Seven Frozen Sailors

Eighty degrees had long been passed, and still our progress was not stayed. We often had a bit of a nip from the ice closing in, and over and over again we had to turn back; but we soon found open water again, after steaming gently along the edge of the track, and thence northward once more, till one day the doctor and I took observations, and we found that we were eighty-five degrees north, somewhere about a hundred miles farther than any one had been before.

“We shall do it, Cookson!” cried the doctor, rubbing his hands. “Only five more degrees, my lad, and we have made our fame! Cookson, my boy, you’ll be knighted!”

“I hope not, sir!” I said, shuddering, as I thought of the City aldermen. “I would rather be mourned!”

“That’s a bad habit, trying to make jokes,” he said, gravely. “Fancy, my good fellow, making a pun in eighty-five degrees north latitude! but I’m not surprised. There is no latitude observed now, since burlesques have come into fashion. Where are you going, Cookson!”

“Up in the crow’s-nest, sir,” I said. “I don’t like the look of the hummocky ice out nor’ard.”

I climbed up, spy-glass in hand, when, to my horror, the doctor began to follow me.

“That there crow’s-nest won’t abear you, sir!” cried Scudds, coming to the rescue.

“Think not, my man?” said the doctor.

“Sure on’t!” said Scudds.

“Ah, well, I’m with you in spirit, Cookson!” he exclaimed.

And I finished my climb, and well swept the horizon line with my glass.

There was no mistaking it: ice, ice, ice on every side. The little canal through which we were steaming came to an end a mile farther on; and that night we were frozen in fast, and knew that there was not a chance of being set free till the next year.

The crew was divided into two parties at once, and without loss of time I got one set at work lowering yards, striking masts, and covering in the ship, while the others were busied with the preparation of the sledges.

Two days after, a party of ten of us, with plenty of provisions on our sledge, and a tent, started under the doctor’s guidance for the Pole.

It was very cold, but the sun shone brightly, and we trudged on, the doctor showing the value of his natural covering, though he was less coated with furs than we were.

He pointed out to me the shape of the land, and which was frozen sea; and at the end of two days, when we were in a wild place, all mighty masses of ice, he declared his conviction that there was, after all, no open Polar sea, only ice to the end.

We had had a bitter cold night, and had risen the next morning cold and cheerless; but a good hot cup of coffee set us right, and we were thinking of starting, when Scudds, who was with us, Abram being left in command, kicked at a piece of ice, saying, “That’s rum-looking stuff!”

“There’s something in it,” said the doctor’s nephew, who was always in the way.

“Let me see,” said the doctor, putting on his spectacles. “To be sure – yes! Axes, quick!”

He took one himself, gave the block of ice a sharp blow, split it in halves, and, to our utter astonishment, a strange-looking animal like a woolly dog lay before us, frozen, of course, perfectly hard.

“A prize!” said the doctor; and we, under his orders, made a good-sized fire, laid the perfectly preserved animal by it, and at the end of a couple of hours had the satisfaction of seeing it move one leg, then another, and, at last, it rose slowly on all fours, raised one of its hind legs, scratched itself in the most natural way in the world, and then seemed to sink down all of a heap, and melt quite away, leaving some loose wool on the snow.

“Well,” said Scudds, rolling his one eye, “if I hadn’t ha’ seen that ’ere, I wouldn’t ha’ believed it!”

“Only a case of suspended animation, my man,” said the doctor, calmly. “We shall make more discoveries yet.”

The doctor was right; for this set all the men hunting about, he giving them every encouragement, so that at the end of an hour we had found another dog; but in dislodging the block of ice in which it was frozen, the head was broken off, so that the only good to be obtained by thawing it was the rough wool and some of the teeth, which the doctor carefully preserved.

“Isn’t it much colder here, doctor?” I said, for the wind seemed to go through me like a knife.

“Hush!” he whispered; “don’t let the men hear, or they’ll be discouraged. It’s perfectly frightful; the thermometers are stopped!”

“Stopped?” I said.

“Yes; the cold’s far below anything they can show. They are perfectly useless now. Let’s get on?”

I stood staring at him, feeling a strange stupor coming over me. It was not unpleasant, being something like the minutes before one goes to sleep; but I was startled into life by the doctor flying at me, and hitting me right in my chest. The next moment he had a man on each side pumping my arms up and down, as they forced me to run for quite a quarter of an hour, when I stopped, panting, and the doctor laid his hand upon my heart.

“He’ll do now!” he said, quietly. “Don’t you get trying any of those games again, captain.”

“What games?” I said, indignantly.

“Getting yourself frozen. Now, then, get on, my lads – we must go ahead!”

For the next nine days we trudged on, dragging our sledge through the wonderful wilderness of ice and snow. At night we camped in the broad sunshine, and somehow the air seemed to be much warmer. But on the tenth day, when we had reached the edge of a great, crater-like depression in the ice, which seemed to extend as far as the eye could reach, the intensity of the cold was frightful, and I spoke of it to the doctor, as soon as we had set up our little canvas and skin tent.

“Yes, it is cold!” he said. “I’d give something to know how low it is! But let’s make our observations.”

We did, and the doctor triumphantly announced that we were within one degree of the Pole.

We were interrupted by an outcry among the men, and, on going to the tent, it was to find them staring at the spirit-lamp, over which we heated our coffee. The flame, instead of fluttering about, and sending out warmth, had turned quite solid, and was like a great tongue of bright, bluish-yellow metal, which rang like a bell, on being touched with a spoon.

“Never mind, my men!” says the doctor coolly. “It is only one of the phenomena of the place. Captain, give the men a piece of brandy each.”

“A little brandy apiece, you mean, sir.”

“No,” he said coolly; “I mean a piece of brandy each.”

He was quite right: the brandy was one solid mass, like a great cairngorm pebble, and we had to break it with an axe; and very delicious the bits were to suck, but as to strength, it seemed to have none.

We had an accident that evening, and broke one of the doctor’s thermometers, the ball of quicksilver falling heavily on the ice, and, when I picked it up, it was like a leaden bullet, quite hard, so that we fired it at a bear, which came near us; but it only quickened his steps.

In spite of the tremendous cold, we none of us seemed much the worse, and joined the doctor in his hunt for curiosities. There was land here as well as ice, although it was covered; for there was on one side of the hollow quite a hill, and the doctor pointed out to me the trace of what he said had been a river, evidently emptying itself into the great crater; but when he pulled out the compass to see in which direction the river must have run, the needle pointed all sorts of ways, ending by dipping down, and remaining motionless.

We were not long in finding that animal life had at one time existed here; for, on hunting among the blocks of ice, we found several in which we could trace curious-looking beasts, frozen in like fossils.

We had set up our tent under the lee of a great rock of ice, on the edge of the crater, which looked so smooth and so easy of ascent, that it was with the greatest difficulty that we could keep the doctor’s nephew from trying a slide down. He had, in fact, got hold of a smooth piece of ice to use as a sledge, when the doctor stopped him, and put an end to his enthusiasm by pointing down and asking him what was below in the distance, where the hollow grew deep and dark, and a strange mist hung over it like a cloud.

“If you go down, Alfred, my boy, you will never get back. Think of my misery in such a case, knowing that you have, perhaps, penetrated the mystery of the North Pole, and that it will never be known!”

The young fellow sighed at this arrest of his project.

Just then we were roused by a shout from Scudds, whom we could see in the distance, standing like a bear on its hind legs, and moving his hands.

We all set off to him, under the impression that he had found the Pole; but he was only standing pointing to a great slab of transparent ice, out of which stuck about ten inches of the tail of something, the ice having melted from it; while, on closer examination, we could see, farther in through the clear, glassy ice, the hind-quarters of some mighty beast.

“A mammoth —Elephas Primigenius!” cried the doctor, excitedly. “We must have him out.”

We stared at one another, while the doctor wabbled round to the other side of the great mass, where he set up a shout; and, on going to him, there he was, pointing to what looked like a couple of pegs about seven feet apart, sticking out of the face of the ice.

“What’s them, sir?” says one of the men.

“Tusks!” cried the doctor, delightedly. “My men, this is as good as discovering the North Pole. If we could get that huge beast out, and restore his animation, what a triumph. Why, he must have been,” he said, pacing the length of the block, and calculating its height, “at least – dear me, yes – forty feet long, and twenty feet high.”

“What a whopper!” growled Scudds. “Well, I found him.”

“We must have him out, my men,” said the doctor again, but he said it dubiously, for it seemed a task beyond us, for fire would not burn, and there was no means of getting heat to melt the vast mass; so at last we returned to the camp, and made ourselves snug for the night.

In the morning, the doctor had another inspection of the mammoth, and left it with a sigh; but in the course of the day we found traces of dozens of the great beasts, besides the remains of other great creatures that must have been frozen-in hundreds or thousands of years before; and the place being so wonderfully interesting, the doctor determined to stay there for a few days.

The first thing, under the circumstances, was to clear the snow away, bank it up round us, and set up the tent in the clear place under the shelter of the big mammoth block.

We all went at it heartily, and as we scraped the snow off, it was to find the ice beneath as clear as glass.

“Ah!” said the doctor, sitting down and looking on, after feeling the mammoth’s tail, knife in hand, as if longing to cut it off, “it’s a wonderful privilege, my lads, to come up here into a part of the earth where the foot of man has never trod before! – Eh! what is it?” he cried, for his nephew suddenly gave a howl of dread, dropped the scraper he had been using, jumped over the snow heap, and ran off.

“What’s he found?” said Scudds, crossing to the place where the young man had been busy scraping, and staring down into the ice. “Any one would think – Oh, lor’!”

He jumped up, and ran away, too, and so did another sailor; when the doctor and I went up to the spot, looked down, and were very nearly following the example set us, for there, only a few inches from us, as if lying in a glass coffin, was a man on his back, with every feature perfect, and eyes wide open, staring straight at us!

“Wonderful!” exclaimed the doctor.

“Then some one has been here before?” I said.

“The ice must have drifted up,” said the doctor. “We are the only men who have penetrated so far. Quick, my lads; we must have him out!”

The boys didn’t like the task, and Scudds was almost mutinous; but the doctor soon had us at work, cutting a groove all round the figure; and, after about five hours’ chipping, we got out the great block with the figure inside perfect, and laid it down in the sun, which now exercised such power in the middle of the day that the ice began to thaw, just as we awoke to the fact that the cold was nothing like so intense, for the spirit-lamp on being tried burned freely, and the brandy, instead of being like rock, showed signs of melting.

At first the men held aloof from the operation; but after a few words from the doctor, Scudds suddenly exclaimed, “No one shall say as I’m afraid of him!” – and he rolled his eye wonderfully as he helped to pour hot water over the figure, which, far from being ghastly as the ice grew thinner, looked for all the world like one of our own men lying down.

In about twelve hours we had got all the ice clear away, and the fur clothes in which the body was wrapped were quite soft. We were then so tired, that, it being night, the doctor had the figure well wrapped up in a couple of buffalo robes, and, in spite of a good deal of opposition, placed beside him in the tent, and we lay down to rest.

I don’t know how long we’d been asleep, for, with the sun shining night and day, it bothers you, but I was awoke by somebody sneezing.

“Uncle’s got a fine cold!” said young Smith, who was next to me.

“So it seems!” I said; and then there was another sneeze, and another, and another; and when I looked, there was the doctor, sitting up and staring at the figure by his side, which kept on sneezing again and again. Then, to our horror, it sat up and yawned, and threw its arms about.

Every fellow in the little tent was about to get up and run away, when the frozen sailor said, in a sleepy fashion, “Why, it’s as cold as ever!”

I tried to speak, but couldn’t. The doctor answered him, though, by saying, “How did you get here?”

“Well,” said the figure, drowsily, “that means a yarn; and if I warn’t so plaguey sleepy, I’d – Heigho! – ha! – hum! – Well, here goes!”

We sat quite awe-stricken, not a man stirring more than to put a bit of pigtail in his mouth, while the English sailor thus spun his yarn: —

Chapter Two.

The English Sailor’s Yarn

You see, I haven’t the trick of putting it together, or else, I dare say, I could spin you no end of a yarn out of many a queer thing I’ve come across, and many a queer thing that’s happened to me up and down.

Well, yes, I’ve been wrecked three times, and I’ve been aboard when a fire’s broken out, and I’ve seen some fighting – close work some of it, and precious hot; and I was once among savages, and there was one that was a kind of a princess among ’em – But there, that’s no story, and might happen to any man.

If I were Atlantic Jones now, I could tell you a story worth listening to. Atlantic Jones was made of just the kind of stuff they make heroes out of for story books. He was a rum ’un was J. If I could spin a yarn about anything, it ought to be about him, now. I only wish I could.

Why was he called Atlantic? I can’t rightly say. I don’t think he was christened so. I think it was a name he took himself. It was to pass off the Jones, which was not particularly imposing without the first part for the trade he belonged to. He was a play-actor.

I don’t think he had ever done any very great things at it before I met with him; anyhow, he was rather down on his luck just then, and shabby – well, anything nearer rags, and yet making believe to have an air of gentility about it, I never came across. I don’t remember ever having a boot-heel brought so directly under my observation which was so wonderfully trodden down on one side. In a moment of confidence, too, he showed me a hole in the right boot-sole that he had worn benefit cards over, on the inside – some of the unsold ones remaining from his last ticket night.

I was confoundedly hard up myself about that time, having just come ashore from a trip in one of those coffin-ships, as they call them now. “Run” they wanted to make out, but it wasn’t much of a run, either. The craft was so rotten, there were hardly two planks sticking properly together, and the last man had scarcely got his last leg into the boat, when the whole ricketty rabbit-hutch went down, and only as many bubbles as you could fill a soup-plate with stayed a-top to mark the whereabouts. But the owners wanted to press the charge, and for a while I wanted to lie close, and that’s why I came to London, which is a big bag, as it were, where one pea’s like another when they’re well shaken up in it.

You’ll say it was rather like those birds who, when they hear the sportsman coming, dive their heads into the sand, and leave the other three-quarters of them in full view to be shot at, thinking no one else can see it, because they don’t happen to be able to see it themselves. You’ll say it was like one of them, for me, a sailor, wanting to keep dark from the police, to go skulking about in waterside taverns and coffee-houses Wapping and Rotherhithe way; well, perhaps it was.

It was at a coffee-house in Wapping I met Atlantic Jones, and he scared me a bit the first time I met him. It wasn’t a pretty kind of coffee-house, not one of those you read about in that rare old book, the Spectator, where the fops, and dandies, and bloods, “most did congregate,” where they “quaffed” and “toasted” in the good old style, which, by the way, must have been somewhat of an expensive old style, and, thank goodness, even some of us third or fourth-raters, nowadays, can spend an odd half-hour or so from time to time very much as the biggest nobs would spend it, though we have but a few silver pieces in our pocket.

To the good old style of coffee-house my fine gentleman, with the brocaded coat-tails, dainty lace ruffles, and big, powdered periwig, would be borne, smoothly (with an occasional jolt or two that went for nothing) in a sedan chair; and on his arrival there, if it were night-time, would call for his wine, his long pipe, his newspaper, and his wax-candles, and sit solemnly enjoying himself, while humbler folks blinked in the dim obscurity surrounding him, for most likely it was not everybody frequenting the place who could afford to be thus illuminated.

No; this was one of the most ordinary, common, and objectionable kind of coffee-shops, where the most frequent order was for “half a pint and slices;” where the half-pint was something thick and slab, which analytical research might have proved to be artfully compounded of parched peas and chicory, with a slight flavouring of burnt treacle; while the slices were good old, solemn, stale bread, with an oleaginous superficial surface, applied by a skilled hand, spreading over broader surfaces than scarcely would have seemed credible; so that regular customers, when they wanted to have their joke, would pick up a a slice, and turn it about, and hold it up to the light and put a penny in their right eye, making believe they had got an eye-glass there, and say, “Look here, guv’nor! which side is it? I’m only a arskin’ fear it should fall on my Sunday go-to-meeting suit, and grease it.”

Rashers of quite unbelievable rancidness, and “nice eggs,” in boiling which poultry, in its early promise, was not unfrequently made an untimely end of, were the chief articles of consumption. The newspapers and periodicals – which, somehow, always appeared to be a week old – were marked by innumerable rings, where the customers had stood their coffee-cups upon them, and there were thousands of brisk and lively flies forever buzzing round about the customers’ heads and settling on their noses; and thousands more of sleepy flies, stationary on the walls and ceiling, and thickly studding the show rasher in the window; and thousands and thousands more dead flies, lying about everywhere, and turning up as little surprises in the milk jug and the coffee-grounds, on the butter, or under the bacon, when you turned it over.

Not in the eggs, by-the-bye. You were pretty safe from them there – the embryo chick was the worst thing that could happen to you.

Not altogether a nice kind of place to pass one’s evenings in, you are thinking. Well, no; but it was uncommonly quiet and snug, and uncommonly cheap, which was rather a point with me. I was, in truth, so hard up that night that I had stood outside the window a good twenty minutes, balancing my last coin – a fourpenny-bit – in my hand, and tossing up, mentally, to decide whether I should spend it in a bed or a supper. I decided on the latter, and entered the coffee-house, where I hoped, after I had eaten, to be able to sleep away an hour or two in peace, if I could get a snug corner to myself.

Several other people, however, seemed to have gone there with something of the same idea, and snored up and down, with their heads comfortably pillowed among the dirty plates and tea-things, while others carried on low, muttered conversations, and one woman was telling an interminable tale, breaking off now and then to whimper.

There was one empty box, in a darkish corner, and I made for that, and ordered my meal – thanking my stars that I had been so lucky as to find such a good place. But I was not left long in undisputed possession of it.

While I was disposing of the very first mouthful the shop-door opened, and a blue-cheeked, anxious-looking man peeped in, as though he were frightened – or, perhaps, ashamed – and glanced eagerly round. Then, as it seemed, finding nothing of a very alarming character, he came a step further in, and stopped again, to have another look, and his eyes fell upon me, and he stared very hard indeed, and came straight to my box, and sat down opposite to me.

I can’t say this made me feel particularly comfortable, for, you see, for some days past I had spent the greater part of my time slipping stealthily round corners, and dodging up and down the sneakiest courts and alleys I could come across, with an idea that every lamp-post was a policeman in disguise that had got his eye on me.

I can’t say I felt much more comfortable at this stranger’s behaviour, when he had taken his seat and ordered a cup of coffee and a round of toast, in a low, confidential tone of voice, just, as it struck me, as a detective might have done who had the coffee-shop keeper in his pay. Then he pulled a very mysterious little brown paper-covered book from his pocket, consisting of some twenty pieces of manuscript, and he attentively read in it, and then fixed his eyes upon the ceiling and mumbled.

Said I to myself, “Perhaps this is some poor parson chap, learning up his sermon for next Sunday.”

But then this was only Monday night; it could hardly be that.

Presently, too, I noticed that he was secretly taking stock of me round the side of the book. What, after all, if the written sheets of paper contained a minute description of myself and the other runaways who were “wanted?”

He now certainly seemed to be making a comparison between me and something he was reading – summing me up, as it were – and I felt precious uncomfortable, I can tell you.

All at once he spoke.

“It’s a chilly evening, sir.”

“Yes,” I said.

“A sailor, I think?”

There was no good denying that. A sailor looks like a sailor, and nothing else.

“Yes,” I said, slowly.

“A fine profession, sir!” said he; “a noble profession. Shiver my timbers!”

Now, you know, we don’t shiver our timbers in reality; and if we did, we shouldn’t shiver them in the tone of voice the blue-cheeked man shivered his, and I couldn’t resist a broad grin, though I still felt uncomfortable.

“I’ve no objection, I’m sure,” said I, “if you have none.”

He was silent for a while, and seemed to be thinking it over, then went on reading and mumbling. Evidently he was a detective. I had met one before once, dressed as a countryman, and talking Brummagem Yorkshire. A detective wanting to get into conversation with a sailor was just likely, I fancied, to start with an out-of-the-way thing like “shiver my timbers.” I made my mind up I wouldn’t be pumped very dry.

“Been about the world a good deal, sir, I suppose?” he said, returning to the charge after a brief pause. “Been wrecked, I dare say – often?”

“Pretty often – often enough.”

“Have you, now?” he said, laying down his book, and leaning back, to have a good look at me as he drew a long breath. “A-h!”

I went on with my meal, putting the best face I could on it, and pretending not to notice him; but it was not very easy to do this naturally, and at last I dropped my bread and butter, and fixed him, in my turn.