The World of Ice by R. M. Ballantyne (e novels to read online TXT) 📖

too steep for the snow to lie on, the towering form of the giant flag-staff, and the leaden clouds that rolled angrily across the sky. But these leaden clouds soon rolled off, leaving a blue wintry sky and a bright sun behind.

The storm blew itself out early in the morning, and at breakfast-time on that day, when the sun was just struggling with the last of the clouds, Captain Guy remarked to his friends, who were seated round the cabin table: “Well, gentlemen, we must begin hard work to-day.”

“Hard work, Captain!” exclaimed Fred Ellice, pausing for a second or two in the hard work of chewing a piece of hard salt junk; “why, what do you call the work we’ve been engaged in for the last few weeks?”

“Play, my lad; that was only play—just to bring our hands in, before setting to work in earnest! What do you think of the health of the men, Doctor?”

“Never was better, but I fear the hospital will soon fill if you carry out your threat in regard to work.”

“No fear,” remarked the second mate; “the more work the better health is my experience. Busy men have no time to git seek.”

“No doubt of it sir,” said the first mate, bolting a large mouthful of pork. “Nothing so good for ’em as work.”

“There are two against you, Doctor,” said the captain.

“Then it’s two to two,” cried Fred, as he finished breakfast, “for I quite agree with Tom, and with that excellent proverb which says: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’”

The captain shook his head as he said: “Of all the nuisances I ever met with in a ship a semi-passenger is the worst. I think, Fred, I must get you bound apprentice, and give you regular work to do, you good-for-nothing.”

We need scarcely say that the captain jested, for Fred was possessed of a spirit that cannot rest, so to speak, unless at work. He was able to do almost anything after a fashion, and was never idle for a moment. Even when his hands chanced to be unemployed his brows were knitted, busily planning what to do next.

“Well now, gentlemen,” resumed the captain, “let us consider the order of business. The first thing that must be done now is to unstow the hold, and deposit its contents on the small island astern of us, which we shall call Store Island, for brevity’s sake. Get a tent pitched there, Mr Bolton, and bank it up with snow. You can leave Grim to superintend the unloading. Then, Mr Saunders, do you go and set a gang of men to cut a canal through the young ice from the ship to the island. Fortunately the floes there are wide enough apart to let our quarter-boats float between them. The unshipping won’t take long. Tell Buzzby to take a dozen men with him and collect moss; we’ll need a large quantity for fuel, and if another storm like this comes, it’ll be hard work to get down to it. Send Meetuck to me when you go on deck; I shall talk to him as to our prospects of finding deer hereabouts, and arrange a hunt. Doctor, you may either join the hunting party or post up the observations, etcetera, which have accumulated of late.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Singleton, “I’ll accept the latter duty, the more willingly that I wish to have a careful examination of my botanical specimens.”

“And what am I to do, Captain?” enquired Fred.

“What you please, lad.”

“Then I’ll go and take care of Meetuck; he’s apt to get into mischief when left—”

At this moment a tremendous shout of laughter, long-continued, came from the deck, and a sound as of numbers of men dancing overhead was heard.

The party in the cabin seized their caps and sprang up the companion, where they beheld a scene that accounted for the laughter, and induced them to join in it. At first sight it seemed as if thirty polar bears had boarded the vessel, and were executing a dance of triumph before proceeding to make a meal of the crew; but on closer inspection it became apparent that the men had undergone a strange transformation, and were capering with delight at the ridiculous appearance they presented. They were clad from head to foot in Esquimaux costume, and now bore as strong a resemblance to polar bears as man could attain to.

Meetuck was the pattern and the chief instrument in effecting this change. At Uppernavik Captain Guy had been induced to purchase a large number of fox-skins, deer-skins, seal-skins, and other furs as a speculation, and had them tightly packed and stowed away in the hold, little imagining the purpose they were ultimately destined to serve. Meetuck had come on board in a mongrel sort of worn-out seal-skin dress, but the instant the cold weather set in he drew from a bundle, which he had brought with him, a dress made of the furs of the Arctic fox, some of the skins being white and the others blue. It consisted of a loose coat somewhat in the form of a shirt, with a large hood to it, and a short elongation behind like the commencement of a tail. The boots were made of white bear-skin which, at the end of the foot, were made to terminate with the claws of the animal, and they were so long that they came up the thigh under the coat, or “jumper” as the men called it, and thus served instead of trousers. He also wore fur mittens, with a bag for the fingers, and a separate little bag for the thumb. The hair on these garments was long and soft, and worn outside, so that when a man enveloped himself in them, and put up the hood, which well-nigh concealed the face, he became very much like a bear, or some such creature, standing on its hind-legs.

Meetuck was a short, fat, burly little fellow by nature, but when he put on his winter dress he became such a round, soft, squat, hairy, and comical-looking creature that no one could look at him without laughing; and the shout with which he was received on deck the first time he made his appearance in his new costume was loud and prolonged. But Meetuck was as good-humoured an Esquimaux as ever speared a walrus or lanced a polar bear. He joined in the laugh, and cut a caper or two to show that he entered into the spirit of the joke.

When the ship was set fast, and the thermometer fell pretty low, the men found that their ordinary dreadnoughts and pea-jackets, etcetera, were not a sufficient protection against the cold, and it occurred to the captain that his furs might now be turned to good account. Sailors are proverbially good needle-men of a rough kind. Meetuck showed them how to set about their work; each man made his own garments, and in less than a week they were completed. It is true the boots perplexed them a little, and the less ingenious among the men made very rare and curious-looking foot-gear for themselves, but they succeeded after a fashion, and at last the whole crew appeared on deck in their new habiliments, as we have already mentioned, capering among the snow like bears, to their own entire satisfaction and to the intense delight of Meetuck, who now came to regard the white men as brothers—so true is it that “the tailor makes the man!”

“’Ow ’orribly ’eavy it is, hain’t it?” gasped Mivins, after dancing round the main-hatch till he was nearly exhausted.

“Heavy?” cried Buzzby, whose appearance was such that you would have hesitated to say whether his breadth or length was greater,—“heavy, d’ye say? It must be your sperrits wot’s heavy, then, for I feel as light as a feather myself.”

“O morther! then may I niver sleep on a bed made o’ sich feathers!” cried O’Riley, capering up to Green, the carpenter’s mate, and throwing a mass of snow in his face. The frost rendered it impossible to form the snow into balls, but the men made up for this by throwing it about each other’s eyes and ears in handfuls.

“What d’ye mean by insultin’ my mate?—take that!” said Peter Grim, giving the Irishman a twirl that tumbled him on the deck.

“Oh, bad manners to ye,” spluttered O’Riley, as he rose and ran away, “why don’t ye hit a man o’ yer own size.”

“’Deed, then, it must be because there’s not one o’ my own size to hit,” remarked the carpenter with a broad grin.

This was true. Grim’s colossal proportions were increased so much by his hairy dress that he seemed to spread out into the dimensions of two large men rolled into one. But O’Riley was not to be overturned with impunity. Skulking round behind the crew, who were laughing at Grim’s joke, he came upon the giant in the rear, and seizing the short tail of his jumper, pulled him violently down on the deck.

“Ah! then give it him, boys,” cried O’Riley, pushing the carpenter flat down, and obliterating his black beard and his whole visage in a mass of snow. Several of the wilder spirits among the men leaped on the prostrate Grim, and nearly smothered him before he could gather himself up for a struggle; then they fled in all directions, while their victim regained his feet and rushed wildly after them. At last he caught O’Riley, and grasping him by the two shoulders gave him a heave that was intended and “calc’lated,” as Amos Parr afterwards remarked, “to pitch him over the foretop-sail-yard!” But an Irishman is not easily overcome. O’Riley suddenly straightened himself and held his arms up over his head, and the violent heave, which, according to Parr, was to have sent him to such an uncomfortable elevation, only pulled the jumper completely off his body, and left him free to laugh in the face of his big friend, and run away.

At this point the captain deemed it prudent to interfere.

“Come, come, my lads,” he cried, “enough o’ this! That’s not the morning work, is it? I’m glad to find that your new dresses,” he added with a significant smile, “make you fond of rough work in the snow; there’s plenty of it before us. Come down below with me, Meetuck; I wish to talk with you.”

As the captain descended to the cabin the men gave a final cheer, and in ten minutes they were working laboriously at their various duties.

Buzzby and his party were the first ready and off to cut moss. They drew a sledge after them towards the Red-snow Valley, which was not more than two miles distant from the ship. This “mossing”, as it was termed, was by no means a pleasant duty. Before the winter became severe the moss could be cut out from the beds of the snow streams with comparative ease, but now the mixed turf of willows, heaths, grasses, and moss was frozen solid, and had to be quarried with crowbars and carried to the ship like so much stone. However, it was prosecuted vigorously, and a sufficient quantity was soon procured to pack on the decks of the ship, and around its sides, so as to keep out the cold. At the same time the operation of discharging the stores was carried on briskly, and Fred, in company with Meetuck, O’Riley, and Joseph West, started with the dog-sledge on a hunting expedition.

In order to enable the reader better to understand the condition of the Dolphin and her crew, we will detail the several arrangements that were made at this time and during the succeeding fortnight. As a measure of precaution, the ship, by means of blasting, sawing, and warping, was with great labour got into deeper water, where one night’s frost set her fast with a sheet of ice three inches thick round her; in a few weeks this ice became several feet thick, and the snow