CHAPTER V.
I SIGHT A WHITE COAST.
Four days did I pass in that little open boat.
The first day was fine, till sunset; it then blew fresh from thenorth-west, and I was obliged to keep the boat before the wind. The nextday was dark and turbulent, with heavy falls of snow and a high swellfrom the north, and the wind a small gale. On the third day the sunshone, and it was a fair day, but horribly cold, and I saw two icebergslike clouds upon the far western sea-line. There followed a cruel nightof clouded skies, sleet, and snow, and a very troubled sea; and thenbroke the fourth day, as softly brilliant as an English May day, butcold--great God, how cold!
Thus might I epitomize this passage; and I do so to spare you theweariness of a relation of uneventful suffering.
In those four days I mainly ran before the wind, and in this way drovemany leagues south, though whenever a chance offered I hauled my sheetfor the east. I know not, I am sure, how the boat lived. I might pretendit was due to my clever management--I do not say I had no share in myown preservation, but to God belongs all the praise.
In the blackness of the first night the sea boiled all about me. Theboat leapt into hollows in which the sail slapped the mast. One lookbehind me at the high dark curl of the oncoming surge had so affrightedme that I never durst turn my head again lest the sight should depriveme of the nerve to hold the oar with which I steered. I sat as squarelyas the task of steering would suffer, trusting that if a sea shouldtumble over the stern my back would serve as a breakwater, and save theboat from being swamped. The whole sail was on her, and I could not helpmyself; for it would have been certain death to quit the steering oarfor an instant. It was this that saved me, perhaps; for the boat blewalong with such prodigious speed, running to the height of a sea asthough she meant to dart from that eminence into the air, that the slopeof each following surge swung like a pendulum under her, and though hersail was becalmed in the trough, her momentum was so great that she wasspeeding up the acclivity and catching the whole weight of the windafresh before there was time for her to lose way.
I was nearly dead with cold and misery when the morning came, but thesparkling sun and the blue sky cheered me, and as wind and sea fell withthe soaring of the orb, I was enabled to flatten aft the sheet and letthe boat steer herself whilst I beat my arms about for warmth and brokemy fast. When I look back I wonder that I should have taken any pains tolive. That it is possible for the human mind at any period of itsexistence to be absolutely hopeless I do not believe; but I can veryhonestly say that when I gazed round upon the enormous sea I was in, andconsidered the size of my boat, the quantity of my provisions, and mydistance (even if I was heading that way) from the nearest point ofland, I was not sensible of the faintest stirring of hope, and viewedmyself as a dead man.
No bird came near me. Once I spied the back of a great black fish abouta quarter of a mile off. The wetness of it caught the sunshine andreflected it like a mirror of polished steel, and the flash was sobrilliant it might have passed for a bed of white fire floating on theblue heavings. But nothing more that was living did I meet, and such wasthe vastness of the sea over which my little keel glided, in the midstof which I sat abandoned by the angels, that for utter loneliness Imight have been the very last of the human race.
When the third night came down with sullen blasts sweeping into a steadystorming of wind, that swung a strong melancholy howl through thegloom, it found me so weak with cold, watching, and anxiety, and thewant of space wherein to rid my limbs of the painful cramp whichweighted them with an insupportable leaden sensation, that I had barelypower to control the boat with the oar. I pined for sleep; one hour ofslumber would, I felt, give me new life, but I durst not close my eyes.The boat was sweeping through the dark and seething seas, and her coursehad to be that of an arrow, or she would capsize and be smothered in abreath.
Maybe I fell something delirious, for I had many strange and frightfulfancies. Indeed I doubt not it was the spirit of madness--that iscertainly tonical when small--which furnished strength enough to my armto steer with. It was like the action of a powerful cordial in my blood,and the very horrors it fed my brain with were an animation to myphysical qualities. The gale became a voice; it cried out my name, andevery shout of it past my ear had the sound of the word 'Despair!' Iwitnessed the forms of huge phantoms flying over the boat; I watched thebeating of their giant wings of shadow and heard the thunder of theirlaughter as they fled ahead, leaving scores of like monstrous shapes tofollow. There was a faint lightning of phosphor in the creaming heads ofthe ebon surges, and my sick imagination twisted that pallid complexioninto the dim reflection of the lamps of illuminated pavilions at thebottom of the sea; mystic palaces of green marble, radiant cities in themeasureless kingdoms of the ocean gods. I had a fancy of roofs of pearlbelow, turrets of milk-white coral, pavements of rainbow lustre like tothe shootings and dartings of the hues of shells inclined and trembledto the sun. I thought I could behold the movements of shapes asindeterminable as the forms which swarm in dreams, human brows crownedwith gold, the cold round emerald eyes of fish, the creamy breasts ofwomen, large outlines slowly floating upwards, making a deeper blacknessupon the blackness like the dye of the electric storm upon the velvetbosom of midnight. Often would I shrink from side to side, starting froma fancied apparition leaping into terrible being out of some hurlingblock of liquid obscurity.
Once a light shone upon the masthead. At any other time I should haveknown this to be a St. Elmo's fire, a corposant, the ignis fatuus of thedeep, and hailed it with a seaman's faith in its promise of gentleweather. But to my distempered fancy it was a lanthorn hung up by aspirit hand; I traced the dusky curve of an arm and observed the busytwitching of visionary fingers by the rays of the ghostly light; theoutline of a large face of a bland and sorrowful expression, pallid asany foam-flake whirling past, came into the sphere of those graveyardrays. I shrieked and shut my eyes, and when I looked again the light wasgone.
Long before daybreak I was exhausted. Mercifully, the wind was scant;the stars shone very gloriously; on high sparkled the Cross of thesouthern world. A benign influence seemed to steal into me out of itssilver shining; the craze fell from me, and I wept.
Shortly afterwards, worn out by three days and nights of suffering, Ifell into a deep sleep, and when I awoke my eyes opened right upon theblinding sun.
This was the morning of the fourth day. I was without a watch. By theheight of the sun I reckoned the hour to be ten. I threw a languidglance at the compass and found the boat's head pointing north-west; shefell off and came to, being without governance, and was scarcely sailingtherefore. The wind was west, a very light breeze, just enough to put abright twinkling into the long, smooth folds of the wide and weightyswell that was rolling up from the north-east. I tried to stand, but wasso benumbed that many minutes passed before I had the use of my legs.Brightly as the sun shone there was no more warmth in his light than youfind in a moon-beam on a frosty night, and the bite in the air was likethe pang of ice itself pressed against the cheek. My right hand sufferedmost; I had fallen asleep clasping the loom of the steering oar, andwhen I awoke my fingers still gripped it, so that, on withdrawing them,they remained curved like talons, and I believed I had lost their use,and even reckoned they would snap off and so set up a mortification,till by much diligent rubbing I grew sensible of a small glow which,increasing, ended in rendering the joints supple.
I stood up to take a view of the horizon, and the first sight that metmy eye forced a cry from me. Extending the whole length of thesouth-west seaboard lay what I took to be a line of white coast meltingat either extremity into the blue airy distance. Even at the lowelevation of the boat my eye seemed to measure thirty miles of it. Itwas not white as chalk is; there was something of a crystallinecomplexion upon the face of its solidity. It was too far off to enableme to remark its outline; yet on straining my sight--the atmospherebeing very exquisitely clear--I thought I could distinguish theprojections of peaks, of rounded slopes, and
aerial angularities inplaces which, in the refractive lens of the air, looked, with their hueof glassy azure, like the loom of high land behind the coastal line.
The notion that it was ice came into my head after the first prospect ofit; and then I returned to my earlier belief that it was land. Methoughtif it were ice, it must be the borderland of the Antarctic circle, thelimits of the unfrozen ocean, for it was incredible that so mighty abody could signify less than the capes and terraces of a continent ofice glazing the circumference of the pole for leagues and leagues; butthen I also knew that, though first the brig and then my boat had beenfor days steadily blown south, I was still to the north of the SouthShetland parallels, and many degrees therefore removed from the polarbarrier. Hence I concluded that what I saw was land, and that thepeculiar crystal shining of it was caused by the snow that covered it.
But what land? Some large island that had been missed by the explorersand left uncharted? I put a picture of the map of this part of the worldbefore my mind's eye, and fell to an earnest consideration of it, butcould recollect of no land hereabouts, unless indeed we had been wildlywrong in our reckoning aboard the brig, and I in the boat had beendriven four or five times the distance I had calculated--things not tobe entertained.
Yet even as a mere break in the frightful and enduring continuity of thesea-line--even as something that was not sea nor sky nor the cold silentand mocking illusion of clouds--it took a character of blessedness in myeyes; my gaze hung upon it joyously, and my heart swelled with a newimpulse of life in my breast. It would be strange, I thought, if onapproaching it something to promise me deliverance from this dreadfulsituation did not offer itself--some whaler or trader at anchor, signsof habitation and of the presence of men, nay, even a single hut toserve as a refuge from the pitiless cold, the stormy waters, the black,lonely, delirious watches of the night, till help should heave into viewwith the white canvas of a ship.
I put the boat's head before the wind, and steered with one hand whilstI got some breakfast with the other. I thanked God for the brightness ofthe day and for the sight of that strange white line of land, that wentin glimmering blobs of faintness to the trembling horizon where thesouthern end of it died out. The swell rose full and brimming ahead,rolling in sapphire hills out of the north-east, as I have said, whenceI inferred that that extremity of the land did not extend very muchfurther than I could see it, otherwise there could not have been so muchweight of water as I found in the heaving.
The breeze blew lightly and was the weaker for my running before it; butthe little line of froth that slipped past either side the boat gave meto know that the speed would not be less than four miles in the hour;and as I reckoned the land to be but a few leagues distant, I calculatedupon being ashore some little while before sundown.
In this way two hours passed. By this time the features of the coastwere tolerably distinct. Yet I was puzzled. There was a peculiar sheenall about the irregular sky-line; a kind of pearly whitening, as itwere, of the heavens beyond, like to the effect produced by the risingof a very delicate soft mist melting from a mountain's brow into theair. This dismayed me. Still I cried to myself, 'It must be land! Allthat whiteness is snow, and the luminous tinge above it is thereflection of the glaring sunshine thrown upwards from the dazzle. Itcannot be ice! 'tis too mighty a barrier. Surely no single iceberg everreached to the prodigious proportions of that coast. And it cannot be anassemblage of bergs, for there is no break--it is leagues of solidconformation. Oh yes, it is land, sure enough! some island whose topsand seaboard are covered with snow. But what of that? It may bepopulated all the same. Are the northern kingdoms of Europe bare of lifebecause of the winter rigours?' And then thought to myself, if thatisland have natives, I would rather encounter them as the savages of anice-bound country than as the inhabitants of a land of sunshine andspices and radiant vegetation; for it is the denizens of the mostgloriously fair ocean seats in the world who are man-eaters; not thePatagonian, giant though he be, nor the blubber-fed anatomies of theice-climes.
Thus I sought to reassure and comfort myself. Meanwhile my boat sailedquietly along, running up and down the smooth and foamless hills ofwater very buoyantly, and the sun slided into the north-west sky anddarted a reddening beam upon the coast towards which I steered.