Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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The early Antarctic night was now drawing down over the furious sea, and it was already so dark that the men could hardly discern one another’s faces. Some active fellows sprang forward at the risk of their lives to cut away the rigging, and release the wreck alongside before the yards upon it should pierce the brig’s bottom; and this being done, the helm was put hard up, with the idea of wearing ship, in order to secure the foremast. But the storm-fiend had marked this unhappy brig, and the successive blows came thick and fast. Scarcely was the wrecked spar sent adrift and the helm shifted, when all the rest of the port fore rigging carried away, and the foremast fell down, carrying with it the bowsprit, main topmast, and a portion of the port main rigging.

By this time it was as dark as the bottom of a well; the brig wallowed before the seas with a mass of wreckage over her side, pitching miserably in the fearful hollows, and huge surges curling their white heights around her. A man had need to be a seaman indeed, and to have a seaman’s heart in him too, to act at all in such a moment as this. The full extent of the mischief could not be guessed. Nothing was certain but that the brig was dispossessed of all but her mainmast, and that there were some heavy spars over the side, pounding at her like battering-rams with every hurl of the raging seas. The first business would be to get clear of this mischief, and the men went to work with their knives, feeling for the lanyards and hacking and cutting with a will. Darkness gives a peculiar horror to disasters of this kind at sea. In the daylight you can see what has happened; you can use your eyes as well as your hands and make despatch, and the worst is evident. But the darkness leaves everything to be guessed at. You shout for help for some job too heavy for you, and it does not come. The outlines of the sea grow colossal by the illusion of the faint light thrown out from their breaking crests; you cannot perceive the flying water so as to duck away from it, and in a breath you may find yourself overboard. It is all distraction and uproar, loud and fearful shouting, and blind groping. When at last the wreck was cleared, the vessel seemed little better than a sheer hulk, nothing standing but her mainmast, upon which the mainyard swung helplessly. That she should have lived through that long and fearful Antarctic night, the seas combing over her, icebergs in her vicinity, and draining in water with every roll, must count among the miracles of the deep. Her people had discovered that the mainmast, having little to support it, had worked loose, breaking away the mast-combings, and starting the planking all around it; so that through this large aperture the water poured into the hold in torrents. The port pump had been disabled by the fall of the masts, and the only other pump was manned and worked with such energy as dying men will put into their arms; but in less than an hour the coal choked it, and now nothing remained but to lighten the vessel by throwing the cargo overboard and baling with buckets. All through those black and howling hours, amid freezing falls of water, and in the heart of the raging Cape Horn storm, this severe labour was pursued, so that when the bleak and melancholy dawn broke upon the desolate ocean it found the brig still afloat, and the brave hearts in her grimly fighting death, though faint, famished, and frozen. Help came shortly before noon. A sail was made out heading dead for the wreck, and by the time she was abreast, the wind and sea had so far moderated as to enable her to bring all the men safely off. It was not a moment too soon, for twenty minutes after the crew had been transferred to the ship the brig was observed to give a heavy lurch, and so lie on her beam-ends, never righting, but slowly sinking in that position—so slowly that after her hull had vanished her mainmast remained forking out like the lifted arm of a drowning man.