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

And now we have fairly got into blue water—the sailor’s delight, the landsman’s dread—

“The sea! the sea! the open sea;

The blue, the fresh, the ever free.”

“It’s my opinion,” remarked Buzzby to Singleton one day, as they stood at the weather gangway, watching the foam that spread from the vessel’s bow as she breasted the waves of the Atlantic gallantly,—“It’s my opinion that our skipper is made o’ the right stuff. He’s entered quite into the spirit of the thing, and I hear’d him say to the first mate yesterday he’d made up his mind to run right up into Baffin’s Bay and make enquiries for Captain Ellice first, before goin’ to his usual whalin’-ground. Now that’s wot I call doin’ the right thing; for, ye see, he runs no small risk o’ gettin’ beset in the ice and losing the fishin’ season altogether by so doin’.”

“He’s a fine fellow,” said Singleton; “I like him better every day, and I feel convinced he will do his utmost to discover the whereabouts of our missing friend; but I fear much that our chances are small, for although we know the spot which Captain Ellice intended to visit, we cannot tell to what part of the frozen ocean ice and currents may have carried him.”

“True,” replied Buzzby, giving to his left eye and cheek just that peculiar amount of screw which indicated intense sagacity and penetration; “but I’ve a notion that, if they are to be found, Captain Guy is the man to find ’em.”

“I hope it may turn out as you say. Have you ever been in these seas before, Buzzby?”

“No, sir—never; but I’ve got a half-brother wot has bin in the Greenland whale-fishery, and I’ve bin in the south-sea line myself.”

“What line was that, Buzzby?” enquired David Summers, a sturdy boy of about fifteen, who acted as assistant steward, and was, in fact, a nautical maid-of-all-work. “Was it a log-line, or a bow-line, or a cod-line, or a bit of the equator?—eh!”

The old salt deigned no reply to this passing sally, but continued his converse with Singleton.

“I could give ye many a long yarn about the South Seas,” said Buzzby, gazing abstractedly down into the deep. “One time, when I was about fifty mile to the sou’west o’ Cape Horn, I—”

“Dinner’s ready, sir,” said a thin, tall, active man, stepping smartly up to Singleton, and touching his cap.

“We must talk over that some other time, Buzzby. The captain loves punctuality.” So saying, the young surgeon sprang down the companion ladder, leaving the old salt to smoke his pipe in solitude.

And here we may pause a few seconds to describe our ship and her crew.

The Dolphin was a tight, new, barque-rigged vessel of about three hundred tons burden, built expressly for the northern whale-fishery, and carried a crew of forty-five men. Ships that have to battle with the ice require to be much more powerfully built than those that sail in unencumbered seas. The Dolphin united strength with capacity and buoyancy. The under part of her hull and sides were strengthened with double timbers, and fortified externally with plates of iron; while, internally, stanchions and cross-beams were so arranged as to cause pressure on any part to be supported by the whole structure; and on her bows, where shocks from the ice might be expected to be most frequent and severe, extra planking, of immense strength and thickness, was secured. In other respects the vessel was fitted up much in the same manner as ordinary merchantmen. The only other peculiarity about her worthy of notice was the crow’s-nest, a sort of barrel-shaped structure fastened to the fore-masthead, in which, when at the whaling-ground, a man is stationed to look out for whales. The chief men in the ship were Captain Guy, a vigorous, practical American; Mr Bolton, the first mate, an earnest, stout, burly, off-hand Englishman; and Mr Saunders, the second mate, a sedate, broad-shouldered, raw-boned Scot, whose opinion of himself was unbounded, whose power of argument was extraordinary, not to say exasperating, and who stood six feet three in his stockings. Mivins, the steward, was, as we have already remarked, a tall, thin, active young man, of a brisk, lively disposition, and was somewhat of a butt among the men, but being in a position of power and trust he was respected. The young surgeon, Tom Singleton, whom we have yet scarcely introduced to the reader, was a tall, slim, but firmly-knit, youth, with a kind, gentle disposition. He was always open, straightforward, and polite. He never indulged in broad humour, though he enjoyed it much, seldom ventured on a witticism, was rather shy in the company of his companions, and spoke little; but for a quiet, pleasant tête-à-tête there was not a man in the ship equal to Tom Singleton. His countenance was Spanish-looking and handsome, his hair black, short, and curling, and his budding moustache was soft and dark as the eyebrow of an Andalusian belle.

It would be unpardonable, in this catalogue, to omit the cook, David Mizzle. He was round, and fat, and oily, as one of his own “duff” puddings. To look at him you could not help suspecting that he purloined and ate at least half of the salt pork he cooked, and his sly, dimpling laugh, in which every feature participated, from the point of his broad chin to the top of his bald head, rather tended to favour this supposition. Mizzle was prematurely bald—being quite a young man,—and when questioned on the subject he usually attributed it to the fact of his having been so long employed about the cooking-coppers that the excessive heat to which he was exposed had stewed all the hair off his head! The crew was made up of stout, active men in the prime of life, nearly all of whom had been more or less accustomed to the whale-fishing, and some of the harpooners were giants in muscular development and breadth of shoulder, if not in height.

Chief among these harpooners was Amos Parr, a short, thick-set, powerful man of about thirty-five, who had been at sea since he was a little boy, and had served in the fisheries of both the northern and southern seas. No one knew what country had the honour of producing him—indeed, he was ignorant of that point himself; for, although he had vivid recollections of his childhood having been spent among green hills, and trees, and streamlets, he was sent to sea with a strange captain before he was old enough to care about the name of his native land. Afterwards he ran away from his ship, and so lost all chance of ever discovering who he was; but, as he sometimes remarked, he didn’t much care who he was, so long as he was himself; so it didn’t matter. From a slight peculiarity in his accent, and other qualities, it was surmised that he must be an Irishman—a supposition which he rather encouraged, being partial to the sons, and particularly partial to the daughters, of the Emerald Isle, one of which last he had married just six months before setting out on this whaling expedition.

Such was the Dolphin and her crew, and merrily they bowled along over the broad Atlantic with favouring winds, and without meeting with anything worthy of note until they neared the coast of Greenland.

One fine morning, just as the party in the cabin had finished breakfast, and were dallying with the last few morsels of the repast, as men who have more leisure than they desire are wont to do, there was a sudden shock felt, and a slight tremor passed through the ship as if something had struck her.

“Ha!” exclaimed Captain Guy, finishing his cup of chocolate, “there goes the first bump.”

“Ice ahead, sir!” said the first mate, looking down the skylight.

“Is there much?” asked the captain, rising and taking down a small telescope from the hook on which it usually hung.

“Not much, sir—only a stream; but there is an ice blink right ahead all along the horizon.”

“How’s her head, Mr Bolton?”

“Nor’-west and by north, sir.”

Before this brief conversation came to a close, Fred Ellice and Tom Singleton sprang up the companion, and stood on the deck gazing ahead with feelings of the deepest interest. Both youths were well read in the history of polar seas and regions; they were well acquainted, by name at least, with floes, and bergs, and hummocks of ice, but neither of them had seen such in reality. These objects were associated in their young minds with all that was romantic and wild, hyperborean and polar, brilliant and sparkling, and light and white—emphatically white. To behold ice actually floating on the salt sea was an incident of note in their existence; and certainly the impressions of their first day in the ice remained sharp, vivid and prominent, long after scenes of a much more striking nature had faded from the tablets of their memories.

At first the prospect that met their ardent gaze was not calculated to excite excessive admiration. There were only a few masses of low ice floating about in various directions. The wind was steady, but light, and seemed as if it would speedily fall altogether. Gradually the blink on the horizon (as the light haze always distinguishable above ice, or snow-covered land, is called) resolved itself into a long white line of ice, which seemed to grow larger as the ship neared it, and in about two hours more they were fairly in the midst of the pack, which was fortunately loose enough to admit of the vessel being navigated through the channels of open water. Soon after, the sun broke out in cloudless splendour, and the wind fell entirely, leaving the ocean in a dead calm.

“Let’s go to the fore-top, Tom,” said Fred, seizing his friend by the arm, and hastening to the shrouds.

In a few seconds they were seated alone on the little platform at the top of the