and saw afar off a spark, which he at first supposed to be a star, but, ere long, discovered to be a light; yet whether it shone on board of a ship, or on the shore, he knew not; so he lashed the helm, and rushing to the lifts and braces, strove to trim the sails and shape the vessel's course towards it.

The bunting began to shake at the gaff-peak; ere long it floated out upon the wind, while a wake whitened astern, a bubble rose under the bows, and the De Ruyter walked through the water as of yore.

The breeze continued, and next morning she was close in upon a bleak, rugged, and mountainous coast, which proved to be the Lizard Point in Cornwall, the most southern promontory of England.*

* It must be borne in mind that the mouth of the Channel was less frequented by shipping in 1670, than now.